News
October 7, 2018
Could an artificial intelligence be considered a person under the law? Humans aren’t the only people in society – at least according to the law. In the U.S., corporations have been given rights of free speech and religion. Some natural features also have person-like rights. But both of those required changes to the legal system.
October 1, 2018
The number of people who’ve died in Indonesia due to recent earthquakes and a subsequent tsunami has exceeded 1,200 people, media reported.
On Friday, a powerful 7.4-magnitude earthquake hit off the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and was followed by two 5.8-magnitude tremors. A 6.5-feet tsunami struck the city of Palu and the Donggala area of Central Sulawesi Province shortly afterward. In some places, the water rose as high as six meters (20 feet).
September 20, 2018
Russia has introduced a national standard for mitigation of littering the outer space. The Russian authorities approved the national standard to fight littering of outer space. According to Rosstandard web site, this document has been developed by the “Roskosmos’” leading scientific Institute “Central Scientific-Research Institute of Machinery (CSRIM).”
September 20, 2018
Climatic bomb: who will be the initiator of a nuclear war for fresh water?
According to the concept of “climatic warfare” that has been popular for the past few years, military conflict risk will rise as the greenhouse effect develops. Shortage of fresh water, droughts, harvest failure cause mass migration, political situation will get tense, and military actions would start. Civil wars in Sudan and Syria are the proofs of this. However, not everybody supports this point of view.
September 19, 2018
Stand back, Aquaman: Harpoon-throwing satellite takes aim at space junk. Experimental spacecraft will fling a net and shoot a spear at targets in space. This weekend, in a move Spiderman might envy, one satellite will fling a net at another craft in low Earth orbit. A few months later, the satellite will ape the spear-wielding Aquaman and fire a harpoon into space. The manoeuvres will test ideas meant to address the growing problem of space junk.
September 17, 2018
Paris climate targets could be exceeded sooner than expected. A new study has for the first time comprehensively accounted for permafrost carbon release when estimating emission budgets for climate targets. The results show that the world might be closer to exceeding the budget for the long-term target of the Paris climate agreement than previously thought.
September 11, 2018
A terrain map that shows Antarctica in stunning detail: Project allows scientists to see continent in high resolution. Scientists have released the most accurate, high-resolution terrain map of Antarctica ever created. The new map has a resolution of 2 to 8 meters, compared to 1,000 meters, which was typical for previous maps.
September 10, 2018
The first-ever mission to demonstrate an asteroid deflection technique for planetary defense has moved into the final design and assembly phase, following NASA's approval last month.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, being designed, built and managed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, will test what's known as the kinetic impactor technique—striking an asteroid to shift its orbit—and take a critical step in demonstrating how to protect our planet from a potential impact.
September 9, 2018
Large wind and solar farms in the Sahara would increase heat, rain, vegetation. Wind and solar farms are known to have local effects on heat, humidity and other factors that may be beneficial—or detrimental—to the regions in which they are situated. A new climate-modeling study finds that a massive wind and solar installation in the Sahara Desert and neighboring Sahel would increase local temperature, precipitation and vegetation. Overall, the researchers report, the effects would likely benefit the region.
August 24, 2018
The world is on fire. Or so it appears in this image from NASA’s Worldview. The red points overlaid on the image designate those areas that by using thermal bands detect actively burning fires. Africa seems to have the most concentrated fires. This could be due to the fact that these are most likely agricultural fires. The location, widespread nature, and number of fires suggest that these fires were deliberately set to manage land. Farmers often use fire to return nutrients to the soil and to clear the ground of unwanted plants.