Hasta La Gadget!

According to scientists and researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, carbon dioxide levels on Earth have reached a level that hasn’t been seen in at least three million years. Scientists believe that large changes in the climate and sea levels are to blame for the rising amount of carbon dioxide.

Specifically, researcher say that carbon dioxide has reached an average daily level over 400 parts per million, which won’t mean anything to the average person, but the researchers says that this is the highest level that they’ve observed since before mankind even existed. The last time that levels were this high was during the time period called the Pliocene, when the climate then was much warmer, ice caps were smaller, and sea levels may have been as much as 80 feet higher. To put 400 parts per million in simple terms, it basically means that if you filled up one million quart jars with air, about 400 of them would be all carbon dioxide.

This is also a reminder that all of the hard work that people have done over the decades in order to control emissions has “failed miserably,” as one researcher puts it. Environmental agencies and even the government has been involved in trying to cut down on emissions, but it seems the problem is much larger than anyone expected.

Then again, researchers say that levels will dip just slightly over the summer, as the growing leaves on trees will remove around 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the air worldwide. However, the level is expected to rise again in the fall and winter, and eventually, researchers say that carbon dioxide will reach 400 parts per million 24/7, no matter what season it is outside.

So what would happen if carbon dioxide levels kept rising? According to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the results could obviously be deadly. Not only can you not breath carbon dioxide, but the climate could eventually get to a point that isn’t a tolerable threshold” for humans to survive in. And while 500 parts per million doesn’t seem like a lot, research suggests that carbon dioxide is great at trapping heat near the surface of the Earth, even at extremely low levels.

SOURCE: The New York Times

IMAGE CREDIT: EMSL

Earth’s carbon dioxide levels reach near-record high is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Scientists and researchers at Aix-Marseille University have conducted a study that claims there is a correlation between a bullet’s speed and the number of cracks in a glass window where the bullet went through. After shooting at over 100 plexiglass plates, the researchers have concluded that the number of cracks tells us something about how fast the bullet penetrated through.

Whenever a bullet or other blunt object pierces through glass or other brittle material, the energy expands outward over the glass, creating the familiar look of radial cracking patterns formed around the bullet hole. While many people have always believed this to be completely random (and it is to an extent), it turns out that there’s actually a method to the madness.

After shooting BBs at plexiglass plates, which were of various thicknesses and strengths (with the BBs traveling at different speeds), the researchers concluded and created a “global scaling law,” with the rule of thumb that the number of cracks double for every fourfold increase in a bullet’s (or other object’s) impact speed.

These findings could be useful to forensic scientists who want to determine the location of a shooter or determine the speed of a vehicle when it got shot at. Of course, it’s not something that will give you a definite answer as to how fast a bullet was traveling, but based on the researchers’ findings, it’s definitely something that can provide forensic investigators with an accurate estimate.

[via io9]

Image via Flickr

Researchers discover correlation between bullet speed and number of cracks in glass is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Ever feel like Facebook‘s becoming a bit dull lately? Maybe it’s your friends who are driving you nuts with their political rants, or you may just be tired of the concept of social networking. Whatever the case may be, millions of users are experiencing the same feeling, according to a new study that says six million US users have left Facebook in just the last month.

The recent data comes from analytics firm SocialBakers, which also says that the UK saw a drop of 1.4 million Facebook users last month. Between the US and UK, the average percentage drop within the last month was 4.25%, which isn’t bad at all, but that obviously doesn’t make up a majority of Facebook users.

Furthermore, however, the last six months have seen a total drop of nine million users in the US and two million in the UK. Other countries are reporting similar results as well, including Canada, Spain, France, Germany, and Japan. The average time spent on Facebook has also fallen to six minutes since December.

However, usage continues to grow. Developing countries are getting in on Facebook, with Facebook usage in Brazil rising by 6%, up to a monthly total of 70 million users. India also has seen growth of 4%, up to 64 million monthly users. Of course, though, we still can’t help but feel that this will affect advertising for the social network, but it may not be a huge hit for them at all.

