Ancient Empires Produced Significant Greenhouse Gasses
An analysis of Greenland ice core samples indicates significant global methane emissions per capita during the Roman Empire and China’s Han Dynasty — much greater than had been known.
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Neighboring Black Holes Defy Predictions of Violent Interactions
Around the cosmos, black holes aren’t known for being the nicest neighbors. They tend to make their presence felt in unpleasant ways, pulling nearby matter inward even as they belch out violent blasts of plasma and radiation. Put two of them in the same neighborhood and the resulting tug-of-war can quickly turn ugly. But in…
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Case of Missing Quasar Gas Clouds Now Solved
The case of the missing quasar gas clouds has been solved by a worldwide research team led by Penn State astronomers. The discovery was announced in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, which describes 19 distant quasars whose giant clouds of gas seem to have disappeared in just a few years. Quasars are powered…
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Remains of Fanged, Tiny Veggie Dinosaur Found
A “punk-sized” dinosaur with porcupine-like bristles featured some flashy stabbing self-sharpening fangs – although it likely only had a taste for plants. The newly identified dinosaur, named Pegomastax africanus, or “thick jaw from Africa,” was a mere two feet long and weighed less than a modern housecat in the flesh. Its remains were chipped out…
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With Limited Budgets, Pursuing Science Smartly
President Obama and his challenger, Mitt Romney, each responded at length to a question posed by ScienceDebate 2012 about the nation’s goals in space. But while both emphasized the importance of space exploration, with Mr. Obama briefly mentioning the need for monitoring the Earth, neither candidate, and neither party, has addressed the scientific question of…
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Switching Cause and Effect in the Quantum World
One of the most deeply rooted concepts in science and in our everyday life is causality; the idea that events in the present are caused by events in the past and, in turn, act as causes for what happens in the future. If an event A is a cause of an effect B, then B…
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The $1 Billion Journey to the Mantle of the Earth
In an unprecedented $1 billion mission to reach the Earth’s mantle, geologists are set to start drilling 3.7 miles beneath the seafloor, to reach the Earth’s mantle. And according to project co-leader Damon Teagle, “It will be the equivalent of dangling a steel string the width of a human hair in the deep end of…
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Tree Rings Reveal Amazon’s Rainfall History
Samples from eight cedar trees in Bolivia have helped shed light on the seasonal rainfall in the Amazon basin over the past century, say researchers. A study led by UK-based scientists said the data from the trees provided a key tool to assess the natural variation in the region’s climate system. It suggested that tree-rings…
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Why We Need a Supercomputer on the Moon
Should we build a supercomputer on the moon? It would be a mammoth technical undertaking, but a University of Southern California graduate student thinks there’s a very good reason for doing this: It would help alleviate a coming deep-space network traffic jam that’s had NASA scientists worried for several years now. Ouliang Chang floated his…
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Study Finds A New Look at Genetic Factors in Intelligence Needed
A new study finds that most of the specific genes long thought to be linked to intelligence probably have no bearing on one’s IQ. Furthermore, researchers say that it may be some time before researchers can identify intelligence’s specific genetic roots. In the study, Christopher Chabris of Union College and David Laibson, a Harvard economist,…