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After arriving at the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft revealed a bizarre world where ice used to flow and erupt like lava. In the last phase of the mission, which ended in 2018, Dawn’s orbit swept within 35 kilometers (22 miles) of Occator Crater, a 92-kilometer-wide feature dotted with bright deposits of sodium carbonate and other minerals. The mission team’s analysis of the data, published on Monday in a set of seven papers in three of Nature’s journals, paints the fullest picture yet of the history of Occator Crater and substantiates earlier suspicions that a reservoir of liquid water exists beneath the surface of Ceres....

The Gobi Desert of Central Asia is one of the earth’s desolate places. Its million square kilometers of sand dunes, sculpted badlands and saw-toothed mountains are alternately scorched by summer’s high-latitude sun and frozen by winter’s Siberian winds. It is not a place to explore unprepared: crossing vast, uninhabited areas between a sprinkling of oases requires careful planning akin to the siege tactics for scaling a Himalayan peak or traversing the Antarctic continent....

Biomedical research scientists send proposals to the National Institutes of Health in the hopes of being funded. A recent study of this process, published in Science by the University of Kansas’s Donna Ginther and her colleagues, revealed that proposals from black applicants are significantly less likely to be funded than proposals from white applicants. This disparity was apparent even when controlling for the applicant’s educational background, training, publication record, previous research awards and employer characteristics....

Months of pandemic-induced lockdowns have stymied international travel. And scientists say there could be an unexpected casualty: weather and climate forecasts. In normal times, hundreds of thousands of planes and ships crisscross the planet daily, ferrying passengers or transporting cargo. Many of these vessels are equipped with sensitive instruments that can collect a variety of scientific information about their surroundings—everything from air or ocean temperatures to wind speeds and humidity. Scientists often use the data to feed the models they use for weather forecasts and climate projections....

The useless shells of tiny ocean animals–foraminifera–drift silently down through the depths of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, coming to rest more than three miles (five kilometers) below the surface. Slowly, over time, this coating of microscopic shells and other detritus builds up. “In the central Pacific, the sedimentation rate adds between one and two centimeters every 1,000 years,” explains Heiko Plike, a geologist at the National Oceanography Center in Southampton, England....

From Nature magazine. Women who bear sons can have slightly shorter lives than those who bear daughters, researchers have found. Their study showed that a woman’s risk of death increased by 7% per year for each son born — a small but statistically robust effect, at least for the individuals the team looked at — Finnish villagers in pre-Industrial Scandinavia. “Previous investigations into the effect of the gender of a baby on its mother’s lifespan have been mixed, so our new analysis really is just another brick in the wall,” says Samuli Helle of the University of Turku in Finland, the study’s lead author....

SAN FRANCISCO — If your death-from-above musings focus solely on asteroids , you need to broaden your worried mind. Comets can also deliver a heaping helping of calamity to Earth, and scientists and policymakers alike should start taking measures to combat the threat, said Joseph Nuth, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Comets have largely been ignored by people that are interested in defending the planet,” Nuth said during a news conference Monday (Dec....

If the goal is to transform the entire energy economy of the world, a series of posters and presentations in the back banquet room of a Boston hotel might not seem the most promising place to start. But add in the idiosyncratic energy of graduate students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) and the energy possibilities suddenly multiply exponentially. Whether it was a Porsche 914 transformed to run on 18 batteries or the fusion experiment using magnetic levitation to confine into a small space a power source of the same type used by the sun, M....

BULGARIA Scientists determined that two teeth, left uncatalogued in a museum for decades, belong to a long-extinct European panda. The beast likely lived in a swampy forest, a radically different habitat from that of its bamboo-eating modern cousins, and had a more diverse diet. KENYA The worst drought in 40 years killed 179 elephants—20 times more than poachers did in the past year—making climate change the bigger threat to the animals....

