Paleontologists have discovered a dinosaur dubbed “the chicken from hell.”
Want to explore the Moon’s north pole? You now can, from your home, using an interactive mosaic of images taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Putting a spacecraft back in the orbit it was intended, thirty-one years later.
The spacecraft, ISEE-3, was intended to study the solar wind and the connection between the Sun and the Earth. In 1986 it was diverted instead to take a look at Halley’s Comet. Now there is an opportunity to return it to its original task, assuming engineers can wake it up after three decades.
Using images from Cassini scientists think they have made their first detection of waves on a lake on Titan.
Scientists think they have detected active volcanoes on Venus.
We should hear more about this story in the next couple of days, after the scientists give their presentation at a science conference today. Note too that this result would only confirm other data, such as the fluctuating levels of sulfur in Venus’s atmosphere, that have suggested active volcanoes hidden under that planet’s thick cloud cover.
Mercury, the incredible shrinking planet.
A educated religious scholar looks at one piece from the Tyson television series and discovers that its portrayal of religion is wrong and no better than blatant propaganda.
This morning, I watched the cartoon in question and took some notes. Let’s walk through what it gets right and what it gets wrong.
I’m actually not going to draw from any exotic sources for this post. I’m going to try confine what I include here only to things that can be found on the first page of a Google search for Giordano Bruno. This will illustrate more clearly the rank intellectual dishonesty involved in this segment. The truth of the story was never more than five minutes away from host Neil DeGrasse Tyson and his writers, producers, and animators. They opted to tell half-truths and outright lies instead. [emphasis mine]
I am not surprised. I said that we should expect this. Tyson’s job is to be front man for the modern shibboleths of the leftwing academic society, and this series is going to pound them home, regardless of the facts.
An asteroid will eclipse the bright naked eye star Regulus for 14 seconds on March 19-20, and everyone in the New York City metropolitan area will be able to watch.
Late on the night of March 19–20, the faint asteroid Erigone (eh-RIG-uh-nee) will briefly eclipse the bright naked-eye star Regulus for more than 20 million people in the New York metropolitan area and parts of Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, upstate New York, and Ontario. The star will vanish from sight for up to 14 seconds around 2:06 a.m. EDT on the morning of the 20th for New Yorkers, and a minute or two later farther north.
If the sky is clear, Regulus will be a cinch for anyone to spot — no astronomy experience required! Around 2 a.m. or a bit before, go out and face the Moon. Extend your arms straight out to your sides. Regulus will be straight above your right hand, roughly as high as the Moon is. It’s the brightest star in that area.
Scientists are also asking ordinary citizens to help gather data, which if sufficient will allow them to recreate a reasonably accurate silhouette of the asteroid, thus determining its size and shape.
Astronomers have found the largest yellow star yet, 1,300 times bigger than the Sun.
The new fascism: A new report by the largest coalition of biomedical research organizations has found that animal rights extremists have shifted their tactics, increasingly targeting individuals rather then universities in their violent attacks.
[The report was designed] to provide guidance to scientists and institutions around the world in dealing with animal rights extremists. That includes individuals and groups that damage laboratories, send threatening e-mails, and even desecrate the graves of researchers’ relatives. In 2004, for example, Animal Liberation Front activists broke into psychology laboratories at the University of Iowa, where they smashed equipment, spray-painted walls, and removed hundreds of animals, causing more than $400,000 in damage. In 2009, extremists set fire to the car of a University of California, Los Angeles, neuroscientist who worked on rats and monkeys. And other researchers say activists have shown up at their homes in the middle of the night, threatening their families and children. [emphasis mine]
To attack the relatives and children of researchers is beyond offensive, and places you on the same level as the typical Islamic terrorist. Such behavior cannot be condoned by anyone, and should be opposed aggressively by all parties, even those who oppose the use of animals in research.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter entered safe mode on Friday, caused by unexpected switch to a backup computer.
They expect to get the probe back into full operation in a couple of days.
My heart bleeds: The IAU has issued a press release condemning the public’s naming of Martian craters as initiated by the private company Uwingu.
This war over the right to name features on other planets is mostly a tempest in a teapot, as the actual names will finally be decided by the people who end up living there. Nonetheless, I really like how Uwingu is pushing the IAU’s buttons, as that organization’s self-righteous insistence that it has the power to name everything in space, from craters to the smallest boulders, has for years struck me as pompous and wrong.
The Milky Way’s council of galaxies.
