Villich News
Discover Magazine - 09-Sep-2014

When Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans in August of 2005, federal officials couldn't predict how it would behave with any real certainty until two days before landfall. Next time, their fortune-telling is likely to be far more accurate, thanks to a new type of hurricane-proof data-gathering drone now in development. Current hurricane-hunting planes gather data on winds, pressure, precipitation...

Discover Magazine - 09-Sep-2014

Greetings from Norway's spectacular Lofoten Islands, one of the crown jewels of our planet's biodiversity: an environment above the Arctic Circle where coral reefs actually thrive, seabirds by the millions roost, and Orcas, humpbacks, and sperm wales — not to mention humans — feast on teeming stocks of fish. This biodiversity has been described as an Arctic Amazon rainforest and Great Barrier Reef...

Discover Magazine - 28-May-2014

An ecologist records nature's color signals to understand the feedback between plants and a changing climate....

Discover Magazine - 28-May-2014

If you've ever described your daily routine as leaving a comfortable place and going somewhere nearly incompatible with life, you were probably exaggerating how bad your job is. A Humboldt squid wouldn't be exaggerating. It spends its days in areas of the ocean with what should be fatally low oxygen levels. To survive, it cranks down its metabolism. Scientists are now beginning  to understand how...

Discover Magazine - 24-May-2014

As firefighters struggled to contain a wildfire that's now raging on more than 44,000 acres of Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, the GOES-15 satellite captured this dramatic view. The animation consists of a series of images acquired by the weather satellite on Tuesday, May 20th. It reveals the smoke plume from the Funny River Fire being sucked into a pattern of cyclonic winds swirling in the Gulf of Alaska...

Discover Magazine - 17-May-2014

About 25 miles south of Chicago lies a stretch of water that nothing lives in. It’s not pollution or over-fishing that has wiped out nearly everything save for insects and bacteria here, it’s electricity. At the river bottom there are multiple 160-foot wide grids of electrodes issuing 2.3 volts per inch every 2.5 milliseconds. The Chicago Electric Dispersal Barrier was implemented to repel fish traveling...

Discover Magazine - 16-May-2014

Nine fires are now burning on more than 9,000 acres in California's San Diego County. Since the first fire outbreaks yesterday, more than 20 residences have been destroyed, with total damages estimated so far at $22.5 million. For up to date official information on these and other blazes in California, see the state's Current Fire Information website. Hundreds of firefighters have been battling the...

Discover Magazine - 15-May-2014

Yesterday, I described new research suggesting that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may be in the early stages of irreversible disintegration and melting — something that could eventually raise sea level by more than 10 feet. Today, I'd like to share the perspective of scientists who weren't involved in the research. In my post yesterday, I said I thought the new findings would eventually come to be...

Discover Magazine - 15-May-2014

FIRE MAP 6 fires burning - not including yesterday's #BernardoFire. #PoinsettiaFire #TomahawkFire #HighwayFire pic.twitter.com/C3KRsnM4rd — 10News (@10News) May 14, 2014 It was only a matter of time, and it looks like that time has come... Drought and heat have caught up to California. As I write this, multiple wildfires are burning in San Diego County. 10News San Diego is reporting that one of the...

Discover Magazine - 14-May-2014

See a correction and update below. May 13 7:15 p.m. MDT If you read ImaGeo regularly, you may have seen my post a couple of weeks ago describing evidence that part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may be breaking up. Yesterday, two additional studies were made public. One was led by Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine, who had this to say at a NASA press conference:...

Discover Magazine - 10-May-2014

In the already parched Plains of the United States, intense drought "seems to be waking up and pushing rapidly north along with warmer temperatures." That's the grim assessment, issued yesterday, from the U.S. Drought Monitor. The bullseye of this expanding misery is Texas, large portions of which have been in drought for close to four years. As of this week, 21 percent of the state is categorized...

Discover Magazine - 10-May-2014

Researchers racing to find the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which has been killing off honeybees in much of the U.S. and Europe, are zeroing in on the culprit. And — surprise — mites are apparently no longer suspects. But cold winters may be accomplices to the crime. Studying colonies of honeybees (Apis mellifera L.) at three locations in central Massachusetts during the 2012-13 winter,...

Discover Magazine - 09-May-2014

Fatigued from measuring all that April precipitation? Embrace cheerful blooms all around you and share your phenology observations (seasonal changes in plants and animals, year to year) with these citizen science projects. Find more phenology projects on SciStarter. Project BudBurst Choose a plant to monitor and share your observations with others online. Improve understanding of continental-scale...

Discover Magazine - 06-May-2014

With geopolitical fires continuing to smolder between Russia and Ukraine, actual wildfires have erupted across a vast swath of territory to the east. You can spot the Russian wildfires in the mosaic of satellite images above showing a large portion of the country as it looks from space today. Each red dot marks a spot on the ground where a sensor on NASA's Terra satellite has detected fire. More than...

Discover Magazine - 03-May-2014

This is notable: The dangers of nuclear power are real, but the accidents that have occurred, even Chernobyl, do not compare to the damage to the earth being inflicted by the burning of fossil fuels — coal, gas and oil. That's from an editorial in today's New York Times, which will make for uncomfortable reading for environmental organizations still very much opposed to nuclear power. One of those...

Discover Magazine - 03-May-2014

Going the bottom of the ocean isn't such a big deal. Sure, James Cameron generated a lot of fuss last year with his record-breaking descent into the Mariana Trench—but Uncle Ben has been to the deep sea without even using a sub. Yes, that picture shows a packet of Uncle Ben's microwaveable rice a kilometer deep in the Atlantic Ocean. It's one of the items an international group of scientists found...

Discover Magazine - 02-May-2014

Much has been made in the past couple of days about the possible role of climate change in the extreme rainfall and subsequent flooding in Alabama and Florida. Here, for example, is a particularly overwrought headline from Future Tense, hosted by Slate: There certainly was a calamity. As Jeff Masters of Wundergroud.com reports: Torrential rains on Tuesday night in Pensacola, Florida brought an all-time...

Discover Magazine - 01-May-2014

Some media outlets have picked up on a new study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. (More on that coverage in a minute.) Here's the headline from the Oregon State University press release: Study finds only trace levels of radiation from Fukushima in albacore The scientists seemed to make sure their results were put in proper context. From the second graph: In fact, you...

Discover Magazine - 27-Apr-2014

From the upper branches of the cottonwood trees overhead — whose shimmering, tremulous leaves are hardly ever quiet, but if the wind stirs at all, rustle and quiver all day long — comes now and then the soft melancholy cooing of the mourning dove, whose voice always seems far away.  — Theodore Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail Figuring out what to post here at ImaGeo is always one of the...


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