As a cold front blew across parts of the High Plains on Tuesday, winds kicked up a huge and intense dust storm. You can see it in the image above, captured by NASA's Terra satellite. The dust is streaming south out of Colorado and Kansas into Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. (Look for the streamers of pale, sand-colored stuff south of the big cloud bank.) With winds gusting to nearly 60 miles per hour,...
Researchers are combining aerial views with underwater autonomous vehicles to get an unprecedented look at undersea environments in real time. ...
Geologists investigate why some earthquakes drag on for months, instead of mere seconds. ...
food. The incursion happened far from most human eyes, and the pandas that witnessed it likely didn't know what to think. It...
The satellite image above shows the powerful storm that brought gale force winds and 36 hours of heavy rainfall to New Zealand, triggering what has been described as a 100-year flood in the city of Christchurch. The city has been beset by flooding before, as well as a devastating magnitude 6.3 earthquake in 2011 that killed 185 people. Police help rescue a woman trapped in her flooded house #CHCHstorm...
In the Taupo Volcanic Zone, tectonic forces stretch the Earth's crust in dramatic fashion. ...
s Jack Hills region is indeed the oldest fragment of Earth’s crust, dating back 4.4 billion years. The findings, from a team of researchers led by University of Wisconsin-Madison geoscience Professor John Valley, strengthen Valley...
The residents of Beijing once again are suffering from hazardous air pollution, prompting the Chinese government to raise the city's smog alert system to "orange" on Friday — the second highest of four alert tiers. As a result, schools have cancelled outdoor sports, children and the elderly have been advised to stay indoors, some industrial facilities were ordered to curtail production, and outdoor...
ve been having this winter. The satellite image above, acquired by NASA...
Scaling up waste-to-energy technology could transform the hog farming industry. ...
No need to start from scratch. Here, someone else already took a wolf and made you a perfectly serviceable sea-level dog. With some genetic tweaking, you can craft a powerful pet that isn't bothered by living on an oxygen-starved mountaintop. A few of the same tweaks to your DNA will even let you live there with it. This is no cockapoo or schnoodle. The Tibetan mastiff and the dog it was bred from,...
Scott MacIvor has cracked open hundreds of artificial bee nests. But two he peered inside in Toronto gave him pause. Within their containers, the bees he studies had carefully built homes for their young out of plastic debris. Mixed in with the usual construction materials of leaves and mud, MacIvor could clearly see bits of shopping bag. These aren't the hive-dwelling honeybees you know from your...
Nature has really been dishing out the misery to millions of people on opposite sides of the Atlantic in the past few days. It might be tempting to conclude that the cold and snow that has reached from Mississippi to Maine this week (as seen in the animation of satellite images above), and the extreme storms that have caused devastating flooding in the United Kingdom, each are separate examples of...
Veteran storm chaser and researcher Tim Samaras improved warning times ahead of tornadoes....
A newly detected fracture suggests that tectonic forces are pulling the continents together once again....
Human conflict appears to intensify during times of heat, drought and torrential rains....
In recent days and weeks, we've been seeing similar-sounding headlines out of California, such as this: Sacramento breaks 130-year old for low rainfall And this: LA is on track to set dry-weather record Indeed, as my fellow Discover blogger Tom Yulsman noted last month: We’ll have to wait a couple of weeks for the official year-end precipitation numbers, but there is no question that 2013 will rank...
Countless biology students have dutifully learned to associate the Galapagos Islands with finches. Here Darwin noticed that birds on different islands had different beak shapes, and ta-da, theory of evolution. But galápago is Spanish for "tortoise," and young Darwin also learned from watching these huge reptiles lumber across the archipelago. Today, the galápagos are only a fraction of their former...
Several weeks ago, Nathanael Johnson at Grist reflected on what he had learned after spending half a year dissecting all the major claims and counter-claims that dominated the GMO debate. It was a very thoughtful post with a jarring headline: What I learned from six months of GMO research: None of it matters Many smart people nodded along, which blew my mind, but also made me realize just how narrowly...
Mantis shrimp have a type of vision unlike any other animal on the planet---that much was known. But now scientists have determined, at a cellular level, how it is that these foot-long crustaceans see the world. And it stems from their unique photoreceptors. In general, photoreceptors absorb light and convert it into electrical signals, which are then sent to the brain for interpretation. Each photoreceptor...