August 20, 2024: Geology of the Land of the Midnight Sun, disruptive dark energy, and the world's oldest person has died. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | Fracture line on Greenland's ice sheet. Jason Edwards/Getty Images | | | Scientists have constructed a new geological map of Greenland. They examined data on changes in gravity, magnetism, crust thickness, bedrock terrain, seismic-wave transmission and ice-surface features across the landmass (where the coasts can be up to 500 miles apart). It turns out that Greenland's ice conceals three previously unidentified geological regions, including one that seems young and volcanic, and another with rough terrain probably from hills and valleys.
Why this matters: Knowing the true geology of the continent will improve GPS accuracy for scientific studies and mineral exploration. The new map will also help predict how stable the ice-sheet is–young volcanic bedrock transfers more geothermal heat to ice sheets than older rocks do.
What the experts say: "If you took North America, put an enormous ice sheet on top of it, and were handed the geology of New York, Maryland or California and asked to [determine] the geology of Nebraska, you would have a hard time making an accurate guess," says Pennsylvania State University geoscientist Sridhar Anandakrishnan. | | | DESI has made the largest 3D map of our universe to date. Earth is at the center of this thin slice of the full map. In the magnified section, the underlying structure of matter in our universe.Claire Lamman/DESI collaboration; custom colormap package by cmastro | | | Something is up with dark energy. The mysterious and constant force that is accelerating the universe's expansion may not be constant after all. Two prominent surveys measuring dark energy found evidence that its pull seems to have weakened over time. The new data come from the DES survey of distant supernovae and from the DESI experiment, which measures galaxies and sound waves from the early universe. The latter showed that the galaxies are less spread apart than they should be if dark energy's role was unchanging through cosmic time.
Why this matters: Dark energy was assumed to be a constant force, called the "cosmological constant," but if the new results are right, it is changeable after all. Physicists are scrambling to propose a single theory of a nonconstant cosmological force that might be a new kind of dark energy.
What the experts say: "If the cosmological constant is wrong, all bets are off about what's right," says Adam G. Riess, a cosmologist at Johns Hopkins University, who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of dark energy. | | | • Wildfires burned 1.5 million square miles of land around the world from March 2023 through February 2024, and climate change is to blame, new research says. | 3 min read | | | • At least a quarter of people who have severe brain injuries and cannot respond physically to commands are actually conscious. | 4 min read | | | • The world's oldest person, Maria Branyas Morera, who lived in Spain, has died at age 117. Although human lifespans have steadily increased for decades, experts debate whether there's an absolute limit to human life. The secret to an organism's lifespan may be found in its genes, says Jo├гo Pedro de Magalh├гes, a professor of molecular biogerontology at the University of Birmingham in England. "If we eliminated aging at the cellular level, humans could live for a millennium—and potentially as long as 20,000 years." | 6 min read | | | Children born today in wealthy countries can expect to live past 100 years old, experts say. Advancements in medicine and technology have been on an exponential increase for decades, improving longevity and treatment for health conditions. In his 2005 book Radical Evolution, author and scholar Joel Garreau predicted that AI would achieve greater-than-human intelligence by 2030, and that technological development would ripple into life-saving treatments and genetically-based anti-aging tactics. If all goes well, the best-case scenario will be a future that includes "almost unimaginably good things ... including the conquering of disease and poverty, but also an increase in beauty, wisdom, love, truth and peace." Sometimes it's nice to take the optimistic view. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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