Author: Jen Pinkowski

A possible new Earth-like world has been found, and it’s giant, according to a study [PDF] published today in Nature. LHS 1140b, an exoplanet a mere 40 light-years away, is 40 percent larger than Earth while orbiting a tiny red dwarf star one-fifth the size of our own. That might not seem like the recipe for “Earth” or “life,” but the planet resides in its star’s habitable zone, the slim “Goldilocks” orbit at which water can exist as a stable liquid. It also exhibits characteristics of a rocky world, which is significant: where there’s water and rock, there’s a possibility for life.

The world was discovered using the transit photometry method of exoplanet detection. As a planet crosses in front of a star, the star dims slightly. Think of an annular solar eclipse: When the Moon crosses in front of the Sun but is too far from the Earth to blot out the Sun entirely, the day is dimmed but isn’t plunged into darkness. The same principle applies here, though on a much finer scale. The amount the star dims also reveals its size.

So what makes this exoplanet so special? What about the TRAPPIST-1 worlds we were celebrating last month? That party might have been a bit premature. Scientists have only measured the density of one of those worlds, and turns out: It isn’t rocky. So … maybe none of the others are, either. While they’re certainly Earth-sized and in their star’s habitable zone, imagining Earth without rocks is something of a challenge. LHS1140b, though, is rocks for days, and now that scientists know it’s there, the plan is to study the hell out of it.

Jason Dittmann of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author of the study tells mental_floss that the team studying LHS 1140b has been allocated Hubble Space Telescope time to do another transit observation. They’ve also applied for further Hubble time and x-ray telescope time in order to assess the high-energy environment the planet may be experiencing. Here on Earth, they hope also to use both Magellan telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, and their Chilean collaborators have applied to use three of that country’s Very Large Telescopes. “So, basically, we’re hoping to throw everything we have at this planet!” he says.

The James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch next year, will really unlock the mysteries of LHS 1140b. “We hope to be able to detect not just that this planet has an atmosphere but also what it’s made of. In particular, [James Webb Space Telescope] may be sensitive to carbon dioxide, water, methane, and ozone,” he says. The Giant Magellan Telescope and European Extremely Large Telescope, both under construction, might be able to detect molecular oxygen as well, as the strongest features of that molecule exist at more optical wavelengths. “If we can do all of these things, we might have a pretty clear picture about the atmosphere, and what’s in it, and hopefully we can even say that’s very similar to the Earth’s.”

Dittmann’s Harvard colleague David Charbonneau, a co-author of the study, tells mental_floss that until James Webb launches, there’s much work to do. “First, we need to figure out the ultraviolet emission from the star,” he says. “Some red dwarfs have huge amounts of UV light, which can be devastating to the atmosphere, and life! So, we are planning to use the Hubble Space Telescope to learn that. Also, there is one (and only one) good ground-based opportunity to study the planet from Chile this fall, so we are trying to have every large telescope in Chile point at the system on that night. We are calling it Transit Night.” That will take place on October 26, 2017.

While ground-based observations won’t be as penetrating as what the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to do, they will tell scientists if the atmosphere has, for example, lots of hydrogen and helium (“which would make the atmosphere fluffy and easy to detect,” he says) and thus not Earth-like. Once the telescopes in development go online, however, there is even a chance that they can find signs of life. “[The Giant Magellan Telescope] can detect oxygen, which is an atmospheric biosignature gas,” he says, though oxygen alone isn’t enough. “Maybe, unlike Earth, the oxygen is made by a different process, such as UV light breaking apart water in the atmosphere. The [James Webb Space Telescope] observations will be sensitive to the other molecules—methane, water, carbon dioxide—that would allow us to know whether the oxygen really is produced by life.”

LHS 1140b was first detected by Harvard’s MEarth (pronounced “mirth”) project, and confirmed by the European Southern Observatory’s High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher. The planet is thought to be at least five billion years old, and its size and density suggest a dense iron core beneath its rocky surface.

It was warm this winter. Freakishly warm, in fact. It was warm enough that we probably should have felt guilty for enjoying it so much. After all, any time you can open your windows when you’re supposed to be shivering and watching travel shows for warmth is a strange situation. Most of the United States just lived through one of the warmest Februarys on record to close out one of the warmest winters on record. Here are some statistics that will show you just how unusually balmy it’s been for the past three months.

1. THIS FEBRUARY WAS WARMER THAN NORMAL.

 
It shouldn’t come as any shock that February’s temperatures were above-average when you crunch the numbers. Out of 888 weather observing stations across the lower 48, a solid 60 percent of those stations (or 534 locations) saw their top-10 warmest February on record this year. Even worse is that 186 of those locations—scattered from the depths of Texas to the Canadian border—recorded their all-time warmest February, with some records stretching back more than 100 years.

