With the help of Google Earth, a lost section of the Great Wall of China has been discovered in the Gobi Desert outside of present-day China.
The testimony continued on Monday of the fired JPL employee who is claiming the science center fired him because of his religious beliefs.
[David Coppedge] trial’s started last week, and on Monday [he] testified that his supervisor Gregory Chin had wrongly accused him, threatened his freedom of religion and created a potentially hostile working environment. “You are pushing your religion in this office and harassing people with this religion,” Chin said, according to Coppedge, who added: “He was angry and he got angrier.”
Coppedge said he asked Chin why he considered intelligent design anything but science. “Dave, intelligent design is religion,” Chin replied, according to Coppedge. Chin warned him against discussing religion or politics with colleagues, he said.
“I felt threatened .. I said: ‘Greg, this gets into issues of free speech and freedom of religion … this could be construed as creating a hostile work environment’,” he added.
Real scientists should never feel threatened by anything Coppedge was saying, and should in fact enjoy debating the issue. Unfortunately, I have learned that such open-mindedness is found with increasing rarity in modern intellectual society, especially when it comes to Judeo-Christian beliefs. This is why I tend to believe Coppedge’s story.
Liquid water on Mars! Scientists have found more evidence that the streaks on Martian hillsides that darken in warm weather are caused by melting groundwater flowing downhill.
Last summer, the team pointing the HiRISE camera on the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) dropped that bombshell: it had identified 7 confirmed and 12 likely sites that contained hundreds of narrow streaks on steep slopes inside crater walls. During warmer seasons, as temperatures rose as high as 27 degrees Celsius, the streaks darkened, and then faded again. Salts could allow brines to be liquid at these temperatures. Today at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, the HiRISE team announced that it now has doubled it stash of streaks, with the identification of 15 confirmed and 23 likely sites, all in the mid-latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere.
Additional analysis of the spectrographic data also suggests that water could be the cause of the darkening.
The Met Office in the UK has issued an updated temperature record for the past 150 years, suggesting that the climate has warmed 0.75 degrees Celsius since 1900.
I remain suspicious of this announcement, as the scientists issuing this report are the same scientists who participated in climategate, including Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University. With that in mind, before I will believe these numbers I will wait for some vetting of this new data by those who have shown themselves to be a bit more skeptical, a bit more open-minded, and a lot more honest.
One more point: to really understand the importance of an increase of 0.75 degrees Celsius over 112 years, we would need some context, something this news article does not give us. For example, how do these numbers compare with the numbers predicted by the various climate models? Also, this is the overall change. How have things changed from year to year? Is there any evidence in this data for a cooling during the past decade, as indicated by other climate measurements?
Scientists have published the first complete global geological map of the Jupiter moon Io.
The highly detailed, colorful map reveals a number of volcanic features, including: paterae (caldera-like depressions), lava flow fields, tholi (volcanic domes), and plume deposits, in various shapes, sizes and colors, as well as high mountains and large expanses of sulfur- and sulfur dioxide-rich plains. The mapping identified 425 paterae, or individual volcanic centers. One feature you will not see on the geologic map is impact craters. “Io has no impact craters; it is the only object in the Solar System where we have not seen any impact craters, testifying to Io’s very active volcanic resurfacing,” says Williams.
You can download the map here.
The boycott by scientists of Elsevier, the publisher of science journals, has paid off.
Life stranger than science fiction: If there is water ice on the Moon, scientists have found that the bombardment from interstellar cosmic rays has likely caused chemical reactions that “can create complex carbon chains similar to those that help form the foundations of biological structures.”
A different experiment at CERN has found that, in contradiction to the OPERA results last year, neutrinos travel at the speed of light, and no faster.
Nine incredible places on Earth. With pictures.
Investment opportunity: Two Sandia National Laboratories researchers are seeking a partnership with a private company to market the self-guided bullet they developed.
The prototype design is a four-inch long bullet with a built-in optical sensor in its nose to detect a laser beam on the target. The sensor directs guidance and control information using an algorithm and a small central processing unit that helps steer tiny built-in fins to guide the bullet. According to the Sandia lab’s computer simulations, an unguided bullet in real world conditions can miss a target that is half a mile away by almost 10 yards. With this guided bullet, however, it could strike within eight inches of a target.
Duck! The orbit of a 150 foot wide asteroid that zipped past the Earth in February, has an orbit that will bring it past the Earth again on February 15, 2013 by less than 15,000 miles.
The team use several automated telescopes to scan the sky, and the discovery came somewhat serendipitously after they decided to search areas of the sky where asteroids are not usually seen. “A preliminary orbit calculation shows that 2012 DA14 has a very Earth-like orbit with a period of 366.24 days, just one more day than our terrestrial year, and it ‘jumps’ inside and outside of the path of Earth two times per year,” says Jaime.
While an impact with Earth has been ruled out on the asteroid’s next visit, astronomers will use that close approach for more studies and calculate the Earth and Moon’s gravitational effects on it.
Because this newly discovered asteroid passes so close and frequently to both the Earth and Moon, astronomers will need a lot more data before they can pin down its orbit precisely, and thus predict the chances of a collision in the near future.
Thank you Barack! Europe, dumped by Obama administration and NASA, has teamed up with Russia to build its ExoMars orbiter and lander.
