Three new Earthlike exoplanets, orbiting M dwarf stars in the habitable zone, have been identified by astronomers using Kepler data.
Duck! New data suggests that the giant ancient asteroid barrage during the early solar system may have lasted much longer than previously thought.
A new study by astronomers has found a vast structure of satellite galaxies and star clusters aligned perpendicular to the Milky Way and extending outward above and below the galaxy’s nucleus by as much as a million light years.
In their effort to understand exactly what surrounds our Galaxy, the scientists used a range of sources from twentieth century photographic plates to images from the robotic telescope of the Sloan Deep Sky Survey. Using all these data they assembled a picture that includes bright ‘classical’ satellite galaxies, more recently detected fainter satellites and the younger globular clusters.
“Once we had completed our analysis, a new picture of our cosmic neighbourhood emerged”, says Pawlowski. The astronomers found that all the different objects are distributed in a plane at right angles to the galactic disk. The newly-discovered structure is huge, extending from as close as 33,000 light years to as far away as one million light years from the centre of the Galaxy.
An animation illustrating this galactic distribution is posted below the fold. You can read the actual preprint paper here.
The problem with this polar alignment with the Milky Way’s core is that the theories for explaining the distribution of dark matter do not predict it.
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Cryosat has released its first seasonal variation map, tracking the growth of the Arctic icecap for the winter of 2010-2011.
The video at the link is quite interesting to watch. Note however that the press information says nothing about whether the icecap was larger or smaller than expected, something that probably is not surprising. It will probably take decades of further work to get the true context of these results.
Wrong again: The Great Lakes are not drying up, as predicted by global warming advocates.
The global warming advocate who invented the concept of “Gaia” now admits he was wrong about global warming.
“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said. “The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.
“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.
Scientists studying Cassini images have spotted the trails of objects as they punch through one of Saturn’s rings.
Good news: Data now suggests that the bats are showing signs of recovery in the first caves hit by white nose syndrome in New York. More here. Plus here’s a link describing some of the research being done on this subject.
Note that the death toll listed in these stories is nothing more than an arbitrary exaggeration by government officials. The National Speleological Society estimates that the numbers are probably far less, and based on my own caving experience, I agree.
Mexico has passed its own very strict climate change law.
The new law contains many sweeping provisions to mitigate climate change, including a mandate to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 30% below business-as-usual levels by 2020, and by 50% below 2000 levels by 2050. Furthermore, it stipulates that 35% of the country’s energy should come from renewable sources by 2024, and requires mandatory emissions reporting by the country’s largest polluters.
Some predictions:
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The uncertainty of science: New data from a neutrino telescope in Antarctica has found that cosmic rays don’t come from gamma ray bursts, as had been believed by astronomers. You can read the paper here. [pdf]
Which means that astronomers at this moment have no idea what produces these high energy cosmic rays.
Dawn’s mission at Vesta has been extended for forty days, while still allowing the spacecraft to reach Ceres as scheduled.
“Our spaceships to fly from here to Abu Dhabi to New Mexico in no more than an hour.”
The suggestion from this story is that not only will Virgin Galactic fly suborbital tourism flights out of Abu Dhabi, but the deal includes an effort to turn SpaceShipTwo into a transportation vehicle as well. Most interesting.
Caving for science! A bacteria, naturally resistant to all antibiotics, has been found in Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico.
The uncertainty of science: A new study has found no evidence of dark matter within 13,000 light years of the Sun, something that had not been expected.
According to widely accepted theories, the solar neighborhood was expected to be filled with dark matter, a mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by the gravitational force it exerts. But a new study by a team of astronomers in Chile has found that these theories just do not fit the observational facts. This may mean that attempts to directly detect dark matter particles on Earth are unlikely to be successful.
These findings will be as controversial as the now abandoned faster-than-light neutrino results last fall. Here, however, the new data is likely going to be more robust, which will cause the entire astrophysical community some real conniptions.
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You can’t make this stuff up: A mathematical journal has retracted a paper because “the article contains no scientific content.”
Indian scientists, using data from their lunar probe Chandrayaan-1, have found evidence for past volcanic activity on the central peak of the crater Tycho.
More bad news for peer-reviewed science: Researchers have found that they cannot reproduce the results for almost ninety percent of the fifty-three “landmark” cancer research papers they reviewed.
It is worse than you think. Consider this quote:
Part way through his project to reproduce promising studies, Begley met for breakfast at a cancer conference with the lead scientist of one of the problematic studies. “We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure,” said Begley. “I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they’d done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It’s very disillusioning.”
