Earth

The Midwestern states have been slammed with storms in recent days leading to massive flooding in many areas. While the floods are tragic, the rain's overall effect on the Midwest landscape is stunning. New NASA photos of Earth taken from space show multiple Midwestern states covered in a thick blanket of bright green leaves and grass, covering the center of the country with a huge swath of fertile, robust vegetation. The photos hint at a promising summer as far as crop growth is concerned.

Continue Reading

A study has been conducted which shows when England began to break away from Europe physically, creating the Dover Strait. Using bathymetric maps to study the bottom of the sea, scientists have discovered a lot more than what's previously been known about the area and the sequence of events that created today's topography. Britain, it turns out, was connected to the mainland (last time it was connected, that is) via a chalk ridge that kept a giant proglacial lake in check - until disaster struck.

Continue Reading

In a little more than a day's time (depending on where you happen to be in the world), we'll be closing the book on 2016. On top of everything that will make 2016 stand out in our minds, here's one more thing to add to the list: 2016 will be one second longer than a standard year. Known as a leap second, we sometimes have to tack on this additional second thanks to irregularities in Earth's rotation.

Continue Reading

A recent study showed that people in record high temperatures, when asked, believe in climate change, while those in record low temperatures often do not. This study was published in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" in December of 2016, which meant I needed to create a sort of guide to simplify what Climate Change is. The definition of Climate Change is the basis of all arguments having to do with Climate Change - we need to get this bit down solid, first and foremost.

Continue Reading

Diamonds have a lot of monetary value, to be sure, but thanks to the Gemological Institute of America, we're learning today that some of the larger ones can have a lot of scientific value too. A team of Institute scientists lead by diamond geologist Evan Smith set out to find where some of the largest, and therefore rarest, diamonds on Earth come from. The evidence they found ended up being quite surprising.

Continue Reading

Google has announced a new Google Earth Timeplapse feature, created in partnership with Time, that presents satellite imagery from 32 years of the Earth's surface in animations to show in detail how our planet is changing. Google Earth has added an additional four years of maps to what was available before, and now makes use of higher-resolution images that offer greater surface details, as well as animations with consistent color and quality.

Continue Reading

Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but those friends might be easier to find than formerly believed. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University have developed a model they believe means that in the deep, deep Earth, diamonds might not be rare at all. This is based on a theory that diamonds can be formed not just by the "redox" reactions commonly believed to have produced the diamonds we know today but also by water passing through rocks. Luckily for the diamond market, it's not going to make jewelry cheaper. At least not yet.

Continue Reading

Following the release of a handful of new images of Earth taken by NASA's DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory) satellite over the past few months, the space agency has launched a new section of its website that showcases daily photos of our "blue marble." The website, found at epic.gsfc.nasa.gov, will post 12 new photos per day, all taken of the Earth over the last 24 hours as it rotates. The images are all taken by DSCOVR's camera, known as EPIC, or Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera.

Continue Reading

In the first trailer for the Boss Key production LawBreakers, this game suggests what might happen were our moon to suddenly explode. They suggest that this explosion was caused by humans - that'd be a feat in and of itself: this massive rock is 3,475 km in diameter and not an easy nut to crack. The moon would require the equivalent of 30 trillion megatons of TNT to destroy - 600 billion nuclear warheads or more. Luckily, "clandestine government testing on the lunar surface" has this covered.

Continue Reading

NASA has released a new sequence of images offering a rare, and incredible, look at the moon passing in front of the sunlit side of Earth. The images, which NASA ever so kindly shared as a GIF, the internet's favorite format, are impressive in that they clearly depict the relationship between our planet and the lunar surface, with the comparison revealing just how bring Earth really is. Also impressive is the fact that the photos were captured from about 1 millions miles away.

Continue Reading

While much of the buzz from NASA recently has been about the New Horizons' trip to Pluto, the agency hasn't totally forgotten about the blue orb we inhabit. Captured from a camera on the Deep Space Climate Observatory, NASA has just released the satellite's first view of the sunlit side of Earth from 1 million miles away, and it sure is stunning. The image shows North and Central America, with the Caribbean islands located in the turquoise areas in the center.

Continue Reading

Climate change and the unrelenting development and stockpiling of nuclear weapons have seen the Doomsday Clock pushed another minute closer to global disaster, with scientists warning that we're three metaphorical minutes from destruction. The clock, a symbolic representation of how close humanity is to teetering on the edge of effective annihilation by its own hand, is now just three minutes from midnight, with the team in charge of the hands - the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, counting seventeen Nobel Prize laureates among its members - ominously suggesting that "the probability of global catastrophe is very high."

Continue Reading