Snapzu Earth: October 2016

Monday, 31 October 2016

Jet powered dumplings you need to meet, not eat

If dumbo and a hovercraft made out, this is what you’d get. We admit we have a pretty warped sense of humour. But when you sit back and look at it, the Dumpling Squid does kinda look like a potential 'love-child' of the two don't you think?

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Bloody Amazing Facts About Vampire Bats

It appears at night, sneaks up behind its prey, and sucks its blood! Is it a vampire? No, it’s a vampire bat! Here are some bloody amazing facts about them for Halloween!

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Insects Are Scary Because Your Brain Confuses Disgust With Fear

How can something so small and harmless be so terrifying?

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A Girl And Her Service Dog Head To The Supreme Court

The Supreme Court will hear Fry v. Napoleon Schools on Monday to decide if disabled children prevented from having qualified service animals at school can go directly to federal court.

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The secret of how life on Earth began

Today life has conquered every square inch of Earth, but when the planet formed it was a dead rock. How did life get started?

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Before the Flood - Full Movie | National Geographic

Join Leonardo DiCaprio as he explores the topic of climate change, and discovers what must be done today to prevent catastrophic disruption of life on our planet.

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The Iconoclast

Jim Allison has always gone his own way—as a small-town-Texas kid who preferred books to football, and as a young scientist who believed the immune system could treat tumors when few others did. And that irreverence led him to find a potential cure for cancer. By Eric Benson.

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Giant Genetic Map Shows Life’s Hidden Links

In a monumental set of experiments, spread out over nearly two decades, biologists removed genes two at a time to uncover the secret workings of the cell. By Veronique Greenwood.

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Melting glaciers in Bolivia could cause catastrophic floods

Bolivia, which holds 20 percent of the world's tropical glaciers has seen its glaciers shrunk by 43% since the mid-1980s. The melting has left behind at least 25 unstable glacial lakes capable of causing sudden and catastrophic outburst floods.

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The Surveillance State Descends on the Dakota Access Pipeline Spirit Camp

For the past six months, at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers, history has been made at one of the largest international gatherings of indigenous people in recent history. Representatives from well over 100 indigenous nations and thousands of people have camped, prayed, and taken action... By the American Civil Liberties Union.

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7 New Species Discovered in Cities

Scientists are discovering new species at the bottom of the ocean and deep in the rainforest, but there are also plenty of new animals being discovered in cities around the world!

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The Price of Gold

Over a period of 20 days, Thom Pierce travelled around South Africa's Eastern Cape, into Lesotho and up to Johannesburg to find and photograph the miners, and widows, suffering from silicosis and pulmonary tuberculosis as a result of working in the gold mines.

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Emerald Ash Borer May Become a Problem for Olive Growers

In October 2014, researchers at Wright State University discovered that an invasive insect called the emerald ash borer (EAB) was attacking white fringetrees (Chionanthus virginicus) in addition to ash trees. This was big news at the time. The EAB had already killed tens of millions of ash trees, and the fact that it could harm another species made it even more devastating. Now the same researchers have found that the EAB can also successfully complete development on olive trees.

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Sunday, 30 October 2016

NASA Scientists Suggest We’ve Been Underestimating Sea Level Rise

Sea level rise has been underestimated by up to 28 percent in some areas. By Sarah Emerson.

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West Antarctica Begins to Destabilize With ‘Intense Unbalanced Melting’

"The bottom of the world has drawn increased scrutiny from scientists over the last few years, as West Antarctic ice loss in some places shows signs of becoming “unstoppable.” There’s enough water locked up in West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea region alone to raise the global average sea level by four feet, and it’s the fastest-melting spot on the continent." By Eric Roston.

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Watch 30 Years of Arctic ice shrinkage in chilling NASA timelapse

A new animation from NASA shows the movement of Arctic sea ice, the large mass of frozen water on the Arctic Ocean, in a stunning time-lapse spanning three decades.

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Amitav Ghosh: where is the fiction about climate change?

The climate crisis casts a much smaller shadow on literary fiction than it does on the world. We are living through a crisis of culture – and of the imagination

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The Strange Inevitability of Evolution

Good solutions to biology’s problems are astonishingly plentiful. By Phillip Ball.

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Scientists call for breaching dams to save Puget Sound orcas

Researchers who track the endangered population of orcas that frequent Washington state waters said Friday that three whales are missing or believed dead since summer. The most recent death of a 23-year-old female known as J28 and likely her 10-month-old calf drops the current population to 80, among the lowest in decadesBy Phuong Le.

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Even 1 tree adds biodiversity to in-between areas

On a gradient from pristine wilderness to a parking lot, most species live in the middle. After extensive observations, mapping, and analysis, researchers from Stanford University have now generated a method of estimating biodiversity based on tree cover. The analysis showed adding a single tree to pasture could boost, for example, the number of bird species from near zero to 80.

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Brazil mutant mosquitoes to breed out diseases

Scientists in Brazil are preparing to release millions of factory-bred mosquitoes in an attempt to wipe out their distant cousins that carry tropical diseases. The insects' method: have sex and then die.

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The e-waste mountains - in pictures

Sustainable development goal target 12.5 is to reduce waste, but with a planet increasingly dependent on technology, is that even possible? Kai Loeffelbein’s photographs of e-waste recycling in Guiyu, southern China show what happens to discarded computers

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These are Tesla’s stunning new solar roof tiles for homes

Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk wasn’t kidding when he said that the new Tesla solar roof product was better looking than an ordinary roof: the roofing replacement with solar energy gathering powers does indeed look great. It’s a far cry from the obvious and somewhat weird aftermarket panels you see applied to roofs after the fact today. The solar roofing comes in four distinct styles that Tesla presented at the event, including “Textured Glass Tile,” “Slate Glass Tile,” “Tuscan Glass Tile, and “Smooth Glass Tile.”

