How many continents on Earth? Not Seven

and soon streetlights on the Moon

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Coffee Table Science
August 11, 2024

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Streetlights on the Moon

Honeybee Robotics, a US-based company, has a tough task on its hands. It has to build streetlights on the Moon, but they have to be taller than the Statue of Liberty.

One lunar night is as long as two weeks on Earth and the absence of sunlight means landers can run out of power, bringing their missions to unfortunate ends. With humans planning to set up base, this could be pretty dangerous. 

The plan is, therefore, to set up huge streetlights that will double up as solar-powered batteries. 

Called,  Lunar Utility Navigation with Advanced Remote Sensing and Autonomous Beaming for Energy Redistribution or LUNARSABER for short, the plan is to install 300 feet tall structures that will soak up the sun during the lunar day and switch on the lights during the two week long nights. 

At these heights, the LUNARSABER could also hoist scientific equipment such as cameras and sensors to a higher vantage point and help spread out a communication network over larger distances. 

But how does one construct something that tall on the Moon? That’s where robotics comes in. 

Honeybee Robotics will design and deploy these towers using rolled metal so that once on the moon, they will rise from the base all by themselves. 

Shhh….I can hear the temperature

No that isn’t some superpower. 

Unknown to most of us is the hidden but innate ability to sense the temperature of water by its sound. 

If snakes can see heat, humans can hear it—we were just not aware of this until now. 

Previous research has shown us that when liquids are poured, humans can differentiate whether they are hot or cold but scientists did not know how that was possible. 

To figure out how it works, researchers at the Ivcher Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Technology (BCT Institute) at Reichman University used a deep neural network (DNN) to characterize recordings of water poured at different temperatures and a machine learning algorithm to classify the thermal properties of water and auditory features of each recording. 

While the algorithm was able to classify temperatures based on sound, human subjects also achieved the same accuracy. Even though the ability wasn’t conscious, it is likely the result of multisensory perception. 

The findings were published in Frontiers of Psychology. 

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How many continents does the Earth Have? Not Seven

If you still haven’t managed to get your head around the reasons why Pluto isn’t a planet anymore, here’s another curveball.

The planet does not have seven continents but six.

Researchers at the University of Derby in the UK and Uppasala University in Sweden investigated the geological processes involved in the breakup of North America and European continents and how these have evolved over time. 

It was believed that the two continents had broken apart 52 million years ago. However, their tectonic plates are still stretching away from each other and have still not broken apart. So, the two regions are technically still one large continent.   

Their study revolved around the origin of Iceland which was attributed to the formation of the mid-Atlantic ridge 60 million years ago. Instead, the researchers suggest that Iceland contains fragments from European and North American tectonic plates, which are not isolated from each other yet. 

The research findings were published in Gondawana Research.

Terraforming Mars? That’s easy now

The average temperature on Mars is -62oC, which is nowhere near anything on Earth. So, if humans want to stay on Mars, the planet needs to be warmed up. Previous suggestions to do this suggested extreme measures, but Martian dust could be a simple solution that could warm up the planet in as little as 10 months. 

Scientists have long wondered if the causative agents of global warming on Earth, such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), could be deployed on Mars instead. But transporting large amounts of CFCs is a major challenge. 

Martian dust is rich in iron and aluminum and could potentially do the same job. However, the size of the dust is too small to achieve this. Researchers Samaneh Ansari and her team at Northwestern University devised a method that could make the material more effective. 

By turning the dust into 9-micrometer-long rods, the researchers plan to make bigger specks of dust, although they would still be smaller than glitter. Yet, even at this size, these specks would absorb infrared radiation and scatter it down onto the Red Planet, creating a greenhouse effect. 

This could warm up the planet by 10oC in just a few months. 

The researchers published their findings in Science Advances.

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Thanks for reading.
Until next time,
Ameya

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