Form feet and legs! Form arms and body! And I’ll form the head!
A researcher has spotted lava flows shaped like coils of rope near the equator of Mars, the first time such geologic features have been discovered outside of Earth.
These twisty volcanic patterns can be found on Hawaii’s Big Island and in the Pacific seafloor on our planet. While evidence for lava flows is present in many places on Mars, none are shaped like this latest find.
The biggest surprise? The largest Martian lava spiral measured 100 feet across – bigger than any on Earth. It is further evidence that Mars was volcanically active within the past 20 million years, rather recently geologically speaking .
For more than a decade, scientists debated whether this maze of valleys near the Martian equator was sculpted by ice or volcanic processes.
As part of a class project last year, Andrew Ryan analyzed about 100 high-resolution photos of the region snapped by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been photographing the Martian surface since 2006. One evening, while taking a second look at the images, Ryan zoomed in and noticed the lava coils. He counted 269 spirals ranging from 16 feet to 100 feet across.
Ryan said he was not surprised the features were overlooked in the past since they blended in with the terrain. The coils looked strikingly similar to Hawaiian lava flows, leading Ryan to conclude that lava – not ice – was the driving force.
Researchers say the new work provides convincing evidence that the curious patterns were forged from volcanic activity.
It’s believed that rivers of molten lava flowed through the Martian valleys into a broad basin where they settled and formed the coil shapes. The spiral shapes were preserved as the lava cooled.
There are no clear signs that the region today is volcanically active. With more observations, it might be possible to find lava coils elsewhere on the red planet.
Bill O’Reilly says gay marriage could lead to turtle marriage. Rick Santorum says it could lead to dog marriage. And now Missouri Rep. Dwight Scharnhorst says it could lead to goat marriage.
Sponsors of legislation in Missouri that would eliminate discussions of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in public schools and prohibit teachers from addressing bullying based on sexual orientation told the Huffington Post that they “do not want the homosexual agenda taught in the schools.” Rep. Dwight Scharnhorst (R), a co-sponsor of the so-called Don’t Say Gay bill, argued that sexual orientation issues “should be taught by parents, clergy and physician” and warned that teaching about LGBT issues would lead to other discussions. “There is no need to talk about Billy wanting to marry a goat,” he said.
While I’m sure Representative Scharnhorst has some wild desires, that doesn’t mean they’re shared by everyone!
By the way, why on earth would you want to prohibit teachers from addressing bullying regardless of the rationale behind it? Why would you want to codify and officially condone bullying for any reason?
This stands a good chance of becoming state law, and the result would be that a generation of young adults in Missouri will have learned that hate-crimes are protected speech.
Only religion could motivate people to be so cruel and immoral.
After catching the Secret Service’s attention with some inflammatory remarks about President Barack Obama, Ted Nugent has been removed from a concert lineup at a prominent military base.
Fort Knox’s June 23rd concert was originally scheduled to have Nugent as the headliner. On Tuesday, Nugent said that he would be “dead or in jail by this time next year” if President Barack Obama is re-elected.” Forty-eight hours later, changes to the concert lineup were in the works.
Yeah, if you make assassination threats against the commander-in-chief of the U.S. military, you should probably expect that you won’t be invited to perform for the military.
And regarding this context, it doesn’t hurt to point out how Ted Nugent avoided the Vietnam draft. Hint: it involves literally shitting in his pants.
Yet another chicken-hawk conservative who thinks he’s a tough guy because he can pull a trigger yet only likes to shoot things that can’t shoot back.
Historical records indicate that, worldwide, witch hunts occur more often during cold periods, possibly because people look for scapegoats to blame for crop failures and general economic hardship. Fitting this pattern, scholars argue that cold weather may have spurred the infamous Salem witch trials in 1692.
The theory, first laid out by the economist Emily Oster in her senior thesis at Harvard University eight years ago, holds that the most active era of witchcraft trials in Europe coincided with a 400- year period of lower-than-average temperature known to climatologists as the “little ice age.” Oster, now an associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago, showed that as the climate varied from year to year during this cold period, lower temperatures correlated with higher numbers of witchcraft accusations.
