Planetary scientists studying images of Jupiter taken from some of the Earth's largest telescopes have discovered a mysterious dark "ribbon" winding around the giant planet's magnetic equator.

The equator is the region equidistant between a planet's north and south poles. Unlike the geographic equator, the magnetic equator defined by the north and south magnetic poles, which on Jupiter, as on Earth, are tilted about 10 to 11 degrees from true north.

Not that this ribbon is visible to human eyes. In a paper published this week in Nature Astronomy, a team led by Tom Stallard, a planetary astronomer at the University of Leicester in the UK, found it by studying infrared emissions from H3+ ions, which are created by interactions between the planet's magnetic field and an upper layer of its atmosphere known as the ionosphere.

"That molecule gets hot and starts glowing," he says. "It's a probe of the interaction between the atmosphere and the surrounding space environment."

Most H3+ observations on Jupiter, he says, have focused on the magnetic poles, where the ions are associated with the planet's aurorae.

Away from the poles, these emissions are much less intense. "It's about 100 times weaker," Stallard says. "The only way [to see it] is by using really big telescopes for a long time."

Life could have existed on the Moon billions of years ago, according to a new scientific study, which concludes that the necessary environmental conditions could have existed there, at not one but two points in history.

The research, published in the Astrobiology journal this week, does not say definitively that there was ever life on the Moon, but argues that the conditions which would have made life possible existed there during two different time periods, for tens of millions of years at a time.

The study's authors write that at least some of the key conditions existed simultaneously on the Moon for long stretches of time.

"If liquid water and a significant atmosphere were present on the early moon for long periods of time, we think the lunar surface would have been at least transiently habitable," said Dirk Schulze-Makuch, co-author of the study and a Washington State University astrobiologist.

Discoveries made in recent years have shown that the Moon is not as dry as was previously thought. One study even showed that there was probably still ice or water trapped within the Moon's interior at the lunar poles - but the new study suggests that there could have been a significant amount of water on the surface of the Moon; many moons ago, so to speak.

New research led by Cardiff University has shown that under a 'business-as-usual' scenario of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, ocean acidification is likely to hit unprecedented levels.

Ocean acidification occurs when CO2 from the atmosphere is absorbed by seawater, resulting in more acidic water with a lower pH.

Around a third of the CO2 released by burning coal, oil and gas gets dissolved into the oceans. Since the beginning of the industrial era, the ocean has absorbed around 525 billion tons of CO2, equivalent to around 22 million tons per day.

The rapid influx of CO2 in to the oceans is severely threatening marine life, with the shells of some animals already dissolving in the more acidic seawater.

Scientists have created a tiny rotor that rotates at speeds of up to 60 billion revolutions a minute - the fastest-spinning human-made rotor in history, and 100,000 times faster than your average dental drill.

The record-breaking invention not only pushes the boundaries of physics but could also be used to study some of the mysteries of quantum mechanics, and how objects operate in a vacuum.

We're actually dealing with some of the fundamentals of science here, like how gravity and friction work in a vacuum. Now that the nano-rotor is up and running, some detailed investigations can begin, according to the team of researchers.

A common set of genes is involved in numerous mental health conditions, according to a study of almost 900,000 genomes. The findings hint that conditions such as anxiety, depression and schizophrenia may all share a physiological basis, and open the door to better diagnosis and treatments.

Verneri Anttila of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues analysed the genomes of around 865,000 people, including those with one of 25 conditions and healthy controls, to see if there were any patterns. Finding these patterns is an important step toward understanding how and why these conditions develop.

The 25 conditions included neurological illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis, and psychiatric conditions such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

A mesmerising - and alarming - new animation from NASA demonstrates just how dramatic the increase in near-Earth asteroids entering our Solar System has become over the last 20 years.

The video, based on data gathered by the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, shows the huge surge of space rocks hurtling towards the inner Solar System.

Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are asteroids and comets in orbits that come within 121 million miles (195 million km) of the sun, and also within roughly 30 million miles of Earth's orbit around our star.

Scientists have discovered what they believe is a lake hidden below a mile of ice at the south pole of Mars. The water was detected by radar and is situated below the southern polar ice cap of the red planet.

The discovery was unveiled in a study conducted by the Italian Space Agency. The evidence comes from the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding instrument (MARSIS) which is on the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft.

The instrument uses pulses of radar to study the interior structure of the planet and has been orbiting Mars on the Mars Express European spacecraft since 2003.

There's more to a galaxy than meets the eye. Galaxies' bright stars seem to spiral serenely against the dark backdrop of space. But a more careful look reveals a whole lot of mayhem.

