Tag: science

The recently reactivated WISE space telescope has discovered its first new asteroid.

3:31 pm

The recently reactivated WISE space telescope has discovered its first new asteroid.

2013 YP139 is about 27 million miles (43 million kilometers) from Earth. Based on its infrared brightness, scientists estimate it to be roughly 0.4 miles (650 meters) in diameter and extremely dark, like a piece of coal. The asteroid circles the sun in an elliptical orbit tilted to the plane of our solar system and is classified as potentially hazardous. It is possible for its orbit to bring it as close as 300,000 miles from Earth, a little more than the distance to the moon. However, it will not come that close within the next century.

WISE, renamed NEOWISE by NASA, is expected to come up with a lot more of these in the coming years.

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Astronomers, using Kepler data, have identified dozens of exoplanets between 1 and 4 times the mass of the Earth.

3:23 pm

Worlds without end: Astronomers, using Kepler data, have identified dozens of exoplanets between 1 and 4 times the mass of the Earth.

One of those planets has the same mass as the Earth, but is far less dense.

The significant fact however that came out of the press conference announcing these results is the belief by astronomers that, based on this data, they expect that 1 in 5 solar systems will have an Earth-sized planet.

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Scientists so good they can predict things after it happens

1:57 pm

Normally I would post this tidbit when I do my monthly update of the Sun’s solar cycle, due out in sometime in the next week. However, this piece of news is so ridiculous that I have got to post it now, just so everyone can see how far science in the modern world has declined.

For the past three years I have documented the number of times the solar scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center have changed their prediction for the number of sunspots during this solar maximum. They have revised their prediction so many times with such a large range that it appears that they really don’t have any real system or theory for making this prediction, but are merely guessing based on instinct, opinion, or tea leaves. Moreover, they do not archive their earlier predictions. If I wasn’t documenting them here monthly, there would be no way to know that while today they predict one thing (very close to what is the right number), two years ago their prediction was way off, In recent months, because the changes have become so absurd, I have been making screen captures of each change.

For the past two months they have been stating that the sunspot maximum had occurred during the summer of 2013 with an average daily sunspot number of 65. Below is my screen capture from when they made this change in November.
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The big solar hotshots of 2013.

11:37 am

The big solar hotshots of 2013.

The article is a nice and visually fascinating overview of the twelve most impressive solar events during the past year. Interestingly, I think #7 is the most significant in that it involved things that didn’t happen.

As small sunspot group NOAA 1838 was falling apart, another active region NOAA 1839 appeared just in time to avoid a spotless day, which would have been the first since 14 August 2011! A spotless day during a solar cycle maximum is not uncommon, but it remains of course a rare event. This absolute low in sunspot number highlighted a period of very low solar activity, with hardly any flares (no C-flares from 7 till 17 September: 11 consecutive days) and no (minor) geomagnetic storms for a full month! Meanwhile, the magnetic field near the solar north pole (finally) completed its reversal, whereas this magnetic flip is still ongoing at the south pole. These reversals testify we’re close to the maximum of solar cycle 24. [emphasis mine]

The phrases in bold clarify where we presently stand with the solar cycle. The southern magnetic field is in the process of reversing, but has not yet completed the flip.

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In the final draft of its new report the IPCC has significantly slashed its predictions for how much the climate will warm in the coming decades.

9:29 pm

From the second to the final draft of its newest report the IPCC significantly slashed its predictions for how much the climate will warm in the coming decades.

In the second draft of the Fifth Assessment Report it had broadly agreed with the models that the world will warm by 0.4 to 1.0 Cº from 2016-2035 against 1986-2005. But in the final draft it quietly cut the 30-year projection to 0.3-0.7 Cº, saying the warming is more likely to be at the lower end of the range [equivalent to about 0.4 Cº over 30 years]. If that rate continued till 2100, global warming this century could be as little as 1.3 Cº.

This will bring the IPCC’s predictions more in line with the reality of the past two decades, which has seen a complete pause in any warming.

