Don't forget Saturday is the second blue moon of the year!
"We had a Blue Moon on January 31, 2018. It was a supermoon, too, and underwent a total eclipse (photos here). But another Blue Moon is coming right up. They’re both Blue Moons by the monthly definition of the term: the second of two full moons to fall within a single calendar month. The second (and last) Blue Moon of 2018 will be on March 31. We haven’t had a year with two Blue Moons since 1999 and won’t have one again until January and March, 2037."
"Garrett James Hardin was one of the first thinkers we would call an “ecologist” – arguably, he helped created the movement. His 1968 paper on The Tragedy of the Commons explained that if a shared resource — for example, a forest or a lake — was not centrally managed, its users would tend to destroy it over time as they acted rationally in their own interests. That idea led Hardin to his lifelong unpopular argument against continued human population growth. And as a result, Hardin was a supporter not only of all birth control methods, but also of sterilization. He also stood firmly against most forms of immigration, comparing immigration into a society with limited resources to an overcrowded lifeboat taking on new members. His position caused him to be ostracized by many mainstream political and academic thinkers."
I was surprised to read that 78% of all gold consumed today is for Jewelry, especially with gold being used for many other purposes, such as electronics and other high-efficiency electrical conductors. Gold can be spread very thing for most uses, outside of jewelry, so while the amount of products that use gold are much wider then jewelry, only jewelery uses a significant amount of gold.
"In a paper published in August in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Bilham and Rebecca Bendick of the University of Montana suggest we’re in for an unusually high number of devastating earthquakes in 2018."
"Of course, there will never be a day when the Earth stands still. This restless rock is constantly in flux, thanks to the constant shuffling between 15 to 20 tectonic plates in the Earth’s crust. They grind and scrape along, largely thanks to a variety of radioactive activities in the molten mantle they skate on."
"In fact, our planet got even busier in 2014. Scientists noted those plates had doubled their activity — moving faster than at any point in the last 2 billion years."
"A pair of NASA space probes have detected an artificial bubble around Earth that forms when radio communications from the ground interact with high-energy radiation particles in space, the agency announced this week. The bubble forms a protective barrier around Earth, shielding the planet from potentially dangerous space weather, like solar flares and other ejections from the sun.
Earth already has its own protective bubble, a magnetosphere stretched by powerful solar winds. The artificial bubble that NASA found is an accident, an unintended result of the interplay between human technology and nature. When humans want to communicate with submarines near the surface of the ocean, they use a type of radio communication known as very low frequency waves, or VLF, transmitted from stations on the ground. Some of the waves can stretch all the way out into Earth’s atmosphere and beyond, where they affect the movement of the radiation particles bouncing around in the region. Sometimes, the interaction between VLF and these particles creates a barrier that can be seen by spacecraft orbiting the planet."