There were folks dressed in lab coats and pink knit brain hats. There were costumed characters and festooned pets. And there were many, many signs. Across the nation and abroad, as thousands of scientists and their supporters convened on Earth Day to defend science against proposed government cuts and political interference, many got their messages across with colorful and candid protest signs. Here are some of the best signs we have seen
Scientific examinations of historical accounts suggest that up to 40 percent of Mexico’s population lives along a zone that is more seismically active than suspected. Ash spews from Mexico's Popocatépetl volcano in August 14, 2019 (see above photo). The peak is part of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, a region which seismologists say may present a greater earthquake hazard than anticipated. According to the Anales de Tlatelolco, the earth cracked open in central Mexico on February 19, 1575. The ancient codex, composed around the time the Aztec Empire fell to Spanish conquistadors, features a story of a convulsion that lasted for up to five days, creating landslides and opening up a nearly three-mile-long scar in the ground.
The “David H. Koch Hall of Fossils — Deep Time” exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History opened June 8, 2019 after a five-year renovation. As a young paleontologist, Kirk Johnson traveled to the Arctic to excavate fossils from 50 million years ago, a time when the air was thick with carbon dioxide and so warm that even the North Pole had no ice. Johnson and his colleagues dug up fossilized crocodiles, turtles, and palm trees. “Palm trees!” Johnson recalled. “In the Arctic! . . . It blew my mind that the Earth could change that much.”
Glaciers in Antarctica are melting faster and across a much wider area than previously thought, a development that threatens to raise sea levels worldwide and force millions of people to flee low-lying areas, scientists said in Geneva during a recentconference. Researchers once believed that the melting was limited to the Antarctic Peninsula, a narrow tongue of land pointing toward South America. But satellite data and automated weather stations now indicate it is more widespread.
There is no one gene that determines a person’s sexual orientation, but genetics — along with environment — play a part in shaping sexuality, a massive new study shows. Researchers analyzed DNA from hundreds of thousands of people and found that there are a handful of genes clearly connected with same-sex sexual behavior. The researchers say that, although variations in these genes cannot predict whether a person is gay, these variants may partly influence sexual behavior.
