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11 votes
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Millions of research papers at risk of disappearing from the Internet: An analysis of DOIs suggests that digital preservation is not keeping up with burgeoning scholarly knowledge
26 votes -
Helium discovery in northern Minnesota may be biggest ever in North America
28 votes -
Wasabi could help preserve ancient Egyptian papyrus artefacts
9 votes -
Why is it so hard to tell the sex of a dinosaur?
9 votes -
Chemistry of Spice Melange (from Dune)
14 votes -
The uncharted world of emerging pathogens – In their quest to detect early outbreaks, virus hunters are sampling environmental DNA in water, dirt, and air
8 votes -
Progress deferred: Lessons from mRNA vaccine development
9 votes -
Tour of Vienna's Natural History Museum in Austria. It houses one of the oldest natural history collections in the world, dating back to the 1700's.
3 votes -
AstraZeneca unveils successes in treatment of lung cancer – best-selling Tagrisso drug slows progression of most common form of the disease at an early stage
22 votes -
What's an obelisk, anyway?
25 votes -
The bizarre patterns that emerge when you heat any fluid
11 votes -
A peer reviewed journal with nonsense AI images was just published
@🔥Kareem Carr | Statistician 🔥: It's finally happened. A peer-reviewed journal article with what appear to be nonsensical AI generated images. This is dangerous. pic.twitter.com/Ez54H6l7iZ
33 votes -
Researchers find response to ketamine depends on opioid pathways, but varies by sex
10 votes -
Are we living in an "ice age"? Clearing up some terminology.
When talking about climate, the ice age is mentioned a lot. Sometimes it is said that "the last ice age" ended roughly 10,000 years ago, and sometimes we are still said to be living in an ice age....
When talking about climate, the ice age is mentioned a lot. Sometimes it is said that "the last ice age" ended roughly 10,000 years ago, and sometimes we are still said to be living in an ice age. So which one is correct? Technically both are correct. This is due to a complexity in terminology.
The broader climate state of Earth is divided into two categories: Icehouse Earth and Greenhouse Earth (Maslin, 2014). The state when there are continental glaciers (those that cover continents, separate from glaciers seen on mountains) at any point on Earth is called the Icehouse Earth, and the state when they do not exist is called the Greenhouse Earth. Approximately 80% of the last 500 million years has been spent as a Greenhouse Earth (Spicer and Corfield, 1992). During the icehouse state of the Earth, there are glacial and interglacial periods. The glacial period occurs when the glaciers at the poles move towards the lower latitudes of Earth, that is, towards the equator. The interglacial period is the time when glaciers remain at the poles.
Both the Icehouse Earth state and the glacial period are called Ice Age, but this is misleading. The last so-called “ice age” occurred 11,700 years ago (Clark et al., 2016). This event refers to the glacial period seen on Earth. However, the Earth is still in an "ice age" because it is still in the Icehouse Earth state. Even though it is currently in the interglacial warming period, this warming is approximately 15 times faster due to climate change (Clark et al., 2016). As the anthropogenic global warming gets stronger, the rate of warming will also increase.
The glacial periods seen in the last 500,000 years can be seen in this picture. Source for the picture is here.
The cycle of glacial and interglacial periods is clearly visible. One of the main factors that caused the emergence of Icehouse Earth states and glacial periods is the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It ended and started the ages by greatly changing the conditions on Earth (Maslin, 2014).
In conclusion, we are currently living in an ice age and also not. The reason for this is that the word ice age refers to two different phenomena. Therefore, it would be more useful to use the terms Icehouse Earth and glacial period instead of ice age. However, how this will be translated into everyday language remains a challenge.
Sources
- Clark, P., Shakun, J., Marcott, S. et al. (2016). Consequences of twenty-first-century policy for multi-millennial climate and sea-level change. Nature Clim Change 6, 360–369.
- Maslin, M. (2014). Climate change: a very short introduction. OUP Oxford.
- Spicer, R. A. & Corfield, R. M. (1992). A review of terrestrial and marine climates in the Cretaceous with implications for modelling the ‘Greenhouse Earth’. Geological Magazine, 129(2), 169-180 pp.
8 votes -
Citation cartels help some mathematicians—and their universities—climb the rankings
8 votes -
Research samples collected over decades at Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet were destroyed when a freezer malfunctioned during the Christmas holidays
30 votes -
Extreme metal guitar skills linked to intrasexual competition, but not mating success
28 votes -
Ultra-rapid MRI while singing and speaking
9 votes -
Researchers were able to isolate the brain from the rest of the body of a pig, and kept it alive and functioning for five hours
59 votes -
Why flying insects gather at artificial light
24 votes -
Tiny ant species disrupts lion's hunting behavior
11 votes -
‘It’s insane’: New viruslike entities found in human gut microbes
30 votes -
Science sleuths are using technology to find fakery and plagiarism in published research
16 votes -
Full field-of-view virtual reality goggles for mice
12 votes -
The Hawthorne effect in human resource management is based on unreliable studies
17 votes -
Seaweed could save a billion people from famine after a nuclear war
27 votes -
Arno Penzias, co-discoverer of the cosmic microwave background, has died age 90
24 votes -
'Americans are fake and the Dutch are rude!': A personal account on their difference in social behavior
54 votes -
Efficiency asymmetry: Scientists report fundamental asymmetry between heating and cooling
17 votes -
LK-99 isn’t a superconductor — how science sleuths solved the mystery
43 votes -
Embracing idiosyncrasies over optimization: The path to innovation in biotechnological design
3 votes -
Magpies swoop bald men more often, eight-year-old's viral survey finds
34 votes -
A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for fifty years
22 votes -
Red and blue US states: dichotomized maps mislead and reduce perceived voting influence
25 votes -
What the Prisoner's Dilemma reveals about life, the Universe, and everything
32 votes -
Scientists use transcranial magnetic stimulation to make patients with chronic pain more hypnotizable
11 votes -
New material allows for better hydrogen-based batteries and fuel cells
17 votes -
Transparent wood is stronger than plastic and tougher than glass
28 votes -
Y'all are nerds (according to math)
8 votes -
Hacking the Climate - 37c3
7 votes -
Genetic engineering was meant to save chestnut trees. Then there was a mistake.
23 votes -
New study - scent of tears from female humans reduces revenge seeking and aggression in males, similar to patterns observed in other mammals
31 votes -
Making purple gold
26 votes -
Watch gravity pull two metal balls together
9 votes -
Reindeer combine sleeping and digesting, Norwegian researchers found after extracting reindeer brain data
9 votes -
What's the thinking out there on the fusion news that has been coming out?
8 votes -
World's first "self-amplifying" vaccine approved in Japan
15 votes -
The origin of mysterious green ‘ghosts’ in the sky has been discovered
18 votes -
Egyptian fractions and the greedy algorithm
6 votes