"Galaxies are just like you and me," Jessica Werk, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in January at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. "They live their lives in a constant state of turmoil."

Much of that turmoil takes place in a huge, complicated setting called the circumgalactic medium, or CGM. This vast, roiling cloud of dust and gas is a galaxy's fuel source, waste dump and recycling center all in one. Astronomers think the answers to some of the most pressing galactic mysteries - how galaxies keep forming new stars for billions of years, why star formation abruptly stops - are hidden in a galaxy's enveloping CGM.

"To understand the galaxies, you have to understand the ecosystem that they're in," says astronomer Molly Peeples of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

Yet this galactic atmosphere is so diffuse that it's invisible - a liter of CGM contains just a single atom. It has taken almost 60 years and an upgrade to the Hubble Space Telescope just to begin probing distant CGMs and figuring out how their constant churning can make or break galaxies.

A climate scientist doing fieldwork has made the shocking discovery that, contrary to predictions, the Earth's ecosystems might have some capacity for self regulation.

CLIMATE CHANGE MAKES SPIDERS BIGGER - AND THAT'S A GOOD THING

BY THERESA MACHEMER 24 JULY 2018

High temperatures make arctic wolf spiders ditch their favorite food, indirectly helping the environment.

THE ARCTIC TUNDRA is teeming with predators, just not the ones you might expect: By biomass, arctic wolf spiders outweigh arctic wolves by at least 80-to-1.

The eye-popping calculation, published today in PNAS by National Geographic explorer Amanda Koltz, could shape our understanding of how the Arctic will respond to future climate change.

Her study reveals that at increased temperatures and population densities, arctic wolf spiders change their eating habits, starting an ecosystem-wide cascade that could change how quickly melting permafrost decomposes.

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In higher temperatures, decomposition occurs more quickly and wolf spiders are more active, so Koltz expected that when her mini-ecosystems got warmer, their wolf spiders would drastically reduce the springtail population. But Koltz found just the opposite.

In plots with more spiders, the spiders actually ate fewer springtails. These larger springtail populations then ate more fungus, which lowered the rate of decomposition. Among the hotter plots, the one with more spiders decomposed less than plots with almost no spiders. In a way, the spiders are helping to fight climate change in the arctic tundra.

The unexpected find has drawn praise from experts. "The novelty of Dr. Koltz's paper is that it shows not only is [climate change] having direct impacts on these important ground dwelling animals but also on the complex ecological interactions between species on the tundra," Joseph Bowden, an entomologist with the Canadian Forest Service who was not involved with Koltz's research, says by email.

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Read more.

Abstract

The cause for the end Permian mass extinction, the greatest challenge life on Earth faced in its geologic history, is still hotly debated by scientists. The most significant marker of this event is the negative δ13C shift and rebound recorded in marine carbonates with a duration ranging from 2,000 to 19,000 years depending on localities and sedimentation rates. Leading causes for the event are Siberian trap volcanism and the emission of greenhouse gases with consequent global warming. Measurements of gases vaulted in calcite of end Permian brachiopods and whole rock document significant differences in normal atmospheric equilibrium concentration in gases between modern and end Permian seawaters.

The gas composition of the end Permian brachiopod-inclusions reflects dramatically higher seawater carbon dioxide and methane contents leading up to the biotic event. Initial global warming of 8-11 °C sourced by isotopically light carbon dioxide from volcanic emissions triggered the release of isotopically lighter methane from permafrost and shelf sediment methane hydrates. Consequently, the huge quantities of methane emitted into the atmosphere and the oceans accelerated global warming and marked the negative δ13C spike observed in marine carbonates, documenting the onset of the mass extinction period.

The rapidity of the methane hydrate emission lasting from several years to thousands of years was tempered by the equally rapid oxidation of the atmospheric and oceanic methane that gradually reduced its warming potential but not before global warming had reached levels lethal to most life on land and in the oceans. Based on measurements of gases trapped in biogenic and abiogenic calcite, the release of methane (of ∼3-14% of total C stored) from permafrost and shelf sediment methane hydrate is deemed the ultimate source and cause for the dramatic life-changing global warming (GMAT > 34 °C) and oceanic negative-carbon isotope excursion observed at the end Permian. Global warming triggered by the massive release of carbon dioxide may be catastrophic, but the release of methane from hydrate may be apocalyptic. The end Permian holds an important lesson for humanity regarding the issue it faces today with greenhouse gas emissions, global warming, and climate change.