2. THE WHOLE WINTER WAS WARMER THAN NORMAL.

Not only was this past February a record-breaker, but the whole winter was warm on average. Data from the Southeast Regional Climate Center shows that over half of those 888 weather observing stations in the contiguous United States saw this winter place among the top ten warmest winters ever recorded, with almost all of the toasty stations residing east of the Rocky Mountains. Most of the all-time warmest winter records were set in the southern part of the country, including cities like Houston, Texas, and Raleigh, North Carolina.

3. THE WARMTH KEPT MOST OF THE SNOW AT BAY.

 
As you can imagine, you’re not going to find very much snow when it’s relatively toasty out there. There have been other winters with less snow than most places saw this year, but the differences are negligible. Take Washington D.C., for example. Washington National Airport, which sits just across the Potomac River from the capital city itself, typically sees about 15 inches of snow every year. They’ve recorded just over an inch of snow this year. On the list of least-snowy winters in the nation’s capital, this winter ranks fourth since records began in 1940.

4. CHICAGO SAW NO SNOW IN JANUARY OR FEBRUARY.

Even more unusual is the fact that Chicago went through the entire months of January and February without seeing one lick of snow cover the ground. According to the city’s National Weather Service office, this was the first time in the city’s 146 years of recording weather observations that they didn’t see any snow on the ground during the dead of winter. The city saw a foot-and-a-half of snow spread out over several storms during the month of December, but all of that snow melted by Christmas. The most they’ve seen since then is a “trace” of snow, which is snow that falls but instantly melts when it hits the ground.

5. THE GREAT LAKES WERE RELATIVELY ICE-FREE.

While we’re looking toward the Midwest, it’s worth noting that the Great Lakes were surprisingly ice-free this season. The five lakes only saw about 15 percent of their surface covered by ice during the season’s maximum extent on February 8, and what little ice did form this year is rapidly melting as warm air continues to bathe the enormous bodies of water. Since NOAA began keeping records back in 1973, a typical winter sees a little more than half of the Great Lakes covered with ice during the peak of winter, but the coverage has been as low as 11 percent, a record achieved in 2002.

6. THE LEAVES LOVED IT, THOUGH.

Humans aren’t the only organisms enjoying the reprieve from winter’s grip. The USA National Phenology Network tracks the extent of trees budding and growing leaves as spring begins to set in. According to their observations, almost every part of the United States that has leaves on its trees right now saw those leaves appear a full three weeks ahead of schedule—what it calls “very large anomalies.” This is welcome news for the birds and the bees, but if there’s a sudden cold snap in March—which isn’t unheard of—it could do some serious damage to any plants that are suddenly more vulnerable than normal.

7. THE WARMTH LED TO SOME SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS.

When you put an active weather pattern together with warm and unstable air, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll wind up with strong thunderstorms at some point. We saw several rounds of severe weather this spring, resulting in at least three fatalities on the last day of February. Severe weather is fairly common in the southeast due to its proximity to muggy air over the Gulf of Mexico, but severe weather stretched unusually far north this year. A tornado that touched down in western Massachusetts on February 25 was the only tornado ever recorded in the state during the month of February, and quite possibly the farthest north we’ve ever seen a tornado since reliable records began in 1950.

8. SO WHY HAS IT BEEN SO WARM?

Why has it been so warm in the east and so cool and active out west? It has to do with the jet stream. For the past couple of years, there’s been a huge ridge in the jet stream over the West Coast that kept them warm and dangerously dry, while the jet stream dipped south and brought cooler, more active weather to the rest of the United States. That pattern broke this year, essentially reversing itself and keeping the warmth-inducing ridge out east while the jet stream in the west keeps dipping south and bringing them a steady stream of rough weather. One theory as to why the pattern flipped is the disappearance of the infamous “Blob,” a nickname given to an unusually warm area of water in the northeastern Pacific Ocean. That water cooled off, which may have allowed the jet stream to readjust itself into the pattern we’ve seen this winter.

 
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, a variety of scruffy hominins roamed the planet, making tools, chasing down dinner, sitting around fires, and looking at the stars. Unfortunately, they didn’t leave much behind. Figuring out how and when these populations spread across the globe and intermingled with each other is a huge puzzle, one with most of the pieces missing.

That’s why scientists are excited about the discovery of two archaic human skulls in China reported in the journal Science today, March 2. These 100,000-year-old fossils have a mix of traits—and even some similarities with Neanderthals—which bolsters the idea that the precursors to modern humans were a diverse bunch who routinely interbred with one another.

Mental_floss spoke to report authors Erik Trinkaus, a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, and paleoanthropologist Xiu-Jie Wu, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, as well as several experts in human evolution who were not involved in the current research.

The two broken skulls were discovered in the outskirts of Xuchang in central China at the Lingjing site, which was a spring for most of its history. The water consistently attracted people and animals over many millennia, and scientists have found at the site thousands bones of creatures like extinct deer and rhino relatives, as well as much more recent Bronze Age remains.

