The Science Has Spoken: Pluto Will Never Be A Planet Again

Rebecca is loving this Snapchat filter from IWD 2017!!

Can you lick the science? An abbreviated list.

Genetics: Do not. Unless cheek swabs?

Chemistry: NO!!!!! DO NOT!!!!!!

Archaeology: Perhaps. But might be human bone.

Geology: Sometimes needed, sometimes dangerous 

Psychology: Best not.

Physics: ????????? How??????

Zoology: In zoology, science licks you. 

Seer of Seers Sage of Sages Prognosticator of Prognosticators Weather Prophet Extraordinary

So reads the official title of Punxsutawney Phil, the world’s most famous weather-predicting groundhog/woodchuck/marmot/whistle pig (yes, they are, in fact, all the same animal… surprises abound in the world of meteorological mammals). 

Phil hails from the town of Punxsutawney, PA, where every year on February 2, a group of grown men sporting top hats and waxed mustaches pull him out of a box and ask him when winter will end. I can never keep straight whether seeing the shadow means spring will come early or if we’ll have a long winter, but this doesn’t really matter, since rodents are not good weather prediction tools.

Despite being about as reliable as a coin flip, Phil is joined in this annual tradition by more than a dozen North American groundhogs like Shubenecadie Sam, General Beauregard Lee, and Wisconson’s humbly-named Jimmy the Groundhog, seen here:

Surprise! Groundhogs can bite! And I would too, if you forcibly removed me from my warm, comfy house, held me aloft in the frigid air in front of thousands of gaping onlookers and flashing lights and asked me about a subject in which I have no expertise.

Rodents might not be real educated in the fields of meteorology and astronomy, but humans are! We’ve got Earth’s orbital mechanics and their corresponding effect on annual temperature cycles down to a literal science. We smart. Just look…

I dug into the science of seasons this week, and I discovered that our system of defining “winter” and “summer” and “spring” and “autumn”, at least the way that most of us non-meteorologists think of them, doesn’t really make sense when you compare it to the weather. 

You might already know that we define “winter” or “summer” based on Earth’s position in relation to the sun, namely the solstices. This makes the seasons easy to keep track of, but for most of us these dates are unreliable, illogical, and remarkably disconnected from the actual weather. The little boxes on your calendar that say “First Day of Winter”, “First Day of Spring” and so on don’t line up very well with how cold or hot it is outside.

Unfortunately, that’s what happens when you try to apply a single calendar to an entire planet… could there be a better way?

You can learn the rest of the story by watching this week’s It’s Okay To Be Smart up at the top of this post. Enjoy!

Please subscribe, like, comment, and donate! Next (and last) episode April 15, 2017. Stay tuned for Bloopers from this episode on April 8, 2017. Starring: Candice Lola Directed by Rebecca Berger Produced by Rebecca Berger and Candice Lola Written by Candice Lola Editing, Color, Sound Design by Rebecca Berger Animation by Rachael K McDonald Links: Music: http://ift.tt/1JICaNj and http://ift.tt/2lquxdO http://ift.tt/2lINlQJ http://ift.tt/2lqtjzr http://ift.tt/2lIL08B http://ift.tt/2lqvuCQ (Donations are always welcome!) http://ift.tt/2lITyw7 http://ift.tt/2lqvQJO

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Researchers Invent Sponge That Could Transform Oil Spill Cleanup

It can soak up 90 times its weight in oil.

Researchers have designed a new material that could completely revolutionize the way oil spills are cleaned up.

When the Deepwater Horizon spill happened in 2010, the cleanup presented an unexpected challenge. Millions of gallons of oil didn’t collect on the surface, where it could be skimmed off or burned, but instead was drifting through the ocean below the waves.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Lab have invented a material that could prevent a similar situation in future spills.

The foam, called Oleo Sponge, can soak up 90 times its own weight in oil before it needs to be wrung out to be reused — and the oil can be recovered.

Continue Reading.

Pan-STARRS solves the biggest problem facing every astronomer

“The science that came out of it alone is staggering. Nobody has had as much astronomical data in all of history as what Pan-STARRS has produced. They’ve discovered about 3,000 new near-Earth objects; tens of thousands of asteroids in the main belt, approximately 300 Kuiper belt objects (about a third of all the Kuiper belt objects ever discovered), and imaged a total of more than three billion verified objects. For those of you wondering, there’s no evidence for or against Planet Nine in the data, but the Pan-STARRS data does support that our Solar System ejected a fifth gas giant in its distant past.”

If you want to observe the night sky, it’s not quite as simple as pointing your telescope and collecting photons. You have to calibrate your data, otherwise your interpretation of what you’re looking at could be skewed by gas, dust, the atmosphere or other intervening factors that you’ve failed to consider. Without a proper calibration, you don’t know how reliable what you’re looking at is. The previous best calibration was the Digitized Sky Survey 2, which went down to 13 millimagnitudes, or an accuracy of 1.2%. Just a few weeks ago, Pan-STARRS released the largest astronomy survey results of all-time: 2 Petabytes of data. It quadruples the accuracy of every calibration we’ve ever had, and that’s before you even get into the phenomenal science it’s uncovered.

Come learn how it’s solved the biggest problem facing every astronomer, and why observational astronomy will never be the same!

The Juno mission has been revealing angles of Jupiter we’ve never seen before. This photo shows Jupiter’s northern temperate latitudes and NN-LRS-1, a.k.a. the Little Red Spot (lower left), the third largest anticyclone on Jupiter. The Little Red Spot is a storm roughly the size of the Earth and was first observed in 1993. As an anticyclone, it has large-scale rotation around a core of high pressure and rotates in a clockwise direction since it is in the northern hemisphere. Jupiter’s anticyclones seem to be powered by merging with other storms; in 1998, the Little Red Spot merged with three other storms that had existed for decades. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstaedt/John Rogers; via Bad Astronomy)

Please subscribe, like, comment, and donate! Next (and last) episode April 15, 2017. Starring: Candice Lola Directed by Rebecca Berger Produced by Rebecca Berger and Candice Lola Written by Candice Lola Editing, Color, Sound Design by Rebecca Berger Animation by Rachael K McDonald Links: Music: http://ift.tt/1JICaNj and http://ift.tt/2lquxdO http://ift.tt/2lINlQJ http://ift.tt/2lqtjzr http://ift.tt/2lIL08B http://ift.tt/2lqvuCQ (Donations are always welcome!) http://ift.tt/2lITyw7 http://ift.tt/2lqvQJO