Earth’s magnetic field is weakening, and could all but disappear within the next 500 years—exposing our planet to intense solar radiation that would scour its surface of life, Reuters.com reports. Researchers say I the geological record indicates that Earth’s * magnetic field tends to switch polarity f every 250,000 years—and that it’s about 550,000 years overdue for a swap, which […]
Read more
Ahhh — to remember the glory days before dirty air descended on Delhi, a methane leak in California gassed thousands, and catastrophic smog in China prompted people to buy bottled air, of all things. Before the Industrial Revolution, the world was basically one big, serene Walden Pond, right? Wrong. Take off those rose-tinted glasses and get acquainted with the story of […]
Read more
The evidence for a new geological epoch which marks the impact of human activity on Earth is now overwhelming according to a recent paper by an international group of geo-scientists. The Anthropocene, which is argued to start in the mid-20th Century, is marked by the spread of materials such as aluminum, concrete, plastic, fly ash and fallout from nuclear testing […]
Read more
Leonid Ivanovich Rogozov was a Soviet general practitioner who took part in the sixth Soviet Antarctic Expedition in 1960–1961. He was the only doctor stationed at the Novolazarevskaya Station and, while there, developed appendicitis, which meant he had to perform an appendectomy on himself, a famous case of self-surgery. Leonid Rogozov was born in Dauriya Station, Chita Oblast, a remote […]
Read more
How Climate Change Could Affect Our Diet Climate change and a shopping list? At first glance, it seems just a wrong correlation. Well, it is not! Climate change is already affecting our present and it will heavily influence our future. The extreme weather conditions brought by climate change are progressively increasing the risk of drought, floods, heat waves and wildfires, […]
Read more
The Japanese whaling fleet is reportedly heading into the seas around Antarctica, drawing widespread condemnation from campaigners. Japan’s fleet of six ships left the port of Shimonoseki, western Japan with a quota of 940 minke whales and 10 fin whales. Calls for the Australian government to intervene have been rejected by the environment minister, Senator Ian Campbell. Japan’s whaling program, […]
Read more
Studies show that the oceans are warming, and Antarctica’s ice is melting. Now there is a new area where the ice is melting, Greenland’s ice sheets. It shows that southwest Greenland’s ice sheets are melting at an alarming rate. They have been melting at about 4 times the rate that was researched in 2003. Research showed that this area was […]
Read more
For the first time, a mission designed to set its eyes on black holes and other objects far from our solar system has turned its gaze back closer to home, capturing images of our sun. NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has taken its first picture of the sun, producing the most sensitive solar portrait ever taken in high-energy […]
Read more
People always wonder how the moon was made. The birth of the planets 4.5 billion years ago was extremely violent. They grew to full size by absorbing rival planet embryos in a series of titanic collisions—one of which probably gave Earth its moon (below). The moon’s large size, low density, and other features suggest that it emerged from an explosion […]
Read more
Colossal volcanic eruptions some 250 million years ago have long been linked to the widespread global extinction known as the “Great Dying“, a 60,000-year period that saw 90 percent of all sea creatures and more than two-thirds of all plants and animals on land die off. But new research has for the first time identified the specific cause of the […]
Read more