What’s the coldest Earth has ever been?

Our planet’s history includes episodes of cold so extreme that glaciers reached sea level in equatorial regions. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/whats-coldest-earth-has-ever-been…

What is the Milky Way?

When someone says “Milky Way,” do you think of the starry pathway across our sky, or of the great pinwheel-shaped galaxy in space? Both are correct! Source: https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/what-is-the-milky-way-galaxy…

Has Section 230 Created a ‘Vast Web of Vengeance’?

Slashdot reader GatorSnake shares “Another take of the implications of Section 230… One person poisoned the online personas of multiple people who had ‘wronged’ her, with it being nearly impossible to have the false accusations removed from the sites or from Google’s search results.” The New York Times reports:
Mr. Babcock, a software engineer, got off the phone and Googled himself. The…

Scientists and Philosopher Team Up, Propose a New Way To Categorize Minerals

An anonymous reader shares a report: Some diamonds were formed billions of years ago in space as the carbon-rich atmospheres of dying stars expanded and cooled. In our own planet’s lifetime, high-temperatures and pressures in the mantle produced the diamonds that are familiar to us as gems. 5,000 years ago, a large meteorite that struck a carbon-rich sediment on Earth produced…

Why it’s the aliens living inside you that create your sense of you

Foreign cells within our bodies help determine our mental states and even contribute to our immune defences – making it tricky to define where you end and the others begin Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24833121-700-why-its-the-aliens-living-inside-you-that-create-your-sense-of-you/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

Third Monolith Reappears, Fourth and Fifth Monoliths Discovered

“People taking a stroll on Sunday morning stumbled upon another mysterious monolith,” reports Insider.com. “This one was found in a northern province of the Netherlands.”
The monolith was covered in ice and surrounded by a small pool of water, according to local reports. The hikers told the Dutch paper Algemeen Dagblad that they’re not sure how the monolith got there. They said…

What are ‘open’ star clusters?

Open clusters are young, loosely bound gatherings of stars that may still be surrounded by the nebula – or space cloud – in which they were born. The Pleiades, Hyades, and Beehive are well-known examples of open star clusters. Source: https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/definition-examples-what-are-open-star-clusters…

Rocket Lab Becomes Second Company After SpaceX To Launch and Land Orbital Rocket

Thelasko shares a report from Forbes: In a major milestone, the New Zealand-based launch company Rocket Lab has successfully recovered an orbital-class rocket after parachuting it back to Earth from near-space — only the second company in history ever to do so. Yesterday, Thursday, November 20 at 9.20 P.M. Eastern Time, the company’s two-stage Electron rocket lifted off from the company’s…

The Curse of the Buried Treasure

Two metal-detector enthusiasts discovered a Viking hoard. It was worth a fortune — but it became a nightmare. From a report:
Leominster, in the West Midlands area of England, is an ancient market town where the past and the present are jumbled together like coins in a change purse. Shops housed in half-timbered sixteenth-century Tudor buildings face the main square, offering cream…

We Learn Faster When We Aren’t Told What Choices to Make

Michele Solis, writing for Scientific American: In a perfect world, we would learn from success and failure alike. Both hold instructive lessons and provide needed reality checks that may safeguard our decisions from bad information or biased advice. But, alas, our brain doesn’t work this way. Unlike an impartial outcome-weighing machine an engineer might design, it learns more from some experiences…