Photo reblogged from Moderation with 14,564 notes
New Study Says Large Regions of Mars Could Sustain Life
—
The question of whether present-day Mars could be habitable, and to what extent, has been the focus of long-running and intense debates. The surface, comparable to the dry valleys of Antarctica and the Atacama desert on Earth, is harsh, with well-below freezing temperatures most of the time (at an average of minus 63 degrees Celsius or minus 81 Fahrenheit), extreme dryness and a very thin atmosphere offering little protection from the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Most scientists would agree that the best place that any organisms could hope to survive and flourish would be underground. Now, a new study says that scenario is not only correct, but that large regions of Mars’ subsurface could be even more sustainable for life than previously thought.
Scientists from the Australian National University modeled conditions on Mars on a global scale and found that large regions could be capable of sustaining life – three percent of the planet actually, albeit mostly underground. By comparison, just one percent of Earth’s volume, from the central core to the upper atmosphere, is inhabited by some kind of life. They compared pressure and temperature conditions on Earth to those of Mars to come up with the surprising results.
The paper is currently available for free here.
(via universetoday)
Source: universetoday.com
Photo reblogged from Ned Hepburn with 7,067 notes
Tim Hetherington was a renowned war photographer who died earlier this year in Libya. Today he would have been 41.
Source: Wikipedia
Photo reblogged from leit að lífi / search for life with 28,310 notes
Source: jamesflynn23.deviantart.com
Photoset reblogged from BLACK FRAME with 2,272 notes
José Parlá “Character Gestures” now at OHWOW Gallery
Source: framenoir
Photo reblogged from ck/ck with 3,777 notes
ckck:
NASA just revealed the design of the Space Launch System (or SLS), which unlike the Space Shuttle will be able to take humans beyond Earth’s orbit to places like the moon or Mars. View bigger.
Source: nasa.gov
Photo reblogged from The Cheat Sheet with 2,693 notes
The memorial grounds will open to family members of the dead on Sept. 11, 2011; everyone else will gain entry the next day. What they’ll find are two square waterfalls, marking the footprints where the World Trade Center towers stood, each with a smaller waterfall laid into its base. You can’t see the bottom from standing height. Water flows into water, never filling a void. Ringing the falls, the names of the dead are punched clean through sheets of bronze. They are arranged by algorithm so that victims are placed next to the people who mattered to them; the non-alphabetical arrangement means that office best friends are adjacent, and firefighters in the same company remain together; there is a same-sex couple and their toddler, with a tangle of last names, the dads above the boy.
Source: thedailybeast.com
Photo reblogged from OH, MY BUDDHA with 4,495 notes
Kermode Bear in Tree, British Columbia
Photograph by Paul Nicklen, National Geographic
A mother of two cubs climbs a Pacific crab apple tree to grab its tart and tiny fruit. In years when autumn salmon numbers are low, the bears must find other food, such as wild berries, lupine roots, and mussels.
Source: National Geographic
Photo reblogged from It's Okay To Be Smart with 15,012 notes
Humans fire laser to sky, sky laughs, responds with lightning
(They were actually firing a kind of “guide star” that is used to target and correct ground-based telescopes when this shot happened. Nature is still not impressed)
(via Short Sharp Science)
Source: newscientist.com
Page 1 of 6
