A timely article appeared in Science News, about how the rotation of the liquid iron core of the earth may be reversing its rotation! As weird as it sounds, this is something that happens naturally and numerous times in earth's history. The result of that reversal of rotation would be a reversal of the North and South magnetic poles of the earth. Again, this is normal, but hasn't happened since modern humans have been around.
What skills are your future employers looking for in this day and age of maybe in the office/maybe at home work?
Turns out the World Economic Forum published a list. Here’s the top 10: |
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A new analysis of ice cores, allowing scientists to go back in time 1000 years, shows Greenland is now the warmest it has ever been during that period. This is significant because so much of its ice-sheet is land based - its melt water therefore contributes to ocean rise around the world.
Keep in mind that what used to be nearly unheard of, Arctic cyclones, are more frequent and powerful over the last couple decades. These have a large, negative effect on sea and glacial ice when it hits Greenland.
Some types of wood are piezoelectric - that is, when warped or put under mechanical stress, some woods can create a voltage difference and current. One can make a wood dance floor be used to generate electricity at some level, it turns out!
This would be a really cool research and engineering project for anyone who is interested!
As we continue with the climate science project, a new study of extensive satellite data and computer simulations of the worlds glaciers has been published in Science. It looked at the projections of what can happen with temperature increases from 1.5 degrees C to 4 degrees C, and the toll that takes on glacial melting and sea level increases. The video below was made by the lead author of the study to summarize the work. Basically some 2 billion people who rely on glacial melts for their water will be affected by continued global warming, to varying degrees depending where they are.
As far as we're concerned, the transistor is one of the greatest discoveries in human history...completely serious about this! It allowed for the creation of an electronic world, which literally everything is now dependent on. Learn a bit about it!
We all know 8 billion humans are going to produce A LOT of waste everyday that goes to landfills in every country around the world. In a place like India, where human population density within cities is among the highest in the world, and combined with millions living in extreme poverty, some horrific situations can develop, such as landfills that are over 200 feet tall (as tall as the Taj Mahal). Hundreds of thousands of people live in the shadows of these literal mountains of trash.
But an additional consequence is the decay of much of that garbage, and one of the gases released in decay is methane - a greenhouse gas many times worse than carbon dioxide. The amount of methane leaked from a single landfill this large is the same as the annual release from 350,000 cars in America. It is a humanitarian health emergency for those who are already extremely poor, but also a larger climate contributor. What is the answer to these situations??? The photo is from New Dehli, India, in April of 2022.
Check out a plan by NASA and others to bring back Mars soil and rock samples to Earth, using multiple spacecraft and vehicles. Would you ever want to be involved with something like this? It is very ambitious and innovative, to be sure. But also, what are the "unintended consequences" of doing this? Are there any we can and should think about? Very interesting, regardless, that humans have this sort of reach and capability to even consider doing this.
An amazing animation coming from a supercomputer simulation of the evolution of the universe following the Big Bang has been published. This movie shows how it took tens of millions of years for the first gas atoms and molecules (almost entirely hydrogen) to begin to come together under gravity to form the first stars. What this new simulation does for the first time is include the interaction between radiation from the Big Bang and the first stars and matter (gas clouds). Filaments of gas formed in a web-like pattern, which are the white strands that develop in the movie. It is along these massive strands where more stars and eventually the first galaxies formed. We see web-like patterns of matter forming a superstructure to the universe to this day! Very cool! This is part of the Cosmic Dawn Project, which attempts to understand the birth and evolution of the universe.
