Tag: mountains

Chinese Glaciers Melting At ‘Shocking’ Pace, Scientists Say

An anonymous reader writes: Glaciers in China’s bleak Qilian mountains are disappearing at a shocking rate as global warming brings unpredictable change and raises the prospect of crippling, long-term water shortages, scientists say. The largest glacier in the 800-kilometer (500-mile) mountain chain on the arid northeastern edge of the Tibetan plateau has retreated about 450 meters since the 1950s, when researchers…

Skin-eating fungus from Europe could invade US, decimate salamanders

The Southern Appalachian mountains are a global biodiversity hot spot for salamanders. And now a skin-eating fungus from Europe could decimate them. Source: https://www.livescience.com/invasive-skin-eating-fungus-could-decimate-salamanders.html

In World First, Slovokia Plans To Test the Entire Country For COVID-19

The BBC reports: Slovakia has begun an ambitious project to test everyone over the age of 10 for Covid-19, but the president has said she thinks the idea is “unfeasible”. The operation to test four million people is to last over two weekends. Infections have soared in Slovakia and officials argue the only alternative would be a total lockdown. President Zuzana…

Pluto’s snowcapped mountains are unlike any on Earth

A new study shows how methane snow accumulates on Pluto’s mountain peaks. These snowcaps – first seen by New Horizons in 2015 – look a lot like ones on Earth, but form in a very alien environment. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/methane-snowcapped-mountains-on-pluto-new-horizons…

The mountains of Pluto are snowcapped, but not for the same reasons as on Earth

In 2015, the New Horizons space probe discovered spectacular snowcapped mountains on Pluto, which are strikingly similar to mountains on Earth. Such a landscape had never before been observed elsewhere in the Solar System. However, as atmospheric temperatures on our planet decrease at altitude, on Pluto they heat up at altitude as a result of solar radiation. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-10-mountains-pluto-snowcapped-earth.html…

Software Engineer Catches Intelligent Bot Posting on Reddit

“The posts were appearing at a rate of about one per minute, and the posts were lengthy, most around six paragraphs long…” writes software engineer Philip Winston. I read through some of the posts. The quality was incredibly good, no machine could have written these even a few years ago. However there were some flaws and tells that suggested they were…

Inside the secret lives of synchronous fireflies

In the Smoky Mountains, thousands of fireflies flash in unison. Researchers want to know how. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/inside-secret-lives-synchronous-fireflies-video…

House Democrats Tackle Big Tech ‘Monopolies’

The House Judiciary Committee says Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are monopolies — but its new plan to rein in their power won’t change anything overnight. Instead, Democratic lawmakers propose to rewrite American antitrust law in order to restructure the U.S.’s most successful and powerful industry over time. From a report: The report is a long pass down the field of…