This is actually very good news, as it suggests that the good scientists in the climate community are beginning to regain control of the science. Rather than bend to the political winds, the IPCC is being forced to bend to the data itself. Nonetheless, no one should be sanguine about the situation. As noted by Christopher Monckton at the link,

Multiple lines of evidence now confirm that the models and consequently the IPCC have overestimated global warming. Yet neither that misconceived organization nor any of its host of unthinking devotees has displayed any remorse. Instead, they persist in maintaining that the warming is temporarily paused, though they cannot really explain why; or they blame particulate aerosols, their get-out-of-jail-free fudge-factor; or they pretend warming is really continuing unabated, saying it has gone into hiding deep in the oceans where, conveniently, we cannot measure it, or that the Earth-atmosphere system has a fever driven by four atom-bombs’-worth of heat content increase every second.

What they are not prepared to countenance, notwithstanding the real-world, measured evidence, is the growing probability that they and their precious models have so badly misunderstood the climate, or so well understood it and so badly misrepresented it, that global warming is simply not going to occur at anything like any of the exaggerated rates that they had until now so confidently over-predicted.

Read the whole thing. Look especially at Figure 9, the last figure, as it shows the data in comparison with the predictions in all the IPCC reports.

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Scientists tell the truth.

8:46 am

Scientists tell the truth.

I especially like this one: “We assume 50 Ivy League kids represent the general population because actual ‘real people’ can be sketchy and expensive.”

Recently there were two college students with me on a cave trip and they were talking about their lab work and said the exact same kind of thing: Sometimes the parameters of an experiment are chosen not for scientific reasons but for convenience or emotions irrelevant to the experiment.

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How global warming activists ended up getting stuck in the ice fields surrounding Antarctica.

8:45 pm

How global warming activists ended up getting stuck in the ice fields surrounding Antarctica.

The first error expedition leaders made was under-estimating the prevailing sea ice conditions at Mawson Station, their destination. The scientists seemed to be convinced that Antarctica was a warmer place today than it had been 100 years earlier, and thus perhaps they could expect less sea ice there. This in turn would allow them to charter a lighter, cheaper vessel.

And then there’s this:

Why the vessel got trapped in the first place may be because [project leader and professor Chris] Turney never bothered to look at sea ice charts, which showed near record high levels of sea ice surrounding Antarctica. Moreover, Turney even denied that the overall sea ice trend was expanding around the continent. Fox News writes, “Turney said it was ‘silly’ to suggest he and 73 others aboard the MV Akademic Shokalskiy were trapped in ice they’d sought to prove had melted. He remained adamant that sea ice is melting, even as the boat remained trapped in frozen seas.”

Did he expect to find less ice than Mawson did 100 years earlier? This appears to be what he expected, given his expedition’s planning. [emphasis mine]

In other words, this group and its so-called scientific leader are typical of the entire global warming climate community. Facts are irrelevant. The Earth is warming, the icecaps are disappearing, and to hell with any data that says otherwise.

Eventually, however, reality bites. Personally, I would much rather focus on reality first, so that I am prepared to deal with it when it jumps up at me.

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The geological history of Venus: What’s known, not known, and unknown.

11:48 am

The geological history of Venus: What’s known, not known, and unknown.

This is a very clearly written overview by James Head, one of the world’s preeminent planetary geologists, of what has been learned about the geology of Earth’s sister planet, the planet of a million volcanoes. Key quote:

Many features on Venus (folded mountain belts, rift zones, tesserae) were like Earth, but there were few signs of Earth-like plate tectonics, so that Venus seemed to have a single lithospheric plate that was losing heat conductively and advectively. But the cratering record presented a conundrum. First, the average age of the surface was <20% of the total age of the planet, and second, the average was not a combination of very old and very young surfaces, such as Earth’s continents and ocean basins. Third, the lack of variability in crater density, and of a spectrum of crater degradation, meant that all geological units might be about the same age. This implied that the observed surface of Venus must have been produced in the past hundreds of millions of years, possibly catastrophically, with very little volcanic or tectonic resurfacing since then! Suddenly, Venus was not like Earth, nor like the Moon, Mars, or Mercury.

Some scientists even believe that Venus was essentially resurfaced in a massive volcanic event about a half billion years ago. Others disagree. Meanwhile, the European probe Venus Express has gotten hints that volcanic activity is still going on.