The correlation may not be surprising in light of textual evidence from the period: popes and scholars alike clearly believed witches were capable of controlling the weather, and therefore, crippling food production.
The Salem witch trials fell within an extreme cold spell that lasted from 1680 to1730 — one of the chilliest segments of the little ice age. The notion that weather may have instigated those trials is being revived by Salem State University historian Tad Baker in his forthcoming book, A Storm of Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 2013). Building on Oster’s thesis, Baker has found clues in diaries and sermons that suggest a harsh New England winter really may have set the stage for accusations of witchcraft.
According to the Salem News, one clue is a document that mentions a key player in the Salem drama, Rev. Samuel Parris, whose daughter Betty was the first to become ill in the winter of 1691-1692 because of supposed witchcraft. In that document, “Rev. Parris is arguing with his parish over the wood supply,” Baker said. A winter fuel shortage would have made for a fairly miserable colonial home, and “the higher the misery quotient, the more likely you are to be seeing witches.”
Psychology obviously played an important role in the Salem events; the young girls who accused their fellow townsfolk of witchcraft are believed to have been suffering from a strange psychological condition known as mass hysteria. However, the new theory suggests the hysteria may have sprung from dire economic conditions.
Weather patterns continue to trigger witchcraft accusations in many parts of Africa, where witch killings persist thanks to Christian missionary work. According to a 2003 analysis by the Berkeley economist Edward Miguel, extreme rainfall — either too much or too little — coincides with a significant increase in the number of witch killings in Tanzania. The victim is typically the oldest woman in a household, killed by her own family.
Oops, looks like RoboMitt is going to need a software update.
Black holes are without question some of the strangest places in the universe. So massive that they hideously deform space and time, so dense that their centers are called “points at infinity,” and pitch- black because not even light can escape them, it isn’t surprising that so many people wonder what it would be like to visit one.
It’s not exactly a restive vacation spot, as it turns out.
If you were to take a step into a black hole, your body would most closely resemble “toothpaste being extruded out of the tube,” as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it.
When an object crosses a black hole’s “event horizon” — its outer boundary, or point of no return — the same physics that causes Earth’s ocean tides begins to take effect. Gravity’s strength decreases with distance, so the moon pulls on the side of the Earth closer to it a bit more vigorously than the side farther from it, and as a result, Earth elongates ever so slightly in the direction of the moon. The land is sturdy, so it doesn’t move much, but the water on Earth’s surface is fluid, so it flows along the elongated axis.
See Bill O’Reilly, we can explain that.
Near a black hole roughly the size of Earth, tidal forces are magnified off the scale. Swan-diving into one, the top of your head would feel so much more gravitational pull than the tips of your toes that you would be stretched, longer and longer. British astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees coined the term ‘spaghettification,’ which is a perfectly good way to put it. You eventually become a stream of subatomic particles that swirl into the black hole.
Since your brain would dissociate into its constituent atoms almost instantly, you’d have little opportunity to soak in the scenery at the threshold of an Earth-size black hole.
However, if you’re dead-set on visiting a space-time singularity, we recommend going big; bigger black holes have less extreme surfaces. If you had a black hole the size of our solar system, then the tidal forces at the event horizon would not quite as strong, so you could actually maintain your structural integrity longer.
In that case, you would get to experience the effects of the curvature of space-time, predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, firsthand.
You would approach the speed of light as you fall into the black hole. And the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time. As you fall, there are things that have been falling in front of you that have experienced an even greater “time dilation” than you have. So if you’re able to look forward toward the black hole, you see every object that has fallen into it in the past. And then if you look backwards, you’ll be able to see everything that will ever fall into the black hole behind you.
So the upshot is, you’ll get to see the entire history of that spot in the universe simultaneously from the Big Bang all the way into the distant future.
Not such a bad way to go, all things considered.
In the event of a zombie apocalypse, popular lore suggests building a moat to protect yourself. In the case of a robot rebellion, climbing a flight of stairs was once thought to do the trick.
