Salt-spoiled soils worldwide: 20% of all irrigated lands — an area equal to size of France. Extensive costs include $27 billion+ in lost crop value/year. UNU study identifies ways to reverse damage, says every hectare needed to feed world’s fast-growing popu
Brazil’s Public Ministry acknowledged that the Sao Paulo water supply might only last another 100 days as drought conditions continue. The city with more than 20 million people is suffering its worst drought in at least 80 years. The most intense drought
What is a neutron star? Astronomers tell us that these tiny yet massively dense objects form by gravitational collapse from the remnants of a massive star that has exploded. The theoretical neutron star was invented to try to explain highly intense bursts of energy from
The final eclipse event of 2014 occurs at the Moon's ascending node in southern Virgo on Thursday, October 23, 2014. This will be a partial solar eclipse almost exclusively visible from Canada and the USA. Except for the far northeast, a sunset eclipse will be visib
Comet Siding Spring hurtled past Mars at about 56 km/s only 139 000 km away from its surface at 18:27 UTC on October 19, 2014. The period when dust from the comet was most likely to reach Mars and the orbits of spacecraft around Mars peaked about 100 minutes later. Acco
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
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
A very strong earthquake measuring M6.5 (Geonet) on the Richter scale was registered south of Kermadec Islands, New Zealand, on October 14, 2014 at 04:12 UTC (17:12 local time). Geonet is reporting depth of 82 km. USGS reports M6.1 earthquake at depth of 31.5 km (19.6 m
