Jupiter’s trademark Great Red Spot — a swirling anti-cyclonic storm larger than Earth — has shrunk to its smallest size ever measured. According to Amy Simon of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, recent NASA Hubble Space Telescope observations confirm the Great Red Spot now is approximately 10,250 miles across. Astronomers have followed […]
Researchers at The University of Akron are again spinning inspiration from spider silk — this time to create more efficient and stronger commercial and biomedical adhesives that could, for example, potentially attach tendons to bones or bind fractures. The Akron scientists created synthetic duplicates of the super-sticky, silk “attachment discs” that spiders use to attach […]
Last year, a meteorite exploded 23 kilometers (14 miles)above Chelyabinsk, Russia. It was estimated to be 18 meters (60 feet) long with the mass of about 10,000 tons. If it had fallen in a populated area, an entire city could have been devastated. Luckily, the meteorite disintegrated and most of the fragments fell into […]
National Science Foundation- (NSF) funded researchers at the University of Washington have concluded that Antarctica’s fast-moving Thwaites Glacier will likely disappear in a matter of centuries, potentially raising sea level by more than a half-a-meter (two feet). Data gathered by NSF-funded airborne radar, detailed topography maps and computer modeling were used to make the determination. […]