1. Is your daily slog through a non-equilibrium system of interacting particles — how physicists define vehicular traffic — getting you down? Us too, especially when it slows for no apparent reason.
2. According to a study in the New Journal of Physics, traffic jams develop spontaneously when vehicle density exceeds a critical level, beyond which minor fluctuations in the flow of individual vehicles destabilize the whole thing.
3. In fact, even construction or an accident isn’t ...read more
This August, the sky will dim until the daytime world becomes dark. The bright disk that usually lights everything, burns skin, feeds plants and tells animals when to sleep will become a blank circle, surrounded by the shifting haze of its atmosphere.
This scene will pass over the United States, from Oregon to South Carolina, potentially capturing an audience even larger than the Super Bowl. And these people — including you, I hope — will likely react emotionally, not scientifically. ...read more
“It’s the first direct evidence of how the tools were used,” says Nowell. “All of a sudden, a wealth of information is unlocked.”
Detecting species by protein residues on stone tools is especially important for once-marshy sites, like Shishan, which are not conducive to bone preservation.Although the Shishan excavations have yet to determine which species of hominin was at the site, Nowell’s team found that they were eating everything from Asian elephant and r ...read more
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Long before recent political turmoil across the pond came to a head, Britain made a literal break for it and physically separated from mainland Europe. Now, researchers have an idea of how the process went down some 450,000 years ago.
A new study from Imperial College London and other European institutes supports the claim that before the English Channel existed, a large chalk ridge connected Britain and France. The ridge acted as a dam, holding back a lake that had formed in front of a nearby g ...read more
On Aug. 21, the dark inner part of the moon’s shadow will sweep across the United States, creating a total solar eclipse for regions in 14 states. But, you may ask, the sun is so much larger than the moon, so how does this work? While our daytime star has a diameter about 400 times larger than that of the moon, it also lies roughly 400 times farther away. This means both disks appear to be the same size, so at certain times from certain locations, the moon can completely cover the sun.
Be ...read more
There, off in the distance: It’s a mountain … it’s a hill … it’s a pingo! These mounds may appear mundane, but beneath their earthy exterior is a core of ice. Sometimes called hydrolaccoliths, pingos typically form in arctic regions, like Siberia and northern Canada. In such frigid climates, groundwater collects and freezes, amassing ice beneath the surface that eventually forces the ground up. They can reach heights of over 170 feet, and if the core melts, they c ...read more
Lava melts ice, right? It seems like a no-brainer, but it’s not quite that simple.
Benjamin Edwards, a geologist at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Penn., has explored scores of volcanoes in British Columbia, Iceland, South America and Russia. His specialty is studying what happens when flowing lava meets ice and snow.Figuring out this interaction helps Edwards and his team understand a volcano’s climate history and better estimate flooding in nearby communities when snowcapped volcan ...read more
Errors in the use of spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel could pose risks for science.
That’s according to a preprint posted on arXiv from Ghada AlTarawneh and Simon Thorne of Cardiff Metropolitan University.
AlTarawneh and Thorne conducted a survey of 17 researchers from the University of Newcastle neuroscience research centre, ranging from PhD students to senior researchers. None of the respondants had any formal, certified training in spreadsheet use, with most (71%) being self-taught ...read more
KELT-11b, one of the physically largest objects known, is 40 percent wider than Jupiter and has the density of styrofoam. (Credit: Walter Robinson/Lehigh University)
Last week, a team of astronomers reported the first potential discovery of an exomoon–a satellite orbiting a planet around another star. Part of what is so striking about the report is the scale of this possible planet-moon system. In this case, the “moon” appears to be about the size of Neptune; the planet it or ...read more
