tedlistens writes: On Wednesday, a solar eclipse gave people across a swath of Indonesia and the South Pacific the chance to see a generous 4 minutes and 9 seconds of totality: the awe-inspiring sight of the moon completely covering the sun, turning day into night and offering a rare glimpse of the corona, the gas swirling in the Sun's outer atmosphere. But in 1972, a small group of astronomers from around the globe sought a way for seeing a longer eclipse than ever before: a prototype Concorde, capable of chasing the eclipse for a whopping 74 minutes across the Sahara Desert, at twice the speed of sound.

An anonymous reader writes: Reason.com's Robby Soave criticizes an article published in the journal Progress in Human Geography, for being "utterly incomprehensible," and "the least essential paper ever written." Entitled Glaciers, Gender, and Science--A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental climate change, the article is authored by researchers at the University of Oregon and funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Despite being filled with "buzzwords -- colonialism, marginalization, masculinist discourses, etc. -- with such frequency that the entire thing comes off like a joke," the article is accompanied by an enthusiastic press release from the University of Oregon, stating that "glacier research has been intertwined with gender relations, masculine cultures of exploration, geopolitics, and individual and institutional power. That, in turn, led to glacier-related academic and governmental jobs being predominantly filled by men. ... Melting glaciers are today considered a national security risk for numerous countries,' [one of the researchers] said. 'Power and colonialism have shaped the science.' That message is detailed extensively in the paper."

Lasrick writes: Ray Weiss at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography describes how countries report greenhouse gas emissions -- a 'bottom-up' approach that can result in inventories that differ from those determined by measuring the actual increases of emitted gases in the atmosphere. Weiss proposes a 'top-down" atmospheric monitoring system for greenhouse gases, and goes into the technology that already exists for doing so.

sciencehabit writes: This month, a drilling platform will rise in the Gulf of Mexico, but it won't be aiming for oil. Scientists will try to sink a diamond-tipped bit into the heart of Chicxulub crater — the buried remnant of the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs, along with most other life on the planet. They hope that the retrieved rock cores will contain clues to how life came back in the wake of the cataclysm, and whether the crater itself could have been a home for novel microbial life. And by drilling into a circular ridge inside the 180-kilometer-wide crater rim, scientists hope to settle ideas about how such 'peak rings,' hallmarks of the largest impact craters, take shape.

Eloking writes with this news from The Verge: SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket into space this afternoon, but — as expected — failed to land the vehicle on a drone ship at sea afterward. CEO Elon Musk said the rocket 'landed hard' on the drone ship. The mission requirements made a successful landing unlikely. This was SpaceX's fourth attempt to land the Falcon 9 post-launch on an autonomous drone ship floating in the ocean. All of the previous sea landings failed too, though the third attempt came very close. The company had low hopes of a successful landing from the start of this mission, since the rocket had to send a heavy satellite into a high orbit. That requires a lot of fuel for the launch itself, so there wasn't much fuel left for the rocket's return to Earth and powered landing.

An anonymous reader writes: U.S. astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian astronaut Mikhail Kornienko returned to Earth Wednesday after spending a year aboard the ISS, conducting experiments for future missions to Mars. Mikhail Kornienko, 55, and Scott Kelly, 52, completed the longest uninterrupted period aboard the ISS since the station was deployed in 2000. Kelly, who has made four trips to the ISS, also breaks the record for cumulative time in space by an American, with 540 days. Kelly and Kornienko performed this mission to study the biological and psychological effects of long stays in space in order to prepare for future missions to Mars in 2030 or sooner. During their stay at the station, both were frequently subjected to medical examination and a battery of tests to study the long-term effects of micro-gravity on the human body.

