What do the Ansei-Nankai and Ansei-Tokai earthquakes of 1854 have in common with the 1944-1946 Tononkai and Nankai earthquakes in Japan? They each suffered massive aftershocks shortly thereafter. The Ansei-Nankai and Ansei-Tokai earthquakes were 8.4 magnitude and only 31 hours apart. Worse, the aftershocks were nearly as bad.
And the same scenario could apply this time, says UC Davis seismologist John Rundle, and Tokyo is at the most risk. Friday's magnitude 9.0 temblor has been followed by hundreds of
Researchers say they have ruled the cosmic bubble theory, an alternate theory on the nature of dark energy, after recalculating the expansion rate of the universe to unprecedented accuracy.
The universe appears to be expanding at an increasing rate and some believe that is because the universe is filled with a dark energy that works in the opposite way of gravity. One alternative to that hypothesis is that an enormous bubble of relatively empty space eight billion light-years across surrounds our galactic neighborhood. If we lived near the center of this void, observations of galaxies being pushed away from each other at accelerating speeds would be an illusion.
Polar bears’ noses are phenomenal. They smell a seal’s fart through a light year of snow and ice or something like that. Polar bears are cute, strong, beautiful, pure awesomeness all the way. Come on: they sleep on snow then swim a few rounds in ice water to cool off! I adore them, I love ‘em, I really do.
Now they disappear. Also the number of lions is drastically plummeting, due to poaching and other factors. What to do about it?
Third graders enjoy clay and pipe cleaners. It might sound cruel to teach them graduate level graph theory most math Ph.D.’s have not seen, but I might get away with it if I uses the right craft supplies. Tell kids spinach is good for them. Children are right to skeptical, as I expect of my reader.
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What startled me most was that a colleague of mine at the University of Padova even sent a message to my departments' mailing list, saying that the new result is very important. But it clearly isn't! In fact, the exclusion at 95% CL in the range of Higgs boson masses that CDF and DZERO could put together from the analysis of additional data is almost exactly the same as the one that they published last Summer.
But maybe I should make a step back and explain the matter from the start, to let you judge by yourself the relevance of the new Tevatron bounds on the rate of Higgs boson production in proton-antiproton collisions.
CDF and DZERO are analyzing the proton-antiproton collisions at 2 TeV that the Tevatron collider is producing since 2001.
Everyone's heard of the Darwin Awards, right? It's where some poor soul dies in such a monumentally stupid way that it can be considered that they have done the human gene pool a great favour by inadvertantly altruistically killing themselves and removing their genes. Well, I have a candidate from the fossil record; a late famennian placoderm, that definitely deserves such an accolade.
Firstly though, a quick primer on placoderms. In short, they were big armoured predatory fishes that were widespread in the Devonian. But, by big, I mean really big. Some of these dudes were as big as a double decker bus and would have pretty happily chomped through a car like it was a ham sandwich.
Bananas in their natural state have up to a hundred seeds but all commercial varieties that you see in stores are seedless. Making seedless varieties made bananas wildly popular, which was good for the people who grow them and good for the people who eat them. That is a science win.
Researchers have now discovered a way to make "the most delicious fruit known to man", as Mark Twain called it, more popular with the public also. The cherimoya, or custard apple, has lots of big, awkward seeds but a group of researchers studied the seedless variety of sugar apple, a relative of the cherimoya, and noted that the ovules, which would normally form seeds, lacked an outer coat.
Low temperatures in the Arctic 'ozone layer' have recently initiated massive ozone depletion, which means the Arctic could experience a record loss of this trace gas that protects the Earth's surface against ultraviolet radiation from the sun. The result has been found by a measurement network of over 30 ozone sounding stations spread all over the Arctic and Subarctic.
In the long term the ozone layer will recover thanks to extensive environmental policy measures enacted decades ago for its protection. This winter's likely record-breaking ozone loss does not alter this expectation.
