Tag: Earth

• 12.24.07

  Icy Depths

  What Lurks Beneath the Arctic Ice in an Unexplored Mid-Ocean Ridge? Three miles beneath the Arctic ice cap, just shy of the North Pole, lies an ancient underwater midocean ridge known as the Gakkel. It was one of the last areas on Earth yet to be explore

• 12.24.07

  WIRED LivingHome

  The Dwelling of the Future is Here - Well, in Los Angeles, Anyway Steven Glenn has an idea that buildings - the ones you live in and the ones you work in - could help save the planet. Glenn is the founder of LivingHomes, a company that develops modern, p

• 12.24.07

  Extreme Microbes

  Some Bacteria are Challenging our Understanding of Life Microbes reside in many places we wouldn't normally dream of visiting—take the Gakkel Ridge, for instance, where geologists are deploying robots under the Arctic ice in the hopes of finding ne

• 11.19.07

  Laser Archaeology

  Saving Historical Sites, Virtually Though they may be centuries old, the world’s archeological treasures – from the Pyramids to remnants of Native American villages – won’t be around forever. Rain, wind, burrowing rodents and touc

• 11.19.07

  History is Crumbling

  A Guide to Some of the World's Most Endangered Archaeological Sites The preservationists at CyArk, a non-profit organization that uses laser scanners to record three dimensional digital images of endangered historic structures,  have their work cut

• 11.5.07

  Peak Water

  In America's Southwest, More People Plus Less Water Equals Trouble Two of the fastest-growing cities in the United States - Phoenix, Arizona and Las Vegas, Nevada - are smack in the middle of the desert. While there's plenty of land to build houses on ou

• 11.5.07

  Worldwide Water Worries

  Too Many People, Not Enough Water Water shortages are a looming potential crisis in the American Southwest (See Peak Water for that story). But they're already a dangerous reality in many other parts of the world where populations are growing and freshwa

• 10.29.07

  Virtual Paleontology

  High-Powered X-Rays Take You Inside a Dinosaur's Skull Paleontologist Nick Fraser knew he had found something special when he unearthed a particular fossil in a Virginia rock quarry. He'd been digging up fossils there for nearly a decade, but this one wa

• 10.29.07

  X-Raying Ancient History

  Digital Scanner Brings Fossils Into 3-D View - and Exposes Fake Ones When researchers at an advanced computer scanning project at the University of Texas at Austin helped discover a previously unknown type of winged dinosaur recently, it made headlines a

• 10.22.07

  Experiment Cave

  Scientists Search for Remnants of the Sun Deep Underground This summer's feature movie Sunshine portrays Earth 50 years into the future, when scientists discover the sun is failing and humanity is doomed. While the scenario is certainly fantastical, it&r

• 10.22.07

  Meteorite Hunters

  Searching for Space Rocks in Kansas Every year, thousands of asteroids sneak into our atmosphere, breaking up into smaller rocks that sometimes make it all the way to the ground. Most of the time, they go unnoticed, but once in a while, a big one gets th

• 10.20.07

  Destination: Earth

  Will an Asteroid Hit Us? Having the good fortune to uncover a meteorite buried in the ground in Kansas is pretty awesome, but it implies the obvious: At some point, a huge asteroid crashed into Earth. And if it has happened before, occasionally with deva

• 10.17.07

  Transcript: Rosaly Lopes Extended Interview

  Rosaly Lopes is a planetary geologist with a thing for volcanoes. A native of Brazil, Rosaly studied planetary science at the University of London. After mapping the hazardous region surrounding Italy's Mount Vesuvius, she moved to the Jet Propulsion Labo

• 10.15.07

  Sounds of Silence

  Scientists learn about Earth from inaudible whispers Though we might not be aware of them, the sounds we are unable to hear can tell us a lot about the world around us. Geophysicist Milton Garces of the University of Hawaii, for instance, uses special in

• 10.15.07

  Rosaly Lopes: Volcanologist

  Studying Volcanoes on Earth and Throughout Our Solar System Some people take their time figuring out what they want to do with their lives.  Rosaly Lopes, on the other hand, was more directed than most of us.  As she recalled in a recent NASA w

• 10.15.07

  Listening for Nukes

  How the UN uses Infrasound to Monitor Nuclear Testing Milton Garces is a busy man. When the director of the Infrasound Library at the University of Hawaii is not busy monitoring volcanoes, he's using infrasound to listen for something at least as importa

• 10.15.07

  Constructing an Infrasound Detector

  High School Science Teacher Reports From the Island of Maio Some 300 miles off the West Coast of Senegal lies a very small, dusty island named Maio. It is here that Professor Michael Hedlin of the University of California at San Diego built an infrasoun

• 9.21.07

  Flotsam Found

  What 29,000 Lost Toys Have Told Us About Our Oceans Our oceans sure look pretty from afar, but if you take a closer look, you'll find plenty of gross stuff lurking around. There are as many as 46,000 pieces of plastic floating in each square mile of ocea

• 9.21.07

  Zone Creep

  Climate Change Might Have Some Benefits Too How does your garden grow? Chances are, differently than it did 10 years ago. Climate change has been linked to extreme weather events and devastating species losses—but not everyone is complaining about

• 9.21.07

  Death Hits the Whitebark

  Climate Change-Driven Extinction Climate change may spice up a few gardens; who doesn't want an exotic flower blooming within reach?—but it's likely to take its toll on a few, too. Some changes might even devastate entire ecosystems. Take the white