As more and more plastic trash permeates the oceans, microplastics are making their way into fish and shellfish, and potentially into humans. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/hundreds-fish-species-consume-microplastics-including-human-food…
Tag: University of California
Coursera partners with Howard University, expands social justice content, and collaborates with Facebook to offer scholarships to Black learners
By Betty Vandenbosch, Chief Content Officer at Coursera At Coursera, we believe that learning is the source of human progress — that it has the power to transform our world. In 2020, we strengthened our commitment to address systemic racism through learning. We focused on creating social justice and anti-racism content and elevating Black voices […]
The post Coursera partners with Howard…
Mars atmosphere shedding charged particles onto Phobos?
New research suggests that particles escaping from Mars’ atmosphere have been accumulating on the surface of the planet’s largest moon Phobos for billions of years. They could provide important new details about the history of both worlds. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/mars-atmosphere-history-phobos-soil…
Astronomers offer possible explanation for elusive dark-matter-free galaxies
A team led by astronomers at the University of California, Riverside, has found that some dwarf galaxies may today appear to be dark-matter free even though they formed as galaxies dominated by dark matter in the past. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-02-astronomers-explanation-elusive-dark-matter-free-galaxies.html…
The US Government’s Entire 645,000-Vehicle Fleet Will Go All-Electric
Jalopnik reports:
The United States government operates a fleet of about 645,000 vehicles, from mail delivery trucks to military vehicles and passenger cars. On Monday, President Joe Biden announced that his administration intends to replace them all with American-made, electric alternatives… In 2015, the government operated 357,610 gasoline vehicles and 3,896 electric ones; in 2019, those numbers grew to 368,807 and 4,475,…
Exchange bias set in a spin-glass phase could arise in a disordered antiferromagnet
A team of researchers from the University of California, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Nuclear Research Center—Negev and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory has developed a way to isolate antiferromagnet (AFM) heterostructures in the absence of a ferromagnet (FM) to study the coupling that occurs between AFM order parameters and spin-glass parameters. In their paper published in the journal Nature…
More Companies Are Joining ‘Tech Exodus’ From California
This week Digital Reality data center services announced it was also relocating its headquarters from the San Francisco Bay Area to Texas, citing factors like a low cost of living and “supportive business climate”. (Though it will still maintain a “significant” presence in the Bay Area.) And Align Technology (makers of the Invisalign orthodontic dental aligners) also announced it had relocated…
New and rare direct image of a brown dwarf
Astronomers have obtained one of the best images yet of a brown dwarf, an object in a mass range midway between stars and planets. This brown dwarf – called HD 33632 Ab – lies 86 light-years from our sun. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/new-brown-dwarf-direct-image-hd-33632-ab…
Dark storm on Neptune changes direction, escapes deadly fate
Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe unusual weather on the planet Neptune, not observed until now. They saw a large, dark storm on Neptune unexpectedly changing direction, thereby saving itself from looming destruction and possibly producing a smaller companion storm. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/large-dark-storm-change-direction-neptune…
Was this mystery radio signal really from Proxima Centauri?
Astronomers with Breakthrough Listen have detected a mysterious radio signal coming from the direction of the nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri. But is it really an alien signal or something more terrestrial? Source: https://earthsky.org/space/wow-signal-2020-blc1-proxima-centauri…