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Science On The Fly, Week Of Dec. 14

Sheyna Gifford |
December 20, 2014 | 4:53 p.m. PST

Contributor

This Week’s Theme: The End Is Nigh  

1. Life ­– A Status Report  

Because we don’t know exactly how much life is really out there, it’s difficult to say how much we’ve lost, and how much we stand to lose. This week Richard Monastersky made this excellent point in Nature: while we don’t know how many animals we have, we know that we’re about to lose a lot of them. We seem to be on the verge of losing 40% of the amphibians on Earth. That’s a problem, no matter how you count it. 

On the Cover of Nature This Week: “Life on the brink. How much biodiversity is left and can we preserve it?”  

A mass extinction is defined as losing 75% of more of the species on Earth. As far as science knows, there have been 5 great mass extinctions in Earth’s history. This one we’re facing now - a loss of 75% of the world we have known - is something we may be facing by 2200. For the first time, this would be a mass extinction created by a species on Earth. The same species bears responsibility for creating a mass extinction - us - could also be the first species to avert a mass extinction. For better and worse, the choice is ours.   

Amazing graphics/visualizations can be found here.  

2) Drumroll! The Award for the Best Storytelling Scientist Goes to...  

Every year, young scientists compete in a world-wide science-slam. It’s like a jam, if the jam is about science, by scientists, for non-scientists. This Science Jam/Slam is called FameLab. 

The challenge to all contestants: teach the world something amazing in three minutes or less.  

2014 is the third year that the FameLab competition has taken place. The regional heat in San Francisco ran from December 14th-15th, and brought us jams on Surviving Nuclear Disaster, The Future of Cancer Treatment, Volcanoes, Exoplanets and Microchimerism - the small amount of DNA that babies leave behind when they exit the womb, which then interacts with moms’ immune systems. Yeah - I had to look that last one up.   

Learn something amazing in just 180 seconds! The FameLab finals are coming...    

3) Venus Express - It’s been a Blast  

We’ll shortly be saying farewell to a more than 8-year-long mission to Venus. The Venus Express - running on fumes after repeated dips into Venus’ atmosphere - is scheduled to go out in a brief blaze of glory in the next few weeks as its orbit degrades.

Since 2005, Venus Express, a beautiful gold-tinted ESA satellite weighing a bit more than a ton, has been diligently studying the atmosphere of our neighboring planet. The Express has detected a ton of cool things in Venus, including planet-wide increasing winds. It directly imaged glories - a visual effect created by the sun shining through Venus’ water droplets. It tried to catch volcanoes in the act of filling the air with sulfur dioxide, and, most recently, it took a dive into the atmosphere to try and find out where Venus’ water went. While Venus is about the same volume as Earth, we have 100,000 time as much water. Where did all the water do? Before making its exit, Venus Express might have helped defog a 4.6 billion-year-old mystery.   

Thank you, Venus Express. Hale, and farewell.  

Reach Sheyna Gifford here. Follow her on Twitter here. Follow The Science Desk here



 

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