Not anymore.
PETMAN, a humanoid robot built in 2011 for the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), who seems determined to bring the SKYNET apocalypse upon us, has been modified to climb stairs, as shown in the unsettling video above.
This is only the latest feat for PETMAN, which has already mastered walking. The robot’s confident swagger has been the butt of jokes, but it wasn’t designed to look like a human on the battlefield. PETMAN’s primary purpose is testing chemical protection clothing, according to creator Boston Dynamics’ website, and it can “simulate human physiology within the protective suit by controlling temperature, humidity and sweating when necessary.”
PETMAN aside, Boston Dynamics may be best known for BigDog, the four-legged pack robot that can walk on ice and keep its balance after getting kicked. PETMAN shows some of the same ability to right itself in the video above—and if that’s not enough, it can also do push-ups.
A young star that is home to at least one alien planet is also ringed by a vast, dusty cloud of comets, like our own solar system. But there’s a big difference: There may be as many as 83 trillion comets there, with collisions destroying thousands each day, a new study suggests.
In fact, there is so much dust around the star that the equivalent of 2,000 comets, each a half-mile (1 kilometer) wide, would have to have been obliterated every day to create the icy dust belt seen today, researchers say. In an announcement of the discovery, European Space Agency officials dubbed the demolition derby a “comet massacre.”
The dust also could have been created by few crashes of larger comets – perhaps just two collisions every day between comets 6 miles across (10 km) – but that’s still a mind-boggling statistic.
The crashing comets encircle the star Fomalhaut about 25 light-years from Earth. Researchers studied the comet belt with the European Space Agency’s far-infrared Herschel space observatory, which spotted the telltale dust created by the constant collisions of comets in motion.
Depending on comets’ size, there could be between 260 billion and 83 trillion comets in the dust belt around the star. If you combined the amount of material in Fomalhaut’s dust belt, the mass would be the equivalent of 110 Earths.
Fomalhaut’s comet belt arrangement is similar to the Kuiper belt of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune in our own solar system. Scientists have known about a dust cloud surrounding Fomalhaut since the 1980s, though now the Herschel observatory has revealed the ring in greater detail than ever before.
Past observations by the Hubble Space Telescope suggested the particles that make up Fomalhaut’s dust belt were fairly large. But that theory was at odds with the Herschel observatory’s temperature readings of the belt.
Herschel observations found that the dust belt’s temperature ranges between minus 382 and minus 274 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 230 and minus 170 degrees Celsius) on average. That would correspond to tiny dust particles, each a few millionths of a meter wide, researchers explained.
The starlight from Fomalhaut would normally sweep such tiny dust particles away, yet they persist, which led Acke and his colleagues to deduce that a fresh supply of dust is coming from comet collisions.
One side of Fomalhaut’s dust belt is warmer than the other because it is off-center, possibly due to the gravitational influence of a planet. A planet was confirmed to be orbiting the star by the Hubble Telescope in 2005.
Formalhaut is a relatively young star, only a few million years old. It is about twice as massive as Earth’s sun.
Fossilized embryos unearthed recently in South America are having a big impact on paleontologists’ ideas about prehistoric reptiles’ way of life.
The little fossils suggest that some reptiles could have been “viviparous,” meaning that instead of laying eggs, they gave birth to live young.
The fossils are what’s left of aquatic reptiles that lived about 280 million years ago—prehistoric animals that scientists call mesosaurs, not to be confused with mosasaurs, which were also a marine reptile.
One of the fossils, found in Brazil, preserves of a baby mesosaur still inside its mother. Another fossil, unearthed in Uruguay, shows an embryo not inside a mother but on its own.
The finds were described in the March issue of the journal Historic Biology.
Researchers said in the study they also found at least 26 small bones, believed to be late embryos, and larger mesosaur skeletons.
Just last year, scientists reported that “whale-like” marine reptiles, plesiosaurs, birthed live young. The report came after the fossil of a pregnant plesiosaur was analyzed.