When the water table was lowered in the area in 2007, Lingjing became drier, and scientists were able to start an excavation, says Trinkaus. While digging, the researchers found the two skulls of archaic humans. They died in the Late Pleistocene, about 100,000 years ago.

“These were hunters and gatherers who, if you saw them, would look basically like people today,” Trinkaus says. “We would probably find them rather dirty and uncouth, but they were basically people.”

The skulls show that these almost-people have some similarities with early modern humans, including a large brain size and modest brow ridges. But they also have some important physical differences. Their low and broad braincase is characteristic of earlier, more primitive eastern Eurasian humans. Meanwhile, the shape of the semicircular canals (bones near the inner ear) and arrangement of the back of the skulls are similar to contemporary Neanderthals from western Eurasia.

This mosaic of physical features “suggests a pattern of regional population continuity in eastern Eurasia, combined with shared long-term trends in human biology and population connections across Eurasia,” says Wu. Those long-term trends include increasing brain size and decreasing massiveness of the skull—patterns that are also seen in humans in western Eurasia and Africa during this time period, which suggests some trends could be universal among humans, Trinkaus says.

The human-evolution experts we spoke to gave a number of reasons why the find is significant.

“It is a fascinating new discovery,” says Lynne Schepartz, a paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. “The presence of the Neanderthal traits is very clear and, in my opinion, unquestionable. This discovery demonstrates the diversity of eastern Asian populations in the Late Pleistocene, reflecting their roots in earlier Homo erectus populations and then increased gene flow and interaction with peoples from the West.”

Fred Smith, an anthropologist at Illinois State University, says the skulls add to two growing points of consensus in paleoanthropology: “Neanderthals had extensive evolutionary influences beyond their core area of western Eurasia, and archaic human groups routinely hybridized with each other, and with early modern humans.”

In fact, this study highlights how the once-common image of Neanderthals as an anomalous European population, distinguished by a set of regional peculiarities, is now “looking increasingly dubious,” according to Boston University anthropologist Matt Cartmill. Instead, he says, recent research suggests that some of the traits we think of as unique to Neanderthals could have been widely distributed in late archaic human populations all across Eurasia. “I am beginning to wonder how useful the concept ‘Neanderthal’ is.”

Other researchers say the skulls’ combination of primitive features and Neanderthal-like traits should be somewhat expected in archaic humans in East Asia from this time period. “This is exactly what the Denisovans (an Asian sister group of the Western Eurasian Neanderthals) should be,” says Jean-Jacques Hublin, director of the department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

The authors of the paper, however, have shied away from assigning a species name or category to these archaic humans just yet. Trinkaus says there isn’t enough known about the Denisovans and that using such a category would not be helpful for understanding the messy population dynamics of archaic humans.

“It’s not the kind of thing that you can make a simple diagram of with lines on a piece of paper,” he explains. “It’s a very complex process.”

But Trinkaus is hopeful that further research at Lingjing, along with discoveries elsewhere in China and East Asia, will shed more light on what these ancestral humans were like. “In the last couple of decades there’s been a renaissance of Pleistocene archaeology and paleontology in that part of the world,” he says.

 
Astronomers say they’ve discovered seven Earth-size planets in tight orbit around a cool, dim star about 39 light-years from us—and all seven are located in the habitable zone that could potentially host life. This is the first time a planetary system oriented to this kind of star has been detected—and its discovery holds the potential to lead us to a lot more exoplanets. An international team of researchers reported their findings in a letter published today in the journal Nature.

“It’s the first time we have seven planets in this temperate zone…that can be called terrestrial,” lead author Michaël Gillon, of Belgium’s Université de Liège, said in a press briefing. “So many is really, really surprising.”

TRAPPIST-1 is an ultracool dwarf star that’s 1/80th the brightness of the Sun and similar in size to Jupiter. All seven planets in its system are within 20 percent of the size and mass of Earth, and their density measurements indicate they’re likely of rocky composition. They’re clutched by TRAPPIST-1 in tight orbits—all would fit well within the orbit of Mercury. But unlike in our solar system, where such closeness to a hot star renders life impossible, the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system, with its cool celestial heart, could potentially host liquid water and organic molecules.

The first three planets were spotted in early 2016 by some of the same researchers involved in the current findings, including Gillon. As the planets cross in front of the star during their orbits, they cause the star, which emits light in the infrared, to briefly dim. Such transits, or eclipses, provide a common way for astronomers to detect exoplanets.

Using telescopes in Chile, South Africa, Spain, the UK, and Morocco, the researchers followed up on these transit signals multiple times in 2016, most notably in late September with a 20-day, nearly continuous monitoring of the star using the Spitzer Space Telescope, currently located about 145 million miles from us in an Earth-trailing orbit around the Sun. By moving our view off the Earth, researchers were able to detect 34 separate transits. This turned out to be the result of seven planets—six in near-resonant orbit—crossing in front of their home star. (The transit of the seventh was detected only once, so the orbit of this planet, known as TRAPPIST-h, hasn’t been determined yet.)

