The scientists published their findings in the journal Tourism Management. Regional operations at lower elevations that either can’t adapt or afford to adapt to warmer temperatures are at risk. In the West of the USA, water scarcity and drought could have a big effect, as ski areas may lose the ability to make snow. In the Northeast, increasingly unreliable winters could affect more than half of the region’s 103 active ski areas....
According to the World Meteorological Organization, a high-pressure zone over the Mediterranean region and an Atlantic low-pressure system induced a strong southwest flux that brought warm air from northwest Africa to the middle latitudes. The air was further warmed when passing the North Atlantic owing to higher-than-normal sea surface temperatures. All this caused record-breaking heat on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day with temperatures above 20°C observed in many European countries....
SOFIA data indicate that magnetic fields are trapping and confining dust near the center of the active galaxy, Cygnus A, and feeding material onto the supermassive black hole at its center. The unified model, which attempts to explain the different properties of active galaxies, states that the core is surrounded by a donut-shaped dust cloud, called a torus. How this obscuring structure is created and sustained has never been clear, but these new results from SOFIA indicate that magnetic fields may be responsible for keeping the dust close enough to be devoured by the hungry black hole....
Coronal mass ejections (CME) are giant plasma bursts that erupt from the sun, heading out into the solar system at speeds as fast as 2 million miles per hour. Like the sun itself, the majority of a CME’s atoms are hydrogen. When these particles interact with Earth’s atmosphere, they lead to the brilliant multicolored lights of the Aurora Borealis. They also have the potential to knock out communications, bringing modern civilization to a standstill....
NASA Flight Engineers Raja Chari and Kayla Barron spent Wednesday afternoon servicing cotton plant cell samples for the Plant Habitat-5 space botany study. The experiment is investigating how microgravity affects cotton genetic expression possibly impacting plant regeneration on and off the Earth. NASA Flight Engineer Mark Vande Hei worked on a similar botany study yesterday nourishing Arabidopsis plants grown on petri plates. That study is exploring how plant molecular mechanisms and regulatory networks adapt to the weightless environment of space....
In this image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter we see frost in and around two gullies, which have both been active before. (View this observation to see what these gullies looked like in 2010.) There are no fresh flows so far this year, but HiRISE will keep watching. The map is projected here at a scale of 50 centimeters (19.7 inches) per pixel. The original image scale is 50.3 centimeters (19....
In a study published on August 23, 2021, in Nature Ecology and Evolution Harvard researchers establish the origin date of the earliest tetrapods and discover they acquired several of the major new adaptive traits that enabled vertebrate life on land at accelerated evolutionary rates. The study led by Dr. Tiago R. Simões, postdoctoral researcher, and senior author Professor Stephanie E. Pierce, both from the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, applied recently developed statistical methods (Bayesian evolutionary analysis) to precisely estimate the time and rates of anatomical evolution during the rise of tetrapods....
Clockwise from top left, the asteroids shown here are 29 Amphitrite, 324 Bamberga, 2 Pallas, and 89 Julia. Named after the greek goddess Pallas Athena, 2 Pallas is about 510 kilometers wide. This makes it the third largest asteroid in the main belt and one of the biggest asteroids in the entire Solar System. It contains about 7% of the mass of the entire asteroid belt — so hefty that it was once classified as a planet....
A team of astrophysicists analyzed 1418 galaxies and found that small ones are likely to spin on a different axis than large ones. The rotation was measured in relation to each galaxy’s closest “cosmic filament” – the largest structures in the universe. Filaments are massive thread-like formations, comprising huge amounts of matter – including galaxies, gas and, modeling implies, dark matter. They can be 500 million light-years long but just 20 million light-years wide....
Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Kansas State University have demonstrated a spray-on mixture of carbon nanotubes and ceramic that has the unprecedented ability to resist damage while absorbing laser light. Coatings that absorb as much of the energy of high-powered lasers as possible without breaking down are essential for optical power detectors that measure the output of such lasers, which are used, for example, in military equipment for defusing unexploded mines....