“All bright galaxies within 20 million light years, including us, are organized in a ‘Local Sheet’ 34-million light years across and only 1.5-million light years thick,” says McCall. “The Milky Way and Andromeda are encircled by twelve large galaxies arranged in a ring about 24-million light years across – this ‘Council of Giants’ stands in gravitational judgment of the Local Group by restricting its range of influence.”
McCall says twelve of the fourteen giants in the Local Sheet, including the Milky Way and Andromeda, are “spiral galaxies” which have highly flattened disks in which stars are forming. The remaining two are more puffy “elliptical galaxies”, whose stellar bulks were laid down long ago. Intriguingly, the two ellipticals sit on opposite sides of the Council. Winds expelled in the earliest phases of their development might have shepherded gas towards the Local Group, thereby helping to build the disks of the Milky Way and Andromeda.
The comet that the European probe Rosetta will visit in August has awakened.
Already 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is approximately 50 percent brighter than in the last images from October 2013. While the comet has moved another 50 million kilometers closer to Earth in this time (and 80 million kilometers closer to the Sun), the increase in brightness cannot be explained by the smaller distance alone. “The new image suggests that 67P is beginning to emit gas and dust at a relatively large distance from the Sun”, says Colin Snodgrass from the MPS. This confirms a study presented by Snodgrass and his colleagues last year in which they had compared the comet’s brightness as recorded during its previous orbits around the Sun. The calculations showed that already in March 2014 its activity would be measurable from Earth.
Update: A preprint paper published today on the astro-ph website predicts that Rosetta will see an unusual topographical feature on the comet’s surface when it arrives in August:
Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The Secular Light Curve (SLC) of this comet exhibits a photometric anomaly in magnitude that is present in 1982, 1996, 2002 and 2009. Thus it must be real. We interpret this anomaly as a topographic feature on the surface of the nucleus that may be a field of debris, a region made only of dust or an area of solid stones but in any case it is depleted in volatiles. We predict that images taken by spacecraft Rosseta will show a region morphologically different to the rest of the nucleus, at the pole pointing to the Sun near perihelion.
A scientist describes the skeptic’s view of global warming.
And since good science should be founded of skepticism, he ends up describing the actual state of climate research, outlining all the uncertainties with great clarity and intelligence.
On Monday NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, showing the sunspot activity for the Sun in January. As I do every month, I am posting it here, below the fold, with annotations.
January was the most active month for sunspots this entire solar cycle, exceeding the predictions of the solar scientists, an event that has been quite rare during this generally weak solar maximum. In fact, the Sun was so active that for the first time, the second peak in a double-peaked solar maximum exceeded the first peak in sunspot activity.
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Most Mars meteorites found on Earth may have been blasted here from a single impact on Mars around 3 million years ago.
This is a great scientific detective story. It has a lot of uncertainties, should definitely be taken with a grain of salt, but is nonetheless very convincing.
WISE’s survey of the sky in infrared has now shown that there is no large planet X orbiting beyond Pluto.
This recent study, which involved an examination of WISE data covering the entire sky in infrared light, found no object the size of Saturn or larger exists out to a distance of 10,000 astronomical units (au), and no object larger than Jupiter exists out to 26,000 au. One astronomical unit equals 93 million miles. Earth is 1 au, and Pluto about 40 au, from the sun. “The outer solar system probably does not contain a large gas giant planet, or a small, companion star,” said Kevin Luhman of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State University, University Park, Pa., author of a paper in the Astrophysical Journal describing the results.
The theory, popular among planetary scientists and journalists, is that this theorized distant planet would periodically disturb the orbits of comets in the Oort Cloud, sending them raining down on Earth and thus cause the periodic extinction events found in the paleontological record. It was a cute theory, but based on little data. Now we have the data, and no such planet exists.
The data has found a lot of previously unknown nearby stars and brown dwarfs, which is significant in that they are close and can be studied more easily.
From a Nobel Prize winner: “I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system.”
Read the whole interview. The scientist outlines problems not only with peer review journals but with the whole structure of modern academic science, which to his mind would have prevented him from doing his Nobel Prize winning research had this system existed then.
In reporting on climate change, ABC and CBS have excluded all commentary from any skeptical scientists for literally years.
Neither CBS nor ABC have included a skeptical scientists in their news shows within the past 1,300 days, but both networks included alarmists within the past 160 days — CBS as recently as 22 days ago. When the networks did include other viewpoints, the experts were dismissed as “out of the scientific mainstream” or backed by “oil and coal companies.”
It is almost like these news organizations are closing their eyes and sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting, “La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la…” Not the kind of behavior you’d expect from a legitimate news organization.
Chicken Little report: Another rock will fly past the Earth today, killing no one.