HughPickens.com writes: David Roberts writes at VOX that it stands to reason that vehicle automation could save energy and reduce emissions in some ways. Cars will be able to chain together more aerodynamically, drive at more consistent speeds, and perhaps serve as shared vehicles in lieu of individual vehicle ownership. But it also stands to reason that automation could increase energy use and emissions in some ways. If driving is easier and more pleasant, people will do it more. Automation will open up car travel to populations (the young, the elderly, the visually or otherwise impaired) who did not previously have access. Self-driving cars could increase the overall amount of vehicle miles traveled. (Read more, below.)

schwit1 writes: Here's a tricky task. Pick a photograph from the web at random. Now try to work out where it was taken using only the image itself. If the image shows a famous building or landmark, such as the Eiffel Tower or Niagara Falls, the task is straightforward. But the job becomes significantly harder when the image lacks specific location cues or is taken indoors or shows a pet or food or some other detail. Nevertheless, humans are surprisingly good at this task. To help, they bring to bear all kinds of knowledge about the world such as the type and language of signs on display, the types of vegetation, architectural styles, the direction of traffic, and so on. Humans spend a lifetime picking up these kinds of geolocation cues. So it's easy to think that machines would struggle with this task. And indeed, they have. Today, that changes thanks to the work of Tobias Weyand, a computer vision specialist at Google, and a couple of pals. These guys have trained a deep-learning machine to work out the location of almost any photo using only the pixels it contains.

StartsWithABang writes: The need for a February 29th, once every four years, doesn't just give us an extra day this year, but it keeps the calendar from drifting and failing to align with the seasons. Even so, the scheme we have worked out today, where years divisible by 4 but not those divisible by 100 unless also divisible by 400 get an extra day, isn't perfect, and will get worse as time goes on. The current misalignment between our calendar and the actual Earth's orbit is big enough that we'll be off by a day every 3,200 years, but bigger news is that the Earth's rotation rate is changing, as our day lengthens and our spin slows down. In another 4 million years, we won't need leap days at all, and if we extrapolate backwards, we can find that early Earth had a day that lasted just 6.5 hours.

MikeChino writes: A week after the ruptured natural gas well in Aliso Canyon was finally declared sealed, we have a full account of the damage — and it doesn't look good. In total, 97,100 metric tons of methane were released into the atmosphere over the course of 112 days — the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions of over half a million cars.

MarkWhittington writes: The conventional wisdom has been among scientists is that a myriad of Earth-like planets exist in the universe, some of which have to be the abode of life, even intelligent life. However, Astrophysicist Erik Zackrisson from Uppsala University in Sweden has run a computer simulation of the universe, incorporating what we know about exoplanets thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope, the laws of physics, and the state of the early universe. The computer simulation came up with exactly one Earth, which is to say the one we live on. Every other planet in the universe does not have the conditions necessary to sustain life. Indeed, strictly speaking, Earth itself should not exist, according to the computer model, according to the story in Discover Magazine.

According to data released by the Fireball and Bolide Reports page of NASA's Near Earth Object Program, a large meteor exploded far off the coast of Brazil on February 6, 2016. The meteor was the largest atmospheric impact recorded since the famous Chelyabinsk bolide that exploded over Russia in 2013. Although the Feb 6 meteor didn't cause any structural damage, the meteor unleashed an energy equivalent of 13,000 tons of TNT exploding instantaneously.

Layzej writes: A new study finds that sea levels on Earth are rising several times faster than they have in the past 2,800 years and are accelerating. Co-author Stefan Rahmstorf explains that the fact that the rise in the 20th century is so large is a logical physical consequence of man-made global warming. This is melting continental ice and thus adds extra water to the oceans. In addition, as the sea water warms up it expands. The data from the past can also be used for future projections, using a so-called semi-empirical model calibrated with the historically observed relationship between temperature and sea level. With the new data, this results in a projected increase in the 21st century of 24-131 cm, depending on our emissions and thus on the extent of global warming.

mdsolar writes: More than 100 geoscientists are calling on the American Geophysical Union to drop ExxonMobil as a sponsor of its annual earth science conference in response to the company's years of spreading climate denial views. The call appeared in an open letter posted Monday morning on a science website called The Natural History Museum. The oil giant Exxon has a history of funding organizations that perpetuate climate misinformation and try to thwart policies that address climate change (in direct conflict with the earth science association's mission and funding policies), the scientists said in their letter to Margaret Leinen, president of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). "AGU has established a long history of scientific excellence with its peer-reviewed publications and conferences, as well as a strong position statement on the urgency of climate action," the letter said. "But by allowing Exxon to appropriate AGU's institutional social license to help legitimize the company's climate misinformation, AGU is undermining its stated values as well as the work of its own members," it added.

