BEFORE you press play on that video (we’re sure some of you just went for it anyway) put down whatever it is you’re eating.
This is a ribbon worm called a Gorgonorhynchus. When it senses nearby prey it launches what looks like a root out of its face. Anything caught in those flinchingly terrifying ‘roots’ get hauled into the worm’s belly.
These adorable little worms live in the ocean…
It’s summer.
Good luck out there.
Seriously, pack your bags. We found a new Earth and I am personally going to wait at Cape Canaveral until someone will sell me a ticket on the first Space Ark to Splitsville.
Our new digs are right in the Goldilocks Zone and according the team that located it, the chances of life are pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.
And the planet’s discoverers are optimistic about the prospects for finding life there.
“Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say, my own personal feeling is that the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent,” said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, during a press briefing today. “I have almost no doubt about it.”
Now if you’ll excuse me I am going to be running up all my credit cards. Try and follow me with that score to space, suckers!
[Space]
Science may now confirm what the dude screaming on Venice Beach has theorized for years. The center of the Earth is made of crystal.
The outer core is composed mostly of liquid iron. The inner core is solid ball about 750 miles in diameter, or a little less than the maximum width of the state of Texas, which formed as the Earth cooled over geologic time, said David Stephenson, a geologist at CalTech.
“The center of the earth is literally a crystal,” said Stephenson. Over time, it grew and now is no longer a single crystal but an aggregate of them.
In the mid-1990s, geologists began to notice an interesting thing. Seismic waves traveling north-south were reaching their destinations about 3 percent faster than waves moving along east-west paths.
“It’s one of these things that’s been detected for some time but kind of why it occurs has been somewhat of a puzzle,” Sleep said. They didn’t know why, but then again, the middle of the globe is perhaps the most difficult place to gather data on Earth.
At least we’ve now locked in on the new status symbol soon to be draped around the neck’s of rappers and heiresses.
[Wired]
A thin film of water ice and organic material has been identified on an asteroid by a NASA telescope. This bolsters the theory that an asteroid brought both crucial elements for life to Earth.
“It now appears that when the asteroids and planets were first forming in the very early Solar System, ice extended far into the Main Belt region,” said Josh Emery, a planetary scientist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. “Extending this refined view to planetary systems around other stars, the building blocks of life — water and organics — may be more common near each star’s habitable zone.”
The discovery also confuses the definition of comets and asteroids, in case you were wondering.
[Pop Sci]