After more than 60 years, McMurdo Station, Antarctica’s main research center, is set to begin its first major infrastructure update. In February, the National Science Foundation got the green light to start construction on the so-called Antarctica Infrastructure Modernization for Science, or AIMS, project.
As first reported by Antarctic Sun, the continent's NSF-funded newspaper, the project will consolidate the sprawling research station’s some 100 buildings into just six prima ...read more
The Iberian Peninsula of modern day Spain and Portugal has long held one of human history's lingering mysteries. Now, two new studies covering nearly 20,000 years have outlined the region's transformative genetic influence.
“It shows how tremendously powerful such transect through time studies are,” said Wolfgang Haak, an anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, who led one of the two works. “Both studies shou ...read more
Oh, otters. The adorable weasel-puppies of the water. They famously hold paws while they’re sleeping so they don’t drift apart, which is about as cute as you can get. But these little marine mammals are also quite crafty. They’re often observed cracking open a tasty meal of mussels, crab or clams with the help of rocks. And a new paper out today in Scientific Reports says otters’ handy use of rocks can leave an archeological record.
There are a few ways otters get to th ...read more
More than 7,000 languages are spoken around the world today, each with unique words and phrases. But linguists have usually assumed that the sonic palette humans have used to produce these languages hasn't changed much over time
But a new study, published today in the journal Science, suggests otherwise. After analyzing languages from across the globe, a team of researchers found that sounds like “v” and “f” are relatively new, emerging just a few thousand years ago ...read more
At geological time scales, what really controls the climate isn't the atmosphere, it's the ground. Most of Earth's carbon dioxide is held underground, in reservoirs of natural gas and oil, but also in the rocks themselves. As the planet's tectonic plates slide and churn against one another, they bury carbon deep beneath the surface while exposing fresh rock that will soak up more carbon over time.
That carbon can be liberated in large volcanic events, causing mass extinctions. But the pro ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine