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The obscuring smoke from the Thomas Fire — now 70 percent as large as L.A. — smothers a large swath of SoCal’s coast. An image acquired by NASA’s Terra satellite shows thick, brownish smoke billowing across a large area of the Southern California coast between Ventura and Santa Barbara on Sunday, Dec. 10, 2017. Please click on the image to enlarge it. (Source: NASA Worldview) I’ve seen my share of satellite images of wildfires. And whether it has been the ...read more

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(Credit: Shutterstock) Let’s preface this whole story with a disclaimer: It’s never really a good idea to pop a pimple. But, if you must, absolutely do not use a dirty woodworking blade. How do we know? Because a 23-year-old man from Chicago did exactly that, and paid a gruesome price. According to a case report published in The Journal of Emergency Medicine, doctors at the John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County treated a construction worker who came to them with a crusty ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) Marshes, streams and lakes lie alongside many of the roads and highways that zigzag across North America. Plants and animals inhabit these water bodies and can be exposed to many of the substances we put on those roads, including road salt. Rock salt helps keep roads safe when winter storms hit, reducing winter road accidents. But it can also have serious, negative effects on aquatic ecosystems. At high concentrations, salt can be fatal to some aquatic animals. Salt can ...read more

Two neutron stars collide; the resulting gravitational wave spread at the speed of light. (Credit: National Science Foundation/LIGO/Sonoma State University/A. Simonne) The dead cores of two stars collided 130 million years ago in a galaxy somewhat far away. The collision was so extreme that it caused a wrinkle in space-time — a gravitational wave. That gravitational wave and the light from the stellar explosion traveled together across the cosmos. They arrived at Earth simultaneously at ...read more

Sure, this is supposed to be Isla Nublar, but I’m pretty sure this is a valley on the big island of Hawaii. A shot from the Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom trailer. First off, don’t get me wrong, I love crazy geo-related films. I’m not going to pull a Neil DeGrasse Tyson here and take all the fun out of a movie because it is horribly, fantastically wrong when it comes to the science … but maybe we need to have a few words about Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. The first t ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) Well, that’s it. Pack it in, boys. Show’s over for us as a species: We’ve peaked. At least, we might have, according to a paper in Frontiers in Physiology. If anything, it looks like we might be going downhill, with climate change and other environmental effects taking our bodies away from their current idealized forms. Fastest, Highest, Strongest First, the findings themselves. In the paper, “Are We Reaching the Limits of Homo Sapiens?”, th ...read more

A second animation shows the giant smoke plume from the Thomas Fire illuminated by this week’s supermoon as it streams over the Pacific This animation of infrared images shows the rapid development of SoCal wildfires driven by strong Santa Ana winds starting on the evening of Dec. 4th, continuing overnight and into the next day. Heat from the fires is highlighted with black, yellow and red pixels. Please click on the image to watch the animation. (Source: Cooperative Institute f ...read more

Photo:flickr/Petras Gagilas We’ve all been there: waiting at the bar, dying for a drink, but unable to catch the bartender’s attention. It’s easy to assume that we are being served (or rather, ignored) by a crappy bartender. But maybe it’s us. Maybe we’re the ones not giving the right signals that say “Beer me! Now!”. This is actually the best-case scenario, because it’s fixable, and these German scientists are here to help (and, eventually, ...read more