To Matilda Knowles: a woman’s life in lichen honoured in death

Knowles died in 1933, but this Sunday her life and work will be honoured by a new plaque at the National Botanic Gardens. Better late than never.

She was an expert on lichens, those crusty growths you see on rocks, walls and trees. Significantly, she was the first person to recognise that, at the shore, lichens grow in distinct tidal bands or zones; she discovered this while studying lichens at Howth.

Read More

‘Animals feel pain’: why a farmer’s son turned vegan

At the age of nine Declan Bowens became vegetarian, and later vegan. ‘Just because we can do it, doesn’t mean we should,’ he says of meat-eating – not a popular position in rural Ireland

Read More

Nasa invites public to sign up for free space ‘boarding pass’

People are being invited to sign up for a free “boarding pass” for trips into space. The plan is to start small with orbital flights but will later involve flights to Mars.

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration is behind the scheme which is linked to its new Orion spacecraft. It is expected to bring humans back into space for travel to far-flung destinations including the Red Planet.

Read More

Satellites expose mysteries of the deep ocean

A new comprehensive map of Earth’s seafloor reveals never-before-seen features hidden deep below the waves, including thousands of uncharted underwater mountains. The map, presented in the Oct. 3 Science, is the most accurate global seafloor map ever made and could provide new clues to how Earth’s surface got its shape.
Read more

Martin Perl, Nobelist and particle physics maverick, dies at 87

Martin Perl, a particle physicist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, who died 30 September, was something of a lone wolf when he set out to see if there was another particle akin to the electron and its heavier unstable cousin, the muon. Perl's hunch was right, and by 1977 he and his colleagues had discovered the particle, dubbed the tau lepton, in experiments using SLAC's famous linear accelerator.
Read more

Mass walrus gathering on Alaskan shore

The walrus is a noble beast. Seeing one should easily serve as a life highlight for any human. So witnessing 35,000 of these majestic, bearded behemoths congregating along the shore of Alaska could qualify as a once-in-a-lifetime revelation—except the walruses probably aren’t very happy to be there. The 2000-kilogram marine mammals would much prefer to be living out their days on sea ice floating in shallow waters
Read more

Record-smashing 'superflare' observed by satellite

It’s time to update the list of record-setting space phenomena. NASA’s Swift satellite has recorded a stellar flare from a nearby red dwarf that is at least 10,000 times bigger than the previous record. The “superflare” was also the longest lasting and hottest on record, reaching about 200 million degrees Celsius, making it 12 times hotter than the center of our sun, redOrbit reports. The flare originated from a binary star system a mere 60 light-years away called DG Canum Venaticorum, but it’s unclear which of the red dwarfs actually emitted the flare.
Link