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“We need to accelerate and intensify efforts to recover Antarctic meteorites,” said Dr. Harry Zekollari. “The loss of Antarctic meteorites is much like the loss of data that scientists glean from ice cores collected from vanishing glaciers – once they disappear, so do some of the secrets of the universe.”


How can climate change effect the search for meteorites in Antarctica? This is what a recent study published in Nature Climate Change hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated how melting snow and ice could prevent successful identification of meteorites, of which approximately 60 percent of all meteorites retrieved on Earth have been found in Antarctica. This study holds the potential to help scientists, climate change activists, and legislators better understand the impacts of climate change on science, as meteorites are crucial for gaining greater insight into the formation and evolution of the solar system and beyond.

With a combination of climate models, satellite observations, and artificial intelligence, the researchers estimate that at current rates, they will lose the ability to identify approximately 5,000 meteorites annually, with approximately 24 percent being lost by 2050 and potentially 76 percent by 2100.

Researchers have discovered two techniques that could enable attackers to bypass audit logs or generate less severe entries when downloading files from SharePoint.

Microsoft SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform that integrates with Microsoft Office and 365, primarily as a document management and data storage system.

Many companies use it for document management and collaboration, creating websites and corporate intranets, automating complex workflows, and enterprise content management applications.

Last week, at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference, the CMS collaboration presented a measurement of the effective leptonic electroweak mixing angle. The result is the most precise measurement performed at a hadron collider to date and is in good agreement with the prediction from the Standard Model.

The Standard Model of particle physics is the most precise description to date of particles and their interactions. Precise measurements of its parameters, combined with precise theoretical calculations, yield spectacular predictive power that allows phenomena to be determined even before they are directly observed.

In this way, the model successfully constrained the masses of the W and Z bosons (discovered at CERN in 1983), of the top quark (discovered at Fermilab in 1995) and, most recently, of the Higgs boson (discovered at CERN in 2012). Once these particles had been discovered, these predictions became consistency checks for the model, allowing physicists to explore the limits of the theory’s validity.

“For the first time we have physical evidence showing us what was happening in the moon’s interior during this critical stage in its evolution, and that’s really exciting,” said Dr. Jeff Andrews-Hanna.


Our Moon has long been hypothesized to have formed from a planet-sized object colliding with the Earth. But, what happened after and how can its unique geologic exterior and interior be explained? This is what a recent study published in Nature Geoscience hopes to address as an international team of researchers led by the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) at the University of Arizona used a combination of spacecraft data and computer models to investigate the geologic processes that led to heavier elements being present on the nearside of the Moon, which is constantly facing Earth due to being tidally locked with our planet. This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand the geologic mechanisms behind planetary formation and could lead to gaining greater insight into how rocky planets like Earth and Mars formed.

For the study, the researchers used data from NASA’s GRAIL mission, which was used to map gravitational anomalies on the Moon, and computer models to determine the distribution of ilmenite, a combination of titanium and iron, across the Moon’s nearside and how much sunk into the Moon’s interior during the Moon’s formation and evolution. It has been previously hypothesized that while ilmenite sunk to the Moon’s interior early on, portions of it returned to the surface from volcanism, and the mechanisms behind these events have led scientists puzzled.