Earth and Science News- Earth and Science Videos and News // Current

^#3

Signature of Antimatter Detected in Lightning

Designed to scan the heavens thousands to billions of light-years beyond the solar system, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has... more

pjacobs51
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Babies begin learning language in the womb

Science Daily reports findings from a new study which suggest that infants begin picking up elements of what will be their first... more

Tyrannous
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Happy Carl Sagan Day!

Back in 1980 the US space programme was in the doldrums. Apollo was fading into history and there hadn't been a US astronaut... more

retro_Syl
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Mukluks to keep it real in the USA

"Warning! Steger Mukluks and Steger Moccasins are addictive. We make the warmest winter boots and most comfortable moccasins... more

CarolynGillis
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Giant crack in Africa will create a new ocean

"A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm.

The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005 and some geologists believed then that it would spawn a new ocean. But that view was controversial, and the rift had not been well studied.

A new study involving an international team of scientists and reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds the processes creating the rift are nearly identical to what goes on at the bottom of oceans, further indication a sea is in the region's future.

The same rift activity is slowly parting the Red Sea, too.

Using newly gathered seismic data from 2005, researchers reconstructed the event to show the rift tore open along its entire 35-mile length in just days. Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began "unzipping" the rift in both directions, the researchers explained in a statement today.

"We know that seafloor ridges are created by a similar intrusion of magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge could break open at once like this," said Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and co-author of the study.

The result shows that highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of in bits, as the leading theory held. And such sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events, Ebinger said.

"The whole point of this study is to learn whether what is happening in Ethiopia is like what is happening at the bottom of the ocean where it's almost impossible for us to go," says Ebinger. "We knew that if we could establish that, then Ethiopia would essentially be a unique and superb ocean-ridge laboratory for us. Because of the unprecedented cross-border collaboration behind this research, we now know that the answer is yes, it is analogous."

http://www.livescience.com/environment/091102-africa-rift-ocean.html"A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm. The crack,... more

DeliaTheArtist
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75 comments

5 days ago

^#8

A fresh way to take the salt out of seawater

"THERE is a lot of water on Earth, but more than 97% of it is salty and over half of the remainder is frozen at the poles or... more

lookatmypix
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33 comments

4 days ago

^#9

New families of viruses found in Antarctic lakes - Ars Technica

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/11/new-families-of-viruses-found-in-antarctic-lakes.ars

quanta
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3 comments

1 day ago

^#10

More evidence showing nanoparticles effect DNA

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/06/2735612.htm Researchers in the United Kingdom have found some nanoparticles - which... more

JanforGore
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3 comments

1 day ago

^#11

The stats are in: no global cooling

The idea that the world is now cooling has been repeated in opinion columns, talk radio, pundit television and more. After a poll was released last week indicating that only 57 percent of Americans now believe there is strong scientific evidence for global warming, which is down from 77 percent in 2006, Seth Borenstein from the Associated Press decided to check out what the statistics are really saying about global warming or cooling. In a blind test, Borenstein sent accumulated ground temperature data from the past 130 years to four independent statisticians. He disguised the sources (NASA, NOAA and British meteorological data) and didn't tell the statisticians what the numbers represented; he asked them to just look for trends in the data. The experts found no true temperature declines over time; additionally, the last ten years comprise not only the highest data set in the record, but they also have a continued, positive trend.

It seems recent weather trends have been cool — 2008 was cooler than previous years, especially the really hot years of 1998 and 2005.

Borenstein wanted to know if this was a longer climate trend or just weather's normal ups and downs. All four of the statisticians agreed independently the statistics overall clearly show an upward trend of warming. Also included was a data set of satellite temperature data that is often favored by skeptics of global warming. Same story there: global temps are on the rise.

The ups and downs during the last decade, which some skeptics say show a cooling rather than warming, are variations that are repeated randomly in data as far back as 1880.
One statistician said that "cherry-picking" a micro-trend within a bigger trend is not the way to look at data.

