Algorithm Predicts And Prevents Train Delays Two Hours In Advance

Ancient Mars had a thick atmosphere filled with carbon dioxide that kept it warm. Rivers trickled into lakes across its surface. Some researchers think there might even have been an ocean. It looked a lot like ancient Earth.

But Mars doesn’t have Earth’s magnetic field, and that has made all the difference. Our magnetic field blocks solar wind - the high energy particles emitted by the sun. 

Thanks to new data from the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) we know that this solar wind has been assaulting Mars for centuries, and as a result its atmosphere is constantly leaking into space. 

Read more here!

The Fantastically Strange Origin of Most Coal on Earth

The absence of the tiniest creature can shape the world in the biggest way.

Ever wonder how coal formed?

An estimated 30 trillion cells in your body—less than a third—are human. The other 70-90% are bacterial and fungal! 

Learn more in the new exhibition, The Secret World Inside You, now open!

Image: Gaby D'Allesandro / © AMNH

Robot Taxi: autonomous mobility for senior citizens in rural areas

Autonomous mobility. A future market, everyone is targeting: Google, Uber, Tesla, Apple, Baidu and a bunch of old-econmoy automotive players. Everybody wishes to triumph with its technology. But have you heard of :DeNA?

The Japanese tech company (originally a mobile gaming company with a net worth of over $1 billion) wants to develop the best smartphone-driven orchestration software for a fleet of robocars. :DeNA just started a new company called “Robot Taxi”, with - not surprisingly - a lucrative future robo-taxi market in mind. The nice thing is, however, that they initially don’t aim for the young urban metropolitan-elite, but rather focus on rural areas and senior citizens. Gizmodo has the story:

Today, it was announced that road tests will begin next year in Kanagawa prefecture, south of Tokyo. Fifty people will travel in trips of two miles from their homes to grocery stores, with a Robot Taxi employee on board as a safety precaution, the Wall Street Journal reports. And the demographics the company is targeting? Senior citizens, and people with no access to public transportation.

Certainly, Japan has a demographic problem and the societal views on robots differ immensely to the rest of the world. But it’s refreshing to see, that (profit oriented) companies exist, which are working on future services with people in mind.

[Robot Taxi] [via gizmodo] [read more about DeNA]

Biologists at the University of Rhode Island were studying the nitrogen content of streams and noticed something odd: whenever there were beaver ponds upstream, nitrogen levels dropped. Beaver ponds slow down river water, and they mix it with organic matter, which must have an effect on river chemistry, but scientists didn’t know exactly what was happening in that murky water. So they made soda-bottle-sized “ponds” that let them study variations on the conditions the beavers set up in their real-life ponds. And they found a kind of reverse nitrogen fixation process was occurring — call it “denitrification.” Bacteria in the dirt and the plant debris turned nitrates into nitrogen gas. The gas bubbled up to the surface and mixed with the atmosphere once more. In some cases, the level of nitrogen in the water dropped 45%.

(via Scientists Acquire More Proof That Only Beavers Can Save the World)

New Virtual Dive Gallery Puts National Marine Sanctuaries at the Tip of Your Fingers

Can’t get to your national marine sanctuaries? Thanks to the wonders of 360-degree photography and virtual reality, these underwater treasures now are as close as the tips of your fingers. NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries has launched a virtual dive gallery, complete with immersive 360-degree views of five national marine sanctuaries: American Samoa, Florida Keys, Flower Garden Banks, Gray’s Reef, and Thunder Bay.

On our new virtual dive gallery, you can explore images like this one of schooling fish in Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary. Photo: Steve Lonhart/NOAA in collaboration with the Ocean Agency

In earlier days of ocean exploration, adventurer and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau amazed the world with his stunning video footage of the underwater places he visited. His film The Silent World opened up an undersea realm that few would otherwise have had the opportunity to see. Now, we’re taking Cousteau’s vision a step further by creating a library of virtual dive experiences that you can experience and interact with from your smartphone, tablet, or personal computer.

The virtual dives take users underwater for a scuba diver’s view of your national marine sanctuaries, allowing you to navigate through the dive sites as if you were there in person. In addition to the striking imagery, the virtual experience helps highlight NOAA’s efforts to monitor issues such as marine debris, ocean noise, invasive species, and changes in habitat and animal health.

The diverse coral reef protected within Fagatele Bay in the National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa can be seen in this image. Image courtesy of XL Catlin Seaview Survey / The Ocean Agency.

No longer out of sight and out of mind

The Sanctuary Virtual Dive Gallery is totally web-based and readily viewable on any computer or mobile device, provided you have access to the internet. So you don’t need to download a special app to your smartphone or use specific software on your computer. While you do not need a need a VR headset to experience the imagery, the virtual reality experience on your mobile device is certainly enhanced with the addition of a headset viewer.

By sharing these underwater experiences, we’re bringing the public up close and personal with the incredible resources the National Marine Sanctuary System protects. These special places might be out of sight and mind most of the time, but beneath the ocean’s waves exist vibrant marine habitats, amazing sea creatures, and relics of our nation’s maritime history.

Seeing tangible examples of the issues affecting sanctuary resources puts viewers behind the “diver’s mask,” so to speak, where they can be inspired to act in support of stewardship and conservation goals. “Because such a small percentage of people in the U.S. are able to scuba dive, we constantly face the challenge of showcasing the underwater beauty and wonders of national marine sanctuaries,” says Mitchell Tartt, chief of the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries’ Conservation Science Division. “These virtual dives are incredibly engaging and truly provide unique experiences that anyone with internet access can enjoy. They are game changers in helping the public and our partners better understand these places.”

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Greenland is Melting Away

This river is one of a network of thousands at the front line of climate change.

 By NYTimes: Coral Davenport, Josh Haner, Larry Buchanan and Derek Watkins                                    

On the Greenland Ice Sheet — The midnight sun still gleamed at 1 a.m. across the brilliant expanse of the Greenland ice sheet. Brandon Overstreet, a doctoral candidate in hydrology at the University of Wyoming, picked his way across the frozen landscape, clipped his climbing harness to an anchor in the ice and crept toward the edge of a river that rushed downstream toward an enormous sinkhole.

If he fell in, “the death rate is 100 percent,” said Mr. Overstreet’s friend and fellow researcher, Lincoln Pitcher.

But Mr. Overstreet’s task, to collect critical data from the river, is essential to understanding one of the most consequential impacts of global warming. The scientific data he and a team of six other researchers collect here could yield groundbreaking information on the rate at which the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, one of the biggest and fastest-melting chunks of ice on Earth, will drive up sea levels in the coming decades. The full melting of Greenland’s ice sheet could increase sea levels by about 20 feet. [bold/itals mine]

“We scientists love to sit at our computers and use climate models to make those predictions,” said Laurence C. Smith, head of the geography department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the leader of the team that worked in Greenland this summer. “But to really know what’s happening, that kind of understanding can only come about through empirical measurements in the field.”

For years, scientists have studied the impact of the planet’s warming on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. But while researchers have satellite images to track the icebergs that break off, and have created models to simulate the thawing, they have little on-the-ground information and so have trouble predicting precisely how fast sea levels will rise.

Dire report by three excellent Times journalists covering a team of researchers camped out on the icesheets of Greenland. The conclusion is that glaciers and land ice are melting at rates far higher than scientists anticipated, or that climate models have shown. This means that sea levels are rising faster than projected, and many coastal communities are in grave danger.

The economic impacts are incalculable.

How To Avoid The Next Atlantis

They say nothing in life is guaranteed except death and taxes. Maybe we should add rising sea levels to that list?

The lapping waves of Earth’s oceans are going to move as much as 1 full meter higher within our lifetimes, and perhaps several meters more in the coming centuries depending on what we do or don’t do about slowing down climate change. Part of this comes from melting glaciers and ice shelves flowing out to sea, and part comes from the natural expansion of water as it warms, but we have to face facts: Sea level is rising.

This new video from MinuteEarth looks at some of the interesting ways that coastal cities around the globe are trying to get ready for a wetter world. I wish this wasn’t something we had to prepare for, but I’m glad we’ve got smart people on the job.

Bonus: Curious what 1 meter of sea level rise looks like? Head over to Climate Central and play with their Surging Seas map simulator. Look, you can even make half of Florida and Louisiana disappear!

Silicon Carbide (SiC) is a key building block for next-generation devices. It takes features from diamonds, one of the toughest materials in the world, and combines them with features of silicon, our ubiquitous semiconductor technology in electronics to make a very new kind of material for power electronics. SiC can more efficiently handle higher voltage and three times the amount of energy compared to silicon chips, allowing us to run everything from locomotives to planes and wind farms faster and more efficiently.