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There’s a Global Crisis Looming: By 2030, Four Out of 10 People Won’t Have Access to Water

Experts predict that in just 14 years, the world will face a catastrophic water deficit. By Reynard Loki. (Oct. 18, 2016)

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The funniest Wildlife Photographs of 2016

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This Map of the World Just Won Japan’s Prestigious Design Award

The 2016 Good Design Award results were announced recently with awards going to over 1000 entries in several different categories. But the coveted Grand Award of Japan's most well-known design award, given to just 1 entry, was announced today.

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Saturday, 29 October 2016

Fall

The beautiful colors of fall.

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A Floating, Urban Forest Where the Food Is Free

Conceived of by artist Mary Mattingly, “Swale” models what New York City might look like if food were considered not only an economic good, but a public one.

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It’s time to get your skates on if you haven’t planted your spring bulbs

Spring bulbs are a gift to grey days and a welcome to warmer ones, but they have to start life now, says Alys Fowler

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Outcry Over Oregon Standoff Verdict: White Militants Acquitted While Native Protestors Maced, Beaten

Condemnation swift on jury's acquittal of Bundy Brothers, racial bias cited. By Alan Jude Ryland.

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Photographer captures what kittens look like mid-pounce

In his newest project, entitled Pounce, photographer Seth Casteel shows us the goofy faces kittens make mid-pounce. Disclaimer: lots of ‘aww-ing’ up ahead.

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What’s A Woggin? A Bird, a Word, and a Linguistic Mystery

Whalers wrote about woggins all the time. What in the world were they?

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Cannabis may enhance night vision

New research shows that the drug makes cells in the retina more sensitive to light.

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World’s Largest Marine Reserve Created Off Antarctica

New 598,000 square-mile protected area is more than twice the size of Texas, and will protect everything from penguins to whales. By Brian Clark Howard.

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Healy-Rae blames nuclear tests for ozone hole

Independent TD Danny Healy-Rae has claimed in the Dáil that the hole in the ozone layer was caused by nuclear testing in the Pacific Ocean 50 years ago. He said "untruths have been bandied about" about climate change for years as he addressed today's debate on the ratification of the Paris Climate Change Agreement, an agreement that he is "very worried about".

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Placebo sweet spot for pain relief found in brain

Scientists have identified for the first time the region in the brain responsible for the "placebo effect" in pain relief, when a fake treatment actually results in substantial reduction of pain, according to new research...

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Friday, 28 October 2016

How (Not) to Map the Internet

It's a web, it's a cloud - it's under attack: how outages reveal the actual shape of the internet

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Older Arctic Sea Ice Disappearing

Arctic sea ice has not only been shrinking in surface area in recent years, it’s becoming younger and thinner as well. In this animation, where the ice cover almost looks gelatinous as it pulses through the seasons, cryospheric scientist Dr. Walt Meier of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center describes how the sea ice has undergone fundamental changes during the era of satellite measurements.

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It’s too late to save our world, so enjoy the spectacle of doom

The business world is right – let’s just get on with the third Heathrow runway, and the extinction of all life on Earth while we’re at it – why delay the inevitable?

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First Known Dinosaur Brain Fossil Discovered

An unassuming lump found on a Sussex beach in 2004 contains the first known fossilized brain tissue from a dinosaur. The 133-million-year-old fossil belongs to a relative of Iguanodon, an iconic herbivorous dinosaur that lived during the early Cretaceous. The fossil mostly consists of an endocast—a sediment cast of the skull cavity where the dinosaur’s brain resided.

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How Is A 1,600-Year-Old Tree Weathering California's Drought?

It's been a brutal forest fire season in California. But there's actually a greater threat to California's trees — the state's record-setting drought. The lack of water has killed at least 60 million trees in the past four years. Scientists are struggling to understand which trees are most vulnerable to drought and how to keep the survivors alive. To that end, they're sending human climbers and flying drones into the treetops, in a novel biological experiment.

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Ocean algae blooms earlier, with potential ripple effects to come

Warmer oceans are acting like a catalyst for one of the world's most abundant species of plankton, triggering earlier blooms of blue-green algae in the waters of the North Atlantic. Because of plankton's fundamental role in the marine ecosystem, researchers expect this shift to have far-reaching impacts throughout the world's oceans. The study, published in the journal Science, focused on Synechococcus, a type of blue-green algae that is one of the most abundant phytoplankton in the ocean. The authors drew on 13 years worth of data to measure the spring blooms that cover the North Atlantic in a carpet of green each year.

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Thursday, 27 October 2016

Eleven Spectacular Birds From the 2016 Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards

An owl in mourning, a parakeet in battle, and a mud-covered flamingo are among the winning images.

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Researchers identify new species of dragonfly in Brazil

A new species of dragonfly with a brown spot on each of its four wingtips and a bluish waxy body coating has been described by Brazilian researchers in an article published in the scientific journal Zootaxa. Found in 2011 near a spring on the Itororó Ecological Reserve in Uberlândia, Minas Gerais State, Brazil, it has been named Erythrodiplax ana.

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Wednesday, 26 October 2016

Italy Earthquake: Strong Tremor Shakes Rome Buildings

A strong earthquake hits central Italy, shaking buildings in the capital, Rome.

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