The more time people spend sitting, the higher their risk of certain types of cancer, according to a new review of previous studies. Researchers found that, with each 2-hour increase in people’s sitting time per day, their risk of colon cancer increased by 8 percent, and women’s risk of endometrial cancer increased by 10 percent. For instance, women in the study who spent a total of 10 hours per day watching TV and sitting at work had an 8 percent increased risk of colon cancer and a 10 percent increased risk of endometrial cancer compared with women who typically sat for 8 hours daily....

Scientific American presents Everyday Einstein by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. By now, you’re probably either sick of hearing about Ebola, or terrified to leave your house. While it’s true that Ebola is a pretty horrible disease, you might be surprised to know just how much misinformation there is out in the media about the current outbreak. Airborne vs Airborne One of the big areas of confusion is whether or not Ebola can be spread by “airborne transmission....

By Eric HandA decade ago Faith Vilas, director of the Multiple Mirror Telescope in Arizona, developed a sideline obsession with the Moon. Perusing archived data from the Galileo mission to Jupiter, she saw something odd in the pictures taken of the Moon. When she filtered the pictures for certain infrared wavelengths, a telling signal popped out at a few spots near the Moon’s south pole. The signal, at least in asteroids, is associated with phyllosilicates, which are minerals that need two things to form: heat and water....

Tough times have come to Alberta’s tar sands. The oil-rich region enjoyed a long boom in the early 21st century. A truck driver could make $100,000 per year hauling bitumen-rich sand. Man camps sprang up in the boreal forest to house workers from as far away as Venezuela and Angola. Strips of cleared land crisscrossed the seemingly endless woods so that geologists could precisely tell where to mine for oil sands or flood the depths with steam to melt the bitumen in place....

A cry for help has come from planetary scientists pleading for a Next Mars Orbiter—or NeMO for short. Researchers say the spacecraft fleet currently orbiting the Red Planet are aging and there are no replacements in the works, imperiling future Mars landers, rovers and even possible human missions that will depend on orbiters to talk to Earth. “We are at a turning point in Mars exploration,” says Casey Dreier, director of space policy at The Planetary Society....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The concept of Oneness is expressed repeatedly in philosophical works both in the east and west. Whether one is reading the Paradoxes of Zeno of Elea (l. c. 465 BCE) or the treatises of Wonyho (l. 617-686 CE) the concept of the One is impossible to ignore....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. It has been said that the greatest enemy of Rome was Rome itself, and this is certainly true of the period known as the Crisis of the Third Century (also known as the Imperial Crisis, 235-284 CE). During this time of almost 50 years, over 20 different emperors ruled in quick succession; a statistic which becomes more alarming when compared with the 26 who reigned between 27 BCE and 235 CE....

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Join World History Encyclopedia as they chat with medievalist Katherine Pangonis, all about her new book Queens of Jerusalem, the Women Who Dared to Rule. Kelly: Do you want to start off by telling us what your book is all about? Advertisement Katherine: My book is about a dynasty of women who ruled in the Middle East during the medieval period, specifically in the 12th century during the times of the Crusades....

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Join World History Encyclopedia as they chat with Dr. Rita Roussos. Dr. Roussos is a native Athenian who has taught archaeology and art history at the American University of Athens and is a trained archaeologist who has worked on sites like Isthmia, Kato, and Mantinea. If you did not already know, World History has teamed up with Adante Travels and designed a tour in Greece exclusively for our readers, which combines the must-see sites with places that lie off the beaten track, and Rita will be the travel guide for the tour....

December 1963 Quasars Found “Early this year astronomers discovered that five celestial objects, previously regarded as being faint and somewhat unusual stars in our galaxy, are perhaps the most bizarre and puzzling objects ever observed through a telescope. Not faint stars at all, they are extremely powerful sources of radio noise and, according to new estimates of their light output, are perhaps the brightest objects in the universe. The dramatic recognition of these unusual objects was the result of a fruitful collaboration between radio and optical astronomers....

A strain of drug-resistant staph identified in pigs in the Netherlands five years ago, which accounts for nearly one third of all staph in humans there, has been found in the U.S. for the first time, according to a new study. Seventy percent of 209 pigs and nine of 14 workers on seven linked farms in Iowa and Illinois were found to be carrying the ST398 strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)....