In 1999, Hurricane Gert formed on the eastern side of the Atlantic and began the long trip to Bermuda. Along the way, it happened to pass over a hydrophone (an underwater microphone) planted half a mile deep in the mid-Atlantic.
And made a little noise.
A hurricane’s intense wind whips the waves into a churning frenzy, and deep below the surface of the ocean the turbulence creates a “rushing sound whose volume is a direct indicator of the storm's destructive power,” according to an MIT press release.
MIT engineering professor Nicholas Makris, in a paper from a forthcoming Geophysical Research Letters, takes data from Gert's cacophonous performance and proposes a new way to gauge the destructive power of an oncoming cyclone.
Remember how when you were little and it rained, your parents told you God is crying because you did something wrong? Turns out it's actually just a whole host of bacteria coalescing into ice and plummeting back to Earth. Because you did something wrong.
Brent Christner of Louisiana State University, with colleagues in Montana and France, reported today in Science that most ice nucleators, particles ice forms around, found in snow at mid- and high-latitude locations were biological in origin. I.e., it's just just the yellow snow you need to worry about. It's pretty much all filled with creepy crawlies (or, more appropriately, fearsome flagellum).
Their guess, then, is that the bacteria affects the rain cycle or actually causes their own precipitation.
We’re still deep in the heart of winter, but tornado season is right around the corner. (You can check out interesting tornado factoids at the NOAA site, here. ) If you live in the Southeast, look out.
A study from the December issue of “Weather and Forecasting,” published by the American Meteorological Society, finds that the deadliest twisters touch down a little closer to Dixie.
Tornado Alley, which stretches from Texas through the Dakotas, still gets the most tornadoes in a given year. But Walker Ashley, a meteorologist at Northern Illinois University, found that the most fatalities occur in a swath further south.
“The country’s most vulnerable region for tornado-related fatalities and killer tornado events basically stretches from Little Rock to Memphis to Tupelo to Birmingham,” Ashley said.
The polar bear is widely accepted as the unofficial symbol of global warming. Most people would suggest that the poor, drowning, computer-generated creature from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth thrust the plight of the polar bear into the national consciousness. Soon after, with the birth of little Knut in a Berlin zoo, the world had a physical being of heartbreaking cuteness to associate with the problem, though the cub, far from the Dorian Gray of his species, is susceptible to the corruption of age, as are most adolescents.
It didn’t take long for Hollywood to cast them as honorable (and rational) warriors, who’d also star in their own features and rub elbows with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio. So when reports surfaced in 2006 that the shifting climate forced the bears into cannibalism, the public reacted with an outpouring of compassion rather than dismissing them as fearsome predators, as may have been the case in other circumstances. These days, 1993 seems a lifetime ago, when America was captivated by Coca-Cola’s dreamlike Arctic idyll.
While rappers around the world are obsessed with making it rain every month on time, Beijing just wants it to stop. In a "when you have a hammer the whole world looks like a nail" situation, the Beijing Meteorological Bureau has been assigned the job of preventing rain during the upcoming Olympics because, at least in part, there's no roof on the fancy new Bird's Nest stadium. And it's working. Mostly.
"Our experiments with rain mitigation have been aimed at light rain," Zhang Qian, head of weather manipulation at the bureau, told a conference. "With heavy rain it is more difficult. The results with light rain have been satisfactory."
That's right, don't worry about the poison air. Just stop the rain.
Everyone has their favorite period in geologic history: The Mesozoic is popular with the ladies, Ordovician is an all-around nice dude and Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous are pretty cool if you can ever get them to stop hanging out with one another (which is like, never). Remember that one time Pleistocene came over to Precambrian's party and yakked in the sink after all those Jaegerbombs? Classic — I love that guy.
It's time to welcome a new epoch to the party: A group of geologists have proposed naming a new epoch, the Anthropocene, after humans. The period would encompass the last 200 years or so, and the geologists think the move is appropriate "because during the past 2 centuries, human activity has become the primary driver of most of the major changes in Earth's topography and climate."
Each geological epoch earns a name based on the characteristics found in the stratigraphic layers of rock found during the designated time period. The Carboniferous, for instance, is so named because of the vast deposits of coal that formed upon the compression of that periods wide-ranging swamps and bogs. The Anthropocene will similarly reflect humans' impact on that stratification — hopefully in the way we've altered the physical and chemical nature of ocean sediments, ice cores, and surface deposits rather than, say, Heidi and Spencer's pointless alteration of the pop cultural landscape.
Of course, Rosie O'Donnell's footprints might represent a dovetailing of the two.
Check out the trailer for his forthcoming film project, Terra Nova: The Antarctica Suite -- it's stuffed to the gills with nerdy factoids about ice, wave acoustics, glacier ecology, and the like.
