Construction workers digging at ground zero have uncovered a 40-foot pothole and other features carved by glaciers about 20,000 years ago.
Unearthing these glacial features has been critical in preparing the foundation for Tower 4 of the new World Trade Center, being built by Silverstein Properties at the southeast corner of the site. Engineers need a clear understanding of the contours of the rock. Read the rest of this entry »
By John Timmer |
It’s relatively easy to track the history of animal life, as animals are often macroscopic and build things like shells and bone. But about 70 percent of the history of life on earth appears to have taken place before animals were on the scene, meaning fossils can only tell a partial story. At the recent evolution symposium hosted by Rockefeller University, Roger Buick spoke about trying to reconstruct the history of the time when Bacteria and Archaea ruled the earth. Separately, Andrew Knoll discussed his attempts to use geology to try to understand the conditions that allowed animal life to bring an end to that era.
The Phoenix lander has sent back new pictures from the arctic circle of Mars, showing for the first time the spot where it will dig through the Red Planet’s dusty surface looking for water and assess conditions for life.
It landed at the edge of a massive crater so large that it could fit 11 Wembley stadiums inside it. The half-ton craft – the size of a small pick-up truck – will scoop up samples of frozen soil from near the six-mile wide crater for analysis by its instruments. Read the rest of this entry »
Our long-term goals are to determine whether life ever arose on Mars, to examine climate, characterise geology and prepare for human exploration.
Mars is a cold desert planet with no liquid water on its surface. However, discoveries made by the Mars Odyssey Orbiter in 2002 showed large amounts of subsurface water ice. The Phoenix Lander targets this region. Read the rest of this entry »
FAIRBANKS, Alaska, April 1 (UPI) – The U.S. space agency says the most extensive research project ever conducted to investigate the Arctic’s lower atmosphere begins this week.
The three-week mission is designed to help scientists identify how air pollution contributes to climate changes in the Arctic. Read the rest of this entry »
The black holes have created endless stories, as they were known to be enormous regions so powerful that nothing can ever escape them, not even light. NASA scientists managed to find this time a “baby” hole, the smallest discovered to date, lighter than other black wholes known so far. The announcement was made on March 31 by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s Nikolai Shaposhnikov and Lev Titarchuck, who initially discovered it. Read the rest of this entry »
A growing movement says yes.
The early conservation movement in the 1800s focused on landmarks: extraordinary places like Yellowstone and Yosemite, areas full of geologic interest to be sure, but also teeming with wildlife and plant communities. Since then, governments have advanced in conserving endangered species and safeguarding the habitats that support them. But as the public has fallen in love with the whales and the bison, its concern for the landscape has stayed at the level of geography, not geology. Read the rest of this entry »
Early civilization used hand, heart, arrow symbols to represent distances
By Clara Moskowitz – LiveScience
Long known for their cool circular calendars and practice of human sacrifice, Aztecs were also math whizzes.
Aztecs used hand, heart and arrow symbols to represent fractional distances when calculating areas of land, scientists have discovered. The researchers pored over Aztec agricultural manuscripts trying to understand how the indigenous people arrived at area calculations. Only when they factored in the pictorial glyphs did the figures make sense. Read the rest of this entry »
ScienceDaily (Mar. 31, 2008) — Evidence of the biggest meteorite ever to hit the British Isles has been found by scientists from the University of Oxford and the University of Aberdeen. The scientists believe that a large meteorite hit northwest Scotland about 1.2 billion years ago near the Scottish town of Ullapool. Read the rest of this entry »
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