My father had a favorite adage when life was hectic: "There's lots of commotion in the ocean." That saying was never more true than the current situation in the busy Atlantic Ocean. The GOES-13 satellite captured this image earlier today (Tuesday Aug. 31) and visible are three areas of tropical commotion. The large and powerful [...]
Move over, Dr. Quinn. Sure, the fictional television doctor could perform surgeries in the Old West using nothing more than a spoon–but one researcher now argues that inhabitants of a small village in Turkey sliced skulls over 4,000 years ago, using shards of volcanic glass.
Working in a Bronze Age graveyard in Ikiztepe, Turkey, archaeologist Önder [...]
Good news: Earl stopped strengthening and is apparently going through an eyewall replacement cycle. It remains a Category 4 storm, and may restrengthen again, but Category 5 may not be in the cards.
Bad news: The hurricane center pushed the forecast track a little to the west again. In fact, the center says that “A HURRICANE [...]
Recently, for Blue Ridge Press, I did a commentary piece about geoengineering, which I understand has now appeared in smaller papers all across the country, including this one, the Philly Tribune.
The folks at Blue Ridge are very happy about how widely this column has circulated, especially given this line from the piece:
Unfortunately, you’ve probably never [...]
Crispian Jago makes completely transparent attempts to get linked from blogs. The thing is, he keeps doing spectacular stuff!
This time it’s a metro-subway-style map showing scientists of the past 400 or so years. It’s wonderfully detailed! Here it is shrunk enough to fit on my meager 610-pixel wide blog: [Click to unsubwaynate and get the 2Mb [...]
I did not know, when I recorded the last Point of Inquiry with Richard Wrangham, that his excellent book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human was soon to be out in paperback.
Otherwise I certainly would have flagged that, because it’s really one of the best pieces of popular science writing that I’ve come across [...]
Back in 2008, the first multi-planet system of extrasolar planets was imaged, and further study of the planets in this very young system is yielding some puzzling results. Astronomers using the Keck Observatory have been able to obtain the spectrum of one planet, HR 8799 b, revealing the temperature, chemical composition, and atmospheric properties of [...]
“Falsification of illness occurs when a patient fabricates symptoms or induces a physical illness. A recent review of the literature covering the past 3 decades identified 42 published case studies of falsified illness in children younger than 18 years of age (1). The psychiatric term for illness falsification is “factitious disorder,” which is defined as [...]
Commercial space companies Armadillo Aerospace and Masten Space Systems have been awarded a total of $475,000 to perform test flights of their experimental vehicles near the edge of space. The award is part of NASA's Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research Program (CRuSR), which seeks to develop commercial reusable transportation to near space for frequent, low-cost trips [...]
Remember those high school liquid nitrogen demonstrations? You know, the one where your teacher dipped a banana into the cloudy stuff, pulled it out, and then shattered it on the floor?
Well, Popular Science blogger Theodore Gray recently decided to stick in his hand. As you can see in a video over on their site, his [...]
…and Category 5 may not be out of the cards.
At right is the latest image of the storm, featuring the pinhole eye often seen when a hurricane is rapidly intensifying, as Earl has today.
Meanwhile, Earl now has a little sister, Fiona, who is following him across the Atlantic.
Earl has lashed Puerto Rico today with its [...]
Seven instruments will be aboard India's second unmanned mission to the Moon, Chandrayaan-2, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) announced today. The mission, which is a cooperative effort between ISRO and the Russian Federal Space Agency, will include an orbiter, a lander and a rover, which officials hope will launch in 2013. The instruments will [...]
We’ve really got to watch this one. Earl is currently exploding in intensity, and as Jeff Masters writes:
Ocean temperatures are a near-record 30°C, and very warm waters extend to great depth, resulting in a total ocean heat content highly favorable for rapid intensification. These nearly ideal conditions for intensification should bring Earl to Category 4 [...]
Not good news this morning, as the National Hurricane Center felt the need to shift the forecast track for Hurricane Earl to the west–e.g., closer to the U.S. east coast.
Earl is now a 95 knot Category 2 hurricane, and given how much it has strengthened in the past 24 hours, seems on course towards Category [...]
Saturn is best known for its rings. This huge and beautiful ring system is easy to spot in even the smallest backyard telescope, so you can imagine they were a surprise when Galileo first noticed them. But astronomers have gone on to find rings around the other gas giant worlds in the Solar System – [...]
Many an alternative theory of gravity has been dreamt up in the bath, while waiting for a bus – or maybe over a light beverage or two. These days it’s possible to debunk (or otherwise) your own pet theory by predicting on paper what should happen to an object that is closely orbiting a black [...]
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2010/10-73AR.html
Also the third planetary candidate, with a radius only 1.5 times that of Earth...
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/alien-planets-solar-system-discovered-100824.html
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-08/search-aliens-should-include-search-intelligent-machines-says-seti-astronomer
http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/3586/mud-volcanoes-on-mars