Today’s stories range from How Mammals Conquered the World after the Asteroid Apocalypse to New Type of Magnetic Wave Discovered Sweeping Across Earth’s Outer Core, 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 Brain ‘Constructs’ the Outside World –Neural activity probes your physical surroundings to select just the information needed to survive and flourish, reports Scientific American.
Why the next big solar storm might hit Earth without warning, reports New Scientist. “A big solar storm could fry the internet, but at least space weather forecasts would give us a day or two to prepare. Or maybe not, because physicists have just discovered a new kind of solar storm that strikes without notice.”
Our Sun Could Someday Reveal the Surfaces of Alien Earths. In the far future, we could reveal detailed views of distant worlds by turning our home star into a gravitational lens, reports Allison Gasparini for Scientific American.
How Mammals Conquered the World after the Asteroid Apocalypse –They scurried in the shadows of dinosaurs for millions of years until a killer space rock created a new world of evolutionary opportunity, reports Scientific American.
Drones Are Turning Into Personal Flying Machines, reports Clive Thompson for Wired. “For eons, sci-fi illustrations depicted people zipping around cities in little flying vehicles. Now those Golden Age fliers might finally be arriving—and ‘they’re just big drones,’ says Chris Anderson, a longtime drone pioneer (and Wired’s former editor in chief). Consider this a lesson in innovation: Big breakthroughs don’t always come from where you’d expect.”
Weather’s unwanted guest: Nasty La Nina keeps popping up, reports Seth Borenstein for AP. “La Nina, the natural but potent weather event linked to more drought and wildfires in the western United States and more Atlantic hurricanes, is becoming the nation’s unwanted weather guest and meteorologists said the West’s megadrought won’t go away until La Nina does.”
A new quantum technique could enable telescopes the size of planet Earth, reports Matt Williams for Universe Today.”
Completely New Type of Magnetic Wave Discovered Sweeping Across Earth’s Outer Core, reports Science Alert. “Using information from ESA’s Swarm satellite mission, scientists have discovered a completely new type of magnetic wave that sweeps across the outermost part of Earth’s outer core every seven years.”
‘Unsustainable’: how satellite swarms pose a rising threat to astronomy –-SpaceX and other companies are still struggling to make their satellites darker in the night sky, reports Nature.
Walmart is expanding its drone deliveries to reach 4 million households –It’s expanding to five new states reports The Verge.
Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilization buried under eastern Turkey? reports The Spectator. “The entire perplexing place, known as Karahan Tepe (pronounced Kah-rah-hann Tepp-ay), which is now emerging from the dusty Plains of Harran, in eastern Turkey, is is estimated to be 11-13,000 years old. For comparison the Great Pyramid at Giza is 4,500 years old. Stonehenge is 5,000 years old. The Cairn de Barnenez tomb-complex in Brittany, perhaps the oldest standing structure in Europe, could be up to 7,000 years old.
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