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The drone delivery of a kidney recently used for an organ transplant in Baltimore is being characterized by the University of Maryland as a “pioneering breakthrough” advancement in human medicine and aviation technology.

“It’s huge. We knew from the very first time that we met with Dr. (Joseph) Scalea, and he suggested the idea of what he wanted to do — we knew it would be earth-shattering and life-changing, and it really has become that,” Matthew Scassero, director of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Test Site at the University of Maryland, told WTOP.

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There is enough room in the world’s existing parks, forests, and abandoned land to plant 1.2 trillion additional trees, which would have the CO₂ storage capacity to cancel out a decade of carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new analysis by ecologist Thomas Crowther and colleagues at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university.

The research, presented at this year’s American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Washington, D.C., argues that planting additional trees is one of the most effective ways to reduce greenhouse gases.

Trees are “our most powerful weapon in the fight against climate change,” Crowther told The Independent. Combining forest inventory data from 1.2 million locations around the world and satellite images, the scientists estimate there are 3 trillion trees on Earth — seven times more than previous estimates. But they also found that there is abundant space to restore millions of acres of additional forests, not counting urban and agricultural land.

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In series of talks, researchers describe major effort to address climate change through carbon-free power.

National Academies study recommends a pilot fusion energy program that aligns with MIT’s fusion approach and SPARC project.

A comprehensive new catalog that factors in “hidden” quakes is helping scientists better understand the planet’s tectonic activity.

‘IMPOSSIBLE WHOPPER:’ The new Impossible Whopper is a plant-based version of the brand’s iconic Whopper sandwich, and has no beef. MORE: https://bit.ly/2GPqNe2

LOS ANGELES — Burger King announced on Monday that it plans to extend testing of their vegan Impossible Whopper into additional markets across the nation, eventually making the vegan burger available nationwide.

The new Impossible Whopper is a plant-based version of the brand’s iconic Whopper sandwich, and has no beef.

Continue reading “Burger King plans nationwide roll out of vegan Impossible Whopper” »

Episodic tremor and accompanying slow slip are observed at the down-dip edge of subduction seismogenic zones. While tremors are the seismic signature of this phenomenon, they correspond to a small fraction of the moment released; thus, the associated fault slip can be quantified only by geodetic observations. On continental strike-slip faults, tremors have been observed in the roots of the Parkfield segment of the San Andreas fault. However, associated transient aseismic slip has never been detected. By making use of the timing of transient tremor activity and the dense Parkfield-area global positioning system network, we can detect deep slow slip events (SSEs) at 16-km depth on the Parkfield segment with an average moment equivalent to M_w 4.90 ± 0.08. Characterization of transient SSEs below the Parkfield locked asperity, at the transition with the creeping section of the San Andreas fault, provides new constraints on the seismic cycle in this region.

The discovery of deep-seated slow slip events (SSEs) was enabled by the establishment of continuous global positioning system (GPS) measurements at the Nankai and Cascadia subduction zones (1, 2). Soon after, tectonic tremors that are temporally and spatially correlated with SSEs were discovered in Japan , leading to the recognition of the coupled phenomenon called episodic tremor and slip (ETS) (4, 5). ETS mostly occurs below the transition from brittle to ductile fault zone properties , where increasing temperatures and pore pressures due to metamorphic dehydration reactions inhibit fast ruptures. Long-lived tremor signals, in contrast with classical earthquakes, are made of a large number of low-frequency earthquakes (LFEs) that are thought to be due to the activation of small seismic asperities by surrounding slow slip. Strain rate transients due to SSEs correlated with tremor bursts are observed for transient durations ranging from minutes to months.

Some 70% of Earth’s surface is covered by water, and yet nearly all earthquake detectors are on land. Aside from some expensive battery-powered sensors dropped to the sea floor and later retrieved, and a few arrays of near-shore detectors connected to land, seismologists have no way of monitoring the quakes that ripple through the sea floor and sometimes create tsunamis. Now, a technique described online in Science this week promises to take advantage of more than 1 million kilometers of fiber optic cables that crisscross the ocean floors and carry the world’s internet and telecom traffic. By looking for tiny changes in an optical signal running along the cable, scientists can detect and potentially locate earthquakes. The technique requires little more than lasers at each end of the cable and access to a small portion of the cable’s bandwidth. Crucially, it requires no modification to the cable itself and does not interfere with its everyday use.