Geminids over ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile in 2013. (Credit: ESO/G. Lombardi)
Step outside after dark this week and you can watch chunks of an asteroid burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. Behold, the Geminid meteor shower, which is renowned as the year’s best.
At peak Geminids, you could catch a shooting star every minute, and this year the moon won’t be bright enough to foul the show. That main action arrives just past 9 p.m. local time Wednesday and lasts until dawn. ...read more
The “American Wonder” in 1925.
Depending on the vehicle manufacturer, you’ll get a different year for the big roll-out of fully autonomous vehicles. General Motors plans to launch them in big cities by 2019.
Ford says it will have a fully autonomous vehicle in commercial operation by 2021.
Google’s self-driving operation, Waymo, announced last month that its autonomous vehicles are ready to fly solo—sans a test driver babysitter—in an area of the Phoenix met ...read more
Photographer Marat Ahmetvaleev was taking panoramic photos of the winter landscape when he captured this beautiful image of the Chelyabinsk meteoroid as it exploded over Russia in 2013. (Credit: M. Ahmetvaleev/NASA APOD)
On February 15, 2013, a near-Earth asteroid with a diameter of 66 feet (20 meters) entered Earth’s atmosphere traveling at around 40,000 miles per hour (60,0000 km/h).
Within a few seconds, the cosmic projectile detonated 12 miles above the Chelyabinsk region of Russia, r ...read more
A tick grasping a dinosaur feather preserved for posterity in 99 million-year-old Burmese amber. (Credit Peñalver et al 2017, doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-01550-z)
Turns out even dinosaurs got ticked off. A nearly 100 million-year-old piece of amber has preserved a tick latched onto a dinosaur feather, the oldest such preserved specimen of the parasite everyone loves to hate. Additional ticks found in related pieces of amber provide more evidence that the nasty critters were feasting on feath ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
