earth
24 stories and discussions about earth, aggregated from every source we track.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is destined to become a landmark and must-visit destination for Los Angeles visitors.
Scientists have captured a subduction zone off Vancouver Island in the process of tearing itself apart, revealing that these massive tectonic systems may die piece by piece rather than all at once. The discovery could…
The whole Earth in 3D, built from open map and elevation data. Free for Mac.
The Van Allen radiation belts are huge, doughnut-shaped regions of highly energetic charged particles trapped by Earth's magnetosphere. These charged particles play a major role in space weather, so studying them…
The deployed fleet of ultra heavy-duty trucks and mining equipment assets powered by Volvo Autonomous Solutions reached a major milestone...
Experiment suggests organisms could live in harsh environment under Enceladus’s icy crust, strengthening possibility moon could support life
When will Earth run out of oxygen? Scientists have determined the most likely cause of the end of life on Earth, and how long we've got.
TESSERA compresses a year of satellite imagery into dense per-pixel embeddings at 10m resolution. Open data, open weights, open embeddings.
Every kill becomes a falling wreck. It's your only weapon, and it lands on your head.
Choosing map projections for accuracy, and Earthling Maps v2
The real universe, drawn entirely in ASCII. Zoom from Earth to the edge of the observable universe.
The Most Expensive Breach on Earth Still Speaks Plaintext DNS
If you were to add up the mass of all the atoms in the Earth, you’d get a number 3 trillion tons more than the Earth’s actual mass. We didn’t have to count all the atoms down to the Earth’s c…
Explorations into the human need to escape the surface of the earth. A mashup of architecture, aeronautics, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, anatomy and human pre-history
One Earth day rarely adds up to exactly 24 hours. Scientists found one (of many) reasons why.
The southern crossing — when northern days begin to shorten and the harvest pilgrimages walk.
About 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub asteroid smashed into Earth, kicking up tsunamis and dropping hot debris that annihilated non-avian dinosaurs and many other species. But not everything it left in its wake was destructive. This space rock hit what is now the partially submerged Yucatan Peninsula, and at the bottom of the ocean, the impact generated enough heat to create a hydrothermal system that persisted for 8 million years and may have been a hotbed of life. When researchers drilled for samples in the impact zone in 2016, they studied the types of rock that had formed as a result of the asteroid strike. This gave more insight into what happened in the immediate and long-term aftermath of this cataclysmic event. The collision was intense enough to cause deformation far beneath the surface. Subterranean effects reached 35 km (almost 22 miles) down, and included the melting an immense amount of rock. Exposure to seawater made that rock porous. As hot water seeped into the pores, a hydrothermal system formed. The hot water gushing into an isolated region of the freezing depths could have attracted microorganisms and possibly other life forms that were otherwise struggling to survive. Read full article Comments
For two decades, largely in service to the International Space Station, NASA has sought to foster an "economy" in low-Earth orbit. Twenty years ago, with a program to develop private spacecraft for cargo delivery to the space station, NASA sought to "stimulate efforts within the private sector to develop and operate safe, reliable, and cost-effective commercial space transportation systems." In recent years this has expanded to creating an entire commercial ecosystem in orbit, with transportation, space stations, manufacturing, tourism, and more, such that NASA is one of many customers in the market. In April 2024, the space agency explicitly laid out its philosophy: "NASA supports a robust commercial space economy that advances American industry and promotes technological discovery through in-space work and research. NASA remains committed to fostering innovation and collaboration within the American space industry." Read full article Comments
Look around you, and you’ll see rare earth elements at work. A phone vibrates because a magnet moves a weight . Its screen was polished with cerium powder. Its connection to the rest of the world crosses oceans on cables amplified with erbium . If you drove today, a rare earth magnet helped you steer, and a cerium compound scrubbed the exhaust . All of these devices function because of 17 metals collectively known as rare earth elements . The scientists who gave the group that name in 1794 created a misnomer. Cerium alone is about as common in the Earth’s crust as copper. However, separating rare earth minerals from one another and from raw ore is intensely difficult. As a result, countries that control the processing of rare earth minerals have a lot of political leverage. Read full article Comments