If you’ve ever noticed yourself getting a headache just before a storm hits, it might not be a coincidence. In fact, weather conditions are commonly reported as a trigger for headaches and migraine attacks. Unfortunately, it’s not yet within our power to change the weather; but we can help ensure that you’re informed about why an oncoming storm may have you reaching for the painkillers as well as your raincoat.Many people with migraine or who are prone to headaches say that weather can be a trigger. The American Migraine Foundation states that just over a third of migraine sufferers feel that particular weather conditions can bring on an attack, and the UK’s National Health Service lists bad weather among 10 common headache triggers. While anecdotally many people will relate to this phenomenon, the scientific studies on the topic have been a bit more mixed in their results. But there is one particular meteorological factor that comes up time and time again: pressure. Atmospheric pressure and headachesChanges in atmospheric pressure have been repeatedly blamed for headaches and migraine attacks. This explains why some people get headaches on airplanes – air pressure is lower at higher altitudes, and although aircraft cabins are pressurized, you can still feel the effects of the pressure changes during take-off and landing. For some, this means that their ears “pop”, causing temporary hearing loss and, in more severe cases, pain and dizziness. For others, it can lead to a case of what’s been called “airplane headache”. It’s a relatively new name for an issue that’s most likely been around since humans started traveling in big metal tubes in the sky, and it’s usually a stabbing pain towards the front of the head that gets better once the pressure has equalized again.But drops in atmospheric pressure don’t only happen at high altitude. They can also precede a storm, and that’s one of the proposed explanations behind weather-induced headaches.A 2019 review took an in-depth look at barometric pressure headaches, and cited a number of studies showing an association between decreased pressure and headache or migraine symptoms. For example, one study of over 7,000 patients in 2009 concluded that “lower barometric pressure led to a transient increase in risk of headache requiring emergency department evaluation.”However, the review authors pointed out that overall, “the results of [studies into barometric pressure headaches] are inconsistent regarding their directionality and fail to establish a strong association.” A more recent review in 2023 made a similar conclusion. How could atmospheric pressure cause headaches?Despite the mixed results on the topic, it’s hard to ignore the fact that so many headache and migraine patients report worsening symptoms when the air pressure drops – so what could be causing their pain?There are a few different theories, but one of the most commonly cited is its effect on the trigeminal nerve. This is the largest cranial nerve, which branches into the scalp and face and is implicated in many headache and facial pain disorders.There is some literature to suggest that the trigeminal nerve is vulnerable to changes in atmospheric pressure where it meets the narrow tubing of the middle ear. A study in rats in 2010 helped plant the seeds of the link between the trigeminal nerve and weather-related headaches. Decreased air pressure was found to increase electrical activity in certain neurons in the brainstem nucleus that relays sensory information from the face. The authors concluded that similar mechanisms could be at play in humans, and could potentially be responsible for barometric pressure headaches. Building on this, a small pilot study in 2021 found that people exposed to changes in barometric pressure for periods of 8 minutes at a time often reported a feeling of pressure in the head and ears, with a few experiencing mild to moderate headaches. The authors called for a bigger study to see if this could be the reason behind some people’s weather-related headaches.Barometric pressure headaches may also originate from pressure imbalances in the sinuses, as neurologist Dr Elizabeth Hartman explained for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Health Center, which can cause pain in the front of the head and behind the eyes. A sudden drop in atmospheric pressure can also worsen an existing headache or migraine in this way.Other weather-related headache triggersBarometric pressure may not be the whole story. According to the American Migraine Foundation, both temperature and humidity have been implicated as possible triggers for some people. The overall picture seems to be that these kinds of triggers vary greatly across headache sufferers. One study from 2000 demonstrated how migraine patients exposed to the same weather phenomenon – warm westerly wind patterns in southern Canada called chinooks – reported worsening symptoms at different times in response to different conditions.The fact that so many people report weather as a trigger for their headaches or migraines shows it should not be dismissed out of hand, and there is some research to back them up; however, there is still a need for larger, rigorous studies to clearly establish what might be going on.For now, if you are someone whose head aches at the first inkling of storm clouds on the horizon, you might be able to cheer yourself up a little bit by impressing your friends with your near-clairvoyant powers of weather forecasting. Just remember: a magician never reveals their secrets. All “explainer” articles are confirmed by fact checkers to be correct at time of publishing. Text, images, and links may be edited, removed, or added to at a later date to keep information current. The content of this article is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions. 

