Japanese astronomers observed the elusive “Phoenicid meteor shower” and have determined that it was spawned by the now vanished Comet Blanpain. They also found that Comet Blanpain was active, though only weakly, in the early 20th Century. This is the first time that researchers could determine the activity of a comet by observing its associated […]
The disastrous 2015-16 Dungeness crab season, delayed and shortened by an unprecedented bloom of toxic algae, is a bitter memory for the West Coast fishing industry. The culprit was domoic acid, a potent neurotoxin produced by marine algae and discovered in 1987 as the cause of amnesic shellfish poisoning. Scientists at UC Santa Cruz have […]
Humans have watched eclipses since before the dawn of written history, and during this long span of time our scientific understanding of the physical world has grown enormously. As a consequence, many of the older ideas we had about the causes and effects of total solar eclipses have been replaced by detailed physical explanations. Nevertheless, […]
The most common types of satellite images are only able to see the “top” of the sky — if it is a cloudy day, the satellite will only be able to see the tops of the clouds. For weather forecasters studying sea ice, this can be a large problem. “Consider if you were riding a […]