What time is the Blood Moon lunar eclipse?
Posted on April 22, 2023
| 4 minutes
| 642 words
| Mittie Cheatwood
A Blood Moon total lunar eclipse will occur this weekend, and here's when to watch it.
The sun, moon and Earth will align Sunday night for a total lunar eclipse on May 15, which occurs when the Earth moves into place between the sun and the full moon. As a result, the Earth casts a giant shadow across the lunar surface, giving the moon a striking reddish hue — which is why lunar eclipses are also referred to as blood moons.
[Read More]Your Cellphone May Be Ruining Your Dating Life
Posted on April 22, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 542 words
| Mittie Cheatwood
Going on a blind date? Here's a tip: Don't bring your phone.
The mere presence of a mobile phone can make the meeting between two strangers more stilted, according to new research published in the May issue of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
Cellphones don't disrupt casual conversation much, the study found, but when people were asked to discuss something meaningful, they reported less trust, empathy and lower relationship quality when a cellphone was in the room.
[Read More]Zealandia: Sunken 8th Continent Reveals Its Buried Secrets
Posted on April 22, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 433 words
| Fernande Dalal
A nine-week voyage took scientists from around the world to drill and explore the seafloor off New Zealand and Australia. They found evidence of land-based fossils, revealing that the ancient landmass wasn't always buried beneath the waves.
"Zealandia, a sunken continent long lost beneath the oceans, is giving up its 60 million-year-old secrets through scientific ocean drilling," Jamie Allan, program director in the U.S. National Science Foundation's Division of Ocean Sciences, said in a statement.
[Read More]Zombie wildfires are blazing through the Arctic, causing record burning
Posted on April 22, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 550 words
| Fernande Dalal
"Zombie" wildfires that were smoldering beneath the Arctic ice all winter suddenly flared to life this summer when the snow and ice above it melted, new monitoring data reveals.
And this year has been the worst for Arctic wildfires on record, since reliable monitoring began 17 years ago. Arctic fires this summer released as much carbon(opens in new tab) in the first half of July than a nation the size of Cuba or Tunisia does in a year.
[Read More]'Alien' Life Could Exist High in Earth's Atmosphere
Posted on April 21, 2023
| 6 minutes
| 1084 words
| Trudie Dory
Life on Earth shows up in surprising places. It's been found in high-temperature vents deep undersea and high in the air. But we're still trying to learn more about these so-called "extremophiles." Researchers are now pondering how well can life reproduce in these environments. Also, could microbes of this type be found on other worlds?
In March, a group of University of Houston students — piggybacking on a payload with a prime mission to scope out auroras — will fly a high-altitude experiment from Alaska to see what microbes are in the high atmosphere, between 18 km and 50 km (11 miles and 31 miles) from the ground.
[Read More]Archaeologists Discover Mysterious 4,000-Year-Old Carved Stones That Look Like Humans
Posted on April 21, 2023
| 2 minutes
| 403 words
| Patria Henriques
Archaeologists discovered nine mysterious stone-carved objects scattered around an ancient hearth on the Mainland of Orkney, an archipelago off the coast of Scotland. The stones likely date back 4,000 years and resemble human figures, with large bodies, distinct necks and heads.
The stones, about 1.6 feet tall (0.5 meters), were found inside a structure made up of three cists — a kind of box-shaped burial structure — two hearths and a partial ring of holes filled with broken stones, according to a statement from the Orkney Research Centre for Archaeology (ORCA).
[Read More]Breaks in the Perfect Symmetry of the Universe Could Be a Window Into Completely New Physics
Posted on April 21, 2023
| 5 minutes
| 1021 words
| Mittie Cheatwood
The bible of particle physics is dying for an upgrade. And physicists may have just the thing: Some particles and forces might look in the mirror and not recognize themselves. That, in itself, would send the so-called Standard Model into a tailspin.
Just about all fundamental reactions between the universe’s subatomic particles look the same when they are flipped around in a mirror. The mirror-image, called parity, is then said to be symmetrical, or to have parity symmetry, in physics speak.
[Read More]Fireball Over Michigan: Did Meteor Really Cause an Earthquake?
Posted on April 21, 2023
| 2 minutes
| 364 words
| Patria Henriques
On Tuesday evening (Jan. 16), people in Ohio, Michigan and Ontario, Canada, were treated to the awe-inspiring view of a meteor streaking across the night sky. At 8:09 p.m. local time in southeastern Michigan, hundreds of people reported hearing a loud boom from the meteor and feeling the ground shake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
"People described it as a booming noise, and that's what the seismometers would have picked up,"
[Read More]Here's Why Great White Sharks Are Natural-Born Superheroes
Posted on April 21, 2023
| 6 minutes
| 1121 words
| Mittie Cheatwood
For a multitude of reasons, great white sharks should be considered nature's ocean-dwelling superheroes — they're big and strong, live long lives, can heal their wounds remarkably fast, and it's even likely that they rarely get cancer. But how is it possible that these ancient giants have so many superhero-like traits? Scientists have now taken a major step toward answering that question by decoding the entire genome of the great white shark.
[Read More]Hundreds of Tiny Bugs Are Probably Hiding in Your Home
Posted on April 21, 2023
| 5 minutes
| 913 words
| Arica Deslauriers
No matter how well you think you know your home, it holds a number of dark corners and hidden spaces that you don't look at too closely from day to day. And more likely than not, these nooks and crannies host a vast range of tiny squatters that have somehow found their way in from outdoors, and in greater numbers than you might expect, according to a new study.
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