Like a cuckoo laying its eggs in the nest of an unsuspecting host, the ancient Greeks are said to have infiltrated the city of Troy by hiding inside an enormous wooden horse. From Homer to Hollywood, the tale of this military masterstroke has been told for thousands of years, yet there’s little evidence to suggest it actually happened.According to the legend, the Achaeans – led by Agamemnon and boasting heroic soldiers such as Achilles – spent 10 years besieging Troy without managing to break through the city’s defenses. Pretending to give up, the assailants sailed to a nearby island, leaving behind a massive wooden horse filled with soldiers.Believing that the giant statue was an offering to the god Athena, the Trojans hauled the horse through their city gates and into the defenseless heart of their town, unaware of the enemies hiding within its belly. As night fell, the Greek soldiers emerged from their horse and laid waste to Troy, bringing an end to the epic war.However, archaeologists are yet to discover any solid evidence for the Trojan War, let alone its somewhat ridiculous finale. What we do know is that Troy was probably the name of a Bronze Age city at what is now Hisarlk in western Turkey. Discovered by German explorer Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s, the site has yielded a small number of arrowheads and evidence of fire within a layer of sediment dated to around 1200 BCE, which roughly lines up with the date mentioned by Homer in his epic poem Iliad and could therefore hint at an ancient battle. Linking these finds to a decade-long siege, however, is a bit of a stretch.As for the big old horse, Homer really only mentions it in passing in Odyssey, and the first substantial description of the event can be found in the Aeneid, composed by the Roman poet Virgil more than a millennium after the ploy was supposedly executed. Most modern archaeologists take the ancient artist’s words with a pinch of salt and suspect that the giant horse was probably metaphorical rather than literal.For example, Dr Armand D'Angour from Oxford University has explained that “archaeological evidence shows that Troy was indeed burned down; but the wooden horse is an imaginative fable, perhaps inspired by the way ancient siege-engines were clothed with damp horse-hides to stop them being set alight.”In other words, the mythical Trojan Horse may have been more akin to a battering ram or other war machines that enabled the Achaeans access to Troy via much less subtle means than the story suggests. Unfortunately, however, it’s highly unlikely that archaeologists will ever find the remains of such a contraption – horse-like or otherwise – since wooden artifacts from antiquity tend to decompose long before they could possibly be discovered.Despite this, the idea of the Trojan Horse has become ingrained in modern culture and parlance, even lending its name to a type of computer malware that invades victims’ systems by disguising itself as an innocuous piece of code. Bizarre as the original idea may seem, the concept is the perfect metaphor for something that invades and destroys from within.Perhaps that’s why the ancient poets invented the Trojan Horse to represent the way in which Agamemnon and company took down the city of Troy.

The Earth is currently moving around the Sun at around 107,000 kilometers per hour (66,500 miles per hour), while the Sun hurtles through the galaxy at 828,000 kilometers per hour (514,500 miles per hour).We know this through centuries of observing the planets and the stars, and observing their motion relative to our planet. You see evidence of the Earth's spin constantly, as the Sun and stars move across the sky as we rotate like a gigantic kebab. If you're willing to put the effort in, you could also observe nearby stars apparently changing position in the sky (known as parallax) throughout the year, gathering your own evidence of Earth's orbit around the Sun. You could also observe stellar aberration, building a case for the model of the Solar System we figured out centuries ago.          But, of course, there are people out there on the planet who don't believe this is true. In a recent post by one confused individual, they post the Earth's movement through the Solar System and galaxy, and the fact that we can still do things like tightrope walks and stacking rocks, as "proof" that the model is incorrect.           IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.This is, of course, a hot mess of a post that demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of physics. The idea appears to be that the fact that we don't feel the planet hurtling through the galaxy somehow proves that the planet is stationary.In fact, the reason why we don't feel the Earth move at breakneck (and everything else) speeds is because there is no such thing as an absolute frame of reference in the universe. When not accelerating or decelerating, you are at rest, whether you are hurtling along on Earth, on a rocket heading away from Earth, or slowly orbiting the solar system on Planet 9 (if it exists).A body at rest remains at rest, while a body in motion remains in motion until another force acts upon it, known as inertia. This is the state you are in as you travel on the Earth. The Earth's motion is relatively smooth, though it is slowed and sped up by various factors, including earthquakes. If it were more jerky, you would feel the acceleration and deceleration (from forces being applied to the Earth) but you do not feel constant velocity or inertia.Think about when you are in an airplane. When the vehicle begins to accelerate, you feel this force being applied to you via the chair behind and beneath you. But once the aircraft stops accelerating and achieves a constant speed, your frame of reference is at rest, and you feel as stationary as if you were on the Earth (which, remember, is actually hurtling through the universe). The rocks of the above post are not immune from the laws of motion and inertia. They continue on the path they are set on (in this case, being a cute little stack following the motion of the Earth) until a force (some jerk knocking them over) is applied to them. As well as not having to worry about the motion of the Earth throughout the galaxy (only his frame of reference), the tightrope walker in the post (Philippe Petit) also benefits from the Earth dragging most of our atmosphere along with it through frictional forces.While a stationary Earth would explain why the rocks do not fall over, it would not explain many of the other things (such as parallax of the stars) that we have observed, nor be able to make predictions about the movement of the bodies in the universe – which is why we abandoned that model centuries before the meme was made.