As Head concludes, it has been 20 years since the last spacecraft arrived at Venus to do geological research. It is time to return.

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Scientists think they have found cloudy skies on a nearby super Earth.

9:25 am

Scientists think they have found cloudy skies on two nearby exoplanets.

One planet is a super Earth, while the other is Neptune-sized.

This finding, as fascinating as it is, is also incredibly uncertain. The data suggests clouds, but the data is quite thin. We are barely seeing what’s there. Without doubt, the reality is far more complex — and interesting — than presently theorized.

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Mars One narrows its applicant pool of would-be Martian colonists from 200,000 to just over a 1000.

6:08 pm

Mars One narrows its applicant pool of would-be Martian colonists from 200,000 to just over a 1000.

People started applying for a voyage to the red planet in April 2013 through Mars One, a Netherlands-based private venture that wants to land humans there by 2025. By the time the company stopped taking applications, more than 200,000 people had submitted one. Today, Mars One announced that it’s made a short(er) list of 1,058 applicants.

These are individuals willing to make a one way trip.

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Global sea ice area is now at its second highest level ever recorded, and closing in on an all time record.

10:50 am

The uncertainty of science: Global sea ice area is now at its second highest level ever recorded and is closing in on an all time record.

The link is also amusing in that it includes some interesting predictions made by global warming scientists and politicians in recent years, all predicting that the Arctic Ocean would be ice free by 2013.

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Were the dinosaurs covered by feathers or scales? Scientists disagree.

9:11 am

Were the dinosaurs covered by feathers or scales? Two scientists find that most had scales.

Palaeontologists Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum in London and David Evans of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto created a database of all known impressions of dinosaur skin tissues. They then identified those that had feathers or feather-like structures, and considered relationships in the dinosaurian family tree.

The results, which Barrett revealed at the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology’s annual meeting in Los Angeles in late October, indicate that although some ornithischians, such as Psittacosaurus and Tianyulong, had quills or filaments in their skin, the overwhelming majority had scales or armour. Among sauropods, scales were also the norm.

The uncertainty of science: Don’t bet any money on this result. The number of dinosaur fossils actually known is relatively tiny — making the overall database tiny as well — and further discoveries could change everything.

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Photos taken 33 years ago by a photographer who died in the Mt. St. Helens eruption have been discovered and developed.

9:52 pm

Photos taken 33 years ago by a photographer who died in the Mt. St. Helens eruption have been discovered and developed.

Reid Blackburn took the photographs in April 1980 during a flight over the simmering volcano. When he got back to The Columbian studio, Blackburn set that roll of film aside. It was never developed. On May 18, 1980 — about five weeks later — Blackburn died in the volcanic blast that obliterated the mountain peak.

Those unprocessed black-and-white images spent the next three decades coiled inside that film canister. The Columbian’s photo assistant Linda Lutes recently discovered the roll in a studio storage box, and it was finally developed.

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Mars Express will do an extremely close flyby of the martian moon Phobos on December 29.

9:21 am

Mars Express will do an extremely close flyby of the martian moon Phobos on December 29.

Late this month, ESA’s Mars Express will make the closest flyby yet of the Red Planet’s largest moon Phobos, skimming past at only 45 km [28 miles] above its surface. The flyby on 29 December will be so close and fast that Mars Express will not be able to take any images, but instead it will yield the most accurate details yet of the moon’s gravitational field and, in turn, provide new details of its internal structure.

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WISE, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, sent back its first images in almost three years this week.

5:57 pm

Back from the dead: WISE sent back its first images in almost three years this week.

The Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft, or NEOWISE, has taken its first set of test images since being reactivated in September after a 31-month-long hibernation, NASA officials announced today (Dec. 19). The space agency wants NEOWISE to resume its hunt for potentially dangerous asteroids, some of which could be promising targets for future human exploration.

We should note that NASA had shut down this functional space telescope even though the cost to use it to hunt asteroids would be relatively little. Cost was cited as the reason, but I suspect it was a combination of the vast overruns for the James Webb Space Telescope and the Obama administration’s puzzling hostility to science at NASA.

