Science

The polar vortex is a permanent broad area of low pressure in the upper atmosphere near the poles. It is located a few miles above the surface of the earth and can be as large as the US and Canada combined. The NASA satellite measured the atmospheric air temperatures from December 1 to 11, and shows the dark blue and ... Read More »

Did you see the full moon Tuesday night? For those who don’t know, it wasn’t just a full moon, but a supermoon. Supermoons happens when the moon passes closest to Earth in its elliptical orbit, making it appear much larger than usual. The supermoon certainly didn’t disappoint with many social media users sharing their photos of the ‘beautiful’ phenomenon on ... Read More »

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has yet to identify the cause of the herring die-off in southwest Nova Scotia. “What it is, is a bit of a mystery,” said David Whorley, director for Fisheries and Oceans Canada in southwest Nova Scotia. The first sightings were reported late last month along the eastern edge of St. Marys Bay, and more ... Read More »

A new report from a group seeking to end the practice of keeping whales in captivity challenges claims by the Vancouver Aquarium and others that research on captive whales helps whales in the wild. The report “A Crumbling Case for Cetacean Captivity?” looked at original, peer reviewed papers from the Vancouver Aquarium and Marineland in Niagara Falls and counted how ... Read More »

We finally have footage of tardigrade mating, and it’s even weirder than expected. Scientists have captured the creatures mating for the first time, providing insights into the weird ways tardigrades reproduce. The video shows that tardigrades perform a form of foreplay, described as ‘mutual stimulation’, before semen ejaculation and egg deposition, which can last an hour. Read More »

NASA is currently working with Stephen Hawking to understand his fantasies of sending a nano-starship to the nearest star system to our nearby planetary group. In April, Hawking and Russian venture capitalist Yuri Milner announced that they were working together on the Breakthrough Starshot initiative to develop tiny spacecraft that could travel at one fifth the speed of light (100 ... Read More »

Christmas Bird Counts are the world’s longest-running citizen science wildlife survey recruiting tens of thousands of observers in Canada, the US, Latin America, the Caribbean, and some Pacific islands. In 1900, Frank Chapman, who was the founder of Bird-Lore, (later to become Audubon Magazine), had an idea that instead of doing a hunt to kill as many small animals, including ... Read More »

Researchers have known for decades that the changing climate has impacted the Antarctic Ice Sheet dramatically. A recent study is suggesting this impact goes both ways. Global climate models that look at the last several thousand years have failed to account for the amount of climate variability captured in the paleoclimate record, according to lead author Pepijn Bakker, a former ... Read More »

Scientists at the Australian National University (ANU) has successfully created Lonsdaleite, a new type of diamond that’s the hardest known to mankind. In fact, this new diamond is so hard that it’s powerful enough to cut through ultra-solid materials found in mining sites. The scientists made nano-sized Lonsdaleite at 400 degrees Celsius (752 degrees Fahrenheit), effectively halving the temperature in ... Read More »

Researchers have discovered that a superluminous supernova spotted in 2015 was actually a spinning black hole ripping apart a star. An extraordinarily brilliant point of light seen in a distant galaxy, and dubbed ASASSN-15lh, was thought to be the brightest supernova ever seen. But new observations from several observatories, including ESO, have now cast doubt on this classification. Instead, a ... Read More »

Scientists have uncovered an ultra-rare quasicrystal in a piece of Russian meteorite, and it’s only the third time ever that we’ve seen one of these strange materials in nature. The findings of the discovery were published in Scientific Reports. It was led by Luca Bindi, a geologist from the University of Florence in Italy, and other colleagues. The discovery is ... Read More »