Fewer large near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) remain to be discovered than astronomers thought, according to a new analysis by planetary scientist Alan W. Harris of MoreData! in La Canada, California. Harris is presenting his results this week at the 49th annual meeting…
Astronomers at Lowell Observatory observed comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresak last spring and noticed that the speed of its rotation was quickly slowing down. A research team led by David Schleicher studied the comet while it was closer to the Earth than it has ever…
Fossil records near the lost Gondwanides mountains show that the Permian-Triassic extinction started 1 million years prior to what was previously believed. Millions of years ago, a mountain range that would have dwarfed the Andes mountains in South America,…
A new study by the US Geological Survey and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates about 2.1 million people in the United States. may be getting their drinking water from private domestic wells considered to have high concentrations of arsenic,…
Around 245 BCE Ptolemy III, ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom in Egypt, made a decision that still puzzles many historians: After pursuing a successful military campaign against the kingdom's nemesis, the Seleucid Empire, centered mainly in present-day Syria and…
Building on existing information and databases relating to volcanic fatalities, scientists from the University of Bristol have, for the first time, been able to classify victims by activity or occupation and look at the distance of their death from the volcano. It…
On May 29, 2006, mud started erupting from several sites on the Indonesian island of Java. Boiling mud, water, rocks and gas poured from newly-created vents in the ground, burying entire towns and compelling many Indonesians to flee. By September 2006, the largest…
The Earth’s interior is still a mystery to us. While we have sent missions to probe the outer reaches of our solar system, the deepest boreholes on Earth go down to only a few kilometers. The only way to learn what’s going on deep inside our planet, in…
Over the last decades, the stratospheric polar vortex has shifted towards more frequent weak states which can explain Eurasian cooling trends in boreal winter in the era of Arctic amplification. When the strong winds that circle the Arctic slacken, cold polar air…
New evidence suggests a gigantic tsunami hit the California coast 900 years ago, removing three to five times more sand than any El Niño storm in history. Since large tsunamis hit the northwestern US every 300 to 500 years and the last occurred in January…
