With TV cameras pointed at her, Felisa Wolfe-Simon began speaking at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 2, 2010. “I’ve discovered — I’ve led a team that has discovered — something that I’ve been thinking about for many years,” Dr. Wolfe-Simon said. She was at that time a visiting researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey, speaking to a sizable …
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In Greenland, the Ice Doesn’t Just Flow, It Quivers and Quakes
When Andreas Fichtner unspooled a fiber-optic cable into a deep hole in Greenland’s ice, he wasn’t expecting to discover a whole new way that glaciers move. Even when the cable started sending back data, his first reaction was skeptical. “Rubbish,” Dr. Fichtner, a professor of seismology and wave physics at the Swiss university ETH Zurich, remembers thinking. “Just some electronic …
Read More »What Lurks in This Flower’s Bizarrely Large Y Chromosome?
The vast majority of plants are hermaphrodites, with both male and female reproductive parts. Oaks, some orchids, the potted spider plant in your office — they’re all capable of reproducing without a member of another sex nearby. “It makes sense if you are an organism that can’t run around and find mates,” said Deborah Charlesworth, a population geneticist at the …
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