Author: John Timmer

The stunning images returned from New Horizons' flyby of Pluto revealed a tremendous amount of information about the dwarf planet's features. That's been followed with the long, hard slog of trying to figure out how these features got there. One of the most striking things that needs an explanation is the apparent youth of Pluto's surface, as some areas appear to be crater-free, including the huge area called Sputnik Planum.

Now, researchers are offering an explanation for Sputnik Planum's apparent youth. Two papers in this week's edition of Nature indicate that radioactivity from Pluto's core would be sufficient to power convection of nitrogen ice. But the huge volume of ice involved creates another mystery, as it appears that almost all of Pluto's inventory of this element somehow ended up in Sputnik Planum.

Here on Earth, nitrogen is a gas making up the majority of our atmosphere. Those who have spent some time in a lab may be familiar with its liquid form, used for things that have to be cooled well below environmental temperatures. But on Pluto, it's typically cold enough—about 35K—that the majority of the dwarf planet's nitrogen is in solid form. This nitrogen ice has a couple of unusual properties. One is that it's much denser than water ice, which would allow the equivalent of icebergs to float on its surface. The other is that, since it's not held together by strong interactions among nitrogen molecules, it's relatively easy to deform.

It's Memorial Day, all Ars staff is off, and we're grateful for it (running a site remains tough work). But on a normal Monday, inevitably we'd continue to monitor news from the world of climate change. Our John Timmer examined the claims that scientists are in it solely for the money in February 2011, and we're resurfacing his piece for your holiday reading pleasure.

One of the more unfortunate memes that makes an appearance whenever climate science is discussed is the accusation that, by hyping their results, climate scientists are ensuring themselves steady paychecks, and may even be enriching themselves. A Google search for "global warming gravy train" pulls out over 50,000 results (six of them from our forums).

It's tempting to respond with indignation; after all, researchers generally are doing something they love without a focus on compensation. But, more significantly, the accusation simply makes no sense on any level.

It has been decades since we recognized the threat of climate change, yet very few governments have instituted policies that address the threat. The first strong international agreement was only established very recently. Meanwhile, the companies that supply fossil fuels continue to push exploration for new supplies.

Under those circumstances, it's fair to consider what would happen if the burning of fossil fuel continued unabated. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change typically considers a scenario in which fossil fuel use continues along its current trends until the end of the century. But a new study examines what would happen if the burning of fossil fuels continues for centuries and we gobble up a conservative estimate of everything that's left to extract. That study suggests that the future is going to be significantly warmer than we might have expected.

Carbon dioxide's warming influence doesn't go up in a linear fashion as its concentration increases. Once an infrared photon gets absorbed, it can't be absorbed again, no matter how many additional carbon dioxide molecules are present. So, as concentrations go up, the warming influence tails off. This is generally approximated by saying that each doubling of the gas' concentration has about the same warming effect.

Yesterday in a press conference and speech in North Dakota, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced what some are terming his energy policy. His announcement was extremely short on specifics, included factual inaccuracies, and in some cases contained obvious internal contradictions. As such, what he said might better be termed "energy aspirations." We'll have to wait for the details to see how these aspirations might eventually lead to policy.

What were those aspirations? There were two related themes in the announcements: extraction is good, and regulations are bad because they tend to limit extraction. So Trump will get rid of a lot of the latter in order to boost the former. But, at the same time, he'll preserve our air, water, and natural resources.

At one point, Trump estimated that "75 percent of our rules and regulations are bad for us." So he'd get rid of most of them: "Any regulation that's outdated, unnecessary, bad for workers, or contrary to the national interest will be scrapped, and scrapped completely." Lest there be any confusion about whose rules were problematic, he went on to accuse the Environmental Protection Agency of using "totalitarian tactics" and accused the Obama administration of blocking extraction.

It seems that nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its core. Based on the presence of extremely bright objects early in the Universe's history, it seems that this relationship goes back to the galaxy's very start—galaxies seem to have been built around these monstrous black holes.

But this presents a bit of a problem. There's a limit to how fast black holes can grow, and they shouldn't have gotten to the supermassive stage anywhere near this quickly. There have been a few models to suggest how they might grow fast enough, but its hard to get any data on what's going on that early in the Universe's history. Now, however, a team is announcing some of the first observational support for one model: the direct collapse of gas into a black hole without bothering to form a star first.

Most black holes form through the collapse of a star with dozens of times the Sun's mass. The resulting black holes end up being a few times more massive than our local star. But supermassive black holes are a different breed entirely, with masses ranging anywhere from 100,0000 times to a billion times that of the Sun.

The USDA will receive a record fine against a company that supplies life science researchers with critical materials. Santa Cruz Biotechnology had been facing a variety of animal welfare charges related to lapses in the care of the research animals it kept. The $3.5-million fine comes as part of a settlement that will end the company's issues with federal regulators. While the company won't admit any wrongdoing, the settlement calls for it to lose its license to keep two species of research animals.

