While the New York city suffers the coldest Valentine’s Day in 100 years, as East Coast is hit with
Whiteface Mountain is the fifth-highest mountain in the U.S. state of New York. On Saturday night (February 13-14, 2016), the Arctic winds blew at 45 mph (72.4205 km/h) at the summit, and according to the U.S. National Weather Service, it was actually colder than Antarctica on Sunday. It’s probably one of the lowest temperatures ever recorded outside of the poles of Earth.
All posts by M. Özgür Nevres
Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, died aged 85
Edgar Mitchell, the American naval officer and aviator, test pilot, aeronautical engineer and NASA astronaut and the sixth man to walk on the Moon, died on February 4, 2016
The Tiny Earth
We are living on a tiny life-bearing rock, an oasis, in a large, very large and hostile desert called “Universe”. The universe is big, really big, in fact
Jacqui Frank of Business Insider has prepared video comparing our planet with large objects (and distances) in the Universe. These amazing to-scale visuals will help to recognize how small (and fragile) our planet is.
Astronomers Think They’ve Found Evidence for a Ninth Planet Beyond Pluto – And It’s a Giant!
Astronomers now think there’s a ninth planet in the solar system almost certainly. The farthest planet from our Sun is probably a giant, smaller than Neptune but likely larger than the Earth. It is informally called Phattie, but commonly known as Planet Nine.
If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel – A tediously accurate map of the Solar System
The title describes itself. Artist and designer Josh Worth has created a great web page which is actually a scaled model of our solar system. He scaled the Moon to only one pixel (the radius of the Moon is 1,737 km / 1079.322 mi) and put the planets and other objects like the Kuiper Belt accordingly.
Since the human brain cannot deal with the really large numbers, it is a good way to understand how big is our Solar system actually (it is really big!).
A giant prehistoric crocodile discovered in the Sahara: Machimosaurus rex
National Geographic grantee Federico Fanti and his research team have unearthed a sea-dwelling crocodylomorph (a teleosaurid) skeleton in southern Tunisia, in the Sahara desert: Machimosaurus rex. It is the world’s largest marine crocodyliform, and was previously unknown to science. Its length is estimated at more than 30 feet (9.14 meters). The giant was probably weighed three tons.
The fossil dates back 130 million years ago. The head of the crocodile alone is over 5 feet long. The discovery proves that this animal lived 25 million years past the hypothesized global extinction at the end of the Jurassic period.
The World entered a new geological era called “Anthropocene”, scientists say
According to a study titled “The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene” and published on Science Magazine, we, humans, changed the world so much that now we can say the world entered a completely a new geological era, “Anthropocene”.
The term is not new. As early as 1960s, Soviet scientists used the term to refer to the Quaternary, the current and most recent of the three periods of the Cenozoic Era in the geologic time scale of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). The Quaternary follows the Neogene Period and spans from 2.588 ± 0.005 million years ago to the present. The Quaternary Period is divided into two epochs: the Pleistocene (2.588 million years ago to 11.7 thousand years ago, the world’s recent period of repeated glaciations) and the Holocene (11.7 thousand years ago to today, began after the last major ice age).
Continue reading The World entered a new geological era called “Anthropocene”, scientists say
Top Ten Most Beautiful Earth Images Taken From the International Space Station in 2015
The astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) occasionally take photos of Earth. Some of them are really cool. Here are the top ten most beautiful Earth images taken from the ISS in 2015 (well, IMHO, of course)
A “Happy New Year” Message from the International Space Station
Aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 46 Commander Scott Kelly of NASA, Flight Engineer Tim Kopra of NASA and Flight Engineer Tim Peake of the European Space Agency wished the people of Earth a Happy New Year. Kelly is nearing the completion of the ninth month of a year-long mission on the orbital laboratory, while Kopra and Peake arrived December 15, 2015, to begin a six-month mission on the complex.
The shark that glowing in the dark has been announced as a New Species: the “Ninja lanternshark”
In 2010, during an expedition of the Spanish research ship Miguel Oliver, the researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute discovered a new type of shark in the Pacific Ocean near Central America, off the coasts of Nicaragua, Panama and Costa Rica. The shark was glowing in the dark. Now it is officially a new kind of shark: its scientific name is Etmopterus benchleyi (it features a tribute to the famous 1974 novel “Jaws” author Peter Benchley), but since it is pure black, it is called “Ninja lanternshark”.
