WASHINGTON, DC, Aug. 9, 2016 — A solar storm that jammed radar and radio communications at the height of the Cold War could have led to a disastrous military conflict if not for the U.S. Air Force’s budding efforts to monitor the sun’s activity, a new study finds. On May 23, 1967, the Air Force […]
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Cancer-causing chemical in drinking water traced to fire-fighting foam
Aug. 9, 2016 – Fire-fighting foam containing highly fluorinated chemicals is contaminating drinking water supplies around many of the nation’s military bases, airports and industrial sites, according to a new study by UC Berkeley and Harvard University researchers. In humans, these chemicals have been linked to kidney and testicular cancer, high cholesterol, obesity and endocrine […]
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Sunflowers move by the clock
Aug. 5, 2016 – It’s summertime, and the fields of Yolo County are filled with ranks of sunflowers, dutifully watching the rising sun. At the nearby University of California, Davis, plant biologists have now discovered how sunflowers use their internal circadian clock, acting on growth hormones, to follow the sun during the day as they […]
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Team led by SF State astronomer catalogs most likely ‘second-Earth’ candidates
Aug. 3, 2016 – Looking for another Earth? An international team of researchers has pinpointed which of the more than 4,000 exoplanets discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission are most likely to be similar to our rocky home. The research, detailed in an article to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, outlines 216 Kepler planets located […]
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Solar eruption larger than Earth
August 1, 2016 – A gigantic ribbon of hot gas bursts upwards from the Sun, guided by a giant loop of invisible magnetism. This remarkable image was captured on 27 July 1999 by SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. Earth is superimposed for comparison and shows that from top to bottom the loop of gas, or […]
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New fossil evidence supports theory that first mass extinction engineered by early animals
July 31, 2016 – Newly discovered fossil evidence from Namibia strengthens the proposition that the world’s first mass extinction was caused by “ecosystem engineers” – newly evolved biological organisms that altered the environment so radically it drove older species to extinction. The event, known as the end-Ediacaran extinction, took place 540 million years ago. The earliest […]
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ORNL-led study analyzes electric grid vulnerabilities in extreme weather areas
OAK RIDGE, Tenn., July 29, 2016 – Climate and energy scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new method to pinpoint which electrical service areas will be most vulnerable as populations grow and temperatures rise. “For the first time, we were able to apply data at a high enough […]