Posted on Sep 1, 2020 in Science
“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.
COVID-19 Can Wreck Your Heart, Even if You Haven’t Had Any Symptoms –A growing body of research is raising concerns about the cardiac consequences of the coronavirus, reports Scientific American.
“The Water Paradox” –Present from Earth’s Birth in a Forbidding Region of the Solar System. Earth is the only planet known to have liquid water on its surface –a fundamental characteristic when it comes to explaining the emergence of life. “We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one,” said scientist and explorer, Jacques Cousteau. Which raises a fascinating question: was Earth’s water always present in the rocks that made up our planet, despite its formation in a region of the Solar System where temperatures were too high for water to condense and clump together with other solids as ice? Or, as some scientists have suggested, delivered later by asteroids and comets that bombarded the Earth?
The sun may have a long-lost twin –There’s a strange sphere of mass at the outer reaches of solar space, reports Live Science.
A Cable Snapped, and the Arecibo Observatory Went Dark. Here’s Why That Matters –-An accident in the middle of the night damaged one of the world’s most important observatories—and scientists still don’t know what caused it
250 Million Years Ago, They Hibernated at the Bottom of the World –In the tusks of creatures that lived before dinosaurs, paleontologists found signs of hibernation-like metabolism, reports the New York Times.
“Human Imagination is a Preview of Coming Attractions” –-two stories in the “Insomnia File” –based on Albert Einstein’s observation about the predictive, self-fulfilling power of human imagination–changes our knowledge of Planet Earth, the Milky Way and the vast cosmos beyond. They link Clarke’s story, Rendezvous With Rama, to the discovery in 2017 of an enigmatic interstellar object by astronomers at a Hawaiian observatory near the summit of Maui’s Haleakala volcano and the unveiling in the data of the Gaia Spacecraft by a Harvard astrophysicist of an enormous “something” that appears to have torn a hole in the Milky Way’s halo.
How Astronomers Revolutionized Our View of the Cosmos –-The universe turns out to be much bigger and weirder than anyone thought reports Martin Rees for Scientific American. When the history of science gets written, this amazing insight will be acclaimed as one of its greatest triumphs—up there with plate tectonics, the genome and the Standard Model of particle physics. And some major fields in astronomy are just getting going. Exoplanet research is only 25 years old, and serious work in astrobiology is really only starting. Some exoplanets may have life—they may even harbor aliens who know all the answers already.
The Physicist Who Slayed Gravity’s Ghosts –Claudia de Rham showed how theories of “massive gravity” could potentially get rid of the need for dark energy, reports Quanta.In the 1930s, Wolfgang Pauli and Markus Fierz proposed a graviton with mass. The idea became more plausible in the 1970s, after physicists discovered that massive particles carry the weak and strong forces. Why couldn’t the force of gravity work in the same way? But “ghosts” soon plagued these theories of massive gravity.
Scientists Created AI to Analyze People’s Dreams on a Massive Scale –Scientists analyzed 24,000 dream reports using AI in the largest dream analysis study to date to test the ‘continuity hypothesis’—the idea that dreams are influenced by and interact with waking life, reports Motherboard Science.
Final Mission: Staging Japan’s Surrender –-General Douglas MacArthur was a war hero—and an old soldier who knew how to put on a show.
What Climate Change Does to the Human Body –An ENT physician sees the effects in her patients all the time, reports Scientific American.
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