Astronomers offer “a surprisingly simple explanation” for the curious behavior of the interstellar visitor in 2017.
Tag Archives: ICE
The Poignant Music of Melting Ice
Scientists and musicians are recording the sounds of unfreezing water to document and predict the effects of climate change. Can their work help slow it, too?
Making Luxury Ice at Home
Americans’ long love affair with the cold has spawned a new obsession with specialty ice.
Residents in Michigan Endure Fourth Day Without Power
After an ice storm caused power failures across the state, 400,000 customers were still without electricity on Saturday. For some, it’s the second blackout in months.
Take Water. Add Sodium Chloride. Chill and Squeeze Into Salty Ices.
The lab-created compounds — never seen before — might exist naturally on icy moons in the outer solar system.
Scientists Get a Close-Up Look Beneath a Troubling Ice Shelf in Antarctica
A robot lowered through the ice reveals how the Thwaites shelf is melting, which will help forecast its effect on global sea level.
Former Trump official led feds to Telegram group livestreaming child abuse
Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)
New details have been revealed through recently unsealed Cook County court documents, showing how federal investigators in 2020 gained access to encrypted Telegram messages to uncover “a cross-country network of people sexually exploiting children.”
The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents based in Arizona launched “Operation Swipe Left” in 2020 to investigate claims of kidnapping, livestreaming child abuse, and production and distribution of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM). That investigation led to criminal charges filed against at least 17 people. The majority of defendants were living in Arizona, but others charged were residents of Illinois, Wisconsin, Washington, DC, California, and South Africa. Ten children were rescued, including four children actively suffering abuse at the time of the rescue. The youngest victim identified was 6 months old, and the oldest was 17 years old.
Telegram became a preferred tool for defendants in this investigation, many of whom believed that police could never access their encrypted messages. At least one federal prosecutor told a judge that authorities never would have gained access; however, one of the defendants, Adam Hageman, “fully cooperated” with investigators and granted access through his account to offending Telegram groups.
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New Form of Ice Discovered Unexpectedly During Experiment
The research illustrates how much scientists still have to learn about a molecule as simple as water.
Power Outages Linger in Texas After Deadly Ice Storm
Wintry conditions led to the deaths of at least 10 people in the South. More than 300,000 customers in Texas were still without electricity on Thursday.
Nets, Buoys, Salt, Ice. For West African Fishermen, ‘Everything’ Is Going Up.
Fishermen in Sierra Leone need large amounts of ice to store their catch on multiday journeys. Like many commodities, it has become pricey.
The Arctic Is Becoming Wetter and Stormier, Scientists Warn
In their annual assessment of the region and its climate, researchers highlighted new signs of a huge transformation underway.
What Antarctica’s Disintegration Asks of Us
What if we saw Antarctica as a harbinger of transformation rather than doom?
Cold-Plunging With Maine’s ‘Ice Mermaids’
A photographer in Maine has been documenting groups of women who submerge themselves in near-freezing water. Here’s what she’s seen.
DHS bought “shocking amount” of warrantless phone-tracking data, ACLU says
Enlarge (credit: Al Drago / Contributor | CQ-Roll Call, Inc.)
For years, people have wondered not if, but how much, the Department of Homeland Security accesses mobile location data to monitor US citizens. This week, the American Civil Liberties Union released thousands of heavily redacted pages of documents that provide a “glimpse” of how DHS agencies came to leverage “a shocking amount” of location data, apparently purchasing data without following proper protocols to ensure they had the authority to do so.
Documents were shared with the ACLU “over the course of the last year through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.” Then Politico got access and released a report confirming that DHS contracted with two surveillance companies, Babel Street and Venntel, to scour hundreds of millions of cellphones from 2017 to 2019 and access “more than 336,000 location data points across North America.” The collection of emails, contracts, spreadsheets, and presentation slides provide evidence that “the Trump administration’s immigration enforcers used mobile location data to track people’s movements on a larger scale than previously known,” and the practice has continued under Biden due to a contract that didn’t expire until 2021.
The majority of the new information details an extensive contract DHS made with Venntel, a data broker that says it sells mobile location data to solve “the world’s most challenging problems.” In documents, US Customs and Border Patrol said Venntel’s location data helped them improve immigration enforcement and investigations into human trafficking and narcotics.
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On a Divided Mount Everest, Climate Cooperation Is Being Tested
China and Nepal have both established unmanned weather stations high on the world’s tallest mountain.
‘Wholly Unexpected’: These Polar Bears Can Survive With Less Sea Ice
The overall threat to the animals from climate change remains, but a new finding suggests that small numbers might survive for longer as the Arctic warms.
