TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Unlikely Suns Reveal Improbable Planets Among the most poignant sights in the heavens are white dwarfs. Although they have a mass comparable to our sun’s, they are among the dimmest of all stars and becoming ever dimmer; they do not follow the usual pattern relating stellar mass to brightness. Astronomers think white dwarfs must not be stars so much as the corpses of stars. Each white dwarf was once much like our sun and shone with the same brilliance. But then it began to run out of fuel and entered its stormy death throes, swelling to 100 times its previous size and brightening 10,000-fold, before shedding its outer layers and shriveling to a glowing cinder the size of Earth. For the rest of eternity, it will sit inertly, slowly fading to blackness.As if this story were not gloomy enough, it gets worse. We and our colleagues have found more than a dozen white dwarfs in our galaxy that are orbited by asteroids, comets and perhaps even planets--entire graveyards of worlds. While the stars were still alive, they rose every day in the skies of these worlds. They gently warmed the soil and stirred the wind. Living organisms may have soaked up their rays. But when the stars died, they vaporized or engulfed and incinerated their inner planets, leaving only the bodies that resided in the chilly outposts. Over time the dwarfs shredded and consumed many of the survivors as well. These decimated systems offer a grim look at the fate of our own solar system when the sun dies five billion years from now. [More] rss.sciam.com |
The Wonderful World of Transgenic Animals [Below is the original script. But a few changes may have been made during the recording of this audio podcast.]Since Dolly the sheep was cloned back in July of 1996, the world of manipulating animal DNA has come a long way. In Massachusetts, goats now produce milk with drugs embedded. There are monkeys whose DNA glows green to enable scientific study. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Fungus Could Be Kudzu Killer [ The following is an exact transcript of this podcast. ]It’s been called the “vine that ate the south.” Kudzu grows so fast it can completely cover a cabin in the woods in a couple of days. The invasive plant takes over another 150,000 acres every year. Which costs another $6 million to control. [More] rss.sciam.com |
The Constitution and the Cross The Supreme Court should rule that a large cross that has been placed on federal land in California violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment. nytimes.com |
U.S. Unveils a $350-Million Energy-Efficiency Initiative at Copenhagen COPENHAGEN--Since the 1970s, refrigerators in the U.S. have swelled from 18 cubic feet to 22 cubic feet. But, at the same time, the energy consumption of such gargantuan coolers has dropped by 75 percent, down to roughly 40 watts, saving countless tons of coal from being burned. And a five-year global program that reached all the refrigerators in the world with similar efficiency improvements might save 1.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide over that span, a significant contribution to combating climate change. [More] rss.sciam.com |