A startling analysis from Globe at Night — a citizen science program run by NSF’s NOIRLab — concludes that stars are disappearing from human sight at an astonishing rate. The study finds that, to human eyes, artificial lighting has dulled the night sky more rapidly than indicated by satellite measurements. The study published in the journal Science showcases the unique contributions that citizen scientists can make in essential fields of research....
Now, in a pair of complementary new studies, two Northwestern University-led teams of geoscientists report new findings on the chronology and character of events that led to this occurrence, known as Ocean Anoxic Event 2 (OAE2), which was co-discovered more than 40 years ago by late Northwestern professor Seymour Schlanger. By studying preserved planktonic microfossils and bulk sediment extracted from three sites around the world, the team collected direct evidence indicating that ocean acidification occurred during the earliest stages of the event, due to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the eruption of massive volcanic complexes on the sea floor....
While all of the face shields offered some protection, none provided high levels of protection from external droplets. In addition to doing laboratory studies on face shields, the research team polled individuals, including health workers, in middle-income nations (Brazil and Nigeria), regarding their attitudes about face shields as PPE. Professor Paul Hunter, from UEA’s Norwich Medical School, said: “Face shields have been popular because they don’t hinder breathing, they allow more natural communication than face masks and they provide splash protection....
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health funded the long-term and ongoing Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Study (CARDIA), which intended to look at how risk factors for heart disease develop over time. This study is one of the longest to demonstrate that including a few heart-healthy walnuts into the diet on a regular basis may serve as a springboard for the eventual adoption of other healthy lifestyle practices....
“We demonstrated that currently plants are going extinct 350 times faster than on average along the studied time span, i.e. 300 years. If we continue ignoring the importance of natural ecosystems and their integrity, this can lead to disastrous consequences, and relationships between plants, insects, and other species may be broken,” warned Anatoliy Khapugin, a Ph.D. degree researcher at Tyumen State University. On the basis of the obtained data, the research group studied the tendencies, reasons, and dynamics of plant extinction over the past 300 years....
Considering the greater good by social distancing during a pandemic turns out to have an attractive personal benefit: A new study has found that staying away from others also reduces an individual person’s chances of contracting COVID-19. Researchers presented study participants with virtual behavior scenarios of various public settings – a grocery store, a crowded beach, a crosswalk – and asked them to place themselves or fictional people in those contexts based on their social distancing preferences....
Molecular motors keep us alive. These cellular transport services, built from proteins, circulate essential chemical packages between the heart of the cell, the nucleus, and the cell periphery. In elongated cells such as neurons, this can be a big commute in molecular miles, equivalent to a person walking from Boston to Manhattan. The constant shuttling of materials by motors keeps cells thriving. When the process malfunctions, a host of neurological diseases can occur....
On Earth, scientists are studying the most extreme environments to learn how life might exist under completely different settings, like on other planets. A University of Washington team has been studying the microbes found in “cryopegs,” trapped layers of sediment with water so salty that it remains liquid at below-freezing temperatures, which may be similar to environments on Mars or other planetary bodies farther from the sun. At the recent AbSciCon meeting in Bellevue, Washington, researchers presented DNA sequencing and related results to show that brine samples from an Alaskan cryopeg isolated for tens of thousands of years contain thriving bacterial communities....
The outflows were detected by astronomers from Australia, the USA, Italy, and The Netherlands. They report their finding in today’s issue of Nature. “These outflows contain an extraordinary amount of energy — about a million times the energy of an exploding star,” said the research team’s leader, CSIRO’s Dr Ettore Carretti. But the outflows pose no danger to Earth or the Solar System. The speed of the outflow is supersonic, about 1000 kilometers a second....
MAVEN, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission, recently celebrated the five-year anniversary of its entrance into orbit around Mars on September 21. The primary scientific goal of the mission is to study what is left of Mars’ atmosphere to determine how, in the distant past, an ocean-covered and potentially habitable Mars became the dry and desolate place it is today. Studying the present Martian atmosphere — the rate at which it is being lost to space and how and why it is being stripped away — gives us clues with which we can piece together the puzzle of understanding planetary atmospheres, including our own....
