Tag: science

Reviewing a book blacklisted by Amazon because it dared say things Amazon doesn’t like

1:35 pm

The Plague of Models, blacklisted by Amazon
The Plague of Models, blacklisted by Amazon

They’re coming for you next: Last week I posted an essay on the over-use and misuse of computer modeling in today’s scientific community, focused specifically on the unreliability of all climate models to successfully predict any actual climate trends.

One of the individuals who read my essay, Kenneth Green, immediately commented here on Behind the Black to note that he had just published a book on this very subject, entitled The Plague of Models: How Computer Modeling Corrupted Environmental, Health, and Safety Regulations, describing how the misuse of models has resulted in the proliferation of government regulations based not on actual data but on computer models that in many ways are nothing more than the opinions of the computer programs.

Green also noted that Amazon has refused to make his book available for sale, essentially banning it for no justifiable reason. As he explained to me in an email,

My publisher, who is a start-up small Canadian publisher specializing in public policy books, tried to upload The Plague of Models to Amazon, as he had previously done with half a dozen other books while working at previous institutions as in-house publisher.

This time, unlike his previous experiences, the book was taken down shortly after it was uploaded (and we know the upload process worked, since the book was available briefly for preview, so there was no technical issue with the manuscript file). The publisher got a form-letter email saying that the book had been taken down because it may have violated some (non-specific) Amazon Term of Service. When he sent a note back requesting clarification/appeal, he got another form letter, this one repeating that the book may have violated some term of service, and warning that any attempt to re-upload would get his entire account terminated.
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Buried ridges at the bottom of a Martian abyss

11:03 am

Buried ridges in a Martian abyss
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image could be labeled a “What the heck?!” photo, as the origin of its most distinct feature is utterly baffling. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 18, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what look like a collection of meandering ridges peeking out from a terrain covered by thick dust.

The scientists label this dust-covered ground, as well as the ripple dunes to the south in the full image, “sand sheets.” Without question, the ground here seems to resemble a Sahara-like terrain. It is utterly featureless, other than the few bedrock features that poke up out of that sand. In the full image some peaks stick out, but it the meandering ridges in this section that are most intriguing. They are reminiscent of rimstone dams in caves, but what formed them remains baffling, since cave rimstone dams are formed by the interaction of limestone and water, and there is absolutely no evidence of any near surface ice at this location in the dry equatorial regions of Mars.

All the ridges signify is a buried terrain formed in some inexplicable way.
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Scientists believe they have recovered the first known interstellar meteorite

8:52 am

A scientific expedition in the Pacific off the coast of Papua New Guinea has found what it thinks are spherules from the first known interstellar meteorite that hit the Earth on January 8, 2014 and dubbed IM1. From their preprint paper [pdf]:

On 8 January 2014 US government satellite sensors detected three atmospheric detonations in rapid succession about 84 km north of Manus Island, outside the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea (20 km). Analysis of the trajectory suggested an interstellar origin of the causative object CNEOS 2014-01-08: an arrival velocity relative to Earth in excess of ∼ 45 km s−1, and a vector tracked back to outside the plane of the ecliptic. The object’s speed relative to the Local Standard of Rest of the Milky-Way galaxy, ∼ 60 km s−1, was higher than 95% of the stars in the Sun’s vicinity.

In 2022 the US Space Command issued a formal letter to NASA certifying a 99.999% likelihood that the object was interstellar in origin.

Using a “magnetic sled” that they dragged across the seafloor, the scientists collected about 700 spherules thought to come from the meteorite, of which 57 have been analyzed and found to have properties that confirm their interstellar origin. As they note in their paper, “The spherules with enrichment of beryllium (Be), lanthanum (La) and uranium (U), labeled “BeLaU”, appear to have an exotic composition different from other solar system materials.”

The “BeLaU” elemental abundance pattern does not match terrestrial alloys, fallout from nuclear explosions, magma ocean abundances of Earth, its Moon or Mars or other natural meteorites in the solar system. This supports the interstellar origin of IM1 independently of the measurement of its high speed, as reported in the CNEOS catalog and confirmed by the US Space Command.

Based on the sparse data, the scientists speculate that these spherules could have come from the crust of an exoplanet, the core collapse of a supernova, the merger of two neutron stars, and even possibly “an extraterrestrial technological origin.” They have no idea, but all these are among the possibilities.

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Pragyan snaps first pictures of Vikram sitting on the Moon

8:28 am

Vikram as seen by Pragyan
Click for original image.

India’s space agency ISRO has released the first two pictures from the Pragyan rover showing the Vikram lander that bought both to the Moon safely.

The picture to the right is the close-up image, which shows two of Vikram’s science instruments. CHASTE is a probe that has been measuring the temperature of the Moon’s regolith at this spot, while ILSA is a seismometer for measuring the seismicity around the landing site.

