ImaGeo

Visualization of Pacific ocean temperatures shows El Niño brewing, heralding possible winter weather impacts

It’s still not here yet, but El Niño sure looks like it’s coming.

In its latest forecast, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center says there is a 70 to 75 percent chance that El Niño will form “in the next couple of months and continue through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2018-19.” If the forecast turns out to be correct, the El Niño could influence weather around the world.

El Niño is typically associated with an extended Pacific jet stream and amplified storm track, boosting the o …

The Crux

Spawning An Intervention

Valérie Chamberland swims like a dolphin, quickly and fluidly, and for most of the past hour she has been darting through the warm, shallow water off the Caribbean island of Curaçao. Now, she is dangling upside down, hovering above a pillow-sized brain coral. Her rubber fins twitch steadily overhead, and as she sips air from the aluminum tank on her back, a stream of bubbles rises from her regulator’s mouthpiece.

The reef spread below Chamberland isn’t one of those flashy, …

The Crux

The Jesuit Astronomer Who Conceived of the Big Bang

In 1927, a prescient astronomer named Georges Lemaître looked at data showing how galaxies move. He noticed something peculiar – all of them appeared to be speeding away from Earth. Not only that, but the farther away they were, the faster they went. He determined a mathematical way to represent this, and connected his relationship to Einstein’s law of General Relativity to produce a grand idea: That of a universe continually expanding. It was a radical idea then, but today it fits with …

The Crux

Leprosy Reborn: How a Long Maligned Disease Might Unlock the Secrets of Stem Cells

For the past 25 years, Anura Rambukkana has been studying a disease that’s already been cured. He studies leprosy, a disease that was once the scourge of humanity before a course of drugs developed in the mid-20th century brought it under control.

For decades, he’s worked in a field that sees little funding and few new faces, and many of his contemporaries have moved on to higher-profile projects involving diseases that attract grant dollars. Rambukkana, a professor of regeneration bio …

D-brief

How Did Titan’s Haze Form? Scientists Find New Clues

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is enveloped in a thick, hazy atmosphere. One new research collaboration has identified a chemical mechanism that could help to explain how the moon’s haze formed.

Titan’s Haze
“Both space probes and land-based instruments have identified the chemical composition of the major constituents of the haze,” said Musahid Ahmed, a scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division and co-leader of the study. “However, how some of heavier particles are f …

Vintage Space

One Apollo Historian's Thoughts on "First Man"

I managed to get to a preview screening of First Man this week! And as someone who has been steeped in Apollo and space history for the better part of her life (I learned about the Moon landing when I was seven and have been obsessed ever since) I have some thoughts about it… Heads up: there are spoilers.

I wanted to love this movie.

The best thing about this movie is it’s gorgeous. Without question, my favourite part was the attention to detail on the hardware. The control panels, the  …

The Crux

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Reliability of Oral Histories

It all started with a stray goat.

On an otherwise nondescript day in the spring of 1947, a young Bedouin boy searched for a goat that had strayed from his flock just northwest of the Dead Sea. While he was looking, Muhammed the Wolf, as the boy was known, noticed a series of small caves in the limestone cliff above him. Thinking his goat may have gone into one of those caves, and not wanting to make the dangerous climb himself, Muhammed picked up a rock and threw it in.

What he heard w …

ImaGeo

Watch the lights blink out in Michael's aftermath, as seen in before and after views from space

Hurricane Michael tore into the Florida Panhandle with winds up to 155 miles per hour, pushing up a flooding storm surge of nine to 14 feet, causing buildings to explode, and toppling countless trees.

Another impact was widespread power outages. Just how widespread is visible in the animation above. I created it using before-and-after nighttime images from the NOAA-20 satellite, one on Oct. 6 and the other on Oct. 12.

The imagery data come from the Visible-Infrared Imaging Radiometer …

D-brief

Researchers Accidentally Reprogram Mature Brain Cells

Sometimes, the best discoveries are the ones you make by accident. Molecular biologists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center can attest to that: The team announced in a new paper in the journal Stem Cell Reports that they’d unintentionally reprogrammed one type of mature neuron into another — all without first reverting it to a stem-cell stage.

As you might’ve guessed, yes, when scientists want to change a brain cell that’s already settled into its specialized  …

ImaGeo

Hurricane Michael: dramatic satellite view of the monster's eye as it buzz-saws into the Florida coast

The utter devastation wrought by Hurricane Michael’s storm surge and 155-mph winds simply boggles the mind.

“It appears that the impact of the hurricane was more like a bomb than a hurricane,” National Public Radio’s Tom Gjelton reported today. “Buildings literally exploded from the force of the wind.”

Literally exploded is no exaggeration, as this aerial footage showing the destruction in Mexico Beach, Florida, shows pretty clearly:

https://twitter.com/news5wcyb/status/10504195047 …