The planets have relatively narrow surface temperature fluctuations—about 100 degrees—despite their proximity to their home star. (Compare that to Mercury, which has temperature variations of nearly 1200F.) The researchers write that three of the planets—E, F, and G—“could harbour water oceans on their surfaces, assuming Earth-like atmospheres.”

They’re probably tidally locked, meaning the same hemisphere of each planet always faces the star. Because they’re so close to each other, they can influence each other’s movements, causing eccentric orbits. The result is a planetary system that looks more like Jupiter and its Galilean moons than our own solar system. The planets likely formed outside the system and were pulled into it, and it’s entirely possible the seven so far identified are not alone.

 University of Montreal astrophysicist Lauren Weiss tells mental_floss, “It’s an exciting discovery! The TRAPPIST-1 system demonstrates that even the smallest stars in our galaxy can form a multitude of planets.”

Weiss, who was not involved in the current study, researches exoplanetary systems—their masses, density, composition, and orbital dynamics. She says of the TRAPPIST-1 system, “These planets are all of sizes that are consistent with rocky compositions. In addition, the mass measurements the authors have conducted are consistent with rocky compositions for the planets.”

Most planet-hunting efforts have been focused on brighter stars and bigger planets—and these efforts have been fruitful. Consider NASA’s Kepler mission: as of today, astronomers using the space telescope have detected 2330 exoplanets.

But the TRAPPIST-1 discovery suggests that we shouldn’t overlook the potential that even cool, dim stars have to lead us to new planets. About 15 percent of stars in our neighborhood are ultracool dwarfs like TRAPPIST-1. Moreover, M dwarf stars like this one are by far the most abundant in the galaxy, says astronomer Jackie Faherty, senior scientist the American Museum of Natural History, who studies them.

“When I heard that the number of planets around Trappist 1 had increased from three to seven, I was taken aback,” Faherty tells mental_floss. “The thought that the galaxy must be bursting at the seams with planets immediately sprung into my head.”

What makes them especially appealing is that because they are dim and small, a relatively substantial amount of light is blocked when a near object—like a planet in a close orbit—crosses in front of one. That makes planetary transits easier to spot.

What does this discovery suggest about the number of Earth-like planets in the galaxy? “There are 200 billion stars in our galaxy, so do the count. You multiply by 10, and you have the number of Earth-size planets in the galaxy—which is a lot,” study co-author Emmanuël Jehin, of the Université de Liège, said in the press briefing.

And as for finding life on one of the TRAPPIST-1 planets? Gillon said that short of traveling to one and collecting a sample, we can’t say for certain life exists on any of them, but the presence of certain molecules in combination with one another will be a likely indicator. “If you have methane, oxygen or ozone, and CO2, you have a strong indication of life and biological activity,” he said in the press briefing. The combination is key—the presence of any one of these on its own isn’t enough to indicate biological life, Gillon noted.

The James Webb Space Telescope, an infrared telescope slated for launch in October 2018, will greatly help in this effort, he says: “Methane and, for instance, water could be detected with the James Webb telescope, and give us a very good insight on the atmospheric properties of the planet.”

The researchers are also going to continue the search with the project SPECULOOS (Search for Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars). 

“We’ve taken a crucial step of finding life out there,” said co-author Amaury Triaud, of the University of Cambridge. “Here if life managed to thrive and release gases similar to those we have on Earth, we will know. We have the right target.”

California is bracing for a life-threatening and potentially historic storm today, February 17, with the arrival of some of the nastiest weather to hit the state in many years. Conditions will go downhill in a hurry through the day as the dreary slog of driving rains, gusty winds, and intense mountain snows blankets the Golden State to begin the weekend.

The latest forecasts from the National Weather Service paint a bleak picture for California and its sprawling countryside. A sustained thump of heavy rain will cover the state during the day on Friday, but the system will begin to pick up steam as it approaches shore closer to nightfall. Heavy rain and strong winds don’t seem like too big of a deal to most of us around the country, but California, with its population of around 39 million, is home to more people than 22 other states combined. Any major weather event that affects such a large segment of the population will create huge problems, especially in such a disaster-prone region of the country.

 
Several inches of rain are possible just about everywhere in California save for the mountains, where the precipitation will fall as many feet of snow, and the southern half of the Central Valley, where the Coast Ranges will block rain from reaching the low-lying center of the state in a phenomenon known as a rain shadow. The heaviest rain will fall in southern California near Los Angeles, where up to six inches of rain are possible in the more intense showers and thunderstorms that develop.

