A group of astronomers from the US, Europe, South Africa, and Chile have determined that, approximately 70,000 years ago, a recently discovered star is likely to have passed through the Oort Cloud, a region at the edge of the solar system from which comets arise (1). Its average distance at … Continue reading
A recent analysis reveals which nations should especially refrain from exploiting much of their carbon-based energy reserves when limiting global warming temperature to 2 °C, Michael Jakob and Jerome Hilaire reported online in the journal Nature on January 7, 2015. Source: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/on-unburnable-carbon-and-the-specter-of-a-carbon-bubble/?_r=0 In 2010, governments from around the world gathered … Continue reading
New laser-based compression experiments by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Bayreuth University, and the University of California, Berkeley, have recreated conditions of cores of super-Earths, planets with masses five times that of the Earth. Through a combination of laser-driven shock compression, a technique that uses lasers to send a strong … Continue reading
Scientists at Princeton University have managed to create an extremely small laser that could have implications for the creation of quantum computers in the near future. The device draws approximately ten billion times less current than a typical light bulb and is about the size of a grain of rice. … Continue reading
The past year was the hottest on record since at least 1891, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) announced on January 5th. The JMA reports that the average temperature was 0.27°C warmer than the 1981 to 2010 baseline average. (1) This finding was not unexpected. In December 2014, the United Nations’ … Continue reading