This "blind" review of the data isn't the only review that has shown obvious warming. Borenstein said that NOAA recently re-examined its data because of the recent "chatter" about cooling, and no cooling trend was found, and earlier this year, climate scientists in two peer-reviewed publications statistically analyzed recent years' temperatures against claims of cooling and found them not valid.

For the full story, read Borenstein's article here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091026/ap_on_sc/us_sci_global_coolingThe idea that the world is now cooling has been repeated in opinion columns, talk radio, pundit television and more. After a poll... more

pjacobs51
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66 comments

12 days ago

^#12

Toyota Develops New Flower Species To Reduce Pollution

Toyota has created two flower species that absorb nitrogen oxides and take heat out of the atmosphere. The flowers, derivatives of... more

Tyrannous
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18 comments

6 days ago

^#13

Government to ban organic farming?

This bill is sitting in committee and I am not sure when it is going to hit the floor. One thing I do know is that very few of... more

Supertramp_
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20 comments

6 days ago

^#14

Scientists: eating too much soy not a good thing

http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/estrogenic-effects-of-soy Considering that the soy we eat in America is now... more

JanforGore
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34 comments

4 days ago

^#15

The 15 most toxic places to live

Earth's orbit Believe it or not, even space contains copious amounts of pollution. An estimated 4 million pounds of space... more

quanta
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18 comments

17 days ago

^#16

Physicists Calculate Exact Number of Alternate Universes

There are 10^10^16 of them (but #1,000,443,163,313,125,343,132 is the evil one) For some time, physicists have theorized about... more

pjacobs51
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78 comments

22 days ago

^#17

Meteor explodes over the Netherlands

When amateur photographer Robert Mikaelyan went out to snap an old Dutch sugar factory on Tuesday, he captured a rare treat: a... more

pjacobs51
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15 comments

23 days ago

^#18

Why a high IQ doesn't mean you're smart

IS GEORGE W. BUSH stupid? It's a question that occupied a good many minds of all political persuasions during his turbulent eight-year presidency. The strict answer is no. Bush's IQ score is estimated to be above 120, which suggests an intelligence in the top 10 per cent of the population. But this, surely, does not tell the whole story. Even those sympathetic to the former president have acknowledged that as a thinker and decision-maker he is not all there. Even his loyal speechwriter David Frum called him glib, incurious and "as a result ill-informed". The political pundit and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough accused him of lacking intellectual depth, claiming that compared with other US presidents whose intellect had been questioned, Bush junior was "in a league by himself". Bush himself has described his thinking style as "not very analytical".

How can someone with a high IQ have these kinds of intellectual deficiencies? Put another way, how can a "smart" person act foolishly? Keith Stanovich, professor of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada, has grappled with this apparent incongruity for 15 years. He says it applies to more people than you might think. To Stanovich, however, there is nothing incongruous about it. IQ tests are very good at measuring certain mental faculties, he says, including logic, abstract reasoning, learning ability and working-memory capacity - how much information you can hold in mind.

But the tests fall down when it comes to measuring those abilities crucial to making good judgements in real-life situations. That's because they are unable to assess things such as a person's ability to critically weigh up information, or whether an individual can override the intuitive cognitive biases that can lead us astray.

This is the kind of rational thinking we are compelled to do every day, whether deciding which foods to eat, where to invest money, or how to deal with a difficult client at work. We need to be good at rational thinking to navigate our way around an increasingly complex world. And yet, says Stanovich, IQ tests - still the predominant measure of people's cognitive abilities - do not effectively tap into it. "IQ tests measure an important domain of cognitive functioning and they are moderately good at predicting academic and work success. But they are incomplete. They fall short of the full panoply of skills that would come under the rubric of 'good thinking'."

Read the full article here:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427321.000-clever-fools-why-a-high-iq-doesnt-mean-youre-smart.html?full=trueIS GEORGE W. BUSH stupid? It's a question that occupied a good many minds of all political persuasions during his turbulent... more