Rainfall totals could reach record territory in L.A., where this storm could make today one of the 10 wettest days ever recorded at Los Angeles International Airport, and it could come close to the top of the list in downtown L.A. The storm system causing all of the trouble could rank among some of the strongest low-pressure systems ever recorded off the coast of California; some weather models are predicting a minimum central pressure lower than 990 millibars—a pressure you’d expect to find in a weak hurricane.

Flash flooding will be a major concern in areas that experience sustained heavy rainfall. The National Weather Service’s latest assessment of the flash flood risk in California shows that rainfall rates of only around one inch of rain per hour could lead to flash flooding. The threat for flooding from this storm is compounded by multiple factors that many other parts of the United States don’t have to worry about, including rough terrain, burned ground from wildfires, and the fact that the soil is still recovering from the years-long drought that’s just now starting to wane. These natural factors, in addition to urban sprawl, limit how quickly rainwater can run off into sewage systems and natural waterways.

Areas that suffered under an immense drought for most of the past decade wished for rain every winter, but this winter’s steady rains have been too much of a good thing. Not only do residents now have to worry about flash flooding and mudslides, but folks who live downstream of the Oroville Dam have some extra concerns. Recent rains pushed Lake Oroville, situated north of Sacramento, California, beyond its capacity, sending water cascading down its two spillways. Tens of thousands of people had to evacuate last week when the dam’s emergency spillway came perilously close to failing due to water eroding the soil and rock near the structure. The lake’s water level has slowly receded in the days since, but this rainstorm could push water back to the same dangerous level we saw just a couple of days ago.

When Hurricane Matthew roared through St. Augustine, Florida, in October 2016, many of the town’s historic buildings were damaged. But it wasn’t until a building owner decided to tear up a flooded floor to mitigate water damage that an historic discovery was made—what may be the skeletons of the earliest European colonists in the United States.

The city of St. Augustine was founded by admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who had sailed from Spain and spotted land in what is now Florida on August 28, 1565. Menéndez became the first governor of Florida, and St. Augustine was its capital for two centuries. Although Pensacola, Florida, is the oldest multiyear European settlement, founded by Tristán de Luna in 1559, St. Augustine, located in the northeast part of the state, wins the title for being the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the contiguous U.S.

Given the age of the city, St. Augustine’s archaeological team has worked for decades to shed light on various phases of occupation. In 1572, the town was relocated from a barrier island onto the mainland, following difficulties defending it from the Timucua Indians. Shortly after this move, the first parish churches were established: Nuestra Señora de la Soledad and, slightly earlier, Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, the parish church of St. Augustine.

The sites of both churches, which were in use between the 16th and 18th centuries, have seen archaeological excavations over the years, including the discovery of numerous burials. La Soledad produced evidence of European, African, and Native American individuals buried in Spanish and British styles, while Los Remedios has European and Native American burials in Christian style.

New graves discovered during flood mitigation in January are being excavated this week by city archaeologist Carl Halbirt due to a planned expansion of a water main through St. Augustine’s Charlotte Street. Halbirt and his team found burials both under the cobblestone street and within what is now the Fiesta Mall, a small building in downtown.

Based on the majolica pottery inclusions, the burials date to 1572–1586 and were therefore almost certainly among the earliest made in St. Augustine. The style of burial is Christian, with the skulls oriented to the east and the arms crossed over the front of the body. The discovery of these graves also means that archaeologists have further physical evidence from Los Remedios, cementing its label as the oldest known parish church in the United States.

John Worth, an archaeologist at the University of West Florida who was not involved in the study, tells mental_floss that this discovery is immensely significant. “Not only do they contribute to an understanding of the church itself, the burials may provide an opportunity to learn more about Florida’s earliest European permanent residents, including perhaps where they originally came from,” Worth says. If the people unearthed were indeed founders of St. Augustine, Worth notes, their skeletons may reveal “the struggles of life during the first two decades of the city’s earliest history.”

Analysis of the remains themselves is only just beginning, but preliminary work by University of Florida anthropologist John Krigbaum suggests the people who were just found appear to be European adults. If the state allows destructive testing, further research will be done on samples from the skeletons to potentially investigate their geographic origins, diets, and any diseases they had. The burials themselves, though, may stay put under the floor or may be reburied at the historic Catholic Tolomato Cemetery.

For a look inside the excavation, check out the segment below from First Coast News.

Last year it was all supermoons, all the time. This year it’s going to be eclipses. There’s the big one on August 21—start planning your trip now!—and leading up to it are a couple of smaller events, starting with a penumbral lunar eclipse tonight, and an annular solar eclipse later this month. The eclipse tomorrow night, February 10, will occur during a “Snow Moon,” and if you stay up a little bit longer, you might even be able to spot a comet. In other words, if you’re looking for cheap date ideas for the last Friday before Valentine’s Day, you’ve come to the right place.

SHOULDER TO SHOULDER WITH THE SNOW MOON

Full moons have names. They survive largely through the pages of the Farmer’s Almanac, a 99-year-old annual best known for its weather predictions. You might recall the Hunter’s Moon, or the Harvest Moon, and who could forget the Beaver Moon?