NASA has formally approved plans -- a year ahead of schedule -- for an infrared space telescope launching around 2024 to record unique wide-angle views of the cosmos, seeking answers to questions about mysterious dark energy and searching for habitable worlds around other stars, the space agency announced Thursday. The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope is projected to cost approximately $2.3 billion and should operate for at least six years. WFIRST's centerpiece is a 7.9-foot (2.4-meter) telescope originally built to allow U.S. intelligence officials to spy on adversaries. Instead of turning the powerful telescope toward Earth for a clandestine surveillance mission, NASA plans to repurpose the hardware for cosmic research.

MarkWhittington writes: Many people are considering what to do if an asteroid was headed for a collision with Earth. One such collision wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Now, films such as "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" depict what might happen if Earth were threatened with a similar event in modern times. As a result, some people are repurposing weapons that were built or envisioned during the Cold War to confront the celestial threat, from old ICBMs to space-based laser systems.

merbs writes: NASA has released its global temperature data for January 2016, and, once again, the record for the hottest month in recorded history has been shattered. At a time when these kinds of records are broken with some regularity, it takes a particularly scorching month to raise eyebrows in the climate science community. It has to be the hottest hottest month by a pretty hot margin. Sure enough, last January did the trick: It was 1.13 C warmer than the global average of 1951-1980 (the benchmark NASA uses to measure warming trends)—in other words, a full 2F warmer than pre-1980 levels.

After a star explodes as a supernova, it usually leaves behind either a black hole or what's called a neutron star -- the collapsed, high-density core of the former star. Neither should be visible to Earth after a few weeks. But this supernova -- SN 2010da -- still was.

"SN 2010da is what we call a 'supernova imposter' -- something initially thought to be a supernova based on a bright emission of light, but later to be shown as a massive star that for some reason is showing this enormous flare of activity," said Breanna Binder, a University of Washington postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astronomy and lecturer in the School of STEM at UW Bothell. Many supernova imposters appear to be massive stars in a binary system -- two stars in orbit of one another. Stellar astrophysicists think that the impostor's occasional flare-ups might be due to perturbations from its neighbor.

frank249 writes: A B.C. engineering lab has created metal-coated glass that transmits up to 10 per cent more light than conventional glass and opens the door to windows that function as electronics. The most immediate use of the technology is to create windows that can be programmed to absorb or reflect heat, depending on the needs of a building's occupants. Adding electronic control to windows will allow you to change the amount of light and heat passing through to more effectively use the energy provided by the sun naturally, Lead investigator Kenneth Chau credit films like Iron Man or Star Trek with providing them inspiration. "There is a dream that we can make glass smarter," he said. "These films give us concepts to strive for; the hard work is uncovering the science to make it happen." All those hours spent watching Star Trek are now starting to look like a "pretty good investment," he said. The results were published this week in the journal Scientific Reports.

A few days ago, we posted reports that a major finding -- the discovery of the long-predicted gravity waves -- was expected to be formally announced today, and reader universe520 is the first to note this coverage in the Economist : It is 1.3 billion years after two black holes merged and sent out gravitational waves. On Earth in September 2015, the faintest slice of those waves was caught. That slice, called GW150914 and announced to the world on February 11th, is the first gravitational wave to be detected directly by human scientists. It is a triumph that has been a century in the making, opening a new window onto the universe and giving researchers a means to peer at hitherto inaccessible happenings, perhaps as far back in time as the Big Bang. Reader DudeTheMath adds: NPR has a nice write-up of the newly-published results: "[R]esearchers say they have detected rumblings from that cataclysmic collision as ripples in the very fabric of space-time itself. The discovery comes a century after Albert Einstein first predicted such ripples should exist. ... The signal in the detector matches well with what's predicted by Einstein's original theory, according to [Saul] Teukolsky [of Cornell], who was briefed on the results." Update: 02/11 18:08 GMT by T : Worth reading: this letter, inspirational and informative, from MIT president L. Rafael Reif, about the discovery. (Hat tip to Brian Kulak.)