Jonathan Roberts, The Conversation
There are ten asteroids that the space organisation NASA said this month have been classified as potentially hazardous based on their size and their orbits in our Solar system.NASA has now identified 693 near-Earth objects thanks to the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft that's been looking for potential threats to Earth since 2013.
Sarah Charley, Symmetry
The Large Hadron Collider is the world's most powerful accelerator. Inside, beams of particles sprint 17 miles around in opposite directions through a pair of evacuated beam pipes that intersect at collision points surrounded by giant particle detectors.
Caleb Scharf, Scientific American
The planet Jupiter is a beast: Three-hundred-and-seventeen times the mass of the Earth, mostly made of metallic hydrogen, and at the center of an astonishing collective of orbiting natural bodies.In fact, Jupiter's satellites form a shrunken version of a full planetary system: from the tightly bound larger Galilean moons (orbiting in their Laplacian mean-motion resonances, akin to places like TRAPPIST-1) to the remarkable array of smaller moonlets that encircle... Читать дальше...
Alex B. Berezow, ACSH
The word pesticide is misunderstood, nearly to the same extent as the word chemical. People have been led to believe, largely by the organic food industry and environmental activists, that pesticides are unnatural, dangerous, and do not belong in the food supply. But this defies a basic understanding of biology.
Scott Johnson, Ars Tech
There have been some well-publicized incidents in which student groups or other protesters have interfered with scheduled appearances by right-wing speakers at US universities. In response, a number of states have considered campus free speech bills based on model legislation produced by the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank.
Peter Brannen, The Atlantic
At the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, Smithsonian paleontologist Doug Erwin took the podium to address a ballroom full of geologists on the dynamics of mass extinctions and power grid failureswhich, he claimed, unfold in the same way.These are images from the NOAA website of the US blackout in 2003, he said, pulling up a nighttime satellite picture of the glowing northeastern megalopolis, megawatts afire under the cold dark of space.
Rachael Rettner, Live Science
A 4-year-old boy in Texas died recently, nearly a week after he went swimming, from what his parents were told was "dry drowning." But what exactly does this mean?The boy, Frankie Delgado, was playing in the waters of the Galveston Bay when he was knocked down by a wave, according to CNN.
Theodora Sutcliffe, BBC News
The Indonesian island of Ternate, like its neighbour Tidore, is almost all volcano. It sprouts from the sea, an almost-perfect, yet truncated cone, wreathed in steamy clouds and fringed with a narrow strip of flatlands and beach that house an airport, a city and an around-the-island road.
Leonard David, Space.com
Communication between Earthlings and intelligent aliens should be based on mathematics exo-arithmetic greetings that form a shared lingo, some researchers say.The idea is that mathematics is as much a part of our humanity as music and art. And it is mathematics that might be understandable even familiar to extraterrestrial civilizations, allowing us to strike up star-speak repartee.
Hakim Abdi, Conversation
Of the 186 countries assessed in a recent survey of climate vulnerability, Chad was rated most in peril. A combination of high poverty, frequent conflicts, and the risk of both droughts and floods means the central African nation is bottom of the list, just below Bangladesh and some way behind Norway, the country least vulnerable to climate change.
Charlotte Price Persson, ScienceNordic
Archaeologists have discovered the oldest grape in Denmark, near the town of Rdbyhavn on Lolland. It is broken and charred and shabby to look at, but dating reveals that it originates all the way back to the Bronze Age. And it is completely amazing according to one of the archaeologists who discovered it, archaeological botanist Peter Steen Henriksen, a curator at the National Museum of Denmark.
Ross Pomeroy, RealClearScience
In 2015, a team of Scottish scientists announced they had found a way to slow the speed of light. By sending photons through a special mask, the researchers altered their shape. In this malformed state, these infinitesimal particles of light traveled slower than normal photons.
Raul Isea, Science 2.0
There are several movies as well as certain philosophical reflections, and scientific studies that consider that we are living in a world that can be described in a computer simulation, implying that our lives are unreal. Our existence is just part of a computer simulation.
