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The first sign of an impending cataclysm in the summer of 1831 was an eerie dimming of the Sun, which for days appeared bluish green across the Northern Hemisphere. In the ensuing weeks, foul weather and a long cold snap triggered crop failures and famines in India and Japan. The instigator was long presumed to be a climate-altering plume from a major eruption, but the volcano’s identity had been one of the great unsolved mysteries of volcanology. “It’s like a whodunit,” says Clive Oppenheimer, a volcanologist at the University of Cambridge. At long last, the culprit has been unmasked in...

The massive swirling storm system was originally thought to have been discovered by astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1665, but a new study found it was not the most recent spot.That means the Great Red Spot is roughly 190 years old since it was last documented in 1831.Researchers from Spain also discovered that the storm system is shrinking each year, dropping from 24,200 miles wide when it was observed in 1879 to just 8,700 miles wide today - suggesting it could also disappear one day.Researchers looked at early observations dating back to Cassini’s discovery, including his drawing of the celestial...

On this date in 1831, one of the great Spanish liberal officers was shot along with dozens of comrades attempting to spark a revolution. It was a dark time for Spanish liberals under the autocratic rule of Ferdinand VII. Jose Maria Torrijos y Uriarte (Spanish Wikipedia page) was one of the heroes of that downtrodden cause from way back, a noble-born officer who had been made a captain at the precocious age of 13 and been around for all of Spanish liberalism’s greatest early 19th century tragedies. He was in Madrid for the ill-fated uprising against its French occupiers in...

Earth’s magnetic field is what allows us to exist. It deflects harmful radiation. It keeps our water and atmosphere in place. But now it’s acting up — and nobody knows why. Planet Earth is alive. Deep beneath its skin, its life blood — rivers of molten iron — pulse around its core. And this mobile iron is what generates the magnetic field that causes auroras — and keeps us alive. But, according to the science journal Nature, something strange is going on deep down below. It’s causing the magnetic North Pole to ‘skitter’ away from Canada, towards Siberia. “The magnetic...

Rapid shifts in the Earth’s north magnetic pole are forcing researchers to make an unprecedented early update to a model that helps navigation by ships, planes and submarines in the Arctic, scientists said.

The magnetic pole is moving so quickly that it has forced the world’s geomagnetism experts into a rare move. On 15 January, they are set to update the World Magnetic Model, which describes the planet’s magnetic field and underlies all modern navigation, from the systems that steer ships at sea to Google Maps on smartphones. The most recent version of the model came out in 2015 and was supposed to last until 2020 — but the magnetic field is changing so rapidly that researchers have to fix the model now. The problem lies partly with the moving pole and partly...

In the wake of Fox Searchlight’s highly anticipated release of The Birth of Nation, the incredible story of Nat Turner’s slave revolt — and the mystery surrounding his remains after death — stays in the minds of viewers long after they’ve seen the film. The new movie, overshadowed by controversy surrounding previous rape allegations against the film’s lead actor, chronicles the life of Rev. Nathaniel Turner, an enslaved Black man who led one of the bloodiest slave insurrections in American history. In 1831, Turner and a small army of his fellow Black brethren fought their way through Virginia’s Southampton County,...

Congressman Ron Paul introduced H.R. 1831, the “Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2011,” on May 11. It is a simple bill at just two pages in length, and it would legalize the growing of industrial hemp in the United States. Currently farmers can grow industrial hemp only if they have received a permit from the DEA – a prospect that the agency has made all but impossible for decades. Otherwise, it is illegal to grow. Although Rep. Paul has introduced several bills like this one in the past, there are several reasons that this bill should be passed now. Hemp...