[via The Guardian]

Facebook losing millions of users, according to study is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

A recent X-ray analysis of molten iron has uncovered that the Earth’s inner core is actually a lot hotter than we all thought previously. According to a team scientists from French research agency CEA, French National Center for Scientific Research CNRS, and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility ESRF, the inner core of the Earth is said to be 6,000 degrees Celsius, or 10,800 degrees Fahrenheit.

This means that the inner core of the planet that we live on is as hot as the surface of the Sun. The Earth’s core is made of solid, crystalline iron that’s surrounded by liquid. This is formed due to the tremendous amount of pressure buildup. However, recent experiments have shown that this inner structure is actually formed at much higher temperatures.

Previous estimates, which took place in the 90s, were achieved by measuring iron’s melting curves, and this placed the core temperature at 5,000 degrees Celsius. However, this new technique utilizes fast X-ray diffraction, and it allows researchers to examine tiny samples of iron at immense pressures to get a better sense of how small iron crystals form and melt.

However, the real challenge was to replicate that crazy amounts of pressure that’s experienced in the Earth’s inner core, which are obviously hard to replicate on the Earth’s surface. However, scientists were able to get close, using high-powered lasers. The iron samples were placed under high pressure from two diamonds squeezing the iron together, and then they were blasted by lasers, which turned the iron into liquid form, where scientists then observed the diffraction period to come up with a final number.

[via BBC News]

Earth’s core as hot as the Sun, claim scientists is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

If you want to find out what a millions-of-years-old creature was all about, you should only have to head to your local time machine and hit the button, right? As it turns out, studying the genes of one creature by the name of Coelacanth might not be far off. What scientists are doing here in 2013 and announcing this week is sequencing the genome of this deep-sea fish to compare it to the iterations of its being from a long, long time ago. Could Jurrasic Park be far off?

Yes, Jurassic Park is quite a ways off – we wont be cloning any dinosaurs with the results of this particular science project. What we will be doing with this information is to hopefully shed some more light on how this fish was related to the world’s first land-based creatures to walk our planet. The way science is doing this is to tap the coelacanth – one beast of a fish.

The image above comes from the NY Times and depicts several members of the National Museum of Kenya inspecting a coelacanth caught by a Kenyan fisherman back in 2001.

This creature can appear up to 2 meters in length and lives in deep, deep caves off the coast of Africa. While of course the full extent of the environment in which this creature lives (or has lived) is not known, the first was discovered by humans back in 1938 along the African coast. The creature remains highly elusive even to today.

The fish gets its “living fossil” name from the extremely slow rate at which its genes have evolved. It’s as if human beings ran at a full sprint away from our more ape-like ancestors while this fish sort of… lumped along.

“What we can see is that while the genome as whole changes, the protein-coding genes – that make the living fish – are much more stable and much more unchanging.

And if you think about it, this might be correlated to the fact that the coelacanth lives in a rather extreme and stable environment. It lives several hundred metres down in the ocean, and it may also be in an environment where it doesn’t have a lot of competitors.

So maybe it adapted to that environment a long time ago and it doesn’t have a huge need for change.” – University of Uppsala in Sweden, Broad Institute of MIT, Harvard in the USA Professor Kerstin Lindblad-Toh

The coelacanth and the creature known as “lungfish” have both been contenders for most closely-related to the first land-walking creatures. According to the report being published this month in the journal Nature, both the lungfish and the coelacanth are up for tetrapod relation glory.

Comparing the DNA profiles of both the coelacanth and the lungfish to modern land-based creatures had them selecting 251 distinct genes similar to mammals, birds, and lizards to build a better picture of the relations between the subjects.

“The lungfish-coelacanth question has gone back and forth over the years; the lungfish answer is not new, but this is a much better, bigger dataset so it does tip the balance a bit.” – professor of evolutionary biomechanics from the Royal Veterinary College John Hutchinson

We’ll be keeping up with the study and watching for additional conclusions from the debate in the near future. For now keep your thinking caps on and get pumped up as we inch ever-closer to a more complete line between ourselves and our earliest ancestral bits and pieces!

[via BBC]

Science taps “living fossil” for clues tipping first land animals is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.