Dec 29, 2016 03:00 AM
The Top 9 Baffling, Humbling, Mind-Blowing Science Stories of 2016
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-na...180961565/
EXCERPT: From gravity's song to the evolutionary secrets of dogs, this year unlocked a treasure trove of scientific discovery. 2016 was a momentous year for science. Check out how Smithsonian covered a few of this year's biggest science news stories....
The Biggest Solved and Unsolved Mysteries of 2016
http://www.livescience.com/57326-biggest...-2016.html
EXCERPT: Hobbits were established to NOT be human, we learned what killed off an ancient, giant ape, but we still don't know what caused the "Wow!" signal nor what happened to Malaysian Flight 370....
Explorers Find Passage to Earth's Dark Age
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ce/511541/
EXCERPT: [...] The discoveries are sending geologists like Jackson into the field in search of more clues to Earth’s formation—and how the planet works today. Modern Earth, like early Earth, remains poorly understood, with unanswered questions ranging from how volcanoes work and whether plumes really exist to where oceans and continents came from, and what the nature and origin might be of the enormous structures, colloquially known as “blobs,” that seismologists detect deep down near Earth’s core. All aspects of the planet’s form and function are interconnected. They’re also entangled with the rest of the solar system. Any attempt, for instance, to explain why tectonic plates cover Earth’s surface like a jigsaw puzzle must account for the fact that no other planet in the solar system has plates. To understand Earth, scientists must figure out how, in the context of the solar system, it became uniquely earthlike. And that means probing the mystery of the first tens of millions of years.
“You can think about this as an initial-conditions problem,” said Michael Manga, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies geysers and volcanoes. “The Earth we see today evolved from something. And there’s lots of uncertainty about what that initial something was.”
[...] Until recently, scientists knew of no geochemical traces from so long ago, and they thought they might never crack open the black box from which Earth’s most glorious features emerged. But the subtle anomalies in tungsten and other isotope concentrations are now providing the first glimpses of the planet’s formation and differentiation. These chemical tracers promise to yield a combination timeline-and-map of early Earth, revealing where its features came from, why, and when. [...] Geochemical signals from near the planet’s core are beginning to shed light on its first 50 million years, a period long viewed as inaccessible to science....
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-na...180961565/
EXCERPT: From gravity's song to the evolutionary secrets of dogs, this year unlocked a treasure trove of scientific discovery. 2016 was a momentous year for science. Check out how Smithsonian covered a few of this year's biggest science news stories....
The Biggest Solved and Unsolved Mysteries of 2016
http://www.livescience.com/57326-biggest...-2016.html
EXCERPT: Hobbits were established to NOT be human, we learned what killed off an ancient, giant ape, but we still don't know what caused the "Wow!" signal nor what happened to Malaysian Flight 370....
Explorers Find Passage to Earth's Dark Age
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ce/511541/
EXCERPT: [...] The discoveries are sending geologists like Jackson into the field in search of more clues to Earth’s formation—and how the planet works today. Modern Earth, like early Earth, remains poorly understood, with unanswered questions ranging from how volcanoes work and whether plumes really exist to where oceans and continents came from, and what the nature and origin might be of the enormous structures, colloquially known as “blobs,” that seismologists detect deep down near Earth’s core. All aspects of the planet’s form and function are interconnected. They’re also entangled with the rest of the solar system. Any attempt, for instance, to explain why tectonic plates cover Earth’s surface like a jigsaw puzzle must account for the fact that no other planet in the solar system has plates. To understand Earth, scientists must figure out how, in the context of the solar system, it became uniquely earthlike. And that means probing the mystery of the first tens of millions of years.
“You can think about this as an initial-conditions problem,” said Michael Manga, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies geysers and volcanoes. “The Earth we see today evolved from something. And there’s lots of uncertainty about what that initial something was.”
[...] Until recently, scientists knew of no geochemical traces from so long ago, and they thought they might never crack open the black box from which Earth’s most glorious features emerged. But the subtle anomalies in tungsten and other isotope concentrations are now providing the first glimpses of the planet’s formation and differentiation. These chemical tracers promise to yield a combination timeline-and-map of early Earth, revealing where its features came from, why, and when. [...] Geochemical signals from near the planet’s core are beginning to shed light on its first 50 million years, a period long viewed as inaccessible to science....