Cape Cod and Boston, Massachusetts, Nimoy’s home town, are visible through the station window. via NASA http://ift.tt/1Anq0nv
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Cape Cod and Boston, Massachusetts, Nimoy’s home town, are visible through the station window. via NASA http://ift.tt/1Anq0nv
By KENNETH CHANG and CORNELIA DEAN
A photographer captured slushy waves in Massachusetts, a wintry phenomenon that even some glaciologists could not fully explain.
Published: February 27, 2015 at 07:00PM
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By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Long before “Jaws,” Dr. Clark rode a 40-foot whale shark, met great whites while scuba diving, studied “sleeping” sharks in undersea caves and witnessed a shark’s birth.
Published: February 25, 2015 at 07:00PM
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By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Long before “Jaws,” Dr. Clark rode a 40-foot whale shark, met great whites while scuba diving, studied “sleeping” sharks in undersea caves and witnessed a shark’s birth.
Published: February 25, 2015 at 07:00PM
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Crewmembers on the space station photograph the Earth from their unique point of view located 200 miles above the surface as part of the Crew Earth Observations program. Photographs record how the planet is changing over time, from human-caused changes like urban growth and reservoir construction, to natural dynamic events such as hurricanes, floods and volcanic eruptions. Astronauts have used hand-held cameras to photograph the Earth for more than 40 years, beginning with the Mercury missions in the early 1960s. The ISS maintains an altitude between 220 – 286 miles (354 – 460 km) above the Earth, and an orbital inclination of 51.6˚, providing an excellent stage for observing most populated areas of the world.
Image Credit: NASA/ESA/Samantha Cristoforetti via NASA http://ift.tt/1wdNNpq
Originally posted on Hypergeometric:
The graphic is from a story today, on this subject, in the Boston Globe .
About the recent model, and that almost unspoken risk.
Originally posted on Blue Marble Earth:
I recently found another thought-provoking feed to follow on Facebook and Tumblr – the Earth Story. In comparison to NASA Earth Observatory, which I’ve posted about before, this feed delves below the mappable surface of the earth into deeper aspects of its history and processes.
Today this article popped up on my feed and I couldn’t resist reblogging. This argument weaves an intricate, tangled web of interactions between solar activity, glacier formation, pressure, and volcanism that seems almost too good to be true, so I’m delving deeper into it.
Their hypothesis hinges on one assumption and two simple mass-balance concepts
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Originally posted on Icy Seas:
While cables are designed at a small company in southern California,while instruments are shipped to friends at the British Antarctic Survey in England, while instrument locations are contemplated by a small group of scientists, technicians, and graduate students, I am also on a journey back in time to check up on the heart beat of the air we breath and the oceans we sail. The Arctic heartbeat to me is the annual change from the total darkness of polar night to total sunlight of polar day. This cycle, this heartbeat takes a year. There is 24 hours of day in summer the same way that there is 24 hours of night now. Let me first show, however, where we are heading before I look at the heartbeat.
I love making maps and this is a rich and pretty one that shows North America from the top where Petermann Fjord and…
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Originally posted on Scientiflix:
Ocean Drifters, a secret world beneath the waves
A short film about plankton written, produced and directed by Dr Richard Kirby (Marine Institute Research Fellow, Plymouth University) with a narration by Sir David Attenborough and music by Richard Grassby-Lewis.
Drawing upon Richard Kirby’s plankton imagery, Ocean Drifters reveals how the plankton have shaped life on Earth and continue to influence our lives in ways that most of us never imagine.
Further information about the plankton can be found at the Ocean Drifters website (oceandrifters.org) and in the popular book about plankton also titled “Ocean Drifters, a secret world beneath the waves”.
The making of Ocean Drifters was supported by Carl Zeiss Ltd and the UK Natural Environment Research Council
By: Plymouth University.
The spacewalks are designed to lay cables along the forward end of the U.S. segment to bring power and communication to two International Docking Adapters slated to arrive later this year. The new docking ports will welcome U.S. commercial spacecraft launching from Florida beginning in 2017, permitting the standard station crew size to grow from six to seven and potentially double the amount of crew time devoted to research.
The second and third spacewalks are planned for Wednesday, Feb. 25 and Sunday, March 1, with Wilmore and Virts participating in all three.
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The mission observes reconnection directly in Earth’s protective magnetic space environment, the magnetosphere. By studying reconnection in this local, natural laboratory, MMS helps us understand reconnection elsewhere as well, such as in the atmosphere of the sun and other stars, in the vicinity of black holes and neutron stars, and at the boundary between our solar system’s heliosphere and interstellar space.
MMS is a NASA mission led by the Goddard Space Flight Center. The instrument payload science team consists of researchers from a number of institutions and is led by the Southwest Research Institute. Launch of the four identical observatories aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station is managed by Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Services Program. Liftoff is currently targeted for 10:44 p.m. EDT on March 12.
Image Credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky via NASA http://ift.tt/17hsNrB
By JEFF GORDINIER
A movement of loosely affiliated cooks, farmers and activists are trying to reclaim the gastronomic paradise at their fingertips.
Published: February 17, 2015 at 07:00PM
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By PETE WELLS
The chefs Jimmy Lau and Nick Kim prepare elevated and memorable Japanese food at the new restaurant Shuko.
Published: February 17, 2015 at 07:00PM
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The Dawn spacecraft is due to arrive at Ceres on March 6, 2015.
Dawn’s mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate’s Discovery Program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK, Inc., of Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The framing cameras were provided by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Göttingen, Germany, with significant contributions by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The visible and infrared mapping spectrometer was provided by the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, built by Selex ES, and is managed and operated by the Italian Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology, Rome. The gamma ray and neutron detector was built by Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, and is operated by the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Arizona.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA via NASA http://ift.tt/17e9246
Though land losses are widely distributed across the 300 kilometer (200 mile) wide coastal plain of Louisiana, Atchafalaya Bay stands as a notable exception. In a swampy area south of Morgan City, new land is forming at the mouths of the Wax Lake Outlet and the Atchafalaya River. Wax Lake Outlet is an artificial channel that diverts some of the river’s flow into the bay about 16 kilometers (10 miles) west of where the main river empties.
Both deltas are being built by sediment carried by the Atchafalaya River. The Atchafalaya is a distributary of the Mississippi River, connecting to the “Big Muddy” in south central Louisiana near Simmesport. Studies of the geologic history of the meandering Mississippi have shown that—if left to nature—most of the river’s water would eventually flow down the Atchafalaya. But the Old River Control Structure, built in the 1960s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, ensures that only 30 percent of the Mississippi flows into the Atchafalaya River, while the rest of the keeps moving toward Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
More information.
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By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
A plateau on the Arctic Ocean floor, where thousands of Pacific walrus gather to feed and raise pups, has received new protections from the Obama administration that recognize it as a biological hot spot and mark it off-limits to future oil drilling.
Published: February 10, 2015 at 10:16PM
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Launched on Feb. 11, 2010 aboard a ULA Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is designed to study the causes of solar variability and its impacts on Earth. The spacecraft’s long-term measurements give solar scientists in-depth information to help characterize the interior of the sun, the sun’s magnetic field, the hot plasma of the solar corona, and the density of radiation that creates the ionosphere of the planets. The information is used to create better forecasts of space weather needed to protect aircraft, satellites and astronauts living and working in space.
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