Tonight’s moon is called the Snow Moon, named by the American Indians for the obvious reason: February is the snowiest month. (This moon was also sometimes called the “Hunger Moon,” for the same reason, and the “Shoulder to Shoulder Around the Fire Moon.”) Generally speaking, you get only one full moon per month. In fact, the word “month” is derived from “moon,” referring to a full cycle of its phases. Next month is the Worm Moon, because with the onset of spring, you have the wormiest month. And so on.

If you decide to have a moonlit picnic with your sweetheart, that kind of trivia is solid gold.

THE SOFTER SIDE OF A LUNAR ECLIPSE

So what of this eclipse business? You might notice also that the moon seems a little … off. I don’t want to get your hopes up here: You will not see a Pacman-like chomp taken out of the moon, nor any well-defined line that you can point at and say, “See that? That is the edge of the Earth’s shadow.”

Penumbral eclipses are a bit subtler than that. What you’ll want to look for is a darker hue to pass across the lunar surface. That’s it, but it’s still really cool. What’s happening is this. Shadows have two elements: the umbra and the penumbra. The umbra is the darkest part of a shadow. (The red super harvest moon in 2015 was caused by the Moon passing into the umbra of the Earth’s shadow.) The penumbra is the much gentler, much blurrier shadow that surrounds the umbra. It’s the place where the light source (in this case the Sun) is partially blocked, but not entirely. That’s the part of the Earth’s shadow that the Moon will be passing through tonight. As long as you keep your expectations in check, you should enjoy the show.

(There’s also the antumbra, in which the object being shadowed is fully contained in the light source—we’ll talk more about that on February 26, when the Moon as seen from the Southern hemisphere will become a giant, terrifying ring of fire.)

If you live in North America, you can watch the penumbral eclipse on February 10 at precisely 7:43 p.m. EST.

THE TEAL COMET NEAR HERCULES

There will also be a comet out for your pre-Valentines Friday date night viewing pleasure. Its full name is Comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdušáková, but its friends call it “45P.” It will be visible around 3:00 a.m. EST. This particular comet visits us every five years, and tonight is its closest approach to Earth in its orbit. You’ll be gazing in the vicinity of the constellation Hercules, and looking specifically for a teal dot with a tail.

Realistically speaking, though, will you be able to see it? If the light pollution in your area is nil, and if your eyes are well adjusted, there’s a very slim chance you’ll be able to spot it with your naked eyes. I would not risk a disappointing end to a date night, however. After checking out the eclipse, head inside where it’s warm and go to Slooh. At 10:30 p.m. EST, astronomers will begin coverage of the comet, and use telescopes to give you a much better view than you’ll find in the backyard. If you have a fireplace, all the better for setting the mood. It is a Shoulder to Shoulder Around the Fire Moon, after all.

A major nor’easter will bring heavy snow and gusty winds to the northeastern megalopolis on Thursday, February 9, dropping at least a half-foot of snow across the most heavily populated region of the United States. The dose of intense winter weather will snarl travel and likely bring daily life to a halt through the beginning of the weekend. The heaviest accumulations are possible between New York City and Boston, where some locations could see a foot or more of snow by sunrise on Friday.

The catalyst behind the classic winter storm is a strong disturbance digging its way east across the country. The same system that will trigger the nor’easter brought snow and subzero temperatures to the Upper Midwest earlier this week; morning lows dropped lower than -20°F in North Dakota and Minnesota on Wednesday morning. The upper-level trough will cause a low-pressure system to develop at the surface in Virginia on Wednesday night. This low will quickly strengthen as it moves over the Atlantic Ocean and tracks parallel to the East Coast. It’s a scene that repeats itself every winter—one that snow lovers and winter haters alike are all too familiar with.

The latest forecast from NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center calls for about half a foot of snow between eastern Pennsylvania through southern New England. The greatest chance for heavy snow stretches from northeastern Pennsylvania through eastern Massachusetts, where the most productive snow bands are expected to develop. Precipitation will begin on Thursday morning in the Mid-Atlantic and work its way north through the afternoon hours. The last of the snow should taper off on Friday morning in New England. It’s worth noting that there will be a relatively sharp gradient between having to crack out the shovel and a dusting on the grass—a boundary that’s likely to set up right along the Mason-Dixon Line. Precipitation will fall mostly as snow north of this line, while the storm will start as rain and could end as some snow to its south. It’s likely too warm for the Washington D.C. area to see more than a light coating of snow at the most, but its far northern suburbs could see a few inches from this system.