Santa Cruz Biotechnology creates antibodies to specific proteins, which researchers then purchase in order to isolate and identify those proteins. The antibodies themselves are often created in furry little factories: research animals that have received immunizations against the protein in question. The animals will then continue making useful antibodies for as long as they live; the antibodies can be isolated using blood samples.

After some initial inspections suggested that Santa Cruz was keeping some animals alive after the point that they should be euthanized due to things like tumors, further searches revealed that the company was being generally shifty about its animal records keeping. An entire herd of goats was never declared in any of the company's paperwork, and the company once cleared out almost 4,000 research animals in advance of some USDA hearings.

Lots of evidence suggests that Mars once had copious amounts of water. There's even some evidence that the planet may have had a large ocean covering the northern pole of the planet. But the existence of the ocean remains controversial. An ostensible shoreline isn't visible across the entire basin that would have been occupied, and arguments have been made that ice would have covered any significant body of water.

Now, however, a large team of scientists has put forward an idea that may help reconcile a number of the apparent contradictions: giant Martian tsunamis. They suggest that one particular region of the red planet they've looked at contains evidence for two of them, the second of which may have driven an icy slurry across Mars' coastal plains.

If you assume an ocean was once in place on Mars, then a tsunami is probably a predictable event. The authors estimate that, in the region they're looking at (part of the Arabia Terra), a meteor big enough to carve out a 30km wide crater would have hit about once every 15 million years. For the area in question, that translates to 23 of these impacts during the time the ocean was thought to be in place.

In 2013, a group at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering brought miniaturization to the world of drones, creating a tiny robot that could fly using rapidly beating wings. Now, after adding a handful of team members from other institutions, Robert Woods' team is back with a paper that gives an update to the group's little flying machines—one that lets the robots hang upside down like bats.

This might at first seem like a frivolous addition (although doing something because it's pretty cool can be a major motivator for cutting-edge engineering). But the researchers have some pretty solid reasons for adding the feature. One of the main reasons you'd build a drone, tiny or otherwise, is to be able to look down on an area from a high vantage point. A big limitation of this approach is that getting to and staying in that high vantage point takes energy.

If there's a way to latch on to something and sit there, it could provide big energy savings, which could allow the drone to monitor an area for much longer than it would otherwise be able to. In the case of a miniature drones, the authors have latch points like "trees, buildings, or powerlines."

Intelligent design, the argument that life is so complex that it must have needed a sophisticated designer, was formulated to get around court rulings that banned creationism from being taught in science classes. For a while, there was an effort to get intelligent design into schools, but that came crashing down after a court case in Dover, Pennsylvania, recognized it as inherently religious. That court case is now more than a decade old, and it looks like some school districts have a short memory.

Zack Kopplin, an activist who has tracked attempts to sneak religious teachings into science classrooms, found a bit of sneaking going on in Youngstown, Ohio. There, a document hosted by the city schools includes a lesson plan that openly endorses intelligent design and suggests the students should be taught that there's a scientific controversy between it and evolution.

The document focuses on the "Diversity of Life" and is a bizarre mix of normal science and promotion of intelligent design. Most of the first page, for example, is taken up by evolution standards that have language that echoes that of the Next Generation Science Standards. But the discussion is preceded by a statement that's straight out of the "teach the controversy" approach: "The students examine the content of evolution and intelligent design and consider the merits and flaws of both sides of the argument." In fact, elsewhere in the document, teachers are told to host a debate where students take turns arguing for evolution and intelligent design.

Jupiter's moon Io is notable for being the most volcanically active body in our Solar System. But Io also has some of the highest mountains we've seen yet, as well, the tallest rising about 17km above the surrounding terrain—Boösaule Montes is roughly twice the height of Mount Everest. And, unlike Mars' Olympus Mons, it isn't volcanic. In fact, many of the moon's tallest peaks aren't associated with volcanoes. They don't form in chains, either, instead rising as isolated blocks roughly 100km across.

Since Io doesn't seem to have plate tectonics, it's not obvious what could build these sorts of peaks. But a new study suggests they're created as a result of volcanism, but only very indirectly. Io's volcanism, it seems, is emptying its interior out fast enough to create intense stresses on its crust.

The researchers involved (Michael Bland and William McKinnon) suggest that Io's mountains do have some earthly analogs. "Their morphology, which varies from peaks and ridges to massifs, plateaux and mesas, is consistent with thrusted or tilted fault blocks," they suggest. These are cases where pieces of the crust are fractured and pushed up relative to their surroundings (though obviously not to the same extent as on Io). So what could be creating the excessive strain that pushes them so high?