Hold on to your hats, because scientists have found more evidence that Earth tips over from time to time. We know that the continents are moving slowly due to plate tectonics, but continental drift only pushes the tectonic plates past each other. It has been debated for the past few decades whether the outer, solid shell of the Earth can wobble about, or even tip over relative to the spin axis. Such a shift of Earth is called "true polar wander", but the evidence for this process has been contentious. New research published in Nature Communications, led by the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Tokyo Institute of Technology's Principle Investigator Joe Kirschvink (also a Professor at Caltech) and Prof. Ross Mitchell at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics in Beijing, provides some of the most convincing evidence to date that such planetary tipping has indeed occurred in Earth's past.
True polar wander bears some dissecting. The Earth is a stratified ball, with a solid metal inner core, a liquid metal outer core, and a solid mantle and overriding crust at the surface which we live on. All of this is spinning like a top, once per day. Because the Earth's outer core is liquid, the solid mantle and crust are able to slide around on top of it. Relatively dense structures, such as subducting oceanic plates and massive volcanoes like Hawaii, prefer to be near the Equator, in the same way that your arms like to be out to your side when you are spinning around in an office chair.

Despite this wandering of the crust, Earth' magnetic field is generated by electrical currents in the convecting liquid Ni-Fe metal of the outer core. On long time scales, the overlying wander of the mantle and crust does not affect the core, because those overlying rock layers are transparent to Earth's magnetic field. In contrast, the convection patterns in this outer core are actually forced to dance around Earth's rotation axis, which means that the overall pattern of Earth's magnetic field is predictable, spreading out in the same fashion as iron filings lining up over a small bar magnet. Hence, these data provide excellent information about the direction of the North and South geographic poles, and the tilt gives the distance from the poles (a vertical field means you are at the pole, horizontal tells us it was on the Equator). Many rocks actually record the direction of the local magnetic field as they form, in much the same way that a magnetic tape records your music. For example, tiny crystals of the mineral magnetite produced by some bacteria actually line up like tiny compass needles, and get trapped in the sediments when the rock solidifies. This, "fossil" magnetism can be used to track where the spin axis is wandering relative to the crust.

An international research team led by Prof. LI Di and Dr. WANG Pei from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) caught an extreme episode of cosmic explosions from Fast Radio Burst (FRB) 121102, using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). A total of 1,652 independent bursts were detected within 47 days starting Aug. 29, 2019 (UT).
It is the largest set of FRB events so far, more than the number reported in all other publications combined. Such a burst set allows for the determination, for the first time, of the characteristic energy and energy distribution of any FRB, thus shedding light on the central engine powering FRBs.

These results were published in Nature on Oct. 13, 2021 (US Eastern Time).

FRBs were first detected in 2007. These cosmic explosions can be as short as one-thousandth of a second while producing one year's worth of the Sun's total energy output. The origin of FRBs is still unknown. Although even aliens have been considered in models for FRBs, natural causes are clearly favored by the observations. The recent focuses include exotic hyper-magnetized neutron stars, black holes, and cosmic strings left over from the Big Bang.

A group of Japanese astronomers just discovered a potential new impact at the planet Jupiter.
Get your scorecards out — Jupiter just took another interplanetary hit. If it's confirmed it would be the 11th observed comet or asteroid strike at the gas giant since the pieces of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into Jupiter in 1994.

A little more than a month after five amateurs independently recorded a similar flash, a team of astronomers, led by Ko Arimatsu of Kyoto University, filmed this most recent flare in Jupiter's cloud tops at 13:24 UT on Friday, October 15th.

The potential impact flash appears around the 12-second mark in this video of Jupiter made on Friday, October 15th.
Ko Arimatsu / Kyoto University

The longest-studied comets in our solar system have inspired ancient myths, religious fervor and modern scientific controversies. Now, the discovery of 88 asteroids and meteoroids orbitally aligned with one of them, Comet Encke, suggests that they all formed from the relatively recent breakup of an even bigger, icy comet. The findings are welcomed by those who believe Comet Encke and the other products of this astronomical event are responsible for many of Earth's most violent and consequential impacts over the last 20,000 years.

Earlier Evidence

Comet Encke was first observed in 1786 and later identified as the source of numerous annual meteor showers. Known collectively as the Taurids, these showers light up the skies of both the northern and southern hemispheres as Earth passes through a stream of debris created by the comet. (This year, look to the stars throughout November for a glimpse of your own.) In the 1980s, however, astronomer William Napier and astrophysicist Victor Clube suggested that objects larger than your average "shooting star" had arrived from a similar source as the comet.

So you think you know what a comet is? Think again. Comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann is challenging old ideas. Astronomers call it a comet, but, really, "giant space volcano" might be a better description. It's a 60-km-wide ball of ice orbiting the Sun beyond Jupiter, and it appears to be one of the most volcanically active bodies in the entire Solar System.

