An atmospheric haze around a faraway planet -- like the one which probably shrouded and cooled the young Earth -- could show that the world is potentially habitable, or even be a sign of life itself.
Astronomers often use the Earth as a proxy for hypothetical exoplanets in computer modeling to simulate what such worlds might be like and under what circumstances they might be hospitable to life.
Irvine, Calif., Nov. 12, 2015 - A glacier in northeast Greenland that holds enough water to raise global sea levels by more than 18 inches has come unmoored from a stabilizing sill and is crumbling into the North Atlantic Ocean. Losing mass at a rate of 5 billion tons per year, glacier Zachariae Isstrom entered a phase of accelerated retreat in 2012, according to findings published in the current issue of Science.
LAWRENCE -- A study appearing in Science magazine today shows a vast ice sheet in northeast Greenland has begun a phase of speeded-up ice loss, contributing to destabilization that will cause global sea-level rise for "decades to come."
A team of scientists, including a researcher from the University of Kansas-based Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS), found that since 2012 warmer air and sea temperatures have caused the Zachariæ Isstrøm ice sheet to "retreat rapidly along a downward-sloping, marine-based bed."
One week ago to the day Cyclone Chapala, the first Category 1 cyclone to strike Yemen in recorded history made landfall in Yemen, then a second tropical cyclone named Megh made landfall. The Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM satellite provided a look at rainfall rates and totals dropped by the historic double tropical cyclones.
Chapala brought over a year's worth of rain and flooding to the south-central coast. Megh made landfall just to the northeast of the coastal city of Aden, which is further west than where Chapala made landfall, and only as a tropical storm.
Photovoltaics added value to homes in six markets, according to a new report titled "Appraising into the Sun: Six-State Solar Home Paired-Sales Analysis," led by a researcher from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and a home appraisal expert.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--As the availability of clean, potable water becomes an increasingly urgent issue in many parts of the world, researchers are searching for new ways to treat salty, brackish or contaminated water to make it usable. Now a team at MIT has come up with an innovative approach that, unlike most traditional desalination systems, does not separate ions or water molecules with filters, which can become clogged, or boiling, which consumes great amounts of energy.
New observations made near the south pole of Titan by NASA's Cassini spacecraft add to the evidence that winter comes in like a lion on this moon of Saturn.
Scientists have detected a monstrous new cloud of frozen compounds in the moon's low- to mid-stratosphere - a stable atmospheric region above the troposphere, or active weather layer.
Successful technologies weave themselves into the fabric of society and essentially slip from our consciousness as have embedded control systems. Such systems with embedded computing units interact with some aspects of the physical world, are called hybrid systems.
Researchers have discovered an exoplanet just slightly bigger than Earth and located much closer to our Solar System than any other terrestrial, alien world. Called GJ 1132b, it orbits a tiny red, dwarf star just 39 light-years away. Though too hot for life, GJ 1132b is large relative to its close-by star, which nevertheless makes it an ideal planetary laboratory.
Gradual melting of winter snow helps feed water to farms, cities and ecosystems across much of the world, but this resource may soon be critically imperiled. In a new study, scientists have identified snow-dependent drainage basins across the northern hemisphere currently serving 2 billion people that run the risk of declining supplies in the coming century. The basins take in large parts of the American West, southern Europe, the Mideast and central Asia. They range from productive U.S. farm land to war-torn regions already in the grip of long-term water shortages.
Ann Arbor, MI, November 12, 2015 - In the U.S. the chances of being arrested are one in three by age 23. Youth offenders face a greater risk for early death than the rest of the population; according to a new study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, that risk increases as a young person becomes more involved in the judicial system. The more serious and prolonged a youth's interaction with the justice system becomes, the more likely he or she is to die prematurely.
The collection of rocky planets orbiting distant stars has just grown by one, and the latest discovery is the most intriguing one to date. The newfound world, although hot as an oven, is cool enough to potentially host an atmosphere. If it does, it's close enough (only 39 light-years away) that we could study that atmosphere in detail with the Hubble Space Telescope and future observatories like the Giant Magellan Telescope.
Scientists have discovered a new exoplanet that, in the language of "Star Wars," would be the polar opposite of frigid Hoth, and even more inhospitable than the deserts of Tatooine. But instead of residing in a galaxy far, far away, this new world is, galactically speaking, practically next door.
An international team of astronomers, led researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Australian National University, have identified some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, which could contain vital clues about the early Universe, including an indication of how the first stars died.
Astronomers have discovered the oldest known stars, dating from before the Milky Way Galaxy formed, when the Universe was just 300 million years old.
The stars, found near the centre of the Milky Way, are surprisingly pure but contain material from an even earlier star, which died in an enormous explosion called hypernova.