Like so many nor’easters before it, this storm will play tug of war between unusually warm temperatures to the south and bitterly cold Arctic air to the north. The sweet spot for the heaviest snow will be where the cold air intersects with the area that has the highest moisture and the strongest lift, a region called the deformation zone. The deformation zone is almost always on the northwestern side of nor’easters, resulting in a swath of heavy snow that parallels the coast. Sometimes the heaviest snow bands set up far enough inland to miss the big cities, and sometimes they form right over the cities and result in those blockbuster blizzards that people remember for years.

The fact that the heaviest snow falls in such a narrow area makes forecasting nor’easters a tricky business. Warm air is a plague in East Coast winter storms; it can turn a potential snowstorm into an icy disaster or just a cold, miserable rain. A small eastward or westward shift—just one or two dozen miles—can render a snowfall forecast completely useless. This happened just last month during the significant snowstorm in the Carolinas and Virginia. The storm tracked a little farther inland than expected, allowing warm air to chew away at the snow and result in mostly ice around cities like Raleigh, North Carolina, while giving heavier snow to Greensboro, two hours to the west of Raleigh.

Temperatures have been a roller coaster leading up to this snowstorm, and that trend will continue soon after it leaves. It’s been so warm on the East Coast lately that some cities are easily setting daily high temperature records, including Washington D.C’s major airports on Tuesday and every airport around New York City on Wednesday. Temperatures behind the nor’easter will remain frigid during the day on Thursday and Friday as Arctic air drains in with the westerly winds behind the storm, aided by the icebox effect of having snow on the ground. Low temperatures on Thursday night will fall into the teens and single digits in areas with snow on the ground, and high temperatures on Friday will struggle to climb out of the 20s. Highs will quickly climb back above normal on Sunday and last through early next week, helping to melt any snow that falls from this hard-hitting but ultimately fleeting burst of winter.

Every year on the second day of February, the country checks in with a dorky and lovable northeastern weather forecaster to see what he has to say about the fate of the remainder of winter. It’s not Al Roker, of course, but a pampered groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil, a mythological staple of American childhoods for generations. Rooted in European folklore and brought to the U.S. in the 1800s, the tradition holds that there will be six more weeks of winter if Phil comes out of his burrow and sees his shadow. If he doesn’t see his shadow, it means we’ll have an early spring that year.

If he’s wrong—analysts can’t quite agree on his accuracy rate—authorities in Punxsutawney insist the clairvoyant groundhog prophesied the weather correctly and his interpreter simply misheard him. If only that excuse worked for meteorologists! Nobody seriously expects an accurate weather forecast from a woodchuck whispering to a guy in a tuxedo and top hat, but everybody expects accurate forecasts from the professional men and women who issue predictions every couple of hours the whole year round. Despite the annual show in rural Pennsylvania, weather forecasting is still one of those professions that’s cool to hate. That disdain is undeserved. Here are four reasons why.

1. FORECASTERS AREN’T IN CAHOOTS WITH STORES TO SELL SHOVELS AND UMBRELLAS.

It’s common for small talk to begin with the assertion that your friendly neighborhood meteorologist is a liar and a guesser, taking wild swings at a map all while stuffing their pockets with bribes from hardware stores to falsely forecast bouts of doom and gloom. Yet despite all of that supposed misinformation, most people still reliably check the weather forecast at least once a day.

The bad rap that weather forecasters get is the result of confirmation bias on the part of people repeating these myths in the first place. You’re more likely to remember an inaccurate forecast—called a “bust”—than you are to remember a forecast that was dead-on, and all those memories add up after a while, making you think that forecasts are more inaccurate than they really are.

2. WEATHER FORECASTING IS ACTUALLY PRETTY ACCURATE THESE DAYS.

The hard data backs up the fact that most weather forecasts are issued on solid footing. Some areas are harder to forecast than others. Miami’s weather is reliably monotonous, while Atlanta, just a few hundred miles away, can experience several dramatic swings in weather conditions in just one day.

Nationwide, Forecast Advisor calculates that the average accuracy rate for weather forecasts generally rests somewhere between 70 and 80 percent. This figure includes most major public and private weather outlets, including the National Weather Service (NWS), The Weather Channel, and AccuWeather. This statistic reflects the fact that meteorologists are equipped with better technology and better knowledge than ever before, allowing them to more confidently issue predictions with greater accuracy for a longer stretch of time. And forecasting is only going to get more accurate, thanks to the newest GOES satellite and a group of suitcase-sized satellites that track hurricanes, all of which launched in late 2016.

Getting three-quarters of your predictions right isn’t perfect, but weather forecasting is one of the only careers where it’s your duty to predict the future every day. There’s always going to be some unpredictability in a vast, fluid atmosphere, but our ability to anticipate its movements is slowly getting better with time.

3. TEMPERATURE FORECASTING HAS IMPROVED DRAMATICALLY IN RECENT DECADES.

The NWS is the official branch of the United States government that issues weather forecasts and monitors the skies to issue alerts to help the public steer clear of hazardous conditions. Like all good forecasters, the NWS keeps track of all their forecasts [PDF] and compares them to actual weather conditions through a process called verification. This data helps them figure out what they did right and improve on the forecasts that they got wrong.

