Temperature anomalies arranged by country 1900 – 2016
Take a look at this beautiful data visualization by Antti Lipponen. It shows the average monthly temperature anomalies arranged by country from 1900 to 2016 with a base period of 1951 to 1980. A quite impressive visualization of climate change.
If you yourself or friends have doubts about climate change, I also recommend to watch this video, addressing some common misconceptions: 13 Misconceptions About Global Warminghttp://youtu.be/OWXoRSIxyIU
Thank you for your interest in this Climate Change/Earth collection. Maybe add me on Google+ (Pierre Markuse) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/Pierre_Markuse) or have a look at the Astronomy/Astrophysics collection here: https://goo.gl/x0zPAJ or the Space/Space Technology collection here: https://goo.gl/5KP0wx
A reconstruction of Hallucigenia’s walking gait, created by Lars Fields.
“Hallucigenia were tiny marine worms — commonly just 15 millimeters in length — that lived in the Cambrian period, when complex, multicellular life was starting to populate the Earth….”
In this image you can see Vietnam and numerous fishing boats with green lighting to attract fish and squid, taken by ESA astronaut Tim Peake (https://goo.gl/4HAAIV) from aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
The bright city at the top of the image is Bangkok in Thailand, the city at the bottom is Cam Ranh in Vietnam.
In this image taken on 15 July 2015 by the High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) aboard ESA’s Mars Express you can see a perspective view in Noctis Labyrinthus on Mars. Visible are details of landslides in the steep-sided walls of the flat-topped graben (https://goo.gl/Rma96b) in the foreground, and in the valley walls in the background. Image resolution is about 16 meters per pixel.
In this image you can see active fires on Earth in September 2015 imaged by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Terra satellite. The image is color-coded, white pixels show the high end of the count — as many as 100 fires in a 1,000-square-kilometer area per day. Yellow pixels show as many as 10 fires, orange shows as many as 5 fires, and red areas as few as 1 fire in a 1,000-square-kilometer area per day.
More active fire maps and other datasets can be found here at NASA’s Earth Observation (NEO) website:
The Terra satellite is part of the Earth Observing System (EOS, https://goo.gl/XYed36), its Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) can take measurements in 36 spectral bands ranging in wavelength from 0.4 µm to 14.4 µm, another MODIS instrument is orbiting Earth aboard the Aqua satellite.
More on the Terra satellite and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) here:
Image credit: ACTIVE FIRES SEPTEMBER 2015 (1 MONTH – TERRA/MODIS)These Fire Maps were created by Reto Stockli, NASA’s Earth Observatory Team, using data courtesy the MODIS Land Science Team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center http://goo.gl/IQXKix
The death of Claudia J. Alexander, a phenomenal woman of science, was totally overlooked by the social media world. WHY IS THAT??!
Well let me educate you just a little bit.
Claudia J. Alexander, a NASA scientist who oversaw the dramatic conclusion of the space agency’s long-lived Galileo mission to Jupiter and managed the United States’ role in the international comet-chasing Rosetta project, died July 11 at Methodist Hospital of Southern California in Arcadia. She was 56.
The cause was breast cancer, said her sister, Suzanne Alexander.
During nearly three decades at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, Alexander was known for her research on subjects including solar wind, Jupiter and its moons, and the evolution and inner workings of comets.
She was the last project manager of Galileo, one of the most successful missions for exploring the distant reaches of the solar system. Alexander was leading the mission when scientists orchestrated its death dive into Jupiter’s dense atmosphere in 2003, when the spacecraft finally ran out of fuel after eight years orbiting the giant planet.
Most recently, she was Rosetta’s U.S. project manager, coordinating with the European Space Agency on the orbiter’s journey to rendezvous with the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet as it circles the sun.
Colleagues said Alexander was particularly keen on”I was a pretty lonely girl. I was the only black girl in pretty much an all-white school and spent a lot of time by myself — with my imagination.”- Claudia Alexander engaging the public in space science.
