Tag Archives: April Fool’s Day

Climate Science, tD

April Fool!

NASA-Thwaites Glacier

The media loves to prank us with a good April Fools’ joke each year. This one is a gem — human-driven climate change will melt our glaciers and polar ice at an increasingly faster pace than previously calculated. Result: faster rising oceans leading to higher ocean levels. What a great joke!

And, to quote the Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination, “I think our biggest form of climate change we should worry about is nuclear weapons.” Or, was it “a hoax created by the Chinese“?

Care to follow more of this global joke? Check out this peer reviewed paper.

Image: Icebergs that have broken from the calving side of Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, November 2014. Courtesy Jim Yungel/NASA.

Art, Cosmology

A Trip to Titan

titanNASA is advertising its upcoming space tourism trip to Saturn’s largest moon Titan with this gorgeous retro poster.

Just imagine rowing across Titan’s lakes and oceans, and watching Saturn set below the horizon. So, dump that planned cruise down the Danube and hike to your local travel agent before all the seats are gone. But, before you purchase a return ticket keep in mind the following:

Frigid and alien, yet similar to our own planet billions of years ago, Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, has a thick atmosphere, organic-rich chemistry and a surface shaped by rivers and lakes of liquid ethane and methane. Cold winds sculpt vast regions of hydrocarbon-rich dunes. There may even be cryovolcanoes of cold liquid water. NASA’s Cassini orbiter was designed to peer through Titan’s perpetual haze and unravel the mysteries of this planet-like moon.
Image: Titan poster. Courtesy of NASA/JPL.
Idea Soup

April Can Mean Only One Thing

April-fool-Hailo-app

The advent of April in the United States usually brings the impending  tax day to mind. In the UK when April rolls in, it means the media goes overboard with April Fool’s jokes. Here’s a smattering of the silliest from Britain’s most serious media outlets.

 

From the Telegraph: transparent Marmite, Yessus Juice, prison release voting app, Burger King cologne (for men).

From the Guardian: Jeremy Clarkson and fossil fuel divestment.

 

From the Independent: a round-up of the best gags, including the proposed Edinburgh suspension bridge featuring a gap, Simon Cowell’s effigy on the new £5 note, grocery store aisle trampolines for the short of stature.

Image: Hailo’s new piggyback rideshare service.