No Worries – Scientists Say Earth’s Poles Won’t Flip for 4,000 Years
The Earth’s magnetic fields helps create a shield that protects us from the continuous onslaught of highly charged space particles and radiation, which are dangerous to creatures living on the Earth’s surface. Without these protective fields, scientists say that the solar wind also would simply blow away our atmosphere in way similar to what scientists suspect […]
Did our Sun Snatch Planet 9 from Another Solar System?
Is it possible that the new-found theoretical Planet 9 is actually an exoplanet, a planet from another solar system? According to astronomers at Sweden’s Lund University, it’s “highly likely” that Planet 9 was actually “snatched” from another solar system by our young sun some 4.5 billion years ago, or within 100 million years after its formation. […]
Mercury’s Surface ‘Painted’ With Carbon from Comets
A first glance, the planet Mercury looks a lot like our Moon, both gray and pockmarked with craters after being bombarded with meteorites and blasted by the solar wind over the millennia. Some take the similarity further, referring to them as “twins.” The color of Mercury’s surface though is much darker than the moon, so […]
Facebook Likes Reveal Personality Traits
A new Anglo-American study has provided evidence that the ‘digital footprints’ you leave behind on your visits to social media websites such as Facebook can reveal more about your personality than your family or best friends. Researchers at California’s Stanford University and the UK’s University of Cambridge constructed a computer model that mined the Facebook […]
Scientists Learn More about Mysterious 3rd Van Allen Belt
New research provides insight into the mysterious Van Allen radiation belts. There are normally two of these giant bands of high-energy radiation encircling the Earth. However, researchers discovered a third and previously unknown radiation ring that only lasted for about a month back in September 2012. Writing in a recent edition of Nature Physics, scientists from UCLA […]
Flu Forecasts Could Soon Join Weathercasts
Imagine that one day soon when you tune in to your favorite radio or TV station for the latest weather forecast, you’re given a flu forecast as well. Adapting techniques used in modern weather prediction, scientists at Columbia University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research have come up with a way to produce localized […]