The 33-foot-wide (10 meters) near-Earth asteroid 2014 EC will come within 34,550 miles (55,600 kilometers) of Earth’s surface this evening (March 6) — just 14 percent of the distance between our planet and the moon, which is about 239,000 miles (385,000 km) on average.
The key quote, however, is this:
Such back-to-back flybys are pretty special, though they can’t exactly be called rare events, [JPL scientist Don] Yeomans said. “For small asteroids, one would expect a flyby of the Earth, to within the moon’s distance, about every two weeks,” he said.
In other words, these flybys happen a lot, with no consequences.
Hubble photographs the break-up of an asteroid.
The ongoing discovery of more fragments makes it unlikely that the asteroid is disintegrating due to a collision with another asteroid, which would be instantaneous and violent in comparison to what has been observed. Some of the debris from such a high-velocity smash-up would also be expected to travel much faster than has been observed.
It is also unlikely that the asteroid is breaking apart due to the pressure of interior ices warming and vaporising. The object is too cold for ices to significantly sublimate, and it has presumably maintained its nearly 480-million-kilometre distance from the Sun for much of the age of the Solar System.
This leaves a scenario in which the asteroid is disintegrating due to a subtle effect of sunlight that causes the rotation rate to slowly increase over time. Eventually, its component pieces gently pull apart due to centrifugal force. The possibility of disruption by this phenomenon — known as the YORP effect — has been discussed by scientists for several years but, so far, never reliably observed.
A look at the President’s overall budget for science, which finds spending levels remain flat.
What makes this story significant is that the budget is really flat. Some agencies will get more money, others less, with the total spent about the same as the year before. They are not discussing, as had been typical in the past, the rate of increase in spending, where a reduction in that rate would be reported falsely as a “cut.”
Chicken Little report: A 100-foot diameter newly discovered asteroid will zip past the Earth inside the Moon’s orbit today at 4:07 pm Eastern.
The asteroid, dubbed 2014 DX 110, is about 100 feet in diameter and is set to come within 216,000 miles of Earth — a close shave by astronomical standards, considering our Moon orbits the Earth at a distance of about 238,900 miles.
While an object that size may not seem imposing, if it were to strike the Earth, it would release a devastating amount of energy greater than a nuclear weapon. The infamous asteroid that exploded over Tunguska, Siberia, on June 30, 1908, has been estimated to be about 30 meters to 60 meters — 100 feet to 200 feet — in diameter.
While it is true that the impact would be significant, this news report does the typical fear-mongering to make the story seem interesting. The problem, however, is that the detection of these fly-bys is becoming more frequent. The number of asteroids isn’t changing, but our ability to spot them is, and with more frequent discoveries comes more frequent news stories like this. I fear that such stories — fueled by press releases from various astronomy organizations — are going to begin to sound like a kid “crying wolf” to the general public. The threat from an asteroid impact is real, even if most asteroids miss us. Desensitizing the public to the threat is not a good thing.
One of the publishers who had published numerous fake peer-reviewed papers generated by a computer program has responded aggressively to fix the problem.
And by aggressive I mean positively. They have removed the fake papers and are reviewing everything they’ve published, with the help of the guy who exposed the fakes, to make sure there aren’t any other fakes not yet identified. They also say they are reviewing their procedures to figure out how this happened and to prevent it from happening again.
On Thursday Japan successfully launched the NASA-built Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory (GPM), designed to track the climate’s rain and snowfall.
This Earth observation satellite will supplement TRMM, which has been tracking rainfall in the tropics since 1997.
An image of North Korea taken from ISS illustrates starkly the failure of a state-run top-down dictatorial society.
As is typical for today’s leftwing political correct journalism, this reality is attributed not to communism but to vague generalities. North Korea is a “rogue state” or “North Korea stands alone as an unusually isolated nation, where residents live under a familial dictatorship,” statements that embarrassingly avoid the truth. The rulers of North Korea, like Cuba, refused to reject communist when the Soviet bloc fell in 1991 and have thus left their countries and the people trapped within them poor and bankrupt.
Aren’t you glad that today’s Democratic Party here in the United States considers leftwing dogma the height of progress and a goal worthy of emulation?
Using archived Kepler data combined with statistical modeling, scientists have proposed the discovery of another 715 exoplanets.
This announcement is neat, but despite the many news stories about it today, it should be taken with a grain of salt. What the scientists have really done is pinpoint 715 stars where further research is likely to produce good exoplanet results. It is not guaranteed, however, that a scientist looking at these stars will actually see an exoplanet.
