If all goes well with maneuvers today, Rosetta will creep inward to an orbit only 16 miles from Comet 67P/C-G.
From this position the probe will begin gathering a global map of the comet nucleus. Nor is this the closest they will get. Over the next month they will move in again and again in weekly increments.
The uncertainty of science: New data from a globular cluster in nearby dwarf galaxy has confirmed that the deficit of lithium that astronomers have found in the Milky Way also exists in other galaxies.
According to the Big Bang theory, the amount of lithium in the universe should be two or three times more than it is. This result shows that the deficit exists outside the Milky Way, which suggests strongly that something significant is wrong with the Big Bang theory.
A simple background check on a West Virginia academic who was touted as a “genius” has discovered that his entire resume was a fraud.
[Anoop] Shankar isn’t a Ph.D. He didn’t graduate from the Harvard of India. He didn’t write dozens of the scholarly publications on his resume, and as for the Royal College of Physicians, they’ve never heard of him. He does have a master’s degree in epidemiology from the University of North Carolina and an Indian medical degree, but at least two of his green card references—attesting to “world class creativity,” “genius insight,” and “a new avenue for treating hypertension”—were a forgery.
Worse, when the investigation threatened his bright future he used two students to try to destroy the career of an investigator by faking a sexual attack.
And even worse yet, the academic community remains unwilling to deal with this fraud aggressively.
Although Shankar was forced out of WVU in December of 2012, the university has yet to address the case publicly, allowing Shankar and his work to continue unchallenged. In the last year alone, he’s published at least three papers, including one in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association. He also landed a new job on the backs of taxpayers: associate professor of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, a large public university in Richmond.
So far, the investigation has only focused on the man’s faked resume. No one has taken a close look at his medical research, though the article does describe one example where Shankar was actually teaching his students to manipulate data unethically to get the results they wanted.
As the article notes, “How many more are there out there?” As I’ve documented repeatedly in the climate field, academia no longer seems interested in cleaning house and maintaining honest standards. This story only reinforces this fact.
Excitement continues to build as archeologists dig deeper into a massive tomb discovered two years ago in northern Greece.
This past weekend the excavation team, led by Greek archaeologist Katerina Peristeri, announced the discovery of two elegant caryatids—large marble columns sculpted in the shape of women with outstretched arms—that may have been intended to bar intruders from entering the tomb’s main room. “I don’t know of anything quite like them,” says Philip Freeman, a professor of classics at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.
The curly-haired caryatids are just part of the tomb’s remarkable furnishings. Guarding the door as sentinels were a pair of carved stone sphinxes, mythological creatures with the body of a lion and the head of a human. And when archaeologists finally entered the antechamber, they discovered faded remnants of frescoes as well as a mosaic floor made of white marble pieces inlaid in a red background.
Archeologists believe this tomb is connected somehow to Alexander the Great and could very well be the burial site of one of his relatives or close allies. They will not know more until they actually enter the tomb.
A Canadian expedition thinks it has located one of the ships from John Franklin’s lost 1845 Arctic expedition.
The Canadian government began searching for Franklin’s ships in 2008 as part of a strategy to assert Canada’s sovereignty over the Northwest Passage, which has recently become accessible to shipping because of melting Arctic ice. Expedition sonar images from the waters of Victoria Strait, just off King William Island, clearly show the wreckage of a ship on the ocean floor.
The uncertainty of science: Even as the Earth’s climate temperature has remained essentially unchanged for the past two decades, the rate of increase in greenhouse gases in 2013 hit its highest number in thirty years.
This Nature article is interesting in two ways. First, it actually breaks with the tradition of the past two decades and notes the gigantic uncertainties that exist in climate science.
The question remains, however, of why the rise in global mean temperatures near the surface has apparently slowed, after a series of exceptionally warm years in the 1990s.
To have mentioned an inconvenient fact like this, casting doubt on the theory of human-caused global warming, has been forbidden for decades in major journals like Nature. That the article does mention it shows that the inconvenient facts have become too obvious to ignore.
The second way the article is interesting is its repeated attempt to make believe that new theories, based on this very incomplete and contradictory data set, can explain the mystery.
Scientists have suggested a number of possible explanations for the global warming pause. According to the latest hypothesis, regularly occurring changes in circulation patterns in the Atlantic and Southern Ocean may have caused an increased volume of relatively warm water to sink to the depth of the ocean, thus reducing the amount of ocean heat escaping to the atmosphere.
The sad fact is that there are now dozens of theories to explain the long pause in global warming, none of which are convincing. The uncertainties continue to rule!
Similarly, the article also makes this naive statement:
Atmospheric methane, the second most important long-lived greenhouse gas, also reached a new high of about 1,824 parts per billion last year, mostly due to increased emissions from cattle breeding, rice farming, fossil fuel mining, landfills and biomass burning. [emphasis mine]
The certainty expressed here about the sources of methane increase in the atmosphere is misplaced. We don’t really know all the sources of the increase in methane in the atmosphere. Recent data instead suggests it could have many natural sources having nothing to do with human activities.