Sports in Norway, Like Skiing and Bobsledding, Face Threat From Warming Arctic
Skiing, hiking and dogsledding will never be the same in Svalbard, Norway, which has warmed more than twice as quickly as the rest of the Arctic. The islands may be isolated, but the changes aren’t.
Why Did Two Antarctic Ice Shelves Fail? Scientists Say They Now Know.
The collapse of the two huge ice shelves was most likely triggered by vast plumes of warm air from the Pacific, researchers have found.
Climate Change Is Hurting Penguins Unevenly in Antarctica
The western side of the Antarctic Peninsula has seen sharp declines in Adélie penguin populations in recent decades. Things look better on the eastern side. Take a tour.
Ice Volcanoes Reshape Pluto and Hint at a Hidden Ocean
Signs of cryovolcanic activity on the dwarf planet in the recent geological past must be driven by an underground body of water, a study suggests.
Sea Ice Around Antarctica Reaches a Record Low
The drop surprised scientists, and may help them understand more about climate change affecting Antarctica and its waters.
The Search Has Begun for an Antarctic Pioneer’s Lost Ship
Explorers have started combing the Weddell Sea for one of the most revered ships in the history of polar exploration, Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance, which sank in 1915.
Water Supplies From Glaciers May Peak Sooner Than Anticipated
New satellite mapping of the world’s mountain ice suggests Earth’s glaciers may contain less water than previously thought.
A Tenacious Winter Storm Now Has the Northeast in Its Sights
Buffalo could receive a foot of snow on Friday, but New York City is expected to be spared the worst. Icy conditions may make commutes difficult in Boston and Portland, Maine.
Scalloped iceberg sculptures occur due to the weirdness of water
Enlarge (credit: Scott Weady)
You would think that understanding something as common as melting ice would be relatively easy. But water is a peculiar substance, and that makes it very hard to predict how ice will melt. A lot of that unpredictability has been attributed to water flowing around the ice (as seen in sea currents flowing around icebergs, for example).
Still, understanding melting is required to better predict things like the breakup of sea ice. So a group of physicists turned the fluid dynamics up to 11 and have shown that melting ice is weird, even when there are no currents.
It only does that to annoy you
The rules that govern the Universe are relatively simple. However, to ensure that the Universe is sufficiently maddening, those simple rules were crafted to produce fluid dynamics and water. Fluid dynamics is the study of how fluids flow.
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An Extraordinary Iceberg Is Gone, but Not Forgotten
A chunk of Antarctic ice that was one of the biggest icebergs ever seen has met its end near South Georgia. Scientists will be studying its effects on the ecosystem around the island for some time.
Study: Leidenfrost effect occurs in all three water phases: Solid, liquid, and vapor
Slow-motion video of boiling ice, a research project of the Nature-Inspired Fluids and Interfaces Lab at Virginia Tech.
Dash a few drops of water onto a very hot, sizzling skillet and they’ll levitate, sliding around the pan with wild abandon. Physicists at Virginia Tech have discovered that this can also be achieved by placing a thin, flat disk of ice on a heated aluminum surface, according to a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Fluids. The catch: there’s a much higher critical temperature that must be achieved before the ice disk will levitate.
As we’ve reported previously, in 1756, a German scientist named Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost reported his observation of the unusual phenomenon. Normally, he noted, water splashed onto a very hot pan sizzles and evaporates very quickly. But if the pan’s temperature is well above water’s boiling point, “gleaming drops resembling quicksilver” will form and will skitter across the surface. It’s called the “Leidenfrost effect” in his honor.
In the ensuing 250 years, physicists came up with a viable explanation for why this occurs. If the surface is at least 400 degrees Fahrenheit (well above the boiling point of water), cushions of water vapor, or steam, form underneath them, keeping them levitated. The Leidenfrost effect also works with other liquids, including oils and alcohol, but the temperature at which it manifests will be different.
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Winter Snow Storm Updates: States Brace for Dangerous Conditions
The storm, which brought snow to the South, was expected to chug along the Appalachians and into the Northeast on Sunday. In the Carolinas, power failures were likely from damaging ice.
Road Salt Works. But It’s Also Bad for the Environment.
The chemical is effective at keeping roads free of snow and ice, but it also has damaging consequences, according to a growing body of research.
Trends in Arctic Report Card: ‘Consistent, Alarming and Undeniable’
The changes happening at the top of the planet could unfold elsewhere in the years to come, scientists report.
Bearing Witness to Svalbard’s Fragile Splendor
To visitors, the Norwegian archipelago can seem both ethereal and eternal. But climate change all but guarantees an eventual collapse of its vulnerable ecosystem.
As Earth Warms, Human History Is Melting Away
Climate change is revealing long-frozen artifacts and animals to archaeologists. But the window for study is slender and shrinking.