Both spacecraft have been on the lunar surface now for one week, which means they are both halfway through their nominal two-week mission that lasts until lunar sunset, occurring on September 4th. Neither were designed to survive the 14-day-long lunar night, though engineers will attempt to kept both alive.

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Update on the ongoing research of the closest supernovae in a decade

12:47 pm

Gemini North image of supernova in Pinwheel Galaxy
Click for original image, taken by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii.

Link here. Though the press release from UC-Berkeley focuses mostly of research being done by its astronomers, it also provides a very good overview of what all astronomers worldwide have been learning since Supernova SN 2023ixf was first discovered by amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki in Japan on May 19, 2023 in the Pinwheel Galaxy, only 20 million light years away. This tidbit is probably the most significant:

Another group of astronomers led by Ryan Chornock, a UC Berkeley adjunct associate professor of astronomy, gathered spectroscopic data using the same telescope at Lick Observatory. Graduate student Wynn Jacobson-Galán and professor Raffaella Margutti analyzed the data to reconstruct the pre- and post-explosion history of the star, and found evidence that it had shed gas for the previous three to six years before collapsing and exploding. The amount of gas shed or ejected before the explosion could have been 5% of its total mass — enough to create a dense cloud of material through which the supernova ejecta had to plow.

Such data is going to help astronomers better predict when a star is about to go boom, by identifying similar behavior.

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The prevailing winds in Mars’ volcano country

12:35 pm

The prevailing winds in Mars' volcano country
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image is actual one new picture and four past images, which taken together reveal something about the larger wind patterns on Mars. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 27, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and shows a tiny wind-swept section of the giant volcanic ash field dubbed the Medusae Fossae Formation, about the size of the subcontinent of India and thought to be source of most of the dust on Mars.

The innumerable parallel thin ridges here all suggest that the prevailing winds blow from the southeast to the northwest. As they blow, the scour the surface ash out, and sometimes reveal the underlying bedrock, which here shows up as those small peaks and a handful of northeast-to-southwest trending larger ridges. Note too that the picture shown is only a small section of the full image, which shows that this landscape continues for a considerable distance in all directions.
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InSight team releases a global map of Mars’ seismic zones

10:03 am

Global map of quakes on Mars
Click for original image.

In a new paper that reviewed the entire archive of Mars quakes detected by the seismometer on InSight during its four years of operation on the Martian surface from 2018 to 2022, scientists have now released an updated global map showing the regions on Mars where seismic activity is most common. From the abstract:

Seismicity on Mars occurs mostly along or north of the boundary between the southern highlands and northern lowlands. Valles Marineris is seismically more active than previous catalogs of located events imply. Further, we show evidence that two events likely originate from the Olympus Mons region.

The map to the right is figure 6 from the paper, and shows clearly the sum total of InSight’s data. The yellow triangle marks InSight’s landing spot. The red line delineates the distant quakes from the nearby quakes detected by InSight. The green line is what the scientists identify as the border between the northern lowland plains and the southern cratered highlands. The data suggests that transition point could be linked geologically in some manner to the quakes themselves.

Though the majority of the detected quakes were in the Cerberus Fossae region, the data also suggests two other seismic active regions, one under the giant canyon Valles Marineris and the other south of Mars’ largest volcano, Olympus Mons.

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Residue ice in southern mid-latitude Martian crater?

11:16 am

Residue ice in the southern mid-latitudes of Mars?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on April 10, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows an unnamed 1.2-mile-wide crater at about 35 degrees south latitude with what appears to be residual glacial ice hugging its north interior wall.

As this is in the southern hemisphere, the ground immediately below the south-facing interior wall of the crater is going to be in shadow the most, and thus it will also be the place where any surface or near-surface ice will survive the longest. In this case it appears that from the bumpy nature of that residual ice it has also been sublimating away. Within it however remains the faint hint of multiple layers, suggesting about a dozen past climate cycles with each new cycle producing a new but smaller layer with less ice.

The material in the southern half of the crater floor appears to be dust formed into ripple dunes.
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JAXA scrubs launch of X-Ray telescope & SLIM lunar lander due to high winds

8:57 am

SLIM's landing zone
Click for interactive map.

Because of high winds, Japan’s space agency JAXA yesterday scrubbed the last launch of its H2A rocket, carrying the XRISM X-Ray telescope and the SLIM lunar lander.

A nice description of both payloads can be found here. XRISM is a simplified reflight of the Hitomi X-Ray telescope that failed immediately after launch in 2016.

Though SLIM carries a camera and two secondary payloads, both designed to hop along on the surface and obtain some data, its main mission is engineering, testing whether a robotic spacecraft can achieve a precision landing with a target zone of 100 meters, or 310 feet. The map to the right shows SLIM’s landing site, with the white dot in the close-up inset a rough approximation of that entire target zone. If successful this technology will make it possible to put unmanned planetary probes in places previously thought too dangerous or rough.

