Home  »  Headline News

On:

The polar vortex has divided into two sections, allowing warm air from the northern Pacific ocean to extend into the Arctic, while displacing cold Arctic air south along the west coast. While the resulting forecast means that the east coast will see milder temperatures in the coming weeks, it also calls for colder than average temperatures in the west, and yet more above-average warmth in the Arctic, already suffering from record-low sea ice levels.
read more

On:

The clinical definition of physical death occurs when an individual’s heart stops beating and brain stops functioning, but what about other biological functions that still carry on after these two admittedly important processes cease? Medical science has long assumed that neurons degrade quickly after their supply of oxygen and nutrients are cut off, but a recent study on post-mortem cellular processes has upended these traditional notions of how long the body’s cellular processes continue after death, showing that some types of cells can be not only alive for days afterward, but some are also more active than when the individual was still alive and kicking.
read more

On:

A recent survey of Arctic permafrost has revealed that the northern tundra holds the world’s largest reserve of mercury, with its size estimated to be in the tens of millions of gallons. Ordinarily, the presence of the toxic metal wouldn’t be a problem, as it is locked away in the frozen soil, but researchers are concerned that as the permafrost melts due to global warming, that mercury trapped there could be released into the environment.
read more

On:

Launched in 2000, NASA’s IMAGE (Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration) satellite was tasked with studying how Earth’s magnetosphere was affected by the solar wind, imaging plasma streams in the planet’s atmosphere from an orbit that took it 28,000 miles (45,000 kilometers) above the North Pole. NASA considered IMAGE’s initial two-year mission a success, and had approved it for a mission extension that would last until 2010, but in December 2005, the spacecraft went silent, and the space agency declared the satellite lost.
read more