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New mapping techniques show how much land would be lost and how many people affected by rapid sea level rises that are often triggered by storms and earthquakes.
The rings around the planet Uranus may have been spotted nearly 190 years prior to the accepted date for their discovery, according to a theory.
The legend of Atlantis, the country that disappeared under the sea, may be more than just a myth. Research on the Greek island of Crete suggests Europe's earliest civilisation was destroyed by a giant tsunami.
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| ©BBC |
Comment: If you believe that Atlantis was in the Mediterranean, that is.
A group of researchers has discovered that a family of tiny mites found in the Southern Hemisphere has taken the unusual step of resuming sexual reproduction after years of producing offspring through asexual means, raising intriguing questions about evolutionary biology.
RUSSIA: ET may have already contacted humans through messages contained in what is believed to have been a meteorite that hit earth almost 100 years ago, Russian scientists claim.
Massive stars create "planetary danger zones" - regions of space where extreme solar winds and radiation make planets less likely to form, according to a new study.
The zones extended 1.6 light-years - about 10 trillion miles (16 trillion kilometers) - around so-called O-type stars, which are roughly 20 times bigger than our sun and a million times brighter.
Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the study team mapped out the Rosette Nebula, a stellar nursery where many stars have formed close together.
The team searched the nebula for protoplanetary disks - the gas, dust, and rocks that swirl around some stars. With time, gravity can pull the clumps of matter together to form planets.
But if the younger stars are in a danger zone, solar wind and radiation from the nearby O-stars tend to blow away their orbiting disks, the study suggests.
The stars and their disks "look like comets ... with a bright head and a tail," said study leader Zoltan Balog of the University of Arizona.
The zones extended 1.6 light-years - about 10 trillion miles (16 trillion kilometers) - around so-called O-type stars, which are roughly 20 times bigger than our sun and a million times brighter.
Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the study team mapped out the Rosette Nebula, a stellar nursery where many stars have formed close together.
The team searched the nebula for protoplanetary disks - the gas, dust, and rocks that swirl around some stars. With time, gravity can pull the clumps of matter together to form planets.
But if the younger stars are in a danger zone, solar wind and radiation from the nearby O-stars tend to blow away their orbiting disks, the study suggests.
The stars and their disks "look like comets ... with a bright head and a tail," said study leader Zoltan Balog of the University of Arizona.
A deep scar under the North Sea thought to be the UK's only impact crater is no such thing, claims a leading geologist. Professor John Underhill, from the University of Edinburgh, says the Silverpit structure, as it is known, has a far more mundane explanation.
Detailed surveys reveal nine similar vast chasms in the area, he says.
This suggests it was part of a more widespread process, probably the movement of salt rocks at depth, not a one-off meteorite impact, he believes.
Detailed surveys reveal nine similar vast chasms in the area, he says.
This suggests it was part of a more widespread process, probably the movement of salt rocks at depth, not a one-off meteorite impact, he believes.
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| ©Phil Allen (PGL) and Simon Stewart (BP) |
| Seismic surveys show a trough surrounded by concentric fractures |
Comment: Wonder how Prof. Underhill knows that meteorite impacts are always individual events and never happen in swarms? Equally how he knows that these craters are not the result of a far larger body breaking up on entering earths atmosphere?
In order to capture all of humanity's yearly carbon emissions, an area the size of Arizona would have to be planted with 250,000 300-foot high carbon-capturing devices.
A limitation in using hydrogen as a fuel in hydrogen-powered vehicles is the difficulty involved in storing it in a cost-effective and convenient manner. While it is possible to store hydrogen using metals, the resulting products often can be prohibitively expensive and cause environmental problems.
Chemists at UC Riverside now offer a possible solution. A class of carbenes - molecules that have unusual, highly reactive carbon atoms - can mimic, to some extent, the behavior of metals, the chemists have found. Called cyclic alkyl amino carbenes or CAACs, these organic molecules, the researchers report, could be used to develop carbon-based systems for storing hydrogen.
Study results appear in the April 20 issue of Science.
In their experiments, the researchers found that the CAACs can split hydrogen under extremely mild conditions, a behavior that has long been seen in metals reacting with hydrogen.
"The mode of action of these organic molecules, however, is totally different from that of metals," said Guy Bertrand, a distinguished professor of chemistry who led the research. "Moreover, the CAACs are able to split ammonia as well - an extremely difficult task for metals."
Chemists at UC Riverside now offer a possible solution. A class of carbenes - molecules that have unusual, highly reactive carbon atoms - can mimic, to some extent, the behavior of metals, the chemists have found. Called cyclic alkyl amino carbenes or CAACs, these organic molecules, the researchers report, could be used to develop carbon-based systems for storing hydrogen.
Study results appear in the April 20 issue of Science.
In their experiments, the researchers found that the CAACs can split hydrogen under extremely mild conditions, a behavior that has long been seen in metals reacting with hydrogen.
"The mode of action of these organic molecules, however, is totally different from that of metals," said Guy Bertrand, a distinguished professor of chemistry who led the research. "Moreover, the CAACs are able to split ammonia as well - an extremely difficult task for metals."
A study presented this week at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting reveals that the looping magnetic fields along the Sun's corona carry magnetic sound waves in a similar manner to musical instruments.
Comment: As for Sir William Herschel - from this link. Also drop 'Planet X' or 'The 12th Planet' and add 'Dark Companion Brown Dwarf Star' on the linked website and you see a picture that has been hidden from us start to form.
New York Times
January 30, 1983
Something out there beyond the farthest reaches of the known solar system seems to be tugging at Uranus and Neptune. Some gravitational force keeps perturbing the two giant planets, causing irregularities in their orbits. The force suggests a presence far away and unseen, a large object that may be the long- sought Planet X. ... The last time a serious search of the skies was made it led to the discovery in 1930 of Pluto, the ninth planet. But the story begins more than a century before that, after the discovery of Uranus in 1781 by the English astronomer and musician William Herschel. Until then, the planetary system seemed to end with Saturn.
As astronomers observed Uranus, noting irregularities in its orbital path, many speculated that they were witnessing the gravitational pull of an unknown planet. So began the first planetary search based on astronomers predictions, which ended in the 1840's with the discovery of Neptune almost simultaneously by English, French, and German astronomers. But Neptune was not massive enough to account entirely for the orbital behavior of Uranus. Indeed, Neptune itself seemed to be affected by a still more remote planet. In the last 19th century, two American astronomers, Willian H. Pickering and Percival Lowell, predicted the size and approximate location of the trans-Neptunian body, which Lowell called Planet X. Years later, Pluto was detected by Clyde W. Tombaugh working at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Several astronomers, however, suspected it might not be the Planet X of prediction. Subsequent observation proved them right. Pluto was too small to change the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, the combined mass of Pluto and its recently discovered satellite, Charon, is only 1/5 that of Earth's moon.
Recent calculations by the United States Naval Observatory have confirmed the orbital perturbation exhibited by Uranus and Neptune, which Dr. Thomas C Van Flandern, an astronomer at the observatory, says could be explained by "a single undiscovered planet". He and a colleague, Dr. Richard Harrington, calculate that the 10th planet should be two to five times more massive than Earth and have a highly elliptical orbit that takes it some 5 billion miles beyond that of Pluto - hardly next-door but still within the gravitational influence of the Sun. ...