When we first posted about the multinational effort between Russia, France, and the U.S. to drill near the hidden Lake Vostok in Antarctica, I have to admit I was worried. Not about the Frogs, mind you -- those cowards wouldn't do anything without our say-so. But you can't trust Russians around uncharted territory.
Sadly, I was right about those borscht-eating bastards: Russia plans to drill into the depths of Lake Vostok, ignoring researchers' principal concerns about potentially contaminating the pristine lake. Buried 4 km below Antarctic ice, Lake Vostok could harbor life forms that exist in a similar manner to possible extraterrestrial life in harsh environments like Europa. Introducing outside microbes could irreparably damage scientific efforts, but that seems to matter little to the vodka-swilling, Dostoevsky-reading intruders.
Antarctica's Lake Vostok lies below 4 kilometers of ice, is 15 million years old, and may reveal new organisms that survive in total darkness and cold without sustenance from the sun. It also sounds like the perfect place for the base of an evil genius — I'm planning on looking into real estate promptly.
For five years,a joint team of Russian, American and French scientists have sought to core the ice around the lake, which provides a paleo-climatic record of at least 400,000 years, and maybe as much as a million years. Finally, scientists are now thawing ice segments cut from an 11,866-foot ice core drilled back in 1998. Scientists have been worried about contaminating the lake with microbes from the surface world, but they got around that problem by taking the core from 656 feet above the surface of the lake, two miles below the surface of Antarctica. The ice has since been stored at -35 degrees Celsius at the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, where I'm applying for a job tomorrow.
Every week, The Anti-Scientist picks a study or news item which he dissects with the clinical detachment of the 19th century's most distinguished grave-robbing anatomists . . .
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The new movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is a rebellion-themed docudrama leveled at the 12 to 24 faith market. It will attempt the daunting task of making perhaps the most traditional belief in western culture edgy and hip. Like Christian death metal, it will do so in clothing rather antithetical to its subject.
But what's that you say? Nine out of ten virgins attending Dallas Baptist University already think creationism is cool. Well, yes, but this set hardly has clout in the culture wars, what with the pleated pants and New Testament trading cards. That's why they're paying star of the film, Ben Stein, and various marketing heavies for that just-so spin.
Back when I used to prospect for gold in my handsome youth (pictured), I always told my fellow golddiggers Scrappy Pete, Fartin' Jim and Paris Hilton that the ocean floor had vast reservoirs of the color, and that's where we should be diggin'. They never believed me, but this list of the top "20 Things You Didn't Know About Gold" from Discover renders my hunch true, along with plenty of other factoids relating to everyone's favorite shiny metal.
Despite the fact that there are millions of people around the world suffering from it, HIV is actually surprisingly hard to transmit. Each time a man has unprotected sex with an HIV-positive man, his risk of becoming infected is only 82 in 10,000, and the risk is even lower for heterosexual sex: a woman only has a 9 in 10,000 chance of contracting the virus from an HIV-positive male during an unprotected sexual encounter. Researchers have long wondered why this is, and whether our bodies have some kind of preliminary line of defense against the virus.
With uncanny timing, given the current droughts in the American Southeast, an exhibit saturated with facts and figures about water will open at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City on Saturday.
Yes, the supermassive magma plume beneath Yellowstone National Park is overdue for an eruption, which would dump inches of ash over the entire continent, plunge the globe into a decade-long nuclear winter, and kill a billion people. But that's a small risk to run in return for its real value: keeping the Pacific Northwest earthquake-free.
Beneath Washington and Oregon, the Pacific oceanic crust is crunching into and under the North American continent -- which should result in enough seismic chaos to prevent people from stacking two Legos on top of each other, much less building a worldwide coffee empire. Luckily, the so-called "Yellowstone plume" acts like earth's own Astroglide, lubing up the tectonic plates and ensuring the world's continued access to Pumpkin Spice Lattes.
Everyone has their favorite period in geologic history: The Mesozoic is popular with the ladies, Ordovician is an all-around nice dude and Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous are pretty cool if you can ever get them to stop hanging out with one another (which is like, never). Remember that one time Pleistocene came over to Precambrian's party and yakked in the sink after all those Jaegerbombs? Classic — I love that guy.
When we first posted about the 
Antarctica's Lake Vostok lies below 4 kilometers of ice, is 15 million years old, and may reveal new organisms that survive in total darkness and cold without sustenance from the sun. It also sounds like the perfect place for the base of an evil genius — I'm planning on looking into real estate promptly. 
Back when I used to prospect for gold in my handsome youth (pictured), I always told my fellow golddiggers Scrappy Pete, Fartin' Jim and Paris Hilton that the ocean floor had vast reservoirs of 