She spearheaded Rosetta’s efforts to involve amateur astronomers through social media and recognize the value of their ground-level observations of the spacecraft’s path toward deep space. In particular, she spurred the creation of a Facebook group where members of the amateur community post comments on their sightings and interact with her and other scientists.
“Claudia’s vision was to engage and empower the amateur community via various social media… a new wrinkle on the concept” of public engagement in NASA’s missions, said Padma A. Yanamandra-Fisher, a senior research scientist with the Space Science Institute who coordinated the outreach.
“I was a pretty lonely girl. I was the only black girl in pretty much an all-white school and spent a lot of time by myself — with my imagination.”- Claudia Alexander
“I was a pretty lonely girl. I was the only black girl in pretty much an all-white school and spent a lot of time by myself — with my imagination.”- Claudia Alexander
“She had a special understanding of how scientific discovery affects us all, and how our greatest achievements are the result of teamwork, which came easily to her,” JPL director Charles Elachi said in a statement. “Her insight into the scientific process will be sorely missed.”
Alexander was born in Vancouver, Canada, on May 30, 1959. She moved to the Silicon Valley with her family when she was 1 and grew up in Santa Clara. Her father, Harold Alexander, was a social worker and her mother, Gaynelle, was a corporate librarian for chip-maker Intel.
As an African American in a predominantly white community, Alexander felt isolated. Writing became a refuge for her.
“I was a pretty lonely girl,” she recalled in a feature for the University of Michigan’s Engineering Magazine. “I was the only black girl in pretty much an all-white school and spent a lot of time by myself — with my imagination.”
She wanted to study journalism at UC Berkeley, but her parents “would only agree to pay for it if I majored in something ‘useful,’ like engineering,” she said in an interview for the Rosetta website.
During college she became an engineering intern at NASA’s Ames Research Center near San Jose. But she found herself drawn to the space facility and visited it as often as she could. Her supervisor eventually arranged for her to intern in the space science division.
She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in geophysics at UC Berkeley and a master’s in geophysics and space physics at UCLA. At the University of Michigan, she wrote her doctoral thesis on comet thermophysical nuclear modeling and earned a PhD in atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences.
In 1986, she joined JPL as a team member for Galileo, which was still years from launching.
In 2000, she became Rosetta’s U.S. project scientist at the relatively young age of 40.
“She was always looking to improve the project and make things flow better,” said Paul Weissman, an interdisciplinary scientist on Rosetta. “Europeans can be difficult about collaborations. Claudia would get people to open up and work together.”
In 2003, she became Galileo project manager, guiding efforts to destroy the venerable spacecraft to prevent it from accidentally crashing into and contaminating any of Jupiter’s moons.
She had also served as a science coordinator on the Cassini mission to Saturn.
In her spare time, Alexander wrote two books on science for children and mentored young people, especially African American girls. “She wanted children of color to see themselves as scientists,” her sister Suzanne said.
A fan of the steampunk movement in science fiction, Alexander wrote and published short stories in the genre. She wore the Victorian-style clothing associated with steampunk fashion when she taped a TED talk on how to engage youths in math and science. Her lecture will be released later this year.
Alexander was never married and had no children. Besides her mother and sister, she is survived by a brother, David Alexander.
On March 22, 2010, communication with NASA’s Mars rover Spirit was lost.
Originally designed for a 90 Sol mission (a Sol, one Martian day, is slightly longer than one Earth day) few would have expected Mars Exploration Rover Spirit to operate as long as 2210 Sols – that’s 24.5 times the planned mission duration!
“It’s an incredible testimony to engineering that this plucky little craft survived 3 winters, when it wasn’t designed to survive any such weather conditions at all,” said Neil Mottinger, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Landing on the opposite side of Mars from its twin, the still operating Opportunity rover, Spirit was part of an effort to answer important questions surrounding the history of the Martian environment and its suitability for the formation of life. Understandably, one central element of these questions was to better understand the history of water on the planet – from its current status to what early Martian topography may have looked like.