All three craft are designed to operate for only about fourteen days, during the daylight hours of the 28-Earth-day-long lunar day.

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Flow channels on Mars

11:13 am

Flow channels on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 13, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists call a “channel and depression”, though to my eye everything looks like flow channels, descending to the east.

The drop from the narrow northern channel to wider southern channel is about 200 feet, with the small crater on the left sitting about halfway between. To our Earthbound eyes, something clearly flowed downhill from that northern channel into the wider channel. What we don’t know now is what the material was that did the flowing?

Was it liquid water? Glaciers? The overview map below provides some context, though it doesn’t actually provide an answer.
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Both Vikram and Pragyan functioning as planned on the Moon

9:29 am

Pragyan on the Moon
Click to see full movie.

According to tweets from India’s space agency ISRO, both the Vikram lander and the Pragyan rover are functioning as planned on the lunar surface, with the rover successfully activating its two science instruments.

The image to the right, taken by Vikram, shows the rover as it completed its roll down the ramp onto the lunar surface. This is a screen capture from a movie showing that roll down, which you can see by clicking on the picture. Since then it has moved another 26 feet from the lander.

I must add once again that Vikram did not land “on the south pole”, as too many so-called news organizations have been falsely claiming. It landed at about 69 degrees south latitude, quite a distance from that pole, in a flat region with no permanently shadowed craters. It is not specifically looking for water, though its instruments might help explain the orbital data that suggests there are areas on the surface of the Moon where hydrogen is somehow present.

If so many news outlets can’t seem to get these very basic facts about this mission correct, one must ask what else do they get wrong routinely? I don’t ask, because I always assume their information is wrong, check it constantly, and find repeatedly that they get numerous basic facts incorrect, especially when it comes to reporting on politics.

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Big mountains everywhere inside Valles Marineris

11:45 am

Big mountains in Valles Marineris
Click for original image.

While the giant canyon Valles Marineris on Mars is known best as the biggest known canyon in the solar system — large enough to cover the continental United States several times over — that size tends to diminish the mountainous nature of its interior. Today’s cool image attempts once again (see for example these earlier posts here, here, here, here, and here) to illustrate that stupendous and mountainous nature.

The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 15, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The goal of the picture was to get a better view of the numerous layers of this terraced cliff wall. What I see, however from my tourist’s perspective, is a steep wall that descends almost 4,500 feet from the high to the low point in just over three miles. This is as steep if not steeper than the walls of the Grand Canyon.
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India’s Pragyan rover has successfully been deployed on the lunar surface

9:23 am


Click for interactive map.

According to a tweet from India’s space agency ISRO late yesterday, the Pragyan rover has successfully rolled down its ramp and is now deployed on the lunar surface.

No further updates have yet been released. According to ISRO’s mission webpage the instruments on both Vikram and Pragyan are as follows:

Lander payloads: Chandra’s Surface Thermophysical Experiment (ChaSTE) to measure the thermal conductivity and temperature; Instrument for Lunar Seismic Activity (ILSA) for measuring the seismicity around the landing site; Langmuir Probe (LP) to estimate the plasma density and its variations. A passive Laser Retroreflector Array from NASA is accommodated for lunar laser ranging studies.

Rover payloads: Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) and Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) for deriving the elemental composition in the vicinity of landing site.

Pragyan’s two spectroscopes are likely similar to instruments on Curiosity and Perseverance on Mars, and allows some good surface analysis. Without a scoop however there will be no analysis of anything below the ground, unless the rover can upend a rock using its wheels.

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Where the Martian landscape begins to dry out

12:30 pm

Where Mars begins to dry out
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, provides us a glimpse at the lower mid-latitudes of Mars where the terrain is beginning to dry out as we move south. The picture was taken on April 29, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what the scientists label “large linear features.”

The main north-south ridge is only about 20-25 feet high, and its meandering nature (which can be seen more clearly in the full image) suggests it is possibly an inverted channel, formed when the bed of a former canyon gets compressed by the water or ice that flows through it, and when the surrounding terrain gets eroded away that channel bed becomes a ridge.

These ridges however could also possibly be volcanic dikes, where magma had pushed up through fractures and faults to form these more resistant ridges.
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India successfully lands Vikram on the Moon

9:10 am


Click for interactive map.

India this morning successfully placed its Vikram lander, carrying its Pragyan rover, on the surface of the Moon in the high southern latitudes.

I have embedded the live stream below, cued to just before landing.

The next challenge is getting Pragyan to roll off Vikram, and spend the next two weeks exploring the nearby terrain. The mission of both it and Vikram is only planned to last through the daylight portion of the 28-day-long lunar day, so it is not expected for either to survive the lunar night. Both will make observations, but the main purpose of this mission has already been accomplished, demonstrating that India has the technological capability to land an unmanned spacecraft on another planet. That the landing was in the high southern latitudes added one extra challenge to the mission.

