Earlier this year, China and Russia conducted a series of experiments that caused a disturbance high in the atmosphere, aimed at testing ionospheric manipulation technologies for military purposes, according to scientists involved in the experiments. Such experiments advance the understanding of how the ionosphere works, and might allow researchers to learn how to manipulate this crucial layer of the atmosphere to both help facilitate — and possibly disrupt — radio communications.
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A new study is suggesting that human influence is affecting the planet in an unexpected way: human-driven global warming appears to be accelerating the shift the planet’s axis. Although scientists have known about the slow wobble in the Earth’s axis for a long time, NASA researchers have found that the planet’s shrinking ice sheets are altering the Earth’s balance, causing the pole to drift one-third faster than it would if the planet’s temperature had remained stable.
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One of the ways that scientists propose that we tackle the problem of global warming is to actively remove greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere. To be an effective compliment to reducing our CO2 output from transport and industry, carbon sequestration will have to be done on a massive scale, meaning that the materials used in the process will need to be plentiful. One of those materials, magnesite, readily absorbs CO2, but there are both practical and economic limits keeping industry from mining the mineral in quantities large enough to be effective. However, researchers in Canada have discovered a way to quickly produce the mineral artificially.read more

A recent survey of the DNA of over 100,000 of the Earth’s animal species, including modern humans, has yielded a shocking result: 90 percent of all extant species arose at the same time, between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, upending the assumption that most creatures would have reached their modern forms at different point throughout the planet’s history. The survey also found that genetic diversity between different species doesn’t increase over time–meaning modern humans haven’t diverged genetically over the course of our history from other species at all.
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