One of many discoveries that Spirit made included finding supportive evidence suggesting rocks from the plains of Gusev had been slightly altered by tiny amounts of water. As the rover had observed, outside coatings and cracks within these samples had suggested water deposited minerals.
While Spirit delivered troves of valuable data home during its activity, it became irrecoverably obstructed in soft soil on Sol 1892 (May 1st, 2009), an incident that would spell the end for the rover. Attempts to free the rover ended on Sol 2155 (January 26, 2010), when NASA reclassified the mission as a stationary research platform. It continued performing science operations from its current location until communication with Spirit was lost on Sol 2210 (March 22, 2010). Attempts to reestablish communication with the rover have been unsuccessful.
Watch this short video, “The Legacy of Mars Rover Spirit”
Celebrate the accomplishments of Mars Exploration Rover Spirit by writing to Congress to let them know you support doubling funding for NASA: http://www.penny4nasa.org/take-action/
Baby Desert Tortoise — Here’s your “awwwwwwww, so cute!” moment for the day…nothing tops this one.
Here we see a a desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) hatching from its egg, as photographed by one of our USGS scientists at the Western Ecological Research Center. USGS studies the life history and ecology of the desert tortoise, which is a federally listed threatened species only found in the Mojave Desert.
Young tortoises are especially prone to predators like dogs and ravens, whose numbers can increase around areas of human activity and structures. Adult tortoises can be killed by car traffic, ingesting trash, and wildfires, and are affected by loss of habitat from urban and industrial development, cutting short their potential lifespan of 100 years.
USGS research on desert tortoises are helping federal and state management agencies improve land use and conservation plans, and balance the recovery of this threatened species with other resource use priorities in the Mojave Desert landscape. Watch a video of a Desert Tortoise hatching at http://bit.ly/USGSTortoise.
A new study by Dr Corinne Moss-Racusin and colleagues has analysed comments by the public responding to a prominent study on gender bias in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). The researchers find that men are more likely to post negative comments in response to scientific evidence of sexism affecting women’s science careers (http://goo.gl/oZXRua).
The researchers find that men are more likely to refute science findings using subjective observations about biology (“women get pregnant and leave their jobs!”). Or men otherwise evoke ideas of personal choice (men are “hungrier” for success and work harder than women). Men are also more likely to deny that inequality exists, or conversely they blamed women for inequality. Some also said that gender bias affects men more than women (“I’ve experienced it in the opposite way so far.”). Men are also more likely to refute the science findings on inequality by stating that they work in STEM (75% of men’s comments) and holding up their personal opinions as authoritative.
The key gender difference is that men use blanket statements and personal opinion to refute scientific evidence about gender bias, while women use personal anecdotes to illustrate the scientific findings. The first strategy – to deny the science on inequality – is used largely by men to invalidate science on sexism in support of the status quo. The other strategy, used mostly by women, supports the science using personal experiences of bias to challenge the status quo. The first approach rejects science evidence, while the other embraces it.
The researchers argue their study is positive as the majority of public’s comments (754) supported the science. The researchers see that sharing science on inequality provides evidence to support change. At the same time, the fact that 95% of the negative comments were made by men is cause for concern, especially as they vehemently insulted, denied or blamed women for any inequality that might exist.
The study presents a useful framework for thinking about, and addressing, why men react negatively to the science of gender bias in STEM.
I have analysed some of my own experiences as one of three women moderators for Science on Google+, the largest science community on Google+. I show how the loudest and most persistent voices denying the science on gender bias are men. They tend two adopt to strategies, sometimes simultaneously. First they deny inequality exists, arguing social science methods are fundamentally flawed and cannot adequately measure bias. Second, they use other social science studies to refute inequality, saying inequality is rooted in biology.
These men always incorrectly use social science to make either point, demonstrating their lack of familiarity with social science methods, while also exemplifying the subjective idea that one can pick and choose which “bits” of science they want to believe. Other empirical sociological research highlights how inequality is one area of science that people disbelieve when this clashes with their personal belief system. In the case of the public who say they love science, a significant sub-group of men want to gate-keep science, by forcing women to remain silent on inequality.