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Gaia, a astronomical space probe designed to pinpoint the location of a billion stars to map the Milky Way, was successfully launched today.

9:08 am

Gaia, a astronomical space probe designed to pinpoint the location of a billion stars to map the Milky Way, was successfully launched today.

This is an important spacecraft, but don’t expect to hear anything about its work now for a long time, as it will take a few years to accumulate the data involved and then a years beyond that to analyze it. Nonetheless, when Gaia’s work is finished we will have our first reasonably good map of the Milky Way, with the ability to project that map forward and backward in time.

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A non-paleontologist documents significant errors in the work of several noted paleontologists.

11:46 am

Dinosaurgate: A non-paleontologist documents significant errors in the work of several noted paleontologists.

About two and half years ago, Dr. Myhrvold came across a 2009 paper by Dr. Erickson as he was trying to answer the question, “Why were dinosaurs big?” He said data in two of the graphs, one plotting the length of the thigh bone versus age, the other mass versus age, conflicted with each other. “I instantly knew that this couldn’t be correct,” Dr. Myhrvold said.

Dr. Myhrvold said he contacted Dr. Erickson, asking for the original data. While Dr. Erickson answered some questions, he said the data was on a computer he had gotten rid of and later that he did not have time to answer more questions, Dr. Myhrvold said.

Dr. Myhrvold was able to obtain some of the data from other researchers and thought he could do a better statistical analysis. Last year, he submitted a paper with his calculations — a fairly esoteric scientific disagreement about how best to extract reasonable generalizations from a limited number of fossils.

Dr. Erickson was one of the reviewers and argued strongly against publication. While praising Dr. Myhrvold’s accomplishments and saying the calculations appeared to be numerically correct, Dr. Erickson said the paper would not advance scientific understanding.

“In fact it will hurt our field by producing inherently flawed growth curves, misrepresenting the work of others, and stands to drive a wedge between labs that are currently cordial with one another,” he wrote. [emphasis mine]

Shades of Phil Jones of Climategate fame, who when asked for his original climate data first stalled, then stonewalled, then admitted that the data had been “lost.” Similarly, like the Climategate scientists who tried to squelch the work and careers of anyone who challenged them, the paleontologist being accused here attempted to prevent the accusation from been published.

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More than half the U.S. is covered with snow this November, the most in ten years.

8:08 pm

More than half the U.S. is covered with snow this November, the most in ten years.

The certainty of climate scientists:

Kevin Trenberth, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, agreed the surprising amount of snowfall is a separate issue from climate change. “If you warm up the atmosphere, you can actually get heavier snowfalls in winter,” Trenberth said. “That’s one of the ironic things about global warming. Maybe we can say that without climate change, it would be colder still. [emphasis mine]

In other words, according to Trenberth the increased snow cover and cold temperatures are evidence of global warming.

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After a successful soft landing, China’s lunar rover Yutu has successfully rolled onto the lunar surface.

10:58 pm

The competition heats up: After a successful soft landing, China’s lunar rover Yutu has successfully rolled onto the lunar surface.

The real significance of this mission is that China has now demonstrated that it has developed the engineering to achieve a controlled soft landing on another world. With this technology, they can move on to building a manned lander, something only the U.S. has been able to accomplish.

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India’s Mangalyaan Mars probe successfully completed its first midcourse correction maneuver today.

9:09 am

India’s Mangalyaan Mars probe successfully completed its first midcourse correction maneuver today.

As with the images the probe took of Earth, the success of this maneuver demonstrates the ability of the probe’s engineers to control, operate, and precisely point the spacecraft’s engine. It also proves that engine works as designed.

Here’s an interesting cultural tidbit: Of the 200,000 people who have applied to Mars One (see my previous post below) to go on its proposed one-way mission to Mars, India has the second most applicants after the U.S.

Mars One applicants come from over 140 countries; the largest numbers are from the US (24 per cent), India (10 per cent), China (6 per cent), Brazil (5 per cent), UK, Canada, Russia and Mexico (4 per cent), Philippines, Spain, Colombia and Argentina (2 per cent), and Australia, France, Turkey, Chile, Ukraine, Peru, Germany, Italy and Poland (1 per cent).

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