The ocean is rich in diverse shades of blue and green. Now researchers find climate change will alter the color of the oceans by the end of the 21st century. The changes won't be dramatic, in fact, they likely won't be visible to the naked eye, but it suggests that the hue of the ocean could be an important marker for scientists watching to see how climate change will affect our seas.
“Ocean color will give us an earlier signal of climate change effects on the marine ecosystem t ...read more
The shape of the Milky Way, usually pictured as a flat spiral, may actually be more like a warped and twisted disk. That's according to a new study of 1,339 stars whose distances could be measured with great accuracy. The resulting map reveals a tipped, uneven disk of material different from our standard picture.
Mapping Pulsating Stars
The 1,339 stars are all Cepheid variables, a type of pulsating star whose intrinsic brightness depends on how long it takes to vary from bright to ...read more
Gazing up at the sky, it's hard not to imagine the sun, moon, stars, and planets as part of an inverted bowl over our heads, even if we know that's an antiquated way of viewing the heavens. These days, we understand it’s the Earth that’s spinning, spinning daily like a ballerina while also circling the sun on its yearly journey. But the bowl imagery was and remains a reasonable way of envisioning how the skies appear to revolve around us, and when certain stars appear or disappear wi ...read more
NASA is often viewed as the epitome of big ideas and extreme planning. But sometimes even they go above and beyond, either with incredible improvised fixes, or missions that survived the test of time and then some.
Hubble Got Glasses
The greatest space telescope astronomers have was almost a giant flop. When the telescope launched in 1991, the pictures it sent back were muddled and far below the predicted quality. It turned out a mirror had been ground to the wrong specifications, leav ...read more
A new paper offers a broad challenge to a certain kind of 'grand theory' about the brain. According to the authors, Federico E. Turkheimer and colleagues, it is problematic to build models of brain function that rely on 'strong emergence'.
Two popular theories, the Free Energy Principle aka Bayesian Brain and the Integrated Information Theory model, are singled out as examples of strong emergence-based work.
Emergence refers to the idea that a system can exhibit behavior or propert ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine