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Latest Articles: Science/Tech
Columbia University study ties southeast drought to population
Post Date: 2009-10-04 14:05:14 by buckeroo
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With the world's governments working feverishly to create climate change legislation standards, a Columbia University study on drought conditions in the southeast disputes prior conclusions on the ties to global warming. European leaders and worldwide environmental organizations have been pressuring the United States to move forward with a climate change bill. It's part of an ongoing effort to further the pressure on India and China to comply with emission standards and to help shape a global continuity on cap-and-trade legislative structure. To this end, there have been numerous attempts to attach randomly-occurring weather events to a bigger global warming umbrella - and to ...
Ig Nobel awards go to knuckle-cracker, tequila chemists, other laureates
Post Date: 2009-10-02 11:44:06 by IDon'tThinkSo
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Ig Nobel awards go to knuckle-cracker, tequila chemists, other laureates A Thousand Oaks doctor testing an arthritis link by cracking his knuckles for 60 years is among the winners of the mock Nobel Prizes. A man who cracked the knuckles of one hand -- but not the other -- for six decades, scientists who figured out why pregnant women don't topple over and chemists who made diamonds from tequila were honored Thursday at the annual Ig Nobel prize ceremony -- a tongue-in-cheek parody of the famous and august Nobels, which are due to be announced next week. Produced by a science humor magazine, the Annals of Improbable Research, the event was celebrated at a raucous event at Harvard ...
Hot and cold
Post Date: 2009-09-30 00:15:36 by sourcery
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If a new Little Ice Age soon sets in, as many scientists believe, Arctic shipping will not happen in our lifetimes. The Arctic ice "is melting far faster than had been previously supposed," we heard this week from the UN's Environment Program, in releasing its 2009 Climate Change Science Compendium. This same week, National Geographic reported that the Arctic ice is probably melting far slower than previously supposed. After ramping up the rhetoric -- two years ago National Geographic told us that "the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions," and last year that "Arctic warming has become so ...
Perfect storm for silver brewing as antibiotics substitute
Post Date: 2009-09-29 15:45:59 by DeaconBenjamin
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Silver may soon replace antibiotics as an alternative for healing, and is increasingly gaining ground in the burgeoning field of nanotechnology. SPOKANE, WASHINGTON - The over-prescription of antibiotics and the rapid spread of bacteria globally are creating "a perfect storm for silver," which will encourage even more medical use of the precious metal, Silver Institute Executive Director Mike DiRienzo said Thursday. In a presentation to the Silver Summit in Spokane, DiRienzo detailed new and emerging uses for silver, lead by the metal's growing significance in hospitals and the practice of medicine. "Currently we're seeing a surge of applications for silver-based ...
Breaking news: Cherry Picking of Historic Proportions
Post Date: 2009-09-29 13:55:18 by sourcery
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A big news day. It appears Steve McIntyre (volunteer unpaid auditor of Big-Government-Science) has killed the Hockey Stick a second time... The details are on the last three days of Steve McIntyre's site Climate Audit, and summed up beautifully on Watts Up. The sheer effrontery and gall appears to be breathtaking. The Briffa temperature graphs have been widely cited as evidence by the IPCC, yet it appears they were based on a very carefully selected set of data, so select, that the shape of the graph would have been totally transformed if the rest of the data had been included. Kieth Briffa used 12 samples to arrive at his version of the hockey stick and refused to provide his ...
Study finds poor toddlers often spanked by age 1
Post Date: 2009-09-29 13:43:06 by Prefrontal Vortex
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Study finds poor toddlers often spanked by age 1 By MELISSA HEALY Los Angeles Times Updated: 09/17/2009 01:44:15 AM PDT There's no topic more incendiary than spanking. Add to that the spanking of very young children by mothers in minority, low-income households, and you have a minefield. A group of Duke University researchers has not only ventured into that minefield, it has set off a few bombs in the process. Published in this month's issue of the journal Child Development, their study of 2,573 toddlers enrolled in Head Start found that for poor children, early and frequent spanking — by the age of 1 — is not only very common, but it also makes their behavior at age 2 ...
Climate Science: Funding Hypocrisy
Post Date: 2009-09-28 15:59:29 by farmfriend
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Climate Science: Funding Hypocrisy By Dr. Tim Ball Monday, September 28, 2009 “Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing” Edmund Burke I experienced two apparently disparate events recently. Both speak to the magnificent hypocrisy Burke identifies. They also illustrate Burke is wrong when he said it costs nothing. We’re all paying and will continue to pay for hypocrisies in climate science and research funding. The first event involved a stay in an upscale hotel. I’ve learned to ignore moral lectures in the bathroom – reuse the towels and save the planet - because I know the real ...
NASA data: Greenland, Antarctic ice melt worsening
Post Date: 2009-09-27 16:19:02 by buckeroo
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WASHINGTON — New satellite information shows that ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica continue to shrink faster than scientists thought and in some places are already in runaway melt mode. British scientists for the first time calculated changes in the height of the vulnerable but massive ice sheets and found them especially worse at their edges. That's where warmer water eats away from below. In some parts of Antarctica, ice sheets have been losing 30 feet a year in thickness since 2003, according to a paper published online Thursday in the journal Nature. Some of those areas are about a mile thick, so they've still got plenty of ice to burn through. But the drop ...
