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How Earth’s Magnetic Field Twists and Buckles During Solar Storms
Declassified Vietnam War files are showing researchers the unpredictable nature of the Sun and helping them work toward predicting the next big solar storm. » Subscribe to Seeker! http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c… » Watch more Focal Point! | https://bit.ly/2Z7LHgi Travelling at the near-speed of light, energetic particles shooting out from the Sun can zip through space, smack into our planet’s atmosphere, and cause incredible disruptions. And one of the biggest impacts we know of happened during the tail end of the Vietnam War. On this episode of Focal Point, we hear from Delores Knipp, a space weather scientist and former officer in the U.S. Air Force who uncovered a war mystery that is…
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How Scientists Are Making ‘Sonic’ Black Holes in a Lab
In order to test Hawking radiation, scientists created their own artificial black hole using sound. But how? Can Hawking’s Black Hole Paradox Be Solved With Fuzzballs? https://youtu.be/esPa1tVSjew Read More: What Sonic Black Holes Say About Real Ones https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-s… “Hawking’s prediction that black holes radiate heat and eventually evaporate completely gives rise to the profound ‘information paradox,’ which asks what happens to information about the stuff that fell into them.” In a first, scientists took the temperature of a sonic black hole https://www.sciencenews.org/article/f… “To produce the sonic black hole, the researchers used ultracold atoms of rubidium, chilled to a state known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, and set them flowing. Analogous to…
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Scientists Just Got One Step Closer to Solving an Antarctic Mystery
Giant holes in the Antarctic, called polynyas, have baffled scientists for years. But now with the help of seals and robots, they might have the answers to these mysterious phenomena. A Dead Satellite Is Unlocking the Secrets Lurking Beneath Antarctica https://youtu.be/Qck8zPUS3Is Read More: Mysterious Hole in Antarctic Sea Ice Explained by Robots and Seals https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mb… “These seals are especially helpful to scientists studying Antarctica because they regularly dive around 600 meters below the ocean surface, and sometimes surpass 2,000 meters of depth.” Polynyas https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/… “Polynyas are large, persistent regions of open water and thin ice that occur within much thicker pack ice, at locations where climatologically, thick pack ice would…
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Why Scientists Are Exploring Earth’s Dangerous Twin
NASA and the ISRO are planning on venturing to Venus for the first time in years because knowing this “Evil Twin” could be the key to understanding our planet’s future. Sunshields & Nukes: What We Need to Terraform Venus and Mars https://youtu.be/XvNbliFXmUM Read More: Can Venus Teach Us to Take Climate Change Seriously? https://www.space.com/42570-venus-mod… “That world is Venus, Earth’s “evil twin,” which was once nice enough — until something went wrong and the atmosphere began trapping a little too much heat.” Why Is NASA Neglecting Venus? https://www.theatlantic.com/science/a… “In the 18th century, Venus was the organizing force in international science. When humanity was finally able to stretch its arms toward the…
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The Secret to Planet Formation Might Be Hiding in the Fulton Gap
There are over 2,300 exoplanets that have been discovered, but there seems to be a gap in the data. Why is this and what can it tell us about our universe? Read More: Weird Worlds? Yes — by the Trillion https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/blog/1555… “It’s been dubbed the Fulton gap, after Benjamin Fulton, lead author on a paper describing it. The Kepler data show that planets of a certain size-range are rare – those between 1.5 and 2 times the size of Earth.” As Planet Discoveries Pile Up, a Gap Appears in the Pattern https://www.quantamagazine.org/as-pla… “Dragomir said the radius gap points to possible rules both about how planets are formed, and what happens…
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How Close Are We to Controlling Machines With Our Minds?
From outsmarting the self check-out to providing options for patients with communication disorders, merging mind with machine could be the next frontier for humanity. How close are we to controlling machines with our minds? This New Mind-Controlled Robot Arm Works Without a Brain Implant https://www.sciencealert.com/new-robo… “A team from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is… creating the first noninvasive mind-controlled robot arm that exhibits the kind of smooth, continuous motion previously reserved only for systems involving brain implants – putting us one step closer to a future in which we can all use our minds to control the tech around us.” China Unveils First Chip Designed Specifically for Mind-Reading https://futurism.com/the-byte/brain-c… “The signals…
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Scientists Created a Plastic That’s Infinitely Recyclable
Plastic is suffocating the planet, but what if we could make recycling plastic more efficient? This Lawrence Berkeley National Lab team has created a brand new kind of plastic that can be recycled endlessly. Are You Seasoning Your Food With Microplastics? – https://youtu.be/ZFgpudNSArI Read More: Closed-loop recycling of plastics enabled by dynamic covalent diketoenamine bonds https://www.nature.com/articles/s4155… “The closed-loop polymer life cycles enabled by PDKs contrast with those for conventional polymers, which are synthesized using irreversible bond-forming reactions that make it difficult and costly to recover the original monomers in high purity. Furthermore, while dynamic covalent polymers have been designed, in principle, around the ability to exchange bonds27, examples of energy-efficient…
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The Newest Form of Water Is Hot and Black, Wait What?
It only took diamonds, x-rays, and a bunch of ultra-powerful lasers to create our newest form of water, Ice XVIII. And it might be the key to unlocking what’s inside the mysterious ice planets of our solar system. This New State of Matter Is a Liquid and a Solid at the Same Time! – https://youtu.be/Quuc9_qDMWs Read More: Nanosecond X-ray diffraction of shock-compressed superionic water ice https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158… “The atomic structure of dynamically compressed H2O is characterized in situ using angular dispersive XRD recorded on multiple image plate detector panels (Fig. 1b). Focusing 16 laser beams on an iron (Fe) foil generates an intense X-ray pulse at 6.7 keV resulting from helium…
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There Are Gravity Pulses Hiding in the Universe’s Most MASSIVE Stars
Blue supergiant stars some of the hottest, biggest young stars in the universe, and their molten cores can reveal more about the formation of everything. How Scientists Found the Universe’s First Type of Molecule – https://youtu.be/lxepnATltvU Blue supergiant stars open doors to a concert in space https://nieuws.kuleuven.be/en/content… “Stars come in different shapes, sizes and colours. Some stars are similar to our Sun and live calmly for billions of years. More massive stars, those born with ten times or more the mass of the Sun, live significantly shorter and active lives before they explode and expel their material into space in what is called a supernova. Blue supergiants belong to this…
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How NASA Mission Designers Invent Futuristic Spacecraft
From journeying to distant worlds to catching asteroids, this NASA conceptual design team turns the spacecraft of your dreams into reality. Watch more Focal Point! | https://bit.ly/2VOJIQv Read More: This Jumping Probe Might Explore Neptune’s Biggest Moon https://www.popsci.com/this-jumping-p… “After the probe (called the Triton Hopper) lands on Triton, it would use radioactive isotopes to heat ice that it mined from the moon to drive rocket-powered jumps up to a kilometer high and five kilometers long. Steven Oleson, the principal investigator on the Triton Hopper, says the probe has the potential to explore a large portion of the moon’s surface. “We want to go from the equator to the pole.”” A…