One of the most interesting aspects of their forecast verification is how far we’ve come in telling temperature over the past couple of decades. According to their findings, a two-day temperature forecast in 2015 was just as accurate as a one-day forecast back in 1995. Even more astounding is that a five-day temperature forecast issued in 2015 had the same accuracy as a two-day forecast issued in 1985. That means that a high-temperature prediction issued on Monday for Friday of the same week was just as accurate in 2015 as a forecast high issued on Monday for Wednesday just 30 years ago. That’s pretty good—and it’s getting a little better each year.

4. TORNADOES ARE STILL TOUGH TO PREDICT, BUT SPOTTING THEM IS GETTING EASIER.

The United States sees more than a thousand tornadoes in an average year. Many of those tornadoes can occur in big outbreaks, but the vast majority of tornadoes occur without much fanfare. Unfortunately, tornadoes are the last thing you want to happen without fanfare.

Tornado warnings are common to a fault. In 2016, the NWS issued 2049 tornado warnings across the country, yet there were only about 1060 tornadoes reported through the end of the year. Assuming that about 60 percent of tornadoes received warnings—the average for the past couple of years—that means that roughly 70 percent of all tornado warnings issued last year were false alarms.

False alarms are a big deal. They have a huge impact on how people react in a dangerous situation. The official false alarm rate reported by the NWS hovers between 70 and 75 percent each year, and the “probability of detection”—whether they issued a warning for a tornado at all—has been around 60 percent for the past few years. That means that tornadoes only form in about 25 to 30 percent of all tornado warnings, and almost 40 percent of tornadoes occur outside of a warning.

Meteorologists have a long way to go on warning us about tornadoes, but they’re getting better. Weather radar is more advanced today than it was five years ago, and much better than it was through the early 1990s. Modern weather radar can detect wind speeds and foreign objects in a thunderstorm—two things that are tremendously useful in trying to spot a tornado buried in heavy rain. New advances coming out in the next decade or two will give us an even better look at tornadic thunderstorms.

Communication can be incredibly limited in patients with advanced amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative motor neuron disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Those who can communicate minimally with eye movements are considered “locked in,” and those who can no longer communicate with eye blinks or eye rolls are referred to as having complete locked-in syndrome, or CLIS. Most of these patients are believed to remain cognitively aware but cannot communicate any thoughts or feelings to caregivers.

For CLIS patients, “quality of life depends on social care by the family and positive social attention from caretakers and friends,” Niels Birbaumer, senior research fellow in neuroscience and psychology at the Wyss Center in Geneva, Switzerland, tells mental_floss.

Researchers have continued to look for ways to offer these patients noninvasive methods of communicating with their caregivers and loved ones. Birbaumer and his colleagues’ new clinical trial offers some fresh hope to CLIS ALS patients with a new brain-computer technology that can essentially “read” the thoughts of these patients and translate their answers to caregivers through a computer interface. Their results were published today in the journal PLOS Biology [PDF].

The system takes the form of a noninvasive cap, worn on the head. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) determines changes in blood flow in the brain, and an electroencephalogram (EEG) hookup monitors sleep and electrical activity in the brain. It is not the first brain-computer interface that exists to help paralyzed patients communicate, but near-infrared spectroscopy is the only approach that has successfully enabled communication for CLIS patients.

The trial focused specifically on four patients with advanced ALS—two of them in permanent CLIS, and two who were close to entering CLIS, with unreliable communication. Three patients completed more than 46 sessions spread over several weeks, and one patient completed 20 sessions.

The participants trained over the course of several weeks by responding to 500 questions, such as “The capital of Germany is Paris.” They also answered personal questions with known answers (“Your husband’s name is Joachim”) and unknown answers (“You want to be moved from left to right”).

All questions were formatted to require either a true/false or yes/no response, which the patient gave by thinking the answer. “’Yes’ and ‘no’ thinking produces different brain blood flow answers in the frontal part of the brain,” Birbaumer explains. “Each patient has a different answer pattern.”

The questions elicited correct responses 70 percent of the time.

Birbaumer says he was surprised by the results: “I had previously thought that people with complete locked-in syndrome are not capable of communication. In fact, we found that all four people we tested were able to answer the personal questions we asked them, using their thoughts alone.”

The next phase of the team’s research will be to attempt to build a brain-computer interface “which allows CLIS patients to select letters and words with their brain,” for more robust and individualized communication. While this may involve invasive implantation, they will also try non-invasive methods, although “so far this was not possible.”

Birbaumer and his team would also like to take the knowledge they’ve gained with ALS CLIS patients and extend it to those who experience chronic strokes.

Whatever their next steps, this technology may allow people living in the silence of their own minds a chance to engage in life-improving social interaction.