We all know what happens when a meteorite breaks apart as it passes through the heavens, right? Of course we do. The parts of the celestial object that fall to Earth accumulate as a translucent gelatinous substance that evaporates soon after it appears, leaving no trace of its existence.While this may sound like a description from a sci-fi story, it is actually based on a very real substance that has fascinated and baffled people for a long time. For centuries, people from across the UK, Europe, and later the US have discovered what has been called “astromyxin”, “star jelly”, “astral jelly”, “star rot” or something similar, in fields and marshes. But while it was always thought to be a product of the heavens, the source of this gooey mass has a very terrestrial origin, one that is a little gory.A splattering of history Accounts of star jelly are not rare; in fact, descriptions of the substance have appeared in various sources, from folklore and art to natural histories. Discoveries of the snot-like stuff have been reported by both lay people and learned individuals alike.In most cases, someone witnesses a shooting star and then stumbles across an unknown substance in a field. Such discoveries usually occur at dawn, and whatever has been found typically disappears soon after.You can understand why people might be puzzled by the sight of this stuff.Image credit: Matauw/Shutterstock.comIn the 13th century, John of Gaddesden, a medieval physician, described what he called stella terrae (“star of the Earth”) in one of his medical texts. According to his writing, it was “a certain mucilaginous substance lying upon the earth” that could be used to treat particular ailments, such as abscesses.Later, in 1619, Robert Fludd, a physician and mystic, described how he had witnessed a meteor falling from the sky. He searched for its remains and, so the story goes, came across a mass of white slippery stuff containing black dots the next morning. This, he believed, was his shooting star.Similarly, in 1656, the metaphysical poet Henry More reportedly explained that “the Starres eat those falling Starres, as some call them, which are found on the earth in the form of a trembling gelly, are their excrement".Even in the 20th century, people reported coming across the substance. In several accounts, the jelly appeared to fall from the sky onto unfortunate residents, as was said to have happened in Reading, Massachusetts in 1983. Similarly, in 1995, a jelly-like substance was allegedly found in a garden in Oxfordshire, England, and was so abundant that it could “fill a kettle”.It is even possible that the phenomenon was known to non-European/Western people too. During the 1950s, Francis Huxley, the British botanist, reported that the Urubu people of Brazil believed that stars sometimes fell from the sky. He claimed to have come across one himself while exploring the jungle – it was a soft blue jelly-like substance.What the sludge? Obviously, star slime has nothing to do with actual meteorites or stars. We know that most meteors are made of rock and ore and, if any of them pass into our atmosphere, they quickly become super-heated. There is no way a gelatinous substance could ever survive such conditions.Still, for as long as star jelly has been identified, people have attempted to explain what it is. The more naturalistic explanations – ones that do not involve falling stars – started to appear in the 17th century, during the heyday of the Scientific Revolution. Various individuals associated with the Royal Society dealt with the substance, including Robert Boyle and Christopher Merrett. The latter explained how various people thought “star-shoot” could be a fungus, some sort of ram ejaculate, or even the leftovers of “dissolved frogs”, as bones had been found among the jelly bits.  Merrett eventually decided that the jelly was indeed related to frogs and apparently demonstrated that it came from a poor amphibian that had been chewed up by cows. John Morton later reached similar conclusions in his The Natural History of Northamptonshire. He even claimed to identify blood vessels and pieces of skin within the goo.Space goo, this is not.Image credit: emka74/Shutterstock.comOver the years, other explanations have been offered, which include the stuff being a byproduct of cyanobacteria, the fruiting bodies of slime molds, or something vomited up by birds and mammals. However, the most likely answer comes back to the frogs.It is probable that star jelly does indeed comes from eviscerated amphibians that have been ripped apart and devoured by predators. As this happens, their ovum jelly is released, which then expands as it comes into contact with moisture – such as the morning dew or rain. Anyone casually examining the gloop may not see any evidence of its former owner, nor any eggs, as they would likely be eaten quickly.So, far from being something mystical from the heavens, the mystery of star jelly probably relates to some very unfortunate amphibians. Still, the story of the substance has shown just how curious people are about unusual discoveries like this, as well as the efforts they will go to to explain them.  

