International Young Scientist Awards

  Moon The  Moon  is Earth's only natural satellite and the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System. The average centre-to-centre distance from the Earth to the Moon is 384,403 km, about thirty times the diameter of the Earth. The common centre of mass of the system (the barycentre) is located about 1,700 km—a quarter the Earth's radius—beneath the surface of the Earth. The Moon makes a complete orbit around the Earth every 27.3 days (the orbital period), and the periodic variations in the geometry of the Earth–Moon–Sun system are responsible for the phases of the moon, which repeat every 29.5 days (the synodic period). The Moon's diameter is 3,474 km, a little more than a quarter of that of the Earth. Thus, the Moon's surface area is less than a tenth that of the Earth (about a quarter the Earth's land area, approximately as large as Russia, Canada, and the United States combined), and its volume is about 2 percent that of Earth. The pull of gravity at its surf

  High seas in murky waters over  prospective seabed mining The prospect of large-scale mining to extract valuable minerals from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, once a distant vision, has grown more real, raising alarms among the oceans' most fervent defenders. "I think this is a real and imminent risk," Emma Wilson of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, an umbrella organisation of environmental groups and scientific bodies, told  AFP . "There are plenty of stakeholders that are flagging the significant environmental risks." And the long-awaited treaty to protect the high seas, even if it is adopted in negotiations resuming on Monday, is unlikely to alleviate risks anytime soon: it will not take effect immediately and will have to come to terms with the International Seabed Authority (ISA). st fervent defenders. (Representative Image) | Photo Credit: AFP The prospect of large-scale mining to extract valuable minerals from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, once

  Cracks on Pluto’s Moon Could Mean a Frozen Ocean Swirls At the Edge of Our Solar System! Brutally reclassified for being the odd one out in 2006, the icy dwarf-planet Pluto no longer  features in any of the primary school science textbooks. But in an interesting turn of events, the ex-planet is back in the news, for one of its moons may have some riveting tidings to offer. In 2015, when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft visited Pluto and its large moon, Charon, the icy geological features on the latter shattered long-held beliefs about Charon being an inert ball of ice. And now, new research suggests those fractures on Charon’s surface may have been caused by icy eruptions from a frozen ocean! Delving into the depths of Charon’s cracks Having toiled to pinpoint the source of cryovolcanic flows and fracture belts on Charon's surface, researchers from the Southwest Research Team finally have an answer. Dr Alyssa Rhoden, team member and SwRI researcher, reveals: "A combination