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A new analysis of a 3,700-year-old Babylonian cuneiform tablet suggests that the ancient Babylonians were using an advanced form of trigonometry roughly a millennium before ancient Greek mathematicians recorded what is known as the Pytharoean theorem. In addition to the tablet’s antiquity, the tables inscribed on it also suggest that the Mesopotamians’ approach to this form of mathematics may be superior to the function we use today.
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Hurricane Harvey expanded from a tropical storm to a category 4 hurricane in just 48 hours, and is now stalled over eastern Texas and western Louisiana and dropping rainfall in the area at a rate never before witnessed. But why is this? Like Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, Harvey expanded to hurricane force with unexpected speed. The reason is that sea-surface waters in the Gulf of Mexico were between 2.7 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit above average. Water temperatures in the Gulf have been rising for the past thirty years, with the highest temperatures being recorded in 2011. They then dropped until 2013, and have since been rising again. read more

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Ordinarily, the bright, white surface of glacial ice found in ice sheets such as the ones that cover Greenland and Antarctica serve to function as reflectors that bounce a certain amount of solar radiation back into space — this effect also helps prevent the ice from being directly warmed too much by the sun. The effect of the ice’s reflectiveness, or albedo, can be compromised by changes in its color, for instance by soot being deposited on the surface from large wildfires ravaging a different part of the globe. The darkening of the ice causes it to absorb more sunlight, and in turn this increases the temperature of the ice, hastening its rate of melt. Now, a new factor has been identified that can darken the albedo of Greenland’s ice: the spread of simple algae.
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New computer models of Mars’ atmosphere are indicating that the Red Planet may experience rapidly-falling snowstorms at night, possibly sprinkling the surface below with a light layer of snow. It was previously assumed that snow that fell on Mars did so slowly, taking hours to drop a single mile, and typically evaporating before it reached the surface. But the new simulations show that ice crystals forming at night may only take about five to ten minutes to fall the same distance, explaining why NASA’s Phoenix lander observed a dusting of snow shortly after touchdown in 2008.
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