The White House was put under lockdown on November 26 after radar operators at the Capitol Police command center spotted a mysterious, “slow-moving blob” on their scopes just south of the National Mall. The radar return prompted the US Capitol to be placed on “restrictive access”, and military aircraft wereread more
A new study that documented rapid changes in the physiology of snail kites in the Florida Everglades has prompted researchers to question exactly how fast evolution can occur in a longer-lived animal – in this case: instead of occurring over a long period of time, over numerous successive generations; the changes in these birds, prompted by the introduction of a new species of prey available to them, took place in less than one-and-a-half generations.
read more
In the entirety of the animal kingdom, humanity has never held a monopoly on intelligence: considering that the concept of intelligence boils down to the ability to gather and usefully process information, this means that virtually all creatures possess at least some degree of intelligence. Humans tend to stand apart in this regard, due to the degree that our capacities have developed to, but even then many of these cognitive traits are shared with some of our non-human brethren: great apes such as chimpanzees are adept tool-users, prairie dogs have a sophisticated vocabulary, and octopuses have excellent problem solving skills.
read more
Both NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center and the U.K. Met’s Space Weather Operations Centre have issued a G2-Moderate geomagnetic storm watch for April 2, due to the presence of a negative polarity coronal hole high speed stream (or CH HSS) facing the Earth. While this isn’t a full coronal mass ejection, coronal holes cause an increase in the speed and volume of the charged particles coming from the sun, and can affect Earth in similar, albeit more moderate, ways.
read more