Meet the man who has exposed the great climate change con trick
Post Date: 2009-09-27 04:57:50 by sourcery
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James Delingpole talks to Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist, whose new book shows that 'anthropogenic global warming' is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a 'first-world luxury' with no basis in scientific fact. Shame on the publishers who rejected the book Imagine how wonderful the world would be if man-made global warming were just a figment of Al Gore's imagination. No more ugly wind farms to darken our sunlit uplands. No more whopping electricity bills, artificially inflated by EU-imposed carbon taxes. No longer any need to treat each warm, sunny day as though it were some terrible harbinger of ecological doom. And definitely no need for the ...
Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations "Totally Wrong"
Post Date: 2009-09-27 03:50:50 by sourcery
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New derivation of equations governing the greenhouse effect reveals "runaway warming" impossible Miklós Zágoni isn't just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary's most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was. That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA's Langley Research Center. After studying it, ...
Preindustrial People Had Little Effect on Atmospheric Carbon Levels
Post Date: 2009-09-25 17:36:13 by sourcery
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There's no doubt that the burning of fossil fuels over the past 2 centuries has caused a huge spike in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But CO2 levels increased gradually over the preceding millennia, too, and scientists did not know how much of that rise was caused by human activity. Now, an isotopic analysis of ancient air trapped in Antarctic ice shows that humans caused little if any of the preindustrial buildup of CO2. The findings negate previous thinking about the role of early humans in the process, experts say, and the research should help scientists develop better baseline models to forecast future climate. After the last ice age ended about 11,000 years ago, ...
The Moon Is Surprisingly Wet
Post Date: 2009-09-25 14:12:12 by mininggold
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Title: The Moon Is Surprisingly Wet Published: Sep 25, 2009 Author: SETH BORENSTEIN WASHINGTON (Sept. 24) - The moon isn't the dry dull place it seems. Traces of water lurk in the dirt unseen.
Orwellian camera network to be made smarter
Post Date: 2009-09-25 11:20:47 by X-15
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How can the UK's place as one of the most CCTV-surveilled nations in the world be improved upon? Why, with more surveillance technology of course. So say engineers at the shiny new Centre for Secure Information Technologies in Belfast, Northern Ireland, dedicated to investigating technologies that improve personal security - whether that's out in the street or online. One focus is improving security on Britain's buses using software that predicts violent behaviour from what's captured on the CCTV now common on the vehicles. "Despite massive investment in CCTV, the impact on antisocial and criminal behavior is negligible because very little video is ever analysed," ...
The Dog Ate Global Warming
Post Date: 2009-09-24 16:09:09 by sourcery
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Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December. Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared. Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren't talking much. And what little they are ...
NASA Data: Greenland, Antarctic Ice Melt Worsening
Post Date: 2009-09-23 14:10:34 by Brian S
33 Comments
(09-23) 10:01 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) -- New satellite information shows that ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica continue to shrink faster than scientists thought and in some places are already in runaway melt mode. British scientists for the first time calculated changes in the height of the vulnerable but massive ice sheets and found them especially worse at their edges. That's where warmer water eats away from below. In some parts of Antarctica, ice sheets have been losing 30 feet a year in thickness since 2003, according to a paper published online Thursday in the journal Nature. Some of those areas are about a mile thick, so they've still got plenty of ice to burn ...
Voices from developing countries at UN climate change summit
Post Date: 2009-09-23 00:47:53 by buckeroo
7 Comments
Voices from developing countries at UN climate change summit www.chinaview.cn 2009-09-23 11:24:31 UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 22 (Xinhua) -- While world leaders gathered at the United Nations for a historic summit on climate change on Tuesday, the developing countries urged the developed countries to acknowledge their responsibility for global warming and honor their promise of providing funds and technology transfer. Addressing the largest summit ever, General Assembly President Ali Treki, a veteran Libyan diplomat, said the poor countries, which are least responsible for the problem of climate change, often suffered first and most from its impact. "In sub-Saharan Africa, in the deltas ...
'Moon rock' in Dutch museum is just petrified wood
Post Date: 2009-09-19 13:16:29 by christine
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AMSTERDAM – It's not green cheese, but it might as well be. The Dutch national museum said Thursday that one of its prized possessions, a rock supposedly brought back from the moon by U.S. astronauts, is just a piece of petrified wood. Rijksmuseum spokeswoman Xandra van Gelder, who oversaw the investigation that proved the piece was a fake, said the museum will keep it anyway as a curiosity. "It's a good story, with some questions that are still unanswered," she said. "We can laugh about it." The museum acquired the rock after the death of former Prime Minister Willem Drees in 1988. Drees received it as a private gift on Oct. 9, 1969 from then-U.S. ...
