Japan may try to put Akatsuki into orbit around Venus five years from now, rather than six.
Andromeda’s once and future stars. Great images of the galaxy too!
You can’t make this stuff up! A vulture, tagged by Israeli scientists to study the bird’s migration patterns, flew into Saudi Arabia where it was arrested as a spy.
The image below was taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on New Year’s Eve. It shows the rover Opportunity on the rim of stadium-sized Santa Maria Crater, where scientists plan to spend the next two months exploring the crater.
Opportunity has truly been an astonishing success for NASA’s planetary science program. The rover has operated on the Martian surface since 2004, almost seven years beyond its original mission length. It is presently about halfway on its long journey to the much larger Endeavour Crater (14 miles in diameter), still several miles away.
The monthly update of the Sun’s developing sunspot cycle was published tonight by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. You can see the newest graph below, which shows the slow rise in sunspots (blue/black lines) in comparison with the consensis prediction made by the solar science community in May 2009 (red line).
Not only does the Sun’s generally quiet trend continue, its activity took an additional plunge in December, dropping significantly from the previous month. This drop is probably due to the seven days of no sunspots that took place in mid-December.
All in all, we continue to head for the weakest maximum in two hundred years (see the graph on this page), which in the past meant very cold weather. Though scientists do not yet understand why the Sun does this or how these changes in solar activity influence the climate as much as they do, that this in now happening at a time when we have the technology to truly study it is an opportunity that must not be missed.
A flightless prehistoric bird, about the size of a chicken and found only in Jamaica, used the blunt and thick bones at the end of its wings as a weapon against its rivals.
New research confirms that the Viking landers did find organics on Mars back in the 1970s. Listen also to the September 15, 2010 and September 23, 2010 radio interviews that John Batchelor and I did with Viking project scientist Gilbert Levin and Christopher McKay of the Ames Research Center on this very subject.
Start ’em young! A ten year old Canadian girl has become the youngest person to discover a supernova.
Why most published research findings are false. And written by a published but skeptical climate scientist. Key quote:
In global warming research, there is a popular misconception that oil industry-funded climate research actually exists, and has skewed the science. I can’t think of a single scientific study that has been funded by an oil or coal company.
But what DOES exist is a large organization that has a virtual monopoly on global warming research in the U.S., and that has a vested interest in [anthropogenic global warming] theory being true: the U.S. Government. The idea that government-funded climate research is unbiased is laughable. The push for ever increasing levels of government regulation and legislation, the desire of government managers to grow their programs, the dependence of congressional funding of a problem on the existence of a “problem” to begin with, and the U.N.’s desire to find reasons to move toward global governance, all lead to inherent bias in climate research.
One hundred thousand dead fish cover 20-miles of the Arkansas River in Arkansas and no one knows why.
Can we find trees on other planets?
The 97% “Consensus” is only 75 Self-Selected Climatologists. Key quote:
Close examination of the source of the claimed 97% consensus reveals that it comes from a non-peer reviewed article describing an online poll in which a total of only 79 climate scientists chose to participate. Of the 79 self-selected climate scientists, 75 agreed with the notion of AGW [anthropogenic global warming]. Thus, we find climate scientists once again using dubious statistical techniques to deceive the public that there is a 97% scientific consensus on man-made global warming; fortunately they clearly aren’t buying it.
This winter is the Stalingrad in the ‘Climate War’.
Though I have been saying that the Sun’s lack of sunspots the last two years suggests the possibility of that we might be facing an extended period without solar activity, I am not a solar scientist. Today, in a paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph website, a solar scientist says just that. Key quote:
One method that has yielded predictions consistently in the right range during the past few solar cycles is that of K. Schatten et al., whose approach is mainly based on the polar field precursor. The incipient cycle 24 [on-going right now] will probably mark the end of the Modern Maximum, with the Sun switching to a state of less strong activity.
Brazil has become the first non-European partner in the European Southern Observatory.
After six blank days, the Sun is once again showing spots. As I have mentioned several times in 2010, this might be the last time the Sun is blank for years to come as it ramps up to solar maximum. However, don’t bet on it, as the Sun’s activity has been way below all predictions. The upcoming solar maximum might very well be the first in centuries with blank days interspersed throughout.
A vast storm rages across the face of Saturn.
The SOHO spacecraft, in space monitoring the Sun since 1995, has discovered its 2000th comet!
Researchers think they have found a way to use DNA to kill the mite that is killing bees in Britain, without harming the bees themselves.
Flying on empty to a comet.
Oink! Scientists rail against senator who belittled research.
In its 14 mile multi-year trek to Endeavour Crater — now about half completed — the Mars rover Opportunity has stopped to take a short rest stop at a small crater.
The crater, dubbed “Santa Maria Crater” by the scientists who operater Opportunity, is about the size of a football field. What makes it especially interesting are the sharp rocks piled up on its rim, as they are probably debris ejected from the crater at impact. Since this material probably came from deep below the Martian surface, it is also likely to hold information about the Martian geological past, thereby making it a prime research site.
An asteroid discovered more than 100 years ago is actually an extinct comet. And it is coming back to life!
Recent monitoring of the Sun’s brightness as it went from maximum to minimum in its solar cycle has found that, surprisingly, the changes in brightness across different wavelengths do not necessarily vary in lockstep. Key quote:
SIM suggests that ultraviolet irradiance fell far more than expected between 2004 and 2007 — by ten times as much as the total irradiance did — while irradiance in certain visible and infrared wavelengths surprisingly increased, even as solar activity wound down overall. The steep decrease in the ultraviolet, coupled with the increase in the visible and infrared, does even out to about the same total irradiance change as measured by the TIM during that period, according to the SIM measurements.
The stratosphere absorbs most of the shorter wavelengths of ultraviolet light, but some of the longest ultraviolet rays (UV-A), as well as much of the visible and infrared portions of the spectrum, directly heat Earth’s lower atmosphere and can have a significant impact on the climate. [emphasis mine]
The uncertainty of science: Did the Martian methane signal come from Earth?
The hubbub about this week’s lunar solstice eclipse was, from my perspective, mostly manufactured press blather. For those who had never seen a lunar eclipse, it was a spectacular experience, but there really was nothing scientifically or technically unique about the fact that it happened to occur on the solstice.
However, below is an eclipse that is definitely unique both technically and scientifically. Scientists using the Mars rover Opportunity have filmed an eclipse on Mars, showing the Martian moon Phobos crossing in front of the Sun. Consider the engineering accomplishment: not only did they need to be able to calculate exactly when this would happen at a very particular spot on the Martian surface, they had to have a camera there able to take the movie. And they had to operate it from Earth!
Scientists have completed the IceCube neutrino observatory in Antarctica, a cubic kilometer in size and situated a mile deep in the ice.
Another scheme to stop a dangerous asteroid: Use a flotilla of solar sails to divert Apophis.
How close to the Sun could we get?