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I will NOT wear a mask, part two

5:16 pm

Here we go again! When the first panic over COVID arrived in 2020 and government thugs and their leftist minions in the culture began demanding that everyone wear a mask, I wrote the following:

It apparently has not been enough that they have successfully destroyed a thriving economy, put millions out of work, destroyed the airline, entertainment, sports, and restaurant industries, over a disease that, at best is nothing more than a slight blip in the overall death rate, and at worst will be comparable to similar past epidemics that we lived through without government-imposed panic or economic disaster.

No, destroying millions of lives has not been enough. They need to do more. They need to find more ways to squelch our freedom, nullify the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and, to paraphrase Orwell, stamp a boot down on our faces, forever.

And in this case, they mean to do this, almost literally.

They are now beginning to demand that we wear masks at all times in public, in the mindless and stupid belief that this will somehow stop COVID-19 from spreading.

I also declared unequivocally that I would not wear a mask, “and if you demand it of me you will have a revolution on your hands.”
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The very tip of a thousand-mile-long crack on Mars

11:25 am

The very tip of a 1000-mile-long Martian crack
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 22, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as “The tip of Cerberus Fossae,” a thousand-mile-long crack in the surface of Mars formed when the ground was pulled apart by underground forces.

If you look closely at the picture’s right edge, you can see that beyond the end of the fissure it actually continues but appears filled with material. In the full picture this however is the end of the crack. Beyond this point the ground is as smooth and as generally featureless as seen within the picture itself, and as also shown in this MRO context camera view of the same area.

Cerberus Fossae is actually three parallel cracks, with this the northernmost one. The eastern tip of the middle crack was previously highlighted in a cool image in July 2022.
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Russian engineers pinpoint approximate crash site of Luna-25

9:07 am

Russian engineers have pinpointed the approximate crash site of Luna-25 on the Moon as the 42-mile-wide crater Pontecoulant G, located at about 59 degrees south latitude, 66 east longitude.

Researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics have simulated the trajectory of the Luna-25 mission, figuring out where and when it crashed into the moon’s surface, the institute said in a statement on Telegram. “The mathematical modeling of the trajectory of the Luna-25 spacecraft, carried out by experts from the Ballistic Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, made it possible to determine the time and place of its collision with the moon,” the statement reads.

According to the institute, the spacecraft fell into the 42-kilometer Pontecoulant G crater in the southern hemisphere of the moon at 2:58 p.m. Moscow time on August 19.

The planned landing site, in Boguslawsky Crater at 73 degrees south latitude and 43 degrees east longitude, was many miles away.

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It is time to devalue the software research of climate models

1:29 pm

When the table of contents of the most recent issue of the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Geophysical Research Letters was released on August 16, 2023, I could not help noticing it contained a string of papers repeatedly showing that the models used to prove the coming fire of global warming continue to remain untrustworthy and unreliable. All of the following papers indicated biases and uncertainties of both climate models as well as the data they used, and each did so in their titles:

All of these papers considered the models valid for future research, and were instead focused on refining and increasing the accuracy of the models. All however showed once again how little we should trust these models.

What makes the publication of these papers significant is that it was the AGU that published them, even though the AGU has a decidedly biased editorial policy in favor of global warming. Despite the AGU’s insistence that “realistic and continually improving computer simulations of the global climate predict that global temperatures will continue to rise as a result of past and future greenhouse gas emissions,” it still cannot avoid publishing papers that repeatedly disprove that conclusion.
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A Martian wedding cake surrounded by brain terrain

11:24 am

Brain terrain surrounding a Martian wedding cake
Click for original image.

Of all many cool images I’ve posted, today might take the cake (pun intended) for the best illustration of the alien nature of Mars. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 28, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what the scientists simply label as “flow features.”

I personally don’t see any obvious flow features in the full image, unless one wants to call the brain terrain that covers this entire plain a flow feature. Brain terrain is a feature unique to Mars whose origin remains a mystery to geologists. As noted by scientists in captioned MRO image in 2019:

You are staring at one of the unsolved mysteries on Mars. This surface texture of interconnected ridges and troughs, referred to as “brain terrain” is found throughout the mid-latitude regions of Mars.

…This bizarrely textured terrain may be directly related to the water-ice that lies beneath the surface. One hypothesis is that when the buried water-ice sublimates (changes from a solid to a gas), it forms the troughs in the ice. The formation of these features might be an active process that is slowly occurring since HiRISE [MRO’s high resolution camera] has yet to detect significant changes in these terrains.

The wedding cake inside the small crater to the upper right only adds to the alienness of this terrain.
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