The bottom line remains: The knowledge we have of the Earth’s atmosphere and climate remains very incomplete and preliminary. Any theories about its nature and operation must be taken with a very large measure of skepticism. Any particular theory might be right, but it is just as likely that future research will very easily prove it wrong.
It would be nice if the journalists at Nature would take this advice.
Scientists have raised questions about the meteorite impact that was reported to have occurred in Nicaragua on Saturday.
More here. There are doubts about the impact crater, the theory that the meteorite was somehow related to the meteorite that flew past the Earth on Sunday, and the boom sound that local residents heard that same night.
A small meteorite hit the ground near Managua’s airport in Nicaragua on Saturday, creating a 39 foot wide crater.
By comparing data from the Voyager fly-bys of Saturn in the 1980s with new data collected by Cassini in the past decade scientists think they can now explain the changes that have occurred in Saturn’s outer F ring.
“The F ring is a narrow, lumpy feature made entirely of water ice that lies just outside the broad, luminous rings A, B, and C,” notes French. “It has bright spots. But it has fundamentally changed its appearance since the time of Voyager. Today, there are fewer of the very bright lumps.” The bright spots come and go over the course of hours or days, a mystery that the two SETI Institute astronomers think they have solved.
“We believe the most luminous knots occur when tiny moons, no bigger than a large mountain, collide with the densest part of the ring,” says French. “These moons are small enough to coalesce and then break apart in short order.”
The Rosetta science team has released their first geology map of Comet 67P/C-G, showing the nucleus’s surface divided into different kinds of terrain.
Scientists have found evidence that Jupiter’s moon Europa undergoes the same kind of plate tectonics seen on Earth.
Using DNA evidence from a shawl that is believed to have been at one of the Jack the Ripper’s murders, forensic scientists think they have finally identified the serial killer.
The story is fascinating, but what makes it even more convincing to me is that the person they name is hardly the wild romantic suspect that many books and movies have proposed in past decades. Instead, he was one of Scotland Yard’s prime suspects.
The uncertainty of science: Geysers that have been detected on Europa in 2012 have now disappeared.
A new mosaic of four Rosetta navigation camera images shows a faint jet of material coming from the comet nucleus.
The jet appears to come from the neck between the two lobes, but that is uncertain.
The first results from Rosetta’s ultraviolet spectrograph find the surface of Comet 67P/C-G to be surprisingly lacking in exposed ice patches.
The lack is unexpected, considering that this same instrument has also detected evidence of water in the comet’s coma.
Paleontologists have discovered an almost complete skeleton of a dinosaur that they estimate was 85 feet long and weighed 65 tons when it died.
And it appears that the dinosaur was still growing when it died.
More information here.
The Rosetta science team announced today that they will unveil the chosen landing site for their Philae lander on September 15.
In approving extensions of seven NASA planetary missions, a review panel concluded that the Curiosity rover wasn’t doing the best it could, and that the project scientist didn’t work hard enough to change their minds.
The Mars Science Laboratory’s Curiosity rover landed on the red planet in August 2012. Equipped with a drill to gather surface samples and spectroscopy equipment to analyze the samples, the rover has collected and analyzed five surface specimens so far and, according to the extended mission proposal just approved by NASA, would analyze another eight over the next two years. That is “a poor science return for such a large investment in a flagship mission,” a 15-person senior review panel chaired by Clive Neal, a geologist at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, wrote in a report published Sept. 3.
The report also chided John Grotzinger, the lead Curiosity project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for neglecting to show up in person during a Mars-focused senior review panel meeting in May. “This left the panel with the impression that the [Curiosity] team felt they were too big to fail,” the senior review panel wrote.
This sounds like a pissing war between scientists. Grotzinger didn’t give them the required deference so they slammed him. No matter happened, however, we know they weren’t going to cancel Curiosity’s funds.
Worlds without end: New research now suggests that almost half of all exoplanets exist in binary star systems.
The astronomers estimate that between 40% to 50% of all exoplanets have binary stars as their host stars.
A new study has provided further proof that the main driving force behind the abandonment of obscure languages is the desire of people to gain economic wealth.
Of all the variables tested, economic growth was most strongly linked to language loss, Amano says. Two types of language loss hotspots emerged from the study, published online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. One was in economically well developed regions such as northwestern North America and northern Australia; a second was in economically developing regions such as the tropics and the Himalayas. Certain aspects of geography seemed to act as a buffer or threat, Amano says. For example, recent declines appear to occur faster in temperate climates than in the tropics or mountainous regions—perhaps because it is easier to travel in and out of temperate regions, Amano says.
As is usual for most of today’s modern intellectuals, already prosperous and speaking English, the author of the article as well as the researchers themselves lament the loss of obscure languages.
Although the study is silent on the subject of interventions to help preserve endangered languages, there is a range of revitalization efforts that can serve as examples, such as the incorporation of the Hawaiian language into school curricula and daily government operations, she says.
In other words, ordinary people want to improve their lives by learning the dominant languages that provide a gateway to wealth, and these self-righteous prigs want to do whatever they can to interfere with that desire. How nice of them!
