Blue whales, grays and humpbacks are traveling south along the California coast this month to their annual breeding grounds in warm Mexican waters. They feed in the same spots where cargo ships travel to some of the world’s busiest ports — and one strike could be deadly.
Link: https://www.kqed.org/science/1715680/can-song-loving-robots-help-save-whales-from-ships
A weapon as legendary as the dagger of King Tutankhamun needs an epic backstory, and last year X-ray analysis showed that the iron in the ancient blade had come from meteorites. Now, a French study has found that the artifact was far from alone as all iron tools dating back to the Bronze Age have otherworldly origins.
Link: https://newatlas.com/bronze-age-iron-tools-meteorites/52474/
A new type of 3-D printing ink has a special ingredient: live bacteria.
Materials made with this “living ink” could help clean up environmental pollution, harvest energy via photosynthesis or help make medical supplies, researchers report online December 1 in Science Advances.
Link: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/new-3-d-printed-materials-harness-power-bacteria
After learning that a satellite that’s been silent for decades has suddenly started sending out new signals you may, of course, suspect that the device has been hijacked by aliens now trying to communicate with Earth. Perhaps they’re warning us that they are planning an invasion!
A University of Bristol-led study has revealed new details about dinosaur feathers and enabled scientists to further refine what is potentially the most accurate depiction of any dinosaur species to date.
Birds are the direct descendants of a group of feathered, carnivorous dinosaurs that, along with true birds, are referred to as paravians – examples of which include the infamous Velociraptor.
Link:https://phys.org/news/2017-11-feathered-dinosaurs-fluffier-thought.html
SCIENTISTS have detected cosmic ray energy readings that could bring them closer to proving the existence of dark matter, a mysterious substance believed to comprise a quarter of our universe, a new study said.
These are not your friendly neighborhood spiders: scientists have mixed a graphene solution that when fed to spiders allows them to spin super-strong webbing. How strong? Strong enough to carry the weight of a person. And these spiders might soon be enlisted to help manufacture enhanced ropes and cables, possibly even parachutes for skydivers, reports The Sydney Morning Herald.
A century after they were discovered killing bacteria in the feces of World War I soldiers, the viruses known as bacteriophages, or simply phages, are drawing new attention for the role they might play within the human body. Phages have been found most everywhere, from oceans to soils. Now, a study suggests that people absorb up to 30 billion phages every day through their intestines.
Link:https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/does-sea-viruses-inside-our-body-help-keep-us-healthy
Life on our planet might have originated from biological particles brought to Earth in streams of space dust, a study suggests.
Fast-moving flows of interplanetary dust that continually bombard our planet’s atmosphere could deliver tiny organisms from far-off worlds, or send Earth-based organisms to other planets, according to the research.
Link:https://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2017/space-dust-may-transport-life-between-worlds
Andrea Lo, CNN
The world’s first “space nation” has taken flight.
On November 12, Asgardia cemented its presence in outer space by launching the Asgardia-1 satellite.
The “nanosat” — it is roughly the size of a loaf of bread — undertook a two-day journey from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, the United States, to the International Space Station (ISS).
Link: http://edition.cnn.com/style/article/asgardia-satellite-launch/index.html
Injecting billions of reflective particles into the stratosphere could help cool an overheating planet, but would also alter the intensity of tropical storms, researchers have said.
Link: https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-in-school/can-we-cool-our-planet/article20462380.ece