Today, Google announced a new 3D time-lapse feature in its Google Earth platform.Google says the time-lapse feature draws from 20 petabytes of satellite imagery, combined to create a 4.4-terapixel video (that's 4.4 million megapixels) that maps to the surface of the globe.

Then, in the early 1900s, astronomers like Russia’s Nikolai Morozov* began observing newly developed high explosives and made a rather startling discovery: Large explosions differ from thrown rocks in a number of ways, but most ominously—at least for our species’ continued existence—they leave circular craters regardless of their angle of impact.

In mid-March, NASA researchers announced that they’d found an unknown life-form hiding aboard the International Space Station.As part of an ongoing research project into the microbial life of the ISS, astronauts onboard in 2015 and 2016 swabbed down various parts of the station and sent home the wipes they used.

© Jon Hall / Samantha Hopkins has been studying mountain beaver evolution for years, working and living in their habitat.“Most people don’t know there are these little brown loafs living in forested tunnels and eating ferns,” says Hopkins, a professor of earth sciences at the University of Oregon.

That’s a lot of math in a short amount of time, yet the game pulls it off without ever feeling like you’re doing work.

Could the solution to eliminating dangerous space junk be a mini-fridge-sized spacecraft equipped with a big magnet, or maybe an orbiting tug that sends out a swarm of tentacles to trap a spent rocket?

Now, a study of the rocks from the Australian Outback by Tusch, Münker and their co-authors, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has captured “a snapshot” of the advent of plate tectonics, said Alan Collins, a geologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

The sun’s magnetic fields are massive, but within its inner layers, their forces are channeled and controlled by the pressure of the superheated plasma, convecting its heat outward like a boiling pot of tomato soup.

A new international study using ancient swamp kauri from Northland shows a temporary breakdown of Earth’s magnetic field 42,000 years ago sparked major climate shifts leading to global environmental change and mass extinctions.

Under the existing standard, some veteran astronauts might have been excluded from longer-term space missions because they are bumping up against lifetime radiation limits.But NASA doesn’t have much data on the health effects of radiation from space on its astronauts.

Recently, Genge has been interpreting messages the space dust carries, not about its origins, but about its destination: Earth at different points in the planet’s history.

Released in 2014, it’s about vision scientists searching for the origin of the human eye—look, a pun—which, if you didn’t know, is “the window,” as one character literally says, “to the soul.” They find it in the genes of a sightless worm, but not before Karen, played by Brit Marling, warns her lab partner that she, at least, has no interest in getting famous, in being seen: “Recognition makes me nauseous,” she says.

You might not spend much time imagining life on a cube, but mathematicians do: They study what travel looks like on all kinds of different shapes.On a sphere, straight paths follow “great circles,” which are geodesics like the equator.

Meanwhile, the spent Centaur rocket continued on its merry way through space and was pretty much forgotten—at least until August of this year, when astronomers using the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) in Hawaii spotted a mysterious object in a solar orbit that was due to pass close by Earth.

As the first spacecraft to visit a carbonaceous asteroid, Hayabusa2 can help determine the provenance of meteorites discovered on Earth and shed some light on the processes that formed the organic compounds in the early solar system.“Are there samples of the organics that we don’t have in our collection because they didn’t survive going through the atmosphere?

“It was geometry with an exact prediction that was borne out in the natural world, with essentially no physics involved,” said Jerolmack, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Over the next few years, Gatens and her team ran experiments on different life-support concepts and did their best to keep up with the constant design changes for the station.

There are more than a thousand asteroids with diameters larger than Didymos and Dimorphos combined, and if any of those were to strike Earth, it could lead to mass extinction and the collapse of civilization.“Everyone knows it’s possible to hit an asteroid,” says Justin Atchison, a DART mission designer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

High-rise buildings in some parts of Los Angeles may sway four times as much during an earthquake as those in the downtown area, according to a study that reveals new information about how underlying geology transmits a big quake’s power into buildings above.

Voyage leader and NIWA marine geologist Dr Joshu Mountjoy says this is the first time this technology has been used to survey submarine canyons in New Zealand waters and information collected will lead to new understanding relevant to many of the world’s continental margins.

In fact, China’s push to continue cleaning up its air in the future could warm the entire northern hemisphere by 0.1 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, making it even tougher to keep the Earth’s temperature below the 1.5 Celsius degree (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming limit that scientists say is necessary to avoid severe weather disruptions, increased rainfall, sea level rise, droughts, and other disastrous climate change effects by the year 2100.

Earth Map has also been designed to empower and provide integrative synergies with the federated FAO's Hand-in-Hand geospatial platform , a more comprehensive tool to provide Members, their partners and donors with the means to identify and execute highly-targeted rural development initiatives with multiple goals ranging from climate adaptation and mitigation to socio-economic resilience.

Geoengineering proposals generally fall into two categories: removing carbon from the atmosphere, or shielding Earth from solar radiation.European and Asian governments support geoengineering in principle, and it now has bipartisan support in the US, which recently approved $4 million for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to assess solar climate interventions.

From a couple thousand feet up in Microsoft’s new Flight Simulator 2020, real-world mapping data from Bing Maps unfurls from the horizon.Mapping tools like Bing’s and Google Earth have long offered enough fidelity that an artist can rely on them to capture far-flung city scenes.

Proactive earthquake alerts will only be in California for now (which already has ShakeAlert and an established data set), and Google says that "over the coming year, you can expect to see the earthquake alerts coming to more states and countries using Android’s phone-based earthquake detection.".

Heat exhaustion is a culmination of overheating, dehydration, and other factors overloading the body's cooling system, which causes a lot of problems.As a Wilderness First Responder, dealing with people suffering from heat exhaustion is one of the toughest parts of the role, because they often don't want to be helped.

If you, like me, have been living under a rock, The Expanse (binge it here) is the revolutionary television phenomenon that has been making WIRED writers lose our collective shit for the past five years .

In late March, a team of astronomers working on a space telescope mission called Neowise discovered a comet booking it past the sun, 160 million miles away from Earth.

Its economics are supposedly simple: A company has to make more money on the resulting recycled material than what it costs to gather plastic waste and process it.So it’s more tempting than ever to just pump out more virgin plastic and let the recycling industry languish.

These neutrinos that Anita was searching for would be classified among the most energetic particles in the universe, which physicists believe are produced by the same processes that generate jets of charged particles called ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays.