03.15.25
Welcome to your weekly space
and science digest.
By Katie Hunt
|
I recently had a fascinating conversation with Dr. Robert Weiss, a veteran professor of urology at Yale University, who recalled the tours of duty he served at Camp Century. The US military built the Arctic research base with great effort beneath Greenland’s ice sheet.
Weiss was enlisted in 1962 as the camp’s only physician and shared what it was like to live in this “city under the ice,” divulging details of generous meals, cheap cocktails and treacherous weather.
Though he didn’t know it at the time, Weiss was also an observer to a hidden chapter of Cold War history: The base was a testing ground for a top secret project to deploy missiles underneath the ice, and its intriguing story isn’t over yet.
|
|
|
Camp Century was a unique outpost of humanity, but its most powerful legacy is perhaps the work scientists conducted there. The station's entrance is seen above.
Drillers obtained a continuous core of ice, 4,560 feet long, that captured the thickness of the entire ice sheet. The sample revealed the first record of how Earth’s climate had varied over the past 100,000 years.
Paul Bierman, a geomorphologist at the University of Vermont, described the ice core as climate science’s Rosetta stone — the inscribed slab that provided the key to decoding ancient Egypt’s hieroglyphs.
Bierman recently studied almost forgotten sediment from the very bottom of the ice core and discovered it contained fossilized plant remains. The specimens were the first direct evidence suggesting that Greenland’s miles-deep ice didn’t exist as recently as 400,000 years ago.
The find suggests the northernmost region of the planet might be more vulnerable to the climate crisis than previously thought.
|
|
|
The 2018 blockbuster movie “The Meg” depicts the long-extinct shark Otodus megalodon as a colossal predator that was 75 feet long.
New research, however, suggests the predator may have been longer, albeit slimmer, than the Hollywood version when it dominated the oceans more than 3.6 million years ago.
The researchers calculated that the likeliest body plan for megalodon wouldn’t have been that of a stout, tanklike great white shark but rather a more streamlined fish, such as a lemon shark.
“Megalodon is not a simple, gigantic version of great white shark. I think that we really have to move away from that concept,” said paleobiologist Dr. Kenshu Shimada, a professor at DePaul University in Chicago.
|
|
|
Ancient facial bones unearthed in a cave in northern Spain are shaking up what scientists know about Europe’s earliest humans.
Found at the Sima del Elefante site in the Atapuerca Mountains, the fossils (above) are at least 1.1 million years old. They make up the left side of the face of an adult hominin.
The mineralized bones are the earliest human fossil remains found so far in Western Europe, and the individual was part of a previously unknown prehistoric population, according to a new study.
The team behind the research suspects the specimens belonged to Homo erectus, a species well-known from fossils found in Africa and Asia but whose remains have never been conclusively found in Europe.
|
|
|
Astronomers have traced the source of a mysterious new class of radio burst pulsing from the Milky Way every two hours.
The culprit appears to be a dead white star that is so closely orbiting another star, their magnetic fields may collide, sending out the heartbeat-like radio pulse.
Astronomers previously only traced the cosmic phenomenon to neutron stars. However, the new finding shows the movements of paired stars can also emit long-period radio pulses.
|
|
|
Try an alternative to plastic bags the next time you take your dog outside to do his business. Our partners at CNN Underscored, a product reviews and recommendations guide owned by CNN, suggest the Dirt Devil DogWalker. The portable vacuum deals with pet waste so you don’t have to.
|
A guitar-shaped shark, seen above, is one of many fantastic creatures discovered by scientists participating in the Ocean Census, a push to document and protect marine life.
In the global alliance’s first major update since its launch in 2023, it said it had identified 866 previously unknown species in a 16-month period.
With the help of divers, piloted submersibles and remotely operated vehicles, researchers found the species in ocean shallows and waters as deep as 3.1 miles below the surface.
Meanwhile, scientists studying blue-lined octopuses this week reported that males of the golf ball-size species deploy a powerful weapon before mating to avoid being eaten by their partners.
|
|
|
|
