Today’s stories range from How the Next Supercontinent’ will Form to Vast Stores of Ancient Helium from Big Bang is Leaking from Earth’s Core to Clue Found to the Unsolved Dyatlov Pass Mystery, and much more. The 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.
How the next ‘supercontinent’ will form, reports BBC Future –“It might seem that the world’s landmasses are fixed, but as Richard Fisher discovers, there are major changes coming.”
Ancient helium leaking from core offers clues to Earth’s formation –“Vast stores of Helium-3, a rare isotope of helium gas, is leaking out of Earth’s core, a new study reports. Because almost all helium-3 is from the Big Bang, the gas leak adds evidence that Earth formed inside a solar nebula, which has long been debated,” reports Science Daily.
What Octopus Minds May Tell Us About Aliens, reports Aaron Scott for NPR–“Escape artists, octopus camouflage in all kinds of surroundings, and they are incredibly intelligent creatures–and that intelligence evolved completely separately from humans’. That separate evolution makes them the perfect animal to study for astrobiologist Dominic Sivitilli at the University of Washington.
Penn State’s Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center Hosted Extraordinary 2021 SETI conference –held virtually, the event focused on the next generation of scientists working on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence Since the 1960s, SETI researchers have seen the study of nonhuman communications on Earth as a potential key to understanding extraterrestrial communications. The SETI group chose the octopus to represent themselves as models for nonhuman intelligences we might expect to find beyond Earth.
Moore’s Law– Homo Sapiens May be the Milky Way’s First Intelligent Civilization, reports Avi Shporer for The Daily Galaxy –Moore’s Law suggests that if life takes 10 billion years to evolve to the level of complexity associated with homo sapiens, then we may be among the first, if not the first, intelligent civilization in the Milky Way, negating Drake’s Equation.”
NASA Researchers Made a New Message for Extraterrestrials –An updated communication could be beamed out for space alien listeners in hopes of making first contact, reports Daniel Oberhaus for Scientific American. The odds that at least one of these billions of planets has produced intelligent life seem favorable enough to spend some time figuring out how to say “hello.”
NASA Stops Launch Rehearsal for Its Giant Moon Rocket –-First a lightning storm, then problems with launch tower fans led to snags with a countdown and propellant loading intended as practice for the rocket’s launch, reports Kenneth Chang for the New York Times.
The First World War Wired –Putin Had No Clue How Many of Us Would Be Watching, reports Thomas Freidman for the New York Times. “Almost six weeks into the war between Russia and Ukraine, I’m beginning to wonder if this conflict isn’t our first true world war — much more than World War I or World War II ever was. In this war, which I think of as World War Wired, virtually everyone on the planet can either observe the fighting at a granular level, participate in some way or be affected economically — no matter where they live.”
‘No hope for science in Russia’: the academics trying to flee to the west, reports The Guardian. “Russian scientists are turning to partners abroad to help them escape, but face an uncertain future even if successful.”
Life’s Preference for Symmetry Is Like ‘A New Law of Nature’ –Techniques from computer science may help explain the tendency in biology for structures to repeat themselves, reports Kate Golembiewski for the New York Times. “Why does symmetry reign supreme? Biologists aren’t sure — there’s no reason based in natural selection for symmetry’s prevalence in such varied forms of life and their building blocks. Now it seems like a good answer could come from the field of computer science.”
The ‘Gargantua’ Hypothesis: Does the Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole Impact the Galaxy’s Planets? reports Maxwell Moe for The Daily Galaxy. “In 2019, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and NASA’s Jeremy Schnittman proposed that inhabited planets might exist around the black holes harbored at the center of most galaxies. Such planets are similar to the fictional water-world planet Miller, the closest planet in the star system orbiting the supermassive black hole, Gargantua, in the movie Interstellar.”
What We Know About Omicron’s BA.2 Variant So Far –Does the new strain sweeping the globe mean COVID will become ever more contagious? asks Charles Schmidt for Scientific American. “Now, as this latest version of SARS-CoV-2 sweeps the planet, pandemic-weary people everywhere are asking the same question: Is society doomed to confront a succession of new viral variants, each one more contagious than the last?”
Author Chris Holm uses science background to forecast scary future in ‘Child Zero’–The novel, due out in May, is set in a time when antibiotics no longer work and draws on Holm’s scientific background as a molecular biologist and researcher, reports The Press Herald. “Before Holm became a full-time author, he was a molecular biologist and researcher. He’s been fascinated for years by scientists’ warnings that antibiotic resistance is increasing at an alarming rate – that, at some point, antibiotics may no longer protect us.
Researchers Find Another Clue in the Dyatlov Pass Mystery –The mystery of nine hikers who died in Russia has baffled people for more than 60 years. The authors of a recent paper think they’ve found another clue, reports the New York Times. “The mystery has confounded investigators and inspired conspiracy theories about corruption and spies, rocket programs and forest monsters, romantic rivalries and U.F.O.s.”
The gardens that have survived for centuries, reports BBC Future –“Even when they’re utterly forgotten, gardens can be surprisingly resilient – so just how long can they survive for?”
How Ukraine Unplugged from Russia and Joined Europe’s Power Grid with Unprecedented Speed –Engineers achieved “a year’s work in two weeks” to safely do so, reports Anna Blaustein for Scientific American.
The animals that detect disasters, reports Norman Miller for BBC Future –“For millennia, people across the globe have reported alarmed animal behavior in the run-up to natural disasters. Could these signals be used to warn us of impending catastrophes?
Do insects, octopus and other invertebrates feel emotions? Evidence is building that they can, reports ABC. –“If they can no longer be considered immune to pain, invertebrate experiences will need to become part of our species’ moral landscape.”
“Ping Pong-Sized Monsters” -Primordial Black Holes Could Be of Any Size and Anywhere in the Milky Way, reports Maxwell Moe for The Daily Galaxy. ““It is extremely unlikely that any wandering supermassive black hole will come close enough to our Sun to have any impact on our solar system,” said lead author Michael Tremmel. “We estimate that a close approach of one of these wanderers that is able to affect our solar system should occur every 100 billion years or so, or nearly 10 times the age of the universe.”
In the Ocean, It’s Snowing Microplastics –Tiny bits of plastic have infiltrated the deep sea’s main food source and could alter the ocean’s role in one of Earth’s ancient cooling processes, scientists say, reports New York Times Science.
New Research Decodes the Sea Cow’s Hidden Language, reports Ashleigh Papp for Scientific American. “Florida manatees are “talking” up a storm, and a team that has been recording those sounds for seven years is starting to understand the chatter.
Recent Planet Earth Reports:
James Webb Space Telescope’s Super-Secret Targets to Is Geometry a Language Only Humans Know?
Critics Horrified by World’s First Octopus Farm to Quest for Immortality
China’s One-of-a-Kind Cyber-Espionage to Multiverse of Universes All with Randomly Dialed Higgs Masses Virus from
Age of Dinosaurs Found in Human Genome to Is Earth’s Core a Weird State of Matter?
Why are NASA Spaceships Exploring Earth’s Deepest Oceans to Is Reality a Wavefunction?
The Terrifying Message Lurking in Earth’s Ancient Record to Robots Evolving Autonomously
The Quantum Century to Events That Could Have Ended Humanity
The ‘Douglas Adams Epoch’ to Earth’s Earliest Life May Owe Existence to Viruses
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