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Is it even possible that an impact crater which has even bigger area than Paris can hide underneath ice? The answer is yes! Recently a gigantic impact crater with 31 kilometres wide was found under Greenland’s ice. This crater was recorded in 25 largest craters on earth.

Thanks to NASA’s operation ice bridge, an airborne radar which is used to measure the thickness of the ice was applied at the edge of Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland. And then researchers immediately found a round shape implements a massive crater.  Although the scientists couldn’t collect the sample from the crater from this time since the crater is still under around 900 meters deep under the ice layer, they collected the sediment from the water melt from the base of the glacier. In the sediment, they found out some significant signs of the impact: “shocked” quartz grains with deformed crystal lattices and glassy grains which implements flash-melted rock. This proves that the meteorite which caused this crater was a relatively rare iron meteorite.

To determine the age of this crater, scientists first determine the age of ice sheet covered on the crater which is 11,700 years old. Then researchers found out that the crater has cut through an ancient riverbed formed  2.6 million years ago. That is to say that the crater was probably formed between 11700 years and 2.6 million years old.

Kurt Kjaer and his team from the University of Copenhagen mentioned that when this kind of big iron meteorite slammed to earth, the impact must cause severe environmental damage around the Northern Hemisphere. Since the crater is likely formed from 11700 and 2.6 million years old, the impact might be the main reason which caused Younger Dryas which is also known as Ice Age. However, this theory is still a hypothesis and is a lack of convincing evidence.

All in all, a massive crater was found underneath Greenland’s ice and it might be the main reason caused the Ice Age back then. Below is a video shows the whole discovery story if this massive crater.

 

Lab-grown meat is coming but will it be allowed to be called “meat”?

Lab-grown meat, or cultured meat, is grown from a sample of animal muscle cells and provides a source of meat that doesn’t require killing an animal. This brings up a big question for food regulators. What do we consider meat? Is it just anything that consists of animal muscle cells, or does it have to directly come from an animal that has been raised in the traditional method?

Cultured meat tastes similar to conventional meat. Dr. Mark Post at Maastricht University, one of the scientists who worked on cultured meat, has tried cooking some of the meat that he grew and said that it “tastes reasonably good” even though it had no fat. It’s not surprising that Dr. Post found his cultured meat to taste good, after all, the product he ate consisted of pure muscle cells, which would be similar to eating any other type of very lean meat purchased at a grocery store. Dr. Post says that cultured meat could be safer and healthier than conventional meat.

The State of Missouri disagrees that cultured meat is “meat” and has passed a law that forbids “misrepresenting a product as meat that is not derived from harvested production livestock or poultry.” The law targets both plant-based meat and cultured meat and aims to prevent shopper confusion. The divide is highlighted by the federal regulators behind the two types of meat. Cultured meat is regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration, while conventional meat is regulated by the US Department of Agriculture.

I think that since cultured meat would provide the same nutritional value as conventional meat, it should be allowed to be labelled as meat.

Twice every year, we Canadians bow down to daylight savings time and set our clocks either back or forward one hour. Some of us look forward to this, while others just grumble and go along with it because it’s tradition. Canada led the daylight savings time charge back on July 01, 1908, when Port Arthur, Ontario became the first municipality in the world to enact daylight savings time. But there must be more to it than tradition. My old colleague, in defense of daylight savings time, famously stated “the plants need the extra hour of light to grow!”. Clearly there are some bad arguments in favour of daylight savings, but there are some good ones as well.

Humans are diurnal, so we’re generally active when it’s light out, and sedentary when it’s dark. An extra hour of light keeps us active for a longer part of our day, making us healthier than if we had simply watched TV. With the extra hour of daylight, tourists also spend more time out of their hotels, spending money in the local economy. According to the Policy Studies Institute in the U.K., “the U.K. tourism industry could experience a boost of 3.5 billion pounds (about 5.6 billion U.S. dollars) per year under permanent daylight savings time”.  The benefits don’t end here either! Under daylight savings, we see an estimated 13% fewer traffic accidents. Additionally, the extra daylight from the spring shift causes a 7% decrease in robberies! So why are some people against daylight savings time?

The arguments against daylight savings time boil down to money and health. A study in the state of Indiana found that residential demand for electricity increases under daylight savings time. In the workplace, productivity drops when time springs ahead. Changing the clock also messes up our internal clocks, causing various sleep-related health issues. In the working days following the time change, researchers found that both the rate and severity of workplace injury increased. That’s not the only health-related problem either. The shift to daylight savings time increases the incidence of heart attacks. With problems like these, it’s certainly not a cut and dry debate.

Each of these benefits and drawbacks affect each of us differently, so we will all  have a different opinion. If we all weigh in, our solution will serve the people. What do you think about daylight savings time?

India and China are the countries with the largest number of people in the world. There are about 2.7 billion people living in these two countries which are more than one-third of the whole population in the whole world.  As shown below, the population of China and India has almost 40% of people on earth.

The air pollution from these two countries is high as well mainly because of their large population with ranked 4th in China and 5th in India. As shown on this webpage. ,  The real-time recorded air pollution data implies that India and China have serious air pollution.

Recently, a study shows that if we are able to eliminate the pollutants emission of India and China, about 15 million years of life in China and 11 million years of life in India can be saved.  Although there are plenty of articles talking about the hazard effect of particulate matter(AKA PM2.5) to human. However, there is no essay has quantified the impact of particulate matter in a specific region and an operatable strategy of solving this problem.

In this study, the researchers from Harvard calculated the change in mortality and life expectancy in each province in China and India with the help of state-of-the-art atmospheric chemistry modeling. The result shows that Shandong, Henan, and Sichuan provinces in China, and Uttar Pradesh state in India needs to replace coal-fired powerplant into less pollutant power generating technologies like wind or water power generation.

With this study, we can start to identify all the region with high pollutant due to coal-fired power plants all over the world and change them into a more clean and renewable energy source. As the result, the world would be a better place without pollutant from coal-fired power plants.