Lifeboat Foundation

After a 10-month journey from Earth, the MAVEN spacecraft entered Mars orbit on September 21, 2014. The mission €”originally planned to gather data for one-Earth-year €”continues to provide unique insight into the history of #Mars ’ atmosphere and climate, liquid water, and planetary habitability.

It is a tremendous credit to the entire MAVEN team that the instruments and spacecraft continue to operate well and that the science continues to provide exciting results related to the #Martian upper atmosphere, ionosphere, and interactions with the Sun and solar wind.

Venus likely maintained stable temperatures and hosted liquid water for billions of years before an event triggered drastic changes in the planet, according to a new study.

Now, Venus is a mostly dead planet with a toxic atmosphere 90 times thicker than ours and surface temperatures that reach 864 degrees, hot enough to melt lead. It’s often called Earth’s twin because the planets are similar in size. But the modern comparisons stop there.

However, a recent study compared five climate simulations of Venus’ past and every scenario suggested that the planet could support liquid water and a temperate climate on its surface for at least three billion years. Like the other planets in our solar system, Venus formed 4.5 billion years ago.

A model based on Brownian motion describes the tsunami-like propagation of chaotic behavior in a system of quantum particles.

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In daily life, “chaos” describes anything messy. In physics, the term has a more specific meaning: It refers to systems that, while subject to deterministic laws, are totally unpredictable because of an exponential sensitivity to initial conditions—think of the butterfly flapping its wings and causing a distant tornado. But how does the chaos observed in the classical, macroscopic world emerge from the quantum-mechanical laws that govern the microscopic world? A recently proposed explanation invokes quantum “information scrambling” [1, 3], in which information gets rapidly dispersed into quantum correlations among the particles of a system. This scrambling is a memory-loss mechanism that can cause the unpredictability of chaos. Developing a theory that fully describes information scrambling remains, however, a daunting task.

Environmental scientists Morgan Page, Michael Angove and Peter Gleick review the scientific validity of scenes from “San Andres,” “2012,” “The Day After Tomorrow,” “Volcano,” “Twister,” “Geostorm,” “The Core,” “Interstellar,” “Sharknado,” “The Perfect Storm,” “Pompeii,” “Noah,” “The Impossible,” “The Happening,” “Hard Rain,” and “Into the Storm”.
Environmental Experts:
Michael Angove — Tsunami Program Manager, NOAA
Dr. Morgan Page — Geophysicist, USGS
Peter Gleick — Hydrologist & Climatologist, Pacific Institute (www.gleick.com)
Tornado Safety info: https://www.weather.gov/safety/tornado
Tsunami Safety info: https://www.weather.gov/safety/tsunami
California Tsunami Safety info: https://www.tsunamizone.org
More about the UN/IOC Tsunami Program here: http://www.ioc-tsunami.org
The Pacific Institute: www.pacinst.com
Can my boat outrun a tsunami?
https://www.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/Documents/Tsunami/Can-my…sunami.pdf
NOAA’s influence on Twister: https://www.noaa.gov/stories/noaa-tornado-scientists-inspire…-years-ago

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Warm weather brings thoughts of spring peepers and leaping bull frogs. But what happens to frogs in the winter? If they can’t dig down far enough into the soil to avoid the ice or aren’t lucky enough to live in warmer climates, some actually freeze.

Fortunately for them, they don’t freeze to death: Most survive to mate another spring.

There are five known species of freeze-tolerant frogs in North America, including the well-studied wood frog, as well as Cope’s gray tree frog, the eastern gray tree frog, spring peepers and the western chorus frog. In the fall, these frogs bury themselves under the leaves on the forest floor — but not deeply enough to escape the icy fingers of Jack Frost.

SEATTLE, Wash. — There were 2,275 bolts of lightning in Saturday’s lightning storm that shocked Puget Sound, according to the National Weather Service on Sunday.

“To have this much lightning in the lowlands is exceptionally rare,” said Reid Wolcott, Warning Coordination Meteorologist for the National Weather Service.

MORE | Photos: Lightning fills the skies over the Puget Sound Region.

WASHINGTON — SpaceX is asking federal regulators to allow it to spread out satellites in more rings around the Earth, saying the tweak to its orbital plans could bring coverage to the southern United States in time for next year’s hurricane season.

In a filing to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX said it wants to triple the number of orbital planes at 550 kilometers, the altitude where its lowest layer of Ku- and Ka-band Starlink satellites are to operate.

SpaceX launched its first 60 Starlink satellites May 23 on a Falcon 9 rocket. The company needs another six Starlink launches before it will have enough satellites to start partial service, but by splitting satellites into 72 rings instead of 24 as originally envisioned, Starlink will be more spread out, enabling greater launch efficiency, SpaceX said.

These photos reveal the storm’s awesome power.

Teenage climate activist responds to criticism, saying ‘when haters go after your looks and differences … you know you’re winning’