The Watchers team and our contributors bring the latest on extreme weather, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, space weather, and all things science. We're all about making sense of the natural world and keeping you informed on what’s happening. Got a tip or a question? Hit us up using the form at newstips!
Comet Siding Spring will make its historic approach to Mars around 18:27 UTC on Sunday, October 19, 2014, and pass within 139 500 km (88 000 miles) away from planet's surface. That is less than half the distance between Earth and its moon and less than one-tenth
Almost 3 billion gallons of oil industry wastewater have been illegally dumped into central California aquifers that supply drinking water and farming irrigation, according to state documents obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity. The wastewater entered the aq
Hydraulic fracturing triggered a series of small earthquakes in 2013 on a previously unmapped fault in Harrison County, Ohio, according to a study published in the journal Seismological Research Letters (SRL) on October 14, 2014. Nearly 400 small earthquakes occurred be
Using a first-of-its-kind, high-resolution numerical model to describe ocean circulation during the last ice age about 21 000 years ago, oceanographer Alan Condron of the University of Massachusetts Amherst has shown that icebergs and meltwater from the North American i
A professor at Tohoku University in Japan, Keiji Nagatani, has spent last 10 years developing robotic systems specifically designed to operate in harsh conditions near active volcanoes. Nagatani's aim is to design robots which can go where humans can't and effec
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) found scores of young volcanic deposits estimated to be less than 100 million years old and provided researchers with strong evidence the Moon's volcanic activity slowed gradually instead of stopping abruptly a billion
What is a human being? It is the ultimate question, to which institutional science offers surprising answers. The materialistic paradigm, which has dominated institutional science for well over a century, states that the essence of consciousness can be reduced to the ph
The scientist who discovered the Ebola virus in 1976 after a pilot brought him a blood sample from a Belgian nun who had mysteriously fallen ill in Zaire says the disease has pandemic potential and he now fears that the world is on the edge of an "unimaginable cata
Recollections in relation to death, so-called out-of-body experiences (OBEs) or near-death experiences (NDEs), are an often spoken about phenomenon which have frequently been considered hallucinatory or illusory in nature; however, objective studies on these experiences
Astronomers working with NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) have found a pulsating dead star beaming with the energy of about 10 million suns. The object, previously thought to be a black hole because it is so powerful, is in fact a pulsar – the