Among its other hellish conditions, Venus is bone dry, despite having once had plenty of water. Where did it all go? A new analysis attributes it to “dissociative recombination”, which caused a loss of hydrogen atoms at twice the rate of previous estimates.Science fiction writers once set their works in the oceans of Venus, which they imagined sat beneath those endless clouds. Once spacecraft checked our neighbor out, the horrifying heat made clear there’d be no liquid water – but where was all the water vapor? Scientists have continued to ponder why Venus is hot and dry, rather than hot and wet, and what the implications might be for planets with more hospitable temperatures.Venus probably started out with a fairly similar amount of water to Earth. Yet it has a hundred-thousandth as much left, all of it in the atmosphere, rather than being distributed between ice, ocean, and air like Earth’s.Once Venus had similar amounts of water to Earth. It must have gone somewhere.Image Credit: NASAThe turbocharged Greenhouse Effect on Venus would have boiled off its water, leading to the steam escaping. However, if steam loss was the whole story, water equivalent to a global layer 10-100 meters (33-330 feet) deep should have been left behind.“As an analogy, say I dumped out the water in my water bottle. There would still be a few droplets left,” said Dr Michael Chaffin of the University of Colorado, Boulder in a statement. Chaffin is part of a team blaming the molecule HCO+, which they have already identified as a major culprit in Mars losing most of its water.There’s evidence to support the confidence Venus once had Earth-like quantities of water. Deuterium (hydrogen’s isotope with one neutron) is less likely to escape than ordinary hydrogen, and the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium reveals how much was once present.Whether there is a little H2O in Venus’s atmosphere or a lot, some of it combines with carbon dioxide at altitudes to produce HCO+. However, the upper atmosphere also has plenty of free electrons, which recombine with the HCO+, leaving carbon monoxide and hydrogen atoms.As the lightest element, hydrogen escapes easily from small planets’ gravity when it doesn’t have a heavier partner to anchor it. Unlike helium, hydrogen bonds easily to other atoms, so in the normal course of events it stays home. HCO+ provides a stepping stone to hydrogen becoming free long enough to escape. In Venus’s case, Chaffin and co-authors think, so much escaped that there’s not enough left to make water, and the oxygen has to go bond with something else.In order to explain Venus’s desiccated state, the team thinks there must have been a lot more HCO+ in its atmosphere than previously anticipated.Once all the hydrogen is lost, the HCO+ will be gone, but the authors don’t think we’re there yet. They think it should still be possible to identify small amounts of the molecule to confirm their hypothesis. “One of the surprising conclusions of this work is that HCO+ should actually be among the most abundant ions in the Venus atmosphere,” Chaffin said.Once HCO+ was included in the models, Chaffin and co-authors found the anticipated amount of water roughly matches what we see today, and the hydrogen/deuterium ratio is in the right ballpark as well.None of the spacecraft we have sent to Venus have detected any HCO+. However, the team thought that is because the instruments they carried were not suited to finding it.The forthcoming Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI) won’t change that, but if this explanation is judged plausible future missions might. Much more than our understanding of Venus rests on this.“There haven’t been many missions to Venus,” study co-author Dr Eryn Cangi said. “But newly planned missions will leverage decades of collective experience and a flourishing interest in Venus to explore the extremes of planetary atmospheres, evolution and habitability.”“Water is really important for life,” Cangi added. “We need to understand the conditions that support liquid water in the universe, and that may have produced the very dry state of Venus today.”The study is published in the journal Nature.

