Not sure if you've heard of those sailing stones in Death Valley. Basically rocks that move and leave behind a trail, but no one has been able to figure out how they move.
It's rare to see the stones in motion, but there's a clear sign that they've been on the move. Behind the rocks are long, sometimes winding trails in the dirt. Scientists have used GPS units to track to stones' movements, and have proven that they're mobile. They were first publicly documented in the early 1900s, but for decades, nobody could explain how they moved, according to Richard Norris, an oceanographer at University of California San Diego, and one of the researchers who finally solved the mystery of the rocks.
...
To figure it all out, Norris and his cousin attached specially-designed GPS units to the back of rocks they had brought into Death Valley (the National Parks Service wouldn't let them mess with the rocks that were already there). They also installed a weather station, and then...they waited.
Spoiler!
It took two years, but finally, the rocks moved. Norris and his cousin, completely by chance, actually got to witness them in action. The researchers discussed their findings in a paper published in PLOS One. They found that when enough rain fell on the playa to pool, and the temperature dropped, the water would freeze into huge, thin sheets of ice around the rocks—which tumble onto the playa from a nearby hillside. As the morning sun began to melt the ice, if a gentle breeze blew, it could move the ice, which dragged the rocks along with it.
"The ice is like the thickness of a window pane," Norris told me. "And although it's very thin, it's a huge, huge sheet of ice. It's sort of being moved sort of inextricably by these breezes and it can shove around really big things—and a lot of rock."
The results shocked Norris and many other scientists, but it's a phenomenon that's since explained similar moving rocks around the globe. Though it wasn't the paranormal explanation that so many people had hoped for, the truth was even more tantalizing.
__________________ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.
But certainty is an absurd one.
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You know what would have been even more convincing? A video of it actually happening. Like, come on! You spend 2 years on it, and it actually happens in front of you and you don't even video it? I call BS. I think they got sick of trying to figure it out and made up a story that didn't involve aliens.
Not sure if you've heard of those sailing stones in Death Valley. Basically rocks that move and leave behind a trail, but no one has been able to figure out how they move.
It's rare to see the stones in motion, but there's a clear sign that they've been on the move. Behind the rocks are long, sometimes winding trails in the dirt. Scientists have used GPS units to track to stones' movements, and have proven that they're mobile. They were first publicly documented in the early 1900s, but for decades, nobody could explain how they moved, according to Richard Norris, an oceanographer at University of California San Diego, and one of the researchers who finally solved the mystery of the rocks.
...
To figure it all out, Norris and his cousin attached specially-designed GPS units to the back of rocks they had brought into Death Valley (the National Parks Service wouldn't let them mess with the rocks that were already there). They also installed a weather station, and then...they waited.
Spoiler!
It took two years, but finally, the rocks moved. Norris and his cousin, completely by chance, actually got to witness them in action. The researchers discussed their findings in a paper published in PLOS One. They found that when enough rain fell on the playa to pool, and the temperature dropped, the water would freeze into huge, thin sheets of ice around the rocks—which tumble onto the playa from a nearby hillside. As the morning sun began to melt the ice, if a gentle breeze blew, it could move the ice, which dragged the rocks along with it.
"The ice is like the thickness of a window pane," Norris told me. "And although it's very thin, it's a huge, huge sheet of ice. It's sort of being moved sort of inextricably by these breezes and it can shove around really big things—and a lot of rock."
The results shocked Norris and many other scientists, but it's a phenomenon that's since explained similar moving rocks around the globe. Though it wasn't the paranormal explanation that so many people had hoped for, the truth was even more tantalizing.
Is this really new?
I swear when I saw the photo of your post I thought to myself "oh yah I saw that, the water freezes and slide or something". Maybe I am crazy
Edit: yah there was an article in 2014 I must have read
Would you like some plastic with your salt? 16 out of 17 brands of sea salt tested as having microscopic plastic particles, from 1 to 10 particles per Kg. That's ok though, ingestion of up to 37 is safe...
The animal probably died as it lived — defying predators with its heavy armor and size — and after 110 million years, its face remains frozen in a ferocious reptilian glare.
How the animal, a land-dwelling, plant-eating nodosaur, died is not known, but somehow its body ended up at the bottom of an ancient sea. Minerals kept the remains remarkably intact, gradually turning the body into a fossil. And when it was unearthed in 2011, scientists quickly realized that it was the best-preserved specimen of its kind.
“It’s basically a dinosaur mummy — it really is exceptional,” said Don Brinkman, director of preservation and research at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta. The dinosaur, with fossilized skin and gut contents intact, came from the Millennium Mine six years ago in the oil sands of northern Alberta, once a seabed.
KIC 8462852 - or "Tabby's Star", or "the Alien Megastructure Star" - has been acting weird again.
Quote:
What makes this star so bizarre is that its dips in brightness don't seem to follow any obvious patterns. When planets or even comets pass in front of their stars, it tends to happen at regular, predictable intervals and they usually block out the same amount of a star's light as the last time they made a pass. But the dips seen in the brightness of KIC 8462852 don't occur on a very tight schedule and they vary in how much they dim the star's light: anywhere from three to more than 20 percent.
To make things even weirder, old observations of the star show it has also dimmed slowly over the course of the past century. So in addition to these odd short term dips where something seems to pass in front of the star, it's also getting noticeably less bright over the long term, as if someone is turning down its energy output like you might with your living room lights using a dimmer switch. We just don't see many, if any, other stars behaving this way.
So back to the latest observations: by May 19, the light seen from KIC 8462853 had dropped by as much as 3 percent over a period of around 24 hours.
The thing is Dyson's spheres would not be practical. Any slight nudge and the whole thing would destabilize and crash into the sun. A Dyson's swarm, on the other hand, might make sense.
The thing is Dyson's spheres would not be practical. Any slight nudge and the whole thing would destabilize and crash into the sun. A Dyson's swarm, on the other hand, might make sense.
Given the millions of other technological advances that would be required in order to make one, I'm not sure that would really be a limiting factor.
Something that harnesses the entire power of a star might be able to avoid destabilization.
I agree that a swarm or ring would be a lot easier to implement, but it would also not collect as much energy.
Low tech experiment may result in a new understanding of neutrinos being their own anti-particle (something usually reserved for bosons) and move beyond the Standard Model.
At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), physicists accelerate particles to the highest energies and in the greatest numbers that humanity has ever achieved. We smash them together at greater than 99.999999% the speed of light, attempting to create new, never-before-seen particles and solve the Universe's greatest, most fundamental mysteries. Despite discovering the Higgs boson and creating millions of these collisions every second for years, it's never found anything that's taken us beyond the particles and interactions of the Standard Model. But a completely different, mundane approach has the potential to do exactly that: simply gather a large number of radioactive, unstable particles together inside a detector, and wait. If a new type of decay occurs, it will revolutionize how we understand neutrinos, taking us beyond the Standard Model in an elegant, surprising, and long-anticipated way.
Today, the team behind the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is announcing the detection of a third black hole merger, the first from its second operational run. The merger shares some features with the previous ones: the black holes were bigger than expected, and their merger released a staggering amount of energy. But the LIGO team was also able to extract some information about the details of the collision and propagation of gravitational waves. These details tell us someting about the limits of general relativity and the history of the black holes themselves.