Tag: science

Using Google Earth, an archeologist in North Carolina thinks she has discovered two lost pyramid sites in Egypt.

3:39 pm

Using Google Earth, a researcher in North Carolina thinks she has discovered two lost pyramid sites in Egypt.

The researcher’s website, Google Earth Anomalies, is intriguing. It focuses on identifying strange and unexplained features that are seen in Google Earth, such as circular and linear features where none should exist. Often these are artifacts of software processing. Sometimes, as in the Egyptian case above, they are not.

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Dawn has begun its slow departure from Vesta in anticipation of its journey to the solar system’s largest asteroid, Ceres.

11:28 am

Dawn has begun its slow departure from Vesta in anticipation of its journey to the solar system’s largest asteroid, Ceres.

The departure was actually announced two weeks ago, but since this is a very slow process it isn’t like we have missed anything. Dawn’s ion engines are very efficient, but they work at a very leisurely pace. It will take a month for the engine’s thrusters to push Dawn out of its orbit around Vesta.

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A UCLA scientist is proposing that the largest canyon on Mars was formed by plate tectonics

10:03 pm

A UCLA scientist is proposing that Valles Marineris — the largest canyon on Mars and the solar system, was formed by plate tectonics.

“In the beginning, I did not expect plate tectonics, but the more I studied it, the more I realized Mars is so different from what other scientists anticipated,” Yin said. “I saw that the idea that it is just a big crack that opened up is incorrect. It is really a plate boundary, with horizontal motion. That is kind of shocking, but the evidence is quite clear. The shell is broken and is moving horizontally over a long distance. It is very similar to the Earth’s Dead Sea fault system, which has also opened up and is moving horizontally.”

The two plates divided by Mars’ Valles Marineris have moved approximately 93 miles horizontally relative to each other, Yin said. California’s San Andreas Fault, which is over the intersection of two plates, has moved about twice as much — but the Earth is about twice the size of Mars, so Yin said they are comparable.

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Despite a 3x increase in the use of gasoline and diesel fuel since the 1960s, the amount of vehicle-related pollution in the Los Angeles area has declined by 98 percent during that same time.

9:50 am

Good news: Despite a 3x increase in the use of gasoline and diesel fuel since the 1960s, the amount of vehicle-related pollution in the Los Angeles area has declined by 98 percent during that same time.

While many on the left will argue that this proves the validity of government regulation, I only see it as evidence that the initial regulations imposed in the 1970s did their job, and that there is no reason for stricter regulation now, something that the EPA, the Obama administration, and the left continue to demand.

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Using today’s most advanced climate models Indian meteorologists were still unable to correctly predict this year’s monsoon rainfall.

9:39 am

The uncertainty of science: Using today’s most advanced climate computer models and data, Indian meteorologists were still unable to correctly predict this year’s monsoon rainfall.

The rains during the four-month-long monsoon season (June to September) – accounting for more than 80% of India’s annual rainfall – is crucial for the agricultural economy. In April, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) had predicted that the monsoon season would see normal or above-average rainfall. On 2 August, however, it confessed that more than half of India has received “deficient or scanty” rains, and that the monsoon rainfall for the entire country is likely to be 19.7 % less than normal.

Because they were trying to predict a long term weather pattern, the overall rainfall produced by the yearly monsoon, this prediction was not unlike most of the climate temperature predictions produced by the IPCC’s global warming climate scientists. Moreover, this monsoon prediction likely used similar algorithms and the same data as the IPCC models.

Thus, this failed prediction of monsoon rainfall gives us another peek into the accuracy of those global warming climate models. And that peek is not encouraging. It suggests once again that we should not yet put much faith in the predictive accuracy of the IPCC’s models. The science is simply not advanced enough yet.

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The Sun continues to fizzle

9:56 am

Yesterday NOAA posted its monthly update of the ongoing sunspot cycle of the Sun. You can see this latest graph, covering the month of July, below the fold.

As we have seen now for almost four years, the Sun continues to under-perform the predictions of solar scientists when it comes to the number of sunspots it is producing. In fact, that the sunspot number did not rise in July is surprising, as July had appeared to be a very active month for sunspots, with some of the strongest solar flares and coronal mass ejections seen in years. Instead, the number declined ever so slightly.
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Archeologists are disputing the age of a jawbone found in a cave in England.

12:37 pm

The uncertainty of science: Archeologists are disputing the age of a jawbone found in a cave in England.

Both sides of the debate agree that there is a lot riding on the outcome. “What is at stake is the entire [prehistory] of Neandertals and early modern humans in Europe,” Pettitt says. Apart from the Kents Cavern fossil and some 43,000- to 45,000-year-old teeth from Italy whose status as modern human or Neandertal is currently also debated, the oldest undisputed human fossils in Europe are about only 40,000 years old and come from a site in Romania. If modern humans really made it all the way to northwest Europe by 41,500 years ago or even earlier, it would mean that they entered Europe much earlier than once thought and also spread across the continent very rapidly. It would also increase the overlap between modern humans and the Neandertals, who already lived in Europe, and who went extinct sometime between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago. What’s more, such an overlap could make it more likely that Neandertals, who made sophisticated ornaments and tools in their last years, copied these techniques from modern humans rather than inventing them on their own.

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