Though we’ve seen plenty of our beautiful blue marble from space before, here’s what Earth looks like from a hundred million miles away. That’s roughly the same distance from the Earth to the Sun. More »
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What Earth Looks Like from a 100 Million Miles Away
While The Pirate Pay is certainly notorious, it’s always oddly lingered in the mid-table when it comes to real-world file sharing. No longer, though: according to fresh analysis by Torrent Freak , the site has now sailed into the top spot as the world’s most-used file sharing site. More »
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The Pirate Bay Is Now the World’s Largest File-Sharing Site
This is the map we’ve all dreamed of seeing. It’s a depiction of Earth in which its primary geological features have been inverted , showcasing a planet with a sprawling landmass that extends across two-thirds of its surface. Read more…
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What Earth would look like with its oceans and landmasses swapped
A new study by Australian geologists has shown that over 80% the world’s commercial gold deposits were generated in a flash process, the result of depressurizing earthquakes that rapidly converted mineral-rich fluids into precious veins of gold. The process is called flash vaporization . Deep below the Earth’s crust, at depths ranging from three to 18 miles (5-30 km), fluid-filled fault cavities are subject to extreme temperatures and pressure. These fluids are rich in dissolved substances like gold and silicate minerals. But for those deposits located near fault lines, an earthquake can create a dramatic drop in pressure which forces the fluid to expand to as much as 130,000 times its former size — and in the blink of an eye. The researchers, a team consisting of Dion Weatherley and Richard Henley, found that this depressurization process causes trapped fluids to expand to a very low-density vapor. This ‘flash’ effect results in the rapid deposition of silica, along with gold-enriched quartz veins. From New Scientist : The fluid cannot get from the surrounding rock into the hole fast enough to fill the void, Henley says, so pressure drops from 3000 times atmospheric pressure to pressures almost the same as those at Earth’s surface in an instant. The nearby fluid flash-vaporises as a result – and any minerals it contains are deposited as it does. Later, incoming fluid dissolves some of the minerals, but the less-soluble ones, including gold, accumulate as more episodes of quake-driven flash deposition occur. “Large quantities of gold may be deposited in only a few hundred thousand years,” says Weatherley – a brief interval by geological standards. “Each event drops a little more gold,” adds Henley. “You can see it microscopically, tiny layer after tiny layer. It just builds up.” They calculate that large earthquakes can deposit as much as 0.1 milligrams of gold along each square meter of a fault zone’s surface in a fraction of a second. Eventually, over the course of many thousands of years, these deposits begin to accumulate. The researchers estimate, for example, that active faults can produce a 100-metric-ton deposit of gold in less than 100,000 years. Read the entire study at Nature Geoscience . More at Nature News and New Scientist . Image: Shutterstock/farbled.
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Most gold deposits were produced by earthquakes
MojoKid writes “We hear about green deployment practices all the time, but it’s often surrounding facilities such as data centers rather than retail stores. However, Walgreens is determined to go as green as possible, and to that end, the company announced plans for the first net zero energy retail store. The store is slated to be built at the corner of Chicago Avenue and Keeney Street in Evanston, Illinois, where an existing Walgreens is currently being demolished. The technologies Walgreens is plotting to implement in this new super-green store will include solar panels and wind turbines to generate power; geothermal technology for heat; and efficient energy consumption with LED lighting, daylight harvesting, and ‘ultra-high-efficiency’ refrigeration.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Walgreens To Build First Self-Powered Retail Store
When it comes to detecting and cataloguing exoplanets, astronomers have only just begun. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that an entirely new class of planets may have been discovered — Neptune-like planets that were stripped of their outer gaseous layers after venturing too close to their sun. Several years ago, astronomers involved in NASA’s Kepler program discovered celestial bodies that appeared too heavy for their size. Some of these planets were Earth-like in size, but featured densities greater than pure iron. No existing theory could explain these observations, but Olivier Grasset, a geophysicist at the University of Nantes in France, has just come up with a possible explanation. Nature News reports : Grasset and his collaborators now say that the strange bodies could be the “fossil cores” of planets that were once much larger, an idea that was first proposed by researchers in 20111. These planets would have been ice giants that formed in the outer parts of a star system and then migrated inwards — as their orbits were affected by interactions with surrounding gas and dust — perhaps getting as close to their suns as Mercury is to ours. The hotter temperatures closer to the stars, Grasset explains, would evaporate the outer layers of the planets, which are made mainly of volatile components such as hydrogen, helium and water. The leftover cores would consist of rock and metal, just like the bulk of Earth, and could weigh up to several times as much as our planet, making them what scientists call super-Earths. But these cores formed under the weight of their planets’ outer layers, under pressures of around 500 gigapascals — 5 million times atmospheric pressure on Earth — and typical temperatures of about 6,000 kelvin. As a result, the materials in these cores should be more compacted, and denser, than Earth. The results were recently presented at a meeting on exoplanets at the Royal Society in London. Read Davide Castelvecchi’s entire article to learn more. Image: NASA/ESA/C.CARREAU.
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This crazy-dense planet could be of an entirely new type
New submitter rujholla writes “The race to the moon is back! This time, though, it’s through private enterprise. Google has offered a $20m grand prize to the first privately-funded company to land a robot on the moon and explore the surface (video) by moving at least 500 meters and sending high definition video back to Earth by 2015.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Moon Mining Race Under Way
littlesparkvt writes in with news about the possibility of a privately funded Mars mission. “Millionaire Dennis Tito became the first paying customer to make a trip to the International Space Station and now he wants to launch a privately funded mission to Mars in 2018. Dennis paid a reported 20 Million to ride aboard a Russian rocket to the International Space Station and has since stayed out of the spotlight, until now. There’s no word whether the trip will include humans, there will be more information on that fact next week. Considering there is little time to train a crew for the mission the flight in 2018 will most likely be an unmanned probe. There’s also a possibility that the first mission to Mars from this private investor will harbor supplies for future astronauts. Plants and food are a possibility as they would take much less space than a full human crew.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Millionaire Plans Mission To Mars In 2018
Forget coffee. Forget juice. Forget milk, damnit. Mountain Dew wants you wash down your Wheaties with an energy drink. Nope. Nope. Nope. We’re not going to do that. More »
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Mountain Dew KickStart: You’re Supposed to Drink This for Breakfast
coondoggie writes “The asteroid NASA says is about the half the size of a football field that will blow past Earth on Feb 15 could be worth up to $195 billion in metals and propellant. That’s what the scientists at Deep Space Industries, a company that wants to mine these flashing hunks of space materials, thinks the asteroid known as 2012 DA14 is worth — if they could catch it.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Earth-buzzing Asteroid Would Be Worth $195B If We Could Catch It