Humans are social animals whose web of relationships is convoluted and often changing. Understanding these social networks and their changes has been the remit of different sciences and various theories. One of them was proposed in the 1940s, called social balance theory. Now, researchers have been able to corroborate it using statistical physics.The idea at the center of social balance theory is, as the name suggests, balance. Individuals want and try to keep balanced relationships within their networks. Positive relationships are balanced, while negative or mixed relationships are not, and you need rules to keep the system balanced. The classical model has four simple rules, based on the simplistic idea that positive relationships are "friends" and negative relationships are "enemies".The first rule is that a friend of a friend is a friend. Now, this is an idealized case – do not immediately jump to thinking about that friend of your friend whom you hate. Another rule is a friend of an enemy is an enemy, and obviously the enemy of a friend is an enemy – we've got to defend our pals. The final rule is more subtle: an enemy of an enemy is a friend. The new analysis tends to agree with this requirement, but the scientists had to bring in significant complexity before they were able to model it.“We can finally conclude that social networks align with expectations that were formed 80 years ago,” first author Bingjie Hao, from Northwestern University, said in a statement. “Our findings also have broad applications for future use. Our mathematics allows us to incorporate constraints on the connections and the preference of different entities in the system. That will be useful for modeling other systems beyond social networks.”Crucial to the new model were two factors: not everyone knows everyone else in real life, and some people are more positive than others. Using both constraints actually reproduces a social network just like the one predicted by Fritz Heider 80 years ago.“We have always thought this social intuition works, but we didn’t know why it worked,” added István Kovács, the study’s senior author. “All we needed was to figure out the math. If you look through the literature, there are many studies on the theory, but there’s no agreement among them. For decades, we kept getting it wrong. The reason is because real life is complicated. We realized that we needed to take into account both constraints simultaneously: who knows whom and that some people are just friendlier than others.”The study is published in the journal Science Advances.

The southern Plains of the US are now in the midst of “tornado season”, but this year’s peak of violent storms has already brought with it one of the most unusual types of twister – one that spins clockwise.On the evening of April 30, a powerful thunderstorm known as a supercell made its way east across Oklahoma. Not only do supercells often bring strong winds and large hailstones, but they can also spawn tornadoes, and this one birthed multiple.That’s not exactly an odd occurrence given that tornadoes produced by supercells are the most common kind, but around 10:26 pm CDT, near the town of Loveland, the storm gave rise to a super-rare anticyclonic tornado.Tornadoes that occur in the Northern Hemisphere normally rotate anticlockwise, but in an estimated 1 percent of cases, they instead spin clockwise. Such anticyclonic tornadoes are normally fairly weak, tornado analyst Paul Robinson told the Washington Post in 2013.    IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.On this occasion, however, the unusual tornado continued to go against convention as it remained powerful, with the National Weather Service (NWS) putting out a statement deeming the twister as “large and extremely dangerous”. Luckily, it occurred mostly over farmland, with no reported casualties – just a lot of uprooted trees.The statement also revealed that at one point, the tornado achieved something else out of the ordinary: it was “nearly stationary”, or at the very least moving extremely slowly.“It’s not common to see (tornadoes) be nearly stationary,” NWS meteorologist Rick Smith explained to CNN. “Tornadoes are almost always going to just go wherever the supercell thunderstorm goes.”This atypical tornado was far from the only one getting things a bit backward that day. Normally, tornadoes in the US travel from west to east, but the mother supercell popped out another irregular offspring that ended up looping back over the path it just took.According to Smith, it’s possible that the two unusual tornadoes were even active at the same time. “You certainly don’t see this every day,” said the meteorologist.   IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.Though tornadoes can happen at any time, the spring months usually see an uptick in storms in the US, with the peak “tornado season” for states such as Oklahoma occurring from May to early June and through to July further north. The lead up to this year’s season has been pretty busy, with the NWS Storm Prediction Center reporting a preliminary figure of 300 tornadoes in the US during April, the second highest figure for the month on record.

