Spielberg’s Disclosure Day reopened a question I’ve carried since childhood: what happens when humanity learns it was never alone?
Category: futurism – Page 8
Biomethane as a renewable replacement for natural gas
While biomethane is flowing into homes across the U.S., Asia and Europe, a renewable replacement for natural gas has yet to reach its full potential in Australia.
New research by University of Melbourne scientists has made it easier for biomethane to be used in heating, cooking and transport.
The team, led by Professor Mohsen Talei, studied key contaminants in biomethane to determine safe concentrations for use in home appliances.
How approaching sounds can warp your perception of time
Everyone’s perception of time is unique. It is a subjective experience shaped by factors such as age, emotions, memory and environmental contexts. And it may also be influenced by background noise, as scientists have demonstrated in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Previous research has shown that approaching noise can stretch our perception of time. But in this paper, researchers in Japan discovered that even when people were concentrating on a different sound, moving sounds in the background still changed their sense of time.
Day-night ocean warming helps explain why El Niño outpaces La Niña in models
Researchers have long known that there is an asymmetry in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the confluence of wind and water currents that creates warm El Niño events and cooler La Niña events. Large-scale climate models tend to underrepresent this asymmetry for reasons that are still not fully understood. Better modeling of the mechanisms that make El Niño events warmer could both provide insight into Earth’s climate system and improve future ENSO predictions.
Previous studies of the asymmetry have looked at large-scale processes such as wind stress responses and thermal advection but haven’t fully answered the question. In a new approach, Yang and team examined how variations in sea surface temperature from day to night affect ENSO asymmetry, approaching the problem at a much smaller scale. The findings are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Comparing 35 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) models, the researchers found that models with larger diurnal amplitudes (DA) for temperature better captured the ENSO asymmetry. Looking deeper with targeted model experiments, they found that a major driver of this mechanism is opposing daily mean sea surface temperature anomaly responses in the central and eastern Pacific. This east–west temperature difference causes the ocean to warm unevenly over months or longer. As a result, El Niño warms the ocean more than La Niña cools it.
Scientists Baffled by a Sudden Reversal Deep Inside Earth’s Core
A surprising reversal in molten iron flow beneath the Pacific is giving scientists a sharper view of how Earth’s magnetic field evolves.
