State Farm, Asteroid falling to Earth, CC BY 2.0 By Allison Kubo Hutchison Recently published in Science, research focusing on the plants, rather than the usual star of the show, dinosaurs, reveals new information about the evolution of rainforests. But don’t worry we will talk about dinosaurs later. In the field of paleobotany, the study
Physics
By: Hannah Pell On 11 June 2021, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) released a report titled “The Race Against Time for Smarter Development.” This report consolidates a culmination of research over five years (2014-2018) on worldwide science policy trends and governance, centering on three key areas: research spending, digital technologies, and sustainability.
By Allison Kubo Hutchison NASA announced on June 2 that it would send two missions to the hot house planet. Once again NASA made robots will vist the Venusian skies for the first time since the Magellen orbiter mission which ended in 1994. These missions come after renewed interest in Venus due to the hotly
By Allison Kubo Hutchison USGS: Pyroclastic flow at Mount Saint Helens on August 7, 1980. The volcano erupts. The immense pressure within the volcano due to the build-up of gases causes fragmentation. The thicker and more viscous the magma the more fragmentation occurs (Read more about that here). The fragmented magma cools into sharp, glasslike
Allison Kubo Hutchison We’ve already covered some important questions like do trilobites bites (spoiler: they don’t) but recent research has given insight into another important question: what is it like to be eaten by a baby T-Rex? The answer is it is between being eaten by a hyena and a crocodile. To get this result,
By: Hannah Pell Considering how much space junk is in orbit, the need to maintain and monitor cislunar space (the region between Earth and the Moon) is becoming an increasingly important issue. To do so effectively may require spacecraft that can propel for longer durations than currently available, and nuclear reactors may offer a solution.
By: Hannah Pell “If we conceive a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are still as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us,” wrote James Clerk Maxwell in his Theory of Heat (1871).
By: Hannah Pell Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. In early May 2021, a ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline caused massive disruption to the East Coast’s fuel supply. Pictures of cars lined up at gas stations and warnings not to “panic buy” gasoline evoked memories of the 1973 oil crisis. Colonial Pipeline Co. paid a $4.4