Category Archives: Friday Headlines

Friday Headlines, February 15, 2013

THE LATEST IN THE GEOSCIENCES

 

THIS JUST IN:

METEOR STRIKE INJURES HUNDREDS IN CENTRAL RUSSIA

A meteor hit in Russia’s Ural mountains at about 9:30 in the morning, local time. The following shock wave (whether from a sonic boom, or the impact itself) caused the shattering of windows and resulted in nearly 1000 injuries, mostly from broken glass. As yet, no fatalities have been reported. The videos and photographs of the event are astounding!

Update:

Neil deGrasse Tyson explains more about it here.

 

ASTEROID IMPACT THAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS: NEW EVIDENCE

A paper in the journal Science published last Friday provided more support that the asteroid impact that happened about ~65 million years ago near Chicxulub (along the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico) probably dealt the deathblow to the dinosaurs.

The new study shows that, within the measurement precision of age, the impact event occurred at the same time as the extinction of dinosaurs. The impact and the extinction occurred no more than 33,000 years apart. Previous studies have argued that there was a substantial time gap between the impact and the extinction.

This does not preclude the possibility that dinosaurs were already on their way out prior to the impact, but it gives more confidence that the impact itself marked the total demise of dinosaurs.

 

SALMON USES MAGNETIC FIELD TO GUIDE ITSELF BACK HOME

A fascinating topic in biology is how, exactly, to migrating organisms know where their going. How do birds know in what direction and how far to fly each winter? How do Monarch butterflies find their roosting sites in Mexico after being born in the United States? How do salmon find their way back to the streams where they hatched? New research had provided an answer to at least the last of these questions.

Many organisms have tiny bits of magnetite in their brains. Even the most primitive of organisms, bacteria, are known to possess magnetite, which they use to orient themselves to the Earth’s magnetic field, much like how a compass needle points North. Organisms can then orient themselves North to South.

At a first pass, it is easiest to think of the Earth’s magnetic field as a simple bar magnet inserted along the Earth’s axis of rotation. But the Earth’s magnetic field is much more complex than that, resulting in it actually being quite different and unique at every point on the Earth’s surface. These differences make every place magnetically unique, and with a sensitive enough magnetometer, one can tell where they are based only on the Earth’s magnetic field.

So a salmon, when it decides to spawn, uses the magnetic field to identify the place where it first swam from river to ocean. Once it’s there, the salmon just starts swimming upstream.

Friday Headlines, January 25, 2013

THE LATEST IN THE GEOSCIENCES

 

NEW TYPE OF VOLCANIC ERUPTION PRODUCES GLOBS OF FLOATING MOLTEN FOAM

 

Just when you start to think there’s nothing left for science to discover, they discover a new type of volcanic eruption.

There are two commonly-used categories of eruptions, effusive, when the lava flows calmly out of the volcano, and explosive, which is self-explanatory. Geoscientists have now added a new category to eruption types: tangaroan.

Tangaroan eruptions are slow and result in a very frothy lava to be released. When these eruptions happen underwater, the foamy lava (called blebs) floats up to the water’s surface.

These eruptions are different than those that form the common floating volcanic rock, pumice, in that pumice is usually formed in explosive eruptions. This new rock doesn’t show the characteristic features of an explosive eruption. The new rock, and the new type of eruption, was clearly much slower than an explosive eruption.

 

CONFIRMED: THE UMBRARAN STARFIGHTER IS AN APATOSAURUS CERVICAL

 

Admittedly, I’m not a giant The Clone Wars fan, but I suspect at least a few of you are. And this is just too cool.

In the Star Wars universe there are lots of interesting spacecraft. On first looking at the Umbraran Starfighter, Matt Wedel and Mike Taylor and at Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week (SV-POW), they suspected it looked a lot like the neck vertebrae of the long-necked dinosaur Apatosaurus (once incorrectly called Brontosaurus).

As it happens, they were absolutely correct. The concept artist (David Hobbins) took his inspiration from a displayed Apatosaurus neck vertebra back in 2007.

How awesome is that?

 

MARS CRATER HELD ANCIENT LAKE & POSSIBLY LIFE, NASA PHOTOS SUGGEST

 

Not everything we learn about Mars needs to come from the fantastical rovers that are crawling over its surface. Some great new bits of information come from satellites orbiting high above the planet.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recently took some photos of the McLaughlin Crater. Close examination of the photos provided evidence that although now the crater is completely dry, it was once full of water.

In addition to giving detailed images of structures on the ground surface, remote imaging from satellites can also provide information about minerals present on the ground, based upon how the light is absorbed and reflected from the surface. In the case of McLaughlin Crater, there is evidence of carbonate and clay minerals which most likely would form in a lake.

The idea that there might have once been liquid water on Mars leads to the corollary that water must still be present on the planet. Scientists suspect that this water would be deep in the subsurface now. This, and all the other recent discoveries on Mars, leads scientists to believe that there Mars may have been habitable to life and my yet harbor life in it’s rocks.