Tag: science

Is it snowing microbes on Enceladus?

8:22 pm

Is it snowing microbes on Enceladus?

“More than 90 jets of all sizes near Enceladus’s south pole are spraying water vapor, icy particles, and organic compounds all over the place,” says Carolyn Porco, an award-winning planetary scientist and leader of the Imaging Science team for NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. “Cassini has flown several times now through this spray and has tasted it. And we have found that aside from water and organic material, there is salt in the icy particles. The salinity is the same as that of Earth’s oceans.”

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James Cameron has set a new record for the deepest solo dive, a depth of 35,756 feet.1James Cameron has set a new record for the deepest solo dive, a depth of 35,756 feet.

6:27 pm

James Cameron has set a new record for the deepest solo dive, a depth of 35,756 feet.

And he is still down there at this moment.

Hovering in what he’s called a vertical torpedo, Cameron is likely collecting data, specimens, and imagery unthinkable in 1960, when the only other explorers to reach Challenger Deep returned after seeing little more than the silt stirred up by their bathyscaphe. After as long as six hours in the trench, Cameron—best known for creating fictional worlds on film (Avatar, Titanic, The Abyss)—is to jettison steel weights attached to the sub and shoot back to the surface. Meanwhile, the expedition’s scientific support team awaits his return aboard the research ships Mermaid Sapphire and Barakuda, 7 miles (11 kilometers) up.

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New research shows that the Medieval Warm Period was a global event, reaching all the way to Antarctica.

7:05 pm

New research shows that the Medieval Warm Period was a global event, reaching all the way to Antarctica.

Pseudo-scientists and global warming activists like Phil Jones and Michael Mann had argued that the warming was local, limited to Europe and parts of North America. The new data proves them wrong. Instead, the evidence shows that in the recent past, before the input of human technology, the Earth’s climate has naturally varied on global scales by significant amounts. And the most likely known cause for the Medieval Warm Period (c1000) and the Little Ice Age (c1600) that followed appears to be related to the Sun.

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New close-up photos of the asteroid Vesta from Dawn have discovered numerous bright spots scattered across the face of the asteroid Vesta.

9:07 pm

New close-up photos of the asteroid Vesta from Dawn have discovered numerous bright spots scattered across the face of the asteroid Vesta.

The photos show surprisingly bright spots all over Vesta, with the most predominant ones located inside or around the asteroid’s many craters. The bright areas range from large spots (around several hundred feet across) to simply huge, with some stretching across 10 miles (16 kilometers) of terrain.

The scientists believe the bright spots might be the asteroid’s oldest material, excavated from below by impacts.

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After one year in orbit around Mercury, Messenger’s scientists have concluded that Mercury is not only dense but odd.

4:35 pm

After one year in orbit around Mercury, Messenger’s scientists have concluded that Mercury is not only dense but odd.

The [proposed gravity] model, when combined with topography data and measurements of the planet’s spin, reveals that as much as 85% of Mercury’s radius is taken up by its dense iron core — an upward revision. “We knew Mercury had a large core,” says [Maria Zuber of MIT]. “Now we think it’s even larger.” What’s more, to compensate for a crust that’s enriched in sulphur and depleted in iron, the team has proposed a solid shell of iron sulphide that sits between the core and the mantle. While the shell satisfies the gravity constraints, it also makes it more difficult for a lot of convection to occur in the thin mantle that overrides it — which presents problems for those that invoke convection as a driver of the observed tectonic and volcanic features at the surface. “There isn’t a whole lot of mantle to be doing this lifting up,” says Zuber.

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