Comet 29P just blew its top ... again. In late September 2021, 29P erupted four times in quick succession, blowing shells of "cryomagma" into space. Arizona amateur astronomer Eliot Herman has been monitoring the debris:

"Initially it looked like a bright compact object," says Herman. "Now the expanding cloud is 1.3 arcminutes wide (bigger than Jupiter) and sufficiently transparent for background stars to shine through."

A Dunlap Institute astronomer has discovered that our solar system may be surrounded by what she describes as a magnetic tunnel that can be seen in radio waves.

Dr. Jennifer West, Research Associate at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, is making a scientific case that two bright structures that are seen on opposite sides of the sky - previously considered to be separate - are actually connected and are made of rope-like filaments. This connection forms what looks like a tunnel around our solar system.

"If we were to look up in the sky," explains West, "we would see this tunnel-like structure in just about every direction we looked - that is, if we had eyes that could see radio light."

To understand self-organization in nature, behold the sandpile.

Remember domino theory? One country going Communist was supposed to topple the next, and then the next, and the next. The metaphor drove much of United States foreign policy in the middle of the 20th century. But it had the wrong name. From a physical point of view, it should have been called the "sandpile theory."

Real-world political phase transitions tend to happen not in neat sequences, but in sudden coordinated fits, like the Arab Spring, or the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. These reflect quiet periods punctuated by crises — like a sandpile. You can add grains of sand to the top of a sandpile for a while, to no apparent effect. Then, all at once, an avalanche sweeps sand down from the top in an irregular pattern, possibly setting off little sub-avalanches as it goes.

A group of Russian scientists have created a drug that may potentially revolutionize the treatment of Covid-19 by defusing the most catastrophic reaction the disease causes in patients, while not destroying their immune response.

The drug, called Leitragin, was developed by the Biomedical Technology Research Center of the Russian Federal Medical and Biology Agency (FMBA), and is currently undergoing clinical trials in Russia. Although its base substance was previously known and used in ulcer treatment medicine by Soviet and Russian doctors, it was the FMBA team that discovered how to apply it for the treatment of severe cases of Covid-19 and, potentially, other deadly diseases that cause life-threatening lung inflammation.

The Russian scientists had tasked themselves with finding a substance that would act as an 'off switch' for the chain reaction that, after being triggered by the invading SARS-CoV-2 virus, actually causes potential organ failure and death. This reaction of the immune system, dubbed the "cytokine storm," has been variously described as our body's overreaction to the virus or a "suicide attack" against the invading pathogen, and even as an evolutionary mechanism to stop the spread of deadly infections with the death of the host.

Trying to stop this uncontrolled immune response while still preserving the body's ability to fight the virus without causing more damage is what scientists and medics in intensive care units across the world have been wrestling with during the Covid-19 pandemic. In that regard, Leitragin is being touted as a game-changer, since its novel mechanism acts in a targeted way, and is said to be completely safe for one's health.

RT interviewed the head of the Russian team of scientists behind Leitragin, and talked to an independent researcher studying cytokine storms, to learn more about the potential of the novel drug.

Researchers came closer than ever before to achieving absolute zero

Scientists just broke the record for the coldest temperature ever measured in a lab: They achieved the bone-chilling temperature of 38 trillionths of a degree above -273.15 Celsius by dropping magnetized gas 393 feet (120 meters) down a tower.

The team of German researchers was investigating the quantum properties of a so-called fifth state of matter: Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), a derivative of gas that exists only under ultra-cold conditions. While in the BEC phase, matter itself begins to behave like one large atom, making it an especially appealing subject for quantum physicists who are interested in the mechanics of subatomic particles.

A mega-comet - potentially the largest ever discovered - is heading from the Oort Cloud towards our direction. Estimated to be 100-200 kilometers across, the unusual celestial wanderer will make its closest approach to the Sun in 2031. However, the closest it will come to Earth is to the orbit of Saturn.

Astronomers say Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein (C/2014 UN271) could be the largest member of the Oort Cloud ever detected, and it is the first comet on an incoming path to be detected so far away.

The graphic above, by astronomer Will Gater compares the size of the comet to other Solar System objects.

The comet was discovered Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein, from the University of Pennsylvania earlier this year. They were scouring through data from the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile. They found data of this object that was originally collected from 2014-2018, which did not show a typical comet tail, and the object was therefore thought to be a dwarf planet.

But within a day of the announcement of its discovery via the Minor Planet Center, astronomers using the Las Cumbres Observatory network took new images which revealed that it has grown a coma in the past 3 years, and that it was rapidly moving rapidly through the Oort Cloud. The object was then officially classified as a comet.