Danish Wind Power Overblown
Post Date: 2009-09-16 13:10:49 by farmfriend
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Danish Wind Power Overblown Tuesday, 15 September 2009 23:00 Two Danish experts in the field of wind energy will be in Washington for the next three days to speak on the subject of wind generated electricity. One would expect they are here to brag on the fact that their country is a leader in the field and that they already satisfy, as President Obama puts it, "20 percent of the electricity through wind power." One would be wrong in such an expectation. They are here to warn us about the dangers of putting our electricity needs in the wind power basket. A nation of 5.4 million — between Missouri and Wisconsin in population — the windy nation is "carpeted" ...
The Science Cartel vs. Immanuel Velikovsky
Post Date: 2009-09-16 07:14:58 by Ada
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In 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky culminated decades of research with a book titled Worlds in Collision that "proposes that many myths and traditions of ancient peoples and cultures are based on actual events." His approach was interdisciplinary, a rarity in the 20th century, taking into account astronomy, physics, chemistry, psychology, ancient history, and comparative mythology. He noted, for example, that Venus, the second brightest object in the night sky, was not mentioned by the earliest astronomers. He proposed that the planet was a newcomer to our solar system, a comet, appearing in historical times with an irregular orbit that caused catastrophic events on our own planet. ...
The Simple Electric Universe
Post Date: 2009-09-15 23:59:15 by Clitora
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The Simple Electric Universe by Wallace Thornhill 06 September, 2009 Some people in each successive generation believe that theirs is the one that has at last seen everything clearly, that their insights point to the truth, the final answer. Yet scientific discovery marches on and today's truth will become tomorrow's anecdotes. - Gerrit L. Verschuur, Interstellar Matters The Southbank, London, August 2009 >> The Southbank, London, August 2009. Photo: John Morgan. Cameraman: Gerald Pecksen [Click to enlarge] Since my last report I have been in England where I convened a meeting of people actively concerned with the Electric Universe and the problem of educating the public. ...
Scientists discover surprise in Earth's upper atmosphere
Post Date: 2009-09-15 00:17:54 by farmfriend
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Scientists discover surprise in Earth's upper atmosphere By Stuart Wolpert | 9/9/2009 3:00:00 PM UCLA atmospheric scientists have discovered a previously unknown basic mode of energy transfer from the solar wind to the Earth's magnetosphere. The research, federally funded by the National Science Foundation, could improve the safety and reliability of spacecraft that operate in the upper atmosphere. "It's like something else is heating the atmosphere besides the sun. This discovery is like finding it got hotter when the sun went down," said Larry Lyons, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and a co-author of the research, which is in press in two ...
Facial expressions 'not global'
Post Date: 2009-09-14 22:44:37 by Prefrontal Vortex
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Facial expressions 'not global' By Judith Burns Science reporter, BBC News A new study suggests that people from different cultures read facial expressions differently. East Asian participants in the study focused mostly on the eyes, but those from the West scanned the whole face. In the research carried out by a team from Glasgow University, East Asian observers found it more difficult to distinguish some facial expressions. The work published in Current Biology journal challenges the idea facial expressions are universally understood. In the study, East Asians were more likely than Westerners to read the expression for "fear" as "surprise", and ...
MERCURY RETROGRADE Murphy's Law as defined in the cosmos Mercury retrograde
Post Date: 2009-09-14 19:09:07 by Clitora
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MERCURY RETROGRADE Murphy's Law as defined in the cosmos Mercury retrograde Sometimes, stuff just happens. If you're concerned that the cosmos has it in for you, check the table below to see if Mercury might have been retrograde. Retrograde Mercury is the most commonly known astrological signature for Murphy's Law ("If something can go wrong, it will"), and is one of the first features intermediate astrology students learn about. Say it to a seasoned astrologer and you'll likely get an amused smile and some delightful stories about how things can get quite unexpectedly unhinged. Computers crash, software develops unexpected glitches, traffic jams ensue, ...
How Do Space Pictures Get So Pretty?
Post Date: 2009-09-14 15:57:56 by Prefrontal Vortex
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How Do Space Pictures Get So Pretty?Photoshop, of course. By Daniel Engber Posted Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2009, at 4:56 PM ET A picture taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope was released on Monday; the image, which depicts the birth of 100,000 stars in a far-away gas cloud, shows a splotchy shape in light red, set against a background of speckled blue-white stars and olive mist. How do these photographs get to be so pretty? Teams of specialists on the ground gussy them up for public consumption. Here's how it works: Telescopes like the Spitzer and the Hubble take black-and-white pictures using different filters to capture particular wavelengths of light. (The image released this week is a ...
Super-light sub has 'capability greater than U.S. Navy'
Post Date: 2009-09-12 21:31:17 by F.A. Hayek Fan
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LONDON, England (CNN) -- A new generation of deep-sea submarines light enough to launch from a yacht could open up the ocean's depths to amateur explorers. The "Deep Flight" winged submersibles are experimental prototypes designed to dive to depths of up to 37,000 ft -- almost four times as deep as a giant squid dives -- descending at 400 ft/minute. They are the brainchild of submarine designer Graham Hawkes who is in the process of building commercial models that can reach those depths. Hawkes has been designing submarines since the 1960s, working initially with the British Special Forces and then for the oil industry. He now sells his designs to wealthy sailboat owners ...
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