There are plenty of venomous and poisonous species across the different habitats of Earth. Some slither, some crawl, and some fly through the sky – but one group takes the title as the most venomous species to swim in the planet's seas. Meet the stonefish.The name “stonefish” refers to five species in the genus Synanceia, including the reef stonefish (Synanceia verrucosa) and the estuarine stonefish (Synanceia horrida). Stonefish are masters of camouflage blending in perfectly with the coral or rocks of the muddy seabed in the Indo-Pacific. According to the Australian Museum, reef stonefish typically eat fish and crustaceans, lying in wait and then striking their prey super fast.The venomous aspect of a reef stonefish comes from the dorsal fin spines that run along the back of the fish. These spines contain a highly toxic venom that can cause intense pain and even death. The Guinness World Records writes that the estuarine stonefish has the largest venom gland of any known fish.          The spines are grooved like a hypodermic needle and are used purely for defense. As such, they are erected by the fish when they feel threatened. Each spine has two venom glands surrounding it. The seriousness of the reaction is largely due to how many spines are involved and the depth at which the spines enter the victim. While the pain is said to be excruciating and incredibly intense, some suggest that hot water therapy is the best pain management tool to inactivate the venom while waiting for medical attention. “When you step on it, that presses on the gland, the gland ruptures and the venom squirts up along the spine,” Bryan Fry, an associate professor at the University of Queensland, told The Guardian. The result is a painful sting that has been described as “worse than childbirth”.Fortunately, an antivenom was developed in 1959, which reduces the likelihood of serious complications.

Hooray! We bring good conservation news from the world of fish biology. Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis) are one of the world's most endangered fish species, living in Death Valley National Park. Biologists have recently completed their annual spring season count and recorded the most fish seen in 25 years.Devils Hole pupfish live in just one small cavern near Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Nye County, Nevada. The pupfish are small, only measuring around 35 millimeters long, and while the males are bright blue the females are a paler teal color. The cavern is filled with water at a balmy 33°C (91°F), and the fish live in the upper 24 meters (80 feet) of the cave. They rely on a small sunlit shelf for algae to eat and are thought to have the smallest habitat of any vertebrate species on Earth. The shelf is essential but precarious; seismic activity can cause the rest of the water to slosh, affecting the shelf, and the cavern is so deep that the bottom has never been reached. The population of Devils Hole pupfish has undergone rapid changes. In the early 1990s there used to be around 200-250 pupfish counted each spring. However, for the last 20 years the population has usually been around 90, with a worryingly low year of just 35 fish counted in 2013. This spring, however, biologists counted 191 Devils Hole pupfish, the highest number since March 1999. The fish are counted twice a year both via scuba diving and on the shelf, with the next count due in the fall of 2024. “It’s exciting to see an increasing trend, especially in this highly variable population. Increasing numbers allow the managing agencies to consider research that may not have been possible in the past, when even slight perturbations of habitat or fish had to be completely avoided. We’re excited about the future directions with respect [to] managing this species,” said Michael Schwemm, Senior Fish Biologist for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, in a statement. 

Around 200 million years ago, Earth's last supercontinent Pangea began to break apart, with plate tectonics slowly moving the continents into the world we recognize today. Plate tectonics is by no means done, and there are several suggested models as to how our future world will look like.Plate tectonics were only discovered relatively recently. Though German meteorologist Alfred Wegner first proposed continental drift in 1912 – and hypothesized that the continents were once joined in a supercontinent he named Pangea – it took until the 1960s and new tech such as echo sounders and magnetometers before scientists studying ocean ridges could explain the processes behind the movement of the crust.Since then, scientists have put together models of plate tectonics, incorporating new data (and the occasional new continent), and even attempted to model what the Earth may look like in our geological future. One such team – looking at how tides are affected by the movement of tectonic plates – produced such a model showing a possible supercontinent in Earth's future.            The simulation is by no means the last word on the matter, with other teams creating their own models of how the continents will move based on new data, and/or better understanding of processes as we learn more.         These models are generally not about finding the shape of Earth's future continents, as interesting as it is to see, but telling us about Earth now.“It probably doesn’t mean anything to humans now in our lifetime,” oceanographer Mattias Green from Bangor University’s School of Ocean Sciences in Menai Bridge, UK, and lead author of the study explained in a statement in 2016. “But it does enhance our understanding of interactions between plate tectonics, Earth’s climate system, its oceans, and even how the evolution of life is, at least to some extent, driven by this tidal process.”For their part, the model provided evidence that Earth is currently going through a period of particularly strong tidal energy, which will last for about 20 million years. As the next supercontinent forms, the ocean basins will form one massive body of water. This body of water will have low tidal energy, leading to smaller waves and less nutrient mixing. As a result, the ocean floor will likely become oxygen-deprived, and devoid of life, which sucks the fun out of the cool animation somewhat.