Shrinking Moon may be Generating Moonquakes

Evidence for moonquakes on Lee-Lincoln fault scarp
The Taurus-Littrow valley is the location of the Apollo 17 landing site (asterisk). Cutting across the valley, just above the landing site, is the Lee-Lincoln fault scarp. Movement on the fault was the likely source of numerous moonquakes that triggered events in the valley. 1) Large landslides on of slopes of South Massif draped relatively bright rocks and dust (regolith) on and over the Lee-Lincoln scarp. 2) Boulders rolled down the slopes of North Massif leaving tracks or narrow troughs in the regolith on the slopes of North Massif. 3) Landslides on southeastern slopes of the Sculptured Hills.
Credits: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University/Smithsonian

A new analysis suggests that the moon is actively shrinking and producing moonquakes along thousands of cliffs called thrust faults spr...

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Common Food Additive Found to Affect Gut Microbiota


Impact of the food additive titanium dioxide (E171) on gut microbiota-host interaction. Frontiers in Nutrition, 2019

Titanium dioxide nanoparticles E171 may impact human health. University of Sydney research provides new evidence that nanoparticles, which are present in many food items, may have a substantial and harmful influence on human health. E171 is commonly used in high quantities in foods and some medicines as a whitening agent. Found in more than 900 food products such as chewing gum and mayonnaise, E171 is consumed in high proportion everyday by the general population.

Published in Frontiers in Nutrition, the mice study found that consumption of food containing E171 has an impact on the gut microbiota (defined by the trillions of bacteria that inhabit the gut) which coul...

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New Water Cycle on Mars discovered

Billions of years ago, Mars could have looked like this with an ocean covering part of its surface. Credit: NASA/GSFC

Approximately every two Earth years, when it is summer on the southern hemisphere of Mars, a window opens: Only in this season can water vapor efficiently rise from the lower into the upper Martian atmosphere. There, winds carry the rare gas to the north pole. While part of the water vapor decays and escapes into space, the rest sinks back down near the poles. Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany describe this unusual Martian water cycle in a current issue of the Geophysical Research Letters...

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Researchers identify rare 2D Insulator with Ferromagnetic properties

Magneto-optical characterization of the ferromagnetic domains in VI3.
CREDIT
Ames Laboratory, US Department of Energy

Collaborating scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Princeton University have discovered a new layered ferromagnetic semiconductor, a rare type of material that holds great promise for next-generation electronic technologies.

As the name implies, semiconductors are the Goldilocks of electrically conductive materials— not a metal, and not an insulator, but a “just-right” in-between whose conducting properties can be altered and customized in ways that create the basis for the world’s modern electronic capabilities. Especially rare are the ones closer to an insulator than to a metal.

The recent discovery o...

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