What is hail or a hailstone? Hail is a form of precipitation that occurs when updrafts in thunderstorms carry raindrops upward into extremely cold areas of the atmosphere where they freeze into balls of ice. Hail can damage aircraft, homes and cars, and can be deadly to livestock and people. How does hail form? Hailstones grow by colliding with supercooled […]
Read more
The rover Opportunity has been roaming over the planet Mars since January 2004 and traveled over 28 miles. It has sent back 225,000 photos of the planets surface. The information from the rover has told us that the winter is twice as long as Earth’s winters. Since it is longer than Earths winters the scientists didn’t expect the rover to […]
Read more
Like many human families, killer whales often rely on the wisdom of matriarchs to help them endure hardships and thrive, new research has found. Male orcas usually live for about 50 years, but females often survive well into their 90s, making them one of the few mammalsthat live for decades after they stop reproducing. Marine scientists studied the behavior […]
Read more
Having a sense of purpose may add years to your life—and the benefit can be realized throughout adulthood. That’s the conclusion of a long-term study that tracked the physical and mental health of more than 6,100 Americans aged 20 to 75. Previous research has shown purposefulness to be one of the strongest predictors of longevity, but this is the first […]
Read more
Earthquakes are the result shifting plates in the crust of Earth. When there is frictional stress building of the plates it causes failure at a fault line an earthquake happens. The shaking of the ground happens when the energy is released, and waves radiate. Research has found that they predict where major seismic activity may happen, but they cannot forecast […]
Read more
British astronomers have identified a celestial object so large that it challenges scientists’ basic assumptions about the nature of the universe. Huge-LQG is a cluster of 73 quasars, each of which lies at the center of its own galaxy.The structure measures 4 billion light-years across at its greatest dimension; our own Milky Way galaxy, which is 100,000 light-years across, is […]
Read more
Researchers have discovered a new map of the octopus genome that is so strange that it could actually be an “alien”. The first whole cephalopod gene sequence shows a striking level of complexity with 33,000 protein-coding genes identified – more than in a human. Not only that, the octopus DNA is highly rearranged – like cards shuffled and reshuffled in […]
Read more