The bodies found in Ben Franklin’s basement.
The uncertainty of science: Satellite photos have revealed that there are twice as many emperor penguins in Antarctica than scientists had predicted.
Not surprising in this era of spin-generated science, every article I’ve seen on this story (here’s another) has felt obliged to say how this news means the poor penguins will start off stronger when global warming arrives to decimate their population. However, wasn’t global warming already happening? And wasn’t that warming supposed to have decimated their population already?
The truth is we really don’t know. This new data could actually mean that emperor penguins like global warming. It could suggest that global warming hasn’t started yet. It could even be evidence that the climate isn’t warming at all.
But no, let’s just spin it in one direction: global warming is happening, and it will kill penguins. No matter how many penguins we find.
The world’s biggest atlas: Yours for only $100K.
Europe’s primary Earth-observation satellite, Envisat, has gone silent.
Launched in 2002, the satellite is billed as the most sophisticated environmental monitor in orbit, with ten instruments providing streams of valuable data on everything from ozone, clouds and greenhouse gases to land-use trends and sea-surface temperatures — data that have figured in more than 2,000 scientific publications, ESA says. Over the years, Envisat has also offered a unique vantage point on major environmental disasters such as the December 2004 earthquake and tsunami in southeast Asia and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Now, scientists fear that the satellite’s decade-long run has come to an abrupt end.
Problems began on 8 April when the satellite’s signal cut out as it was passing over a ground station in Sweden. ESA has been working with a team of scientists and engineers to diagnose the problem and to re-establish contact, but the outlook remains unclear.
New data suggests that a microscopic creature called a tardigrade, along with its eggs, could survive an interplanetary trip.
The 100-year march of technology in one graph.
Astronomers have identified two of the oldest known stars, about 12 billion years old, both only a hundred light years away.
What is intriguing about this discovery is that these two white dwarfs had to have formed very soon after the Big Bang, long before the Milky Way galaxy existed as we know it today. How they ended up here is an interesting puzzle.
Editors representing almost two dozen journals have publicly asked for an investigation into almost two hundred papers authored by anesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii.
On 8 March, the journal Anaesthesia published an analysis questioning data in 168 of Fujii’s papers. Now the group of editors, mostly from journals focusing on anesthesiology, is planning to retract what may be Fujii’s entire English language body of work if the institutions with which he was affiliated cannot confirm that the studies took place, that the original research data have been verified, and that the studies had been properly reviewed in advance for ethical considerations.
Given the results of the Toho University investigation, getting those confirmations might be problematic. According to Ken Takamatsu, dean of the university’s faculty of medicine, Fujii told Toho’s investigating committee that he had discarded the experimental data for all of the studies then being questioned, but he claimed there had been no fabrication. [emphasis mine]
The number of papers in question equals 193. If these are all retracted it would be a new record.
The highlighted words illustrate something that pertains to the climate field, climategate, and Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University. Jones, like the anesthesiologist above, had also destroyed his original data, making it impossible to verify the validity of his work. In both cases, such behavior is completely unacceptable in the field of science. It appears the field of anesthesiology recognizes this obvious fact. Sadly, the climate field does not, as Jones’ work is still considered valid by too many climate scientists.
One more thought: That it was possible for so many papers to be published in peer-reviewed journals — despite the fact that the editors now admit that they cannot even confirm that the studies took place — tells us a great deal about the failures in modern peer-reviewed science.
Mars: dry with only periodic short bursts of wetness.
Though this Science article outlines well the present “consensus” for Mars’s past climate, it also tries to make it sound like the planetary science community had once believed that Mars was once ocean-covered like the Earth and now has abandoned that consensus. To this I say bunk. Though many respected planetary scientists have looked for and found evidence for a past ocean on Mars, this possibility has always been controversial. From my readings most planetary scientists have always believed that Mars has generally been dry, interspersed with short periods when there is flowing liquid water on its surface. Even the advocates of the Martian ocean never proposed an Earthlike ocean, but a somewhat shallow and short-lived phenomenon.
A new consensus: Fifty top NASA experts, including astronauts, scientists, and engineers, have issued a letter demanding that NASA stop making global warming claims in press releases and websites.
We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.
The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.
The individuals who signed this letter comprise a who’s-who from NASA’s science and space exploration work over the past fifty years. Their willingness to sign such a letter cannot be dismissed lightly.