How Maori Arrival in New Zealand Was Frozen in Antarctic Ice
Ice cores drilled from the southern continent preserved a signal of the peopling of islands thousands of miles away.
Arctic Sea Ice Hits Annual Low, but It’s Not as Low as Recent Years
Cool conditions north of Alaska in August reduced melting, scientists say, but the overall is still downward.
The Moon Crater Where NASA Will Send Its Viper Rover
The agency picked the Nobile crater near the lunar south pole to seek frozen water that will be essential to future astronaut missions.
Unraveling the Mysteries Hidden in Vast Glacier Caves
A group of scientists and adventure athletes are venturing into icy labyrinths to study their relationships with glacial melting and climate change.
What Does It Mean for a Whole Nation to Become Uninhabitable?
“It’s changing quite rapidly,” says a hunter in Canada. “And I’m not old at all. I’m 31.”
Electric cars have much lower life cycle emissions, new study confirms
Enlarge / If we’re serious about decarbonizing, the internal combustion engine has to go by 2030-2035, according to a new study. (credit: Reinhard Krull/EyeEm/Getty Images)
If you listen to electric vehicle naysayers, switching to EVs is pointless because even if the cars are vastly more efficient than ones that use internal combustion engines—and they are—that doesn’t take into account the amount of carbon required to build and then scrap them. Well, rest easy because it’s not true. Today in the US market, a medium-sized battery EV already has 60–68 percent lower lifetime carbon emissions than a comparable car with an internal combustion engine. And the gap is only going to increase as we use more renewable electricity.
That finding comes from a white paper (pdf) published by Georg Bieker at the International Council on Clean Transportation. The comprehensive study compares the lifetime carbon emissions, both today and in 2030, of midsized vehicles in Europe, the US, China, and India, across a wide range of powertrain types, including gasoline, diesel, hybrid EVs (HEVs), plug-in hybrid EVs (PHEVs), battery EVs (BEVs), and fuel cell EVs (FCEVs). (The ICCT is the same organization that funded the research into VW Group’s diesel emissions.)
The study takes into account the carbon emissions that result from the various fuels (fossil fuels, biofuels, electricity, hydrogen, and e-fuels), as well as the emissions that result from manufacturing and then recycling or disposing of vehicles and their various components. Bieker has also factored in real-world fuel or energy consumption—something that is especially important when it comes to PHEVs, according to the report. Finally, the study accounts for the fact that energy production should become less carbon-intensive over time, based on stated government objectives.
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Iceberg Splits From Antarctica, Becoming World’s Largest
The iceberg broke off from the edge of the Ronne Ice Shelf into the Weddell Sea this week, researchers said.
Emissions Cuts Could Drop the Impact of Melting Ice on Oceans by Half
A new study said that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius could reduce sea level rise from melting ice sheets from about 10 inches to about five by 2100.
How ICE’s Mishandling of Covid-19 Fueled Outbreaks Around the Country
To date, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has reported over 12,000 virus cases. Our investigation found that the impact of infection extended beyond U.S. detention centers.
Icing Muscle Injury Ineffective, Study Says
Icing muscles after strenuous exercise is not just ineffective, it could be counterproductive, a new study in mice suggests.
Hunting Ghost Particles Beneath the World’s Deepest Lake
A neutrino-spotting telescope beneath Russia’s frozen Lake Baikal in Russia is close to delivering scientific results after four decades of setbacks.
How to Walk Safely in the Snow, Ice and Slush
Walk like a penguin: Turn your feet slightly outward and take short, flat-footed steps.
What a Texas Plumber Faces Now: A State Full of Burst Pipes
Since a winter storm and hard freeze swept through the state last week, knocking out power and heat, homeowners have swamped plumbers with urgent repair calls.
Walking (and Skating) on Thin Ice, Some in Europe Paid the Price
Temperatures that had not been seen in years brought out the playful side of people across the continent. A few who took to icy canals and ponds needed rescuing.
‘Icebound’ Takes Us Back to the Arctic, in All Its Terror and Splendor
Andrea Pitzer’s new book resurrects the story of William Barents’s 16th-century expeditions to the Arctic.
Climate Change Is Making Winter Ice More Dangerous
A new study has found that cold-weather drownings are increasing sharply in warmer parts of the Northern Hemisphere.
Iceberg Headed for Sub-Antarctic Island Could Threaten Wildlife
The iceberg, known as A68a, broke apart from the Antarctic Peninsula in 2017 and has been drifting ever since.
Oklahoma Ice Storms Leave Thousands Without Power on Eve of Early Voting
Tree limbs are breaking under the weight of an unseasonable ice storm, downing power lines and cutting off electricity to nearly 375,000 households and businesses across the state.