An artist rendered their own view of what the merging galaxies might look like. (Credit: NAOJ)
Thirteen billion years ago, two galaxies collided to make something totally new. Each of those galaxies was among the universe’s first, since the cosmic clock had only been ticking for less than a billion years. As the galaxies’ dust and gas swirled together, new generations of stars were born, and their light began racing across the cosmos until it collided with the 66 radio telescopes ...read more
(Credit: SpeedKingz/Shutterstock)
The
first time someone synthesized saccharin, the artificial sweetener in Sweet’N
Low, it was an accident. A scientist studying coal tar in 1879 didn’t wash his
hands before eating dinner and was surprised to taste a sweet residue from the
lab on his fingertips. Same goes for the invention of the sweetener sodium
cyclamate in 1937: the unwitting pioneer, who was working on a fever medication,
put his cigarette down on the lab bench, and when he pi ...read more
Colorized elevation map of a lakebed in New Jersey shows stripes of ancient sediment deposits. The deposits are tied to cycles of wet and dry climates throughout Earth’s history. (Credit: LIDAR image, US Geological Survey; digital colorization by Paul Olsen)
Ribbons of blue — the modern Raritan and Neshanic rivers — slice across a landscape that’s key to understanding Earth’s deep-time climate cycles. This colorized elevation map captures a 40-square-mile chunk o ...read more
Overall, the global mean temperature during March through May was 1.02 °C warmer than the 1951-1980 average. This made it the second warmest such period in records dating back to 1880. (Source: NASA GISS)
March through May — spring in the Northern Hemisphere — was the second warmest such period in records dating back to 1880, according to a new analysis out today from NASA.
On its own, the month of May was third warmest.
The map above shows how temperatures around the ...read more
These clouds snapped by the Curiosity rover on Mars are much lower and thicker than the meteor-generated clouds the study looked at. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Justin Cowart)
No matter what planet you’re on, physics remains the same. For clouds, that means they follow a peculiar law – they form only around a seed of some sort, usually a fleck of dust or salt. On Earth, with its thick atmosphere and strong air currents, it’s possible to find these lightweight particles through ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine