InSight detects gravity waves, low rumbles and devilish dust

More than a year after NASA’s Mars InSight lander touched down in a pebble-filled crater on the Martian equator, the rusty red planet is now serving up its meteorological secrets: Gravity waves, surface swirling “dust devils,” and the steady, low rumble of infrasound, Cornell and other researchers have found. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-02-insight-gravity-rumbles-devilish.html…

Mystery Sounds From Storms Could Help Predict Tornadoes

Mysterious rumbles that herald tornadoes could one day be used to predict when and where they will strike, according to researchers. From a report: Storms emit sounds before tornadoes form, but the signals at less than 20Hz are below the limit for human hearing. What causes these rumbles has also been a conundrum. Now researchers said they have narrowed down the…

Germany’s Giant Windmills Are Wildly Unpopular

“Local politics are a bigger problem for renewable energy growth than competition from fossil fuels,” warns a Bloomberg columnist: It’s getting harder to get permission to erect the turbine towers. Local regulations are getting stricter. Bavaria decided back in 2014 that the distance between a wind turbine and the nearest housing must be 10 times the height of the mast, which,…

Small asteroid C0PPEV1 paid a heavy price for almost striking Earth yesterday

Earth’s gravity bent the trajectory of asteroid C0PPEV1 so much yesterday – as this asteroid swept only 3,852 miles (6,200 km) above Africa – that its farthest point from the sun has now shifted out to the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/near-earth-asteroid-close-pass-oct-2019-c0ppev1…