As winter gives way to spring in the Arctic, the region's lid of floating sea ice is shriveling much more sharply than normal.
According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center's latest monthly update, published April 3, Arctic sea ice reached its maximum extent on March 13, which marked the end of the winter season. Since then, warming spring temperatures have caused the ice to shrink — and lately, the shrinkage has been record-setting.
Late-March ice losses in the Berin ...read more
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket completed a static fire engine test shortly after 11am eastern today, in preparation for its first commercial launch next week. This will mark the second-ever flight of Falcon Heavy, delivering a communications satellite into space.
Falcon Flight
The test firing this morning went well, and mission managers are now targeting a launch on April 9. This is a slight delay from the earlier April 7 launch date, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk warns the date might slip again. ...read more
The scrappy Israeli Beresheet mission successfully entered lunar orbit on April 4, joining a select club of nations and agencies that have ever circled the moon. This morning, SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), who built and operate the spacecraft, released its first close-up pictures of the moon’s mysterious far side. And next week, on April 11, Beresheet will make its most daring maneuver as it attempts to land on the lunar surface.
Slow but steady
Beresheet lifted off fr ...read more
If stories about psychopaths fascinate you, you might’ve heard of something called the dark triad. It’s a trio of traits that psychologists developed in the early 2000s to measure the more sinister aspects of human personality. Now, a team from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Hawai’i-West O’ahu has finally crafted a counterpart test of the so-called light triad traits.
Dark Vs. Light
Given the human tendency toward morbid curiosity, it’s no su ...read more
Whales evolved from hoofed, four-legged land walkers in south Asia more than 50 million years ago. Now researchers have unearthed the skeleton of an ancient four-legged whale in Peru. The discovery sheds light on how cetaceans dispersed from the Indo-Pakistan region to the Pacific Ocean.
“The new find from Peru is the geologically oldest quadrupedal whale from the Americas, so it gives a minimum age [for] when they reached the New World,” said Olivier Lambert, a paleontologist at th ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine