By
Tom Yulsman |
May 15, 2013 11:18 pm
I launched the ImaGeo blog here at Discover back in February, and ever since I’ve been focusing on spectacular visuals related to the science of our planet. Starting Thursday, May 16, I’ll be slowing down a bit on my posts as I head off to China and Cambodia for a few weeks.
I plan on continuing to blog here at ImaGeo while I’m gone. Just not every day. I’m particularly interested in the phenomenon of megacities. Along those lines, check out the image above. It’s a screenshot of a timela …
By
Christie Wilcox |
May 15, 2013 4:00 pm
By the time you realize what has happened, it’s too late. An Anopheles gambiae mosquito can land on your skin completely unnoticed. While you continue unaware, she stealthily walks over your exposed flesh, searching, probing the surface of your skin with her proboscis until she finds a blood vessel. She then situates her body perfectly at just the right angle, hunches down, and plunges her needle-like mouthparts into your skin. Tiny pumps pull the warm, protein-rich blood into her mouth.
…
By
Lisa Raffensperger |
May 15, 2013 1:38 pm
Watching a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis is enough to evoke wonder even from the most world-weary of souls. But rarely do we get to see behind the scenes of the pupa’s transformation. Current methods rely on dissection of the chrysalis, or at best, staining the critter (thereby killing it) and using X-rays to look inside.
Now scientists have worked out how to use a CT scanner, used in medical settings for high-powered X-rays, to look inside a living chrysalis. And they’ve produced t …
By
Rebecca Kreston |
May 15, 2013 1:34 pm
The year 2018 has recently been declared our new target year for eliminating polio from the world by the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation and Rotary International. It is clear that the next five years will pose no small challenge; we have spent over 60 years vaccinating millions of children and adults since Salk and Sabin’s discovery of viable polio vaccines, and we have long struggled in particular with three countries where the virus is endemic: Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nig …
By
Gemma Tarlach |
May 15, 2013 12:39 pm
Newly discovered water trapped more than a mile below ground in Canada could be billions of years old — and could hold clues both to Earth’s past climate and possible habitats for life on Mars.
A research team reporting today in Nature has found pockets of subterranean water that could be as old as 2.64 billion years. The fluids are located 1.5 miles underground in a mine near Timmins, Ontario, in rock that is part of Canada’s Precambrian Shield, the oldest part of North America …
By
Bill Andrews |
May 15, 2013 12:05 pm
In news that’s sure to delight young boys everywhere, scientists now have a better grasp on the impressive winds of Uranus. Neptune too. In a Nature study published today astronomers find that the most obvious weather patterns on the two ice giants are relatively shallow, only about 1,100 kilometers (683 miles) deep at most. The finding helps researchers understand the internal dynamics on Uranus, Neptune and similar exoplanets.
The two farthest planets from our sun might seem familiar …
By
Seriously Science |
May 15, 2013 10:00 am
My grandfather was really smart. Instead of paying me an hourly wage to pick weeds, he paid me 2 cents per weed. I just knew that if I pulled fast enough, I would make more money, and I pulled weeds like there was no tomorrow. Like my grandfather, these researchers wanted to know how to get people to work harder for the same rewards, and came up with something a little surprising. To one group, the scientists offered the chance to pick one reward for every ten minutes of typing. The second g …
By
Breanna Draxler |
May 15, 2013 9:40 am
Most of us would agree that harming others on purpose and for no reason is immoral. Social scientists have long assumed that marketplaces are to blame for many a compromised moral. There’s no shortage of historical examples: take the slave trade, or buying indulgences from the church, for instance. Now science has weighed in to confirm this hunch: a marketplace degrades a person’s morals.
That was what German researchers found in an experimental set-up that put people’s morals up against …
By
Neuroskeptic |
May 15, 2013 3:01 am
The BBC today has an interesting article by Mark Brown of British mental health magazine One in Four: Do famous role models help or hinder?
The context is that in Britain, charities and other advocates for people with mental illness have become fond of pointing to famous people, past and present, who suffered from a psychiatric disorder.
The hope is that highlighting these ‘role models’ will fight stigma and provide hope. Winston Churchill and Steven Fry are especially popular in t …
By
Tom Yulsman |
May 15, 2013 1:59 am
The sun really seems to be ramping up its activity. At 9:45 EDT on Tuesday night, it unleashed its fourth flare in as many days. You can see it toward the left side of the sun in the image above from the Earth-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft.
The false coloring in this picture is due to the wavelengths of light that the instrument on SDO viewed the sun with. These wavelengths are particularly good at revealing flaring activity.
Characterized as an X1.2 flare, it was not …
