New research from a duo of environmental engineers at Drexel University is suggesting the decades-old claim that house plants improve indoor air quality is entirely wrong. Evaluating 30 years of studies, the research concludes it would take hundreds of plants in a small space to even come close to the air purifying effects of simply opening a couple of windows. From…
Tag: Organic compounds
These alien geysers spew life’s building blocks
The Cassini mission to Saturn is over, but scientists still pore over its data. The newest discovery is of organic compounds – the ingredients of amino acids, the building blocks of life – in water vapor plumes from Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/new-organic-compounds-discovered-in-enceladus-plumes-ingredients-of-amino-acids…
Organic Compounds Found In Plumes of Saturn’s Icy Moon Enceladus
Scientists have detected new types of organic compounds in the plumes that have been erupting from Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. Space.com reports: NASA’s Cassini spacecraft collected invaluable data and images of Saturn and its moons over the approximately 20 years that the mission took place. While the mission ended on Sept. 15, 2017, with the craft diving toward the planet in…
New organic compounds found in Enceladus ice grains
New kinds of organic compounds, the ingredients of amino acids, have been detected in the plumes bursting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The findings are the result of the ongoing deep dive into data from NASA’s Cassini mission. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-10-compounds-enceladus-ice-grains.html…
Did underground explosions create Titan’s lakes?
The lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan are filled with liquid methane, not water, and some are surrounded by steep rims. A new study suggests these features might have been caused by explosions of warming nitrogen, which created Titan’s lake basins long ago. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/did-underground-explosions-create-titans-lakes…
EPA To Roll Back Regulations On Methane, a Potent Greenhouse Gas
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The Trump administration laid out on Thursday a far-reaching plan to cut back on the regulation of methane emissions, a major contributor to climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency ,in its proposed rule, aims to eliminate federal requirements that oil and gas companies install technology to detect and fix methane…
Scientists Discover New Chemistry That May Help Explain Origins of Cellular Life
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Before life began on Earth, the environment likely contained a massive number of chemicals that reacted with each other more or less randomly, and it is unclear how the complexity of cells could have emerged from such chemical chaos. Now, a team led by Tony Z. Jia at the Tokyo Institute of Technology…
Dragonfly aims for Saturn’s moon Titan
Scheduled for launch in 2026, the Dragonfly mission will look for clues to the origins of life, and possibly even evidence of life itself, on Saturn’s alien yet remarkably Earth-like moon Titan. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/dragonfly-mission-saturn-moon-titan…
See super-detailed images of Saturn’s rings
Textures and patterns, from clumpy to straw-like, pop out of these images from the Cassini mission. “It’s like turning the power up a notch on what we could see in the rings,” said a scientist. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/images-sculpting-saturns-rings-details-cassini…
Mud ball meteorites rain down in Costa Rica
“Mud ball” meteorites – full of clays, organics and water – are unique among space rocks. And a lot of them fell in April 2019 on a small town in Costa Rica, much to the delight of scientists. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/mudball-meteorite-fall-aguas-zarcas-costa-rica-2019…