This seems like a rather important discovery — where there’s water, there *could be* living microorganisms. We’re staying tuned to this . . .
View a NASA Video about “Cold Faithful”.
Image above from NASA – an infrared false-color view of the “Cold Faithful” Geyser on Enceladus.
Break out the red-blue 3D glasses and check this stereo picture of the Sahara Impact Crater. What? You don’t have a pair? Well, just send Rainbow Symphony a self-addressed-stamped envelope and they’ll send you a free pair!
From SpaceWeather.com
KEBIRA IMPACT CRATER: Sometimes asteroids miss, and sometimes they don’t. Planetary scientist Farouk El-Baz of Boston University has just announced the discovery of a 19-mile-wide impact crater in the Sahara desert. He named it Kebira, an Arabic word meaning “large.”
Kebira is so large that it is actually difficult to see from ground level. Satellite images show it better. Using Landsat 7 data, Frank Reddy of Astronomy Magazine created this 3D anaglyph:
View with red-blue glasses for 3D effect.
“Desert sands, wind, and ancient rivers have eroded the dark, 100-million-year-old sandstone, but the crater’s rings and central uplift still stand out,” says Reddy. “El-Baz thinks this is the source of a yellow-green desert glass found throughout the region.
SpaceWeather.com offers a larger 3D view of the crater.
Global Warming is always a hot topic since the left often uses the phenomenon to try and leverage their obstructive agenda. They generally attempt to blame the industry of mankind in general, and the United States in particular, for the “horrible” consequences of global warming.
The left embraces the Kyoto Accord, an international treaty whereby countries agree to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases by imposing restrictive laws and higher taxes. The United States is not signatory to the treaty, largely because it is based on the faulty premise that greenhouse gasses emitted by industry is the major contributing factor to global warming; in fact, chaotic solar activity has more to do with the climate on our planet than any other factors. Why should we sign up for a useless effort and penalize our industry and economy?
Volcanoes, range and forest fires and infrequent caldera activity have had temporary effects, but are not comparable to the major contributor, the Sun. And these terrestrial occurrences are much more consequential than anything our emissions can contribute (short of global thermonuclear war).
Thinking that the minor contribution of industrial emissions can compare with the influence of solar magnetic flux, coronal mass ejections (CMEs), x-ray flares, solar wind and other solar phenomena is like thinking that a mouse can single-handedly whip a herd of pachyderms. Complete nonsense.
Now, it seems that Old Sol is busily fusing hydrogen into helium, recharging his batteries, and resting up for yet another period of intense activity that is certain to result in a major assault on our planet’s climate. From Science Blog
Scientists Gaze Inside Sun, Predict the Next Solar Cycle
The next solar activity cycle will be 30 to 50 percent stronger than the previous one, and up to a year late in arriving . . .
[ . . . ]
The sun goes through a roughly 11-year cycle of activity, from stormy to quiet and back again. Predicting the sun’s cycles accurately years in advance will help societies plan for active bouts of solar storms, which can disrupt satellite orbits and electronics, interfere with radio communication, and damage power systems. The forecast is important for NASA’s long-term Vision for Space Exploration plans, since solar storms can be hazardous to unprotected astronauts as well.
[ . . . ]
We are currently back in the quiet period for the current cycle (cycle 23). The next cycle will begin with a rise in solar activity in late 2007 or early 2008, according to the team, and there will be 30 to 50 percent more sunspots, flares, and CMEs in cycle 24. This is about one year later than the prediction using previous methods, which rely on statistics, like the strength of the large-scale solar magnetic field and the number of sunspots, to make estimates for the next cycle.
Images credit SOHO
Uh oh! The gulf coast and other hurricane-prone areas had better start building the Mother of All Levees.
For additional reading, see our entire collection of global warming articles.
Imagine my surprise when I found an article on Space.com that was, in effect, a movie review. The