Science

Earth has a concealed continent called ‘Zealandia’ hidden in the Pacific Ocean and attached to New Zealand, according to newly published research. Satellite maps indicate the “continent” covers an area of nearly two million square miles – about two-thirds the size of Australia, says the BBC. Scientists first detected signs of a mystery land mass in the 1990s and gave …

How a puzzling sensor reading transformed NASA’s Cassini Saturn mission and created a new target in the search for habitable worlds beyond Earth. On Feb. 17, 2005, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft was making the first-ever close pass over Saturn’s moon Enceladus as it worked through its detailed survey of the planet’s icy satellites. Exciting, to be sure, just for the thrill …

Temperatures across the Quinte Conservation watershed for the weekend and into next week are forecast to be above normal. Water Resources Manager Christine McClure says, “These mild temperatures will further degrade local ice conditions in the Quinte Conservation watershed and we are urging members of the public to be extremely cautious around local waterways. Ice that was safe earlier may …

Ice loss from Canada’s Arctic glaciers has transformed them into a major contributor to sea level change, new study by University of California, Irvine glaciologists has found. From 2005 to 2015, surface melt off ice caps and glaciers of the Queen Elizabeth Islands grew by an astonishing 900 percent, from an average of three gigatons to 30 gigatons per year, …

Citizen researchers can join an online hunt for icy worlds, brown dwarfs and other yet-to-be-discovered objects beyond the orbit of Neptune, using a technique that’s not all that different from the method that led to Pluto’s discovery 87 years ago. Through a new website called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, anyone can now help search for objects far beyond the orbit …

United Arab Emirates will construct a mini city on Red Planet as part of the 2117 Mars project. United Arab Emirates has unveiled its plans to colonize Mars by 2117. The announcement was made on Tuesday at the World Government Summit. His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the nation’s Prime Minister and Vice President, announced the Mars 2117 …

The Mariner’s Guide to Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises of Western Canada is a resource developed by the Coastal Ocean Research Institute, Prince Rupert Port Authority and Port of Vancouver. This guide is targeted at large vessel mariners and aims to inform them about the cetacean species along the B.C. coast, threats to these animals that may be associated with large …

The Arctic has a serious litter problem: in just ten years, the concentration of marine litter at a deep-sea station in the Arctic Ocean has risen 20-fold. This was recently reported in a study by researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). Plastic bags, glass shards and fishing nets: despite its location, far …

A team of researchers, including Dr Mikko Tuomi of the University of Hertfordshire, have discovered 60 new planets orbiting stars near the Earth’s solar system, as well as evidence that there could be as many as 54 more on top of that. This could mean almost 120 new planets! This is a drawing of Gliese 411b, one of the 60 …

Progress in the long-running battle to improve the flavor of the supermarket tomato has been achieved with help from an unlikely-seeming source: Chinese geneticists. “Consumers complain that the modern tomato has little flavor. [It’s] like a ‘water bomb,'” said the study’s co-principal investigator Sanwen Huang, the deputy director general at the Agricultural Genome Institute at Shenzhen at the Chinese Academy …

Asteroid 2017 BQ6 safely flew past Earth on Feb. 6 at about 6.6 times the distance of Earth to the moon. To radar imager Lance Benner at JPL in Pasadena, asteroid 2017 BQ6 resembles the polygonal dice used in Dungeons and Dragons. But my eyes see something closer to a stepping stone or paver you’d use to build a walkway. …