(Inside Science) -- Earth’s interior teems with movement and heat, a characteristic that manifests in memorable fashion as volcanoes and earthquakes. But even Earth’s more seemingly stable solid rocks move, too. Understanding just how rocks respond when they are pushed and pulled by natural forces, such as tectonic activity, or human-caused forces, like hydraulic fracturing, can make mining, construction, natural gas production and other projects safer. It can also improve geological ...read more
Five hundred years before the Incan empire reached its height in South America, a different civilization reigned: the Wari.
One of the Wari’s claims to fame is that they were early brewers of a drink called chicha. The fermented beverage was made by the Inca after them and can still found in Peru today. Many variations of the drink have been common across Central and South America for centuries
New evidence, recently published in the journal Sustainability, suggests this beer relat ...read more
Back in 2015, the black hole V404 Cygni got the attention of astronomers all over the globe when it suddenly brightened for two weeks. The outburst happened as the black hole began gobbling up material from a star that orbits it once every days. As the material swirled into the black hole, it heated up enough to glow brightly. Then, the black hole starting shooting some of that material far out into space as bright jet beams. When astronomers took a close look at the jets, th ...read more
The oceans are crawling with viruses. An international team of researchers surveyed the world’s oceans from pole to pole, sampling the waters for the microorganisms and they found nearly 200,000 of them.
Although we mostly think of viruses in terms of being sick, in the oceans, viruses and other marine microbes have an outsized impact on marine ecosystems. Their role is so large in fact that the researchers say the microorganisms can help predict how the oceans will respond to climat ...read more
For the past few decades, if you asked an astronomer how the moon was created, nearly all of them would tell you that a Mars-sized world nicknamed Theia crashed into the early Earth, sending a cloud of debris high into space where it coalesced into our silvery satellite. And there's strong evidence to support this idea.
But dig deeper, and you'll find nagging problems with the theory. Almost all models of the giant impact imply that the moon should still contain a lot of The ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine