The Concord Consortium’s Paul Horwitz and Evolution Readiness advisory board member Louise Mead of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action discuss “the evolution of teaching evolution“ in a February 7 article originally published in the Hechinger Report.
The following are two Energy2D simulations that compare convection and conduction, which should run within this page if you have installed Java and Java applets are enabled with your browser. The first one shows the case of natural convection. The seco…
“Within the next 6 to 12 months, I suspect we’ll be able to detect and verify and announce planets that at least have the size of our own Earth.” –Dr. Geoffrey Marcy, University of California Berkeley “This changes our understanding of our role in the universe. We, in some sense, are not alone in terms […]
It seems counter-intuitive, but it seems that warmer summers actually slow the flow of Greenland’s ice sheets. A new study, published yesterday in Nature, explains how increased melting in warmer years causes the internal drainage system of the ice sheet to change, slowing the glacier’s flow towards the ocean. Normally, the melt-water finds its way […]
Warm millennium, that is. And Southern Hemisphere, that is. New research suggests that Earth will continue to warm into the year 3000, even if human-caused carbon dioxide emissions stop right now. According to their models, scientists predict that the Northern Hemisphere will fare much better, with the warming trend reversing within the millennium. This is […]
NASA scientists have deduced that the newly-discovered planet Kepler-10b is 4.6 times more massive than Earth with an average density of 8.8 grams per cubic centimeter, about the same density as bronze. How did they learn this from a telescope that detects light changes? (See earlier post about Kepler-10b’s discovery.) It turns out that knowing […]
Metals feel colder because they conduct heat faster, not because they are really “colder.” This is often a misconception from students. A very simple IR experiment may dispel this misconception by visualizing what is going on when you touch a piec…
On January 10, 2011, NASA confirmed that the Kepler space telescope had found its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Kepler-10b is really small, the smallest planet yet discovered outside of our solar system, at 1.4 times the size of Earth. The discovery of Kepler-10b was made possible by some major advances in technology: the ability […]
Use a VERY long sampling straw? Nope. Use a spectrometer? Yup. (Explore how this works in our “Is there life outside of Earth?” investigation.) Scientists at NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency collaborated to send the Cassini spacecraft to Saturn to get closer looks at the planet, its rings, and its […]
Scientists have used indirect measurements of movement to infer the presence of waves for a very long time. For example, how can you tell when it’s windy without going outside? You look to see the movements of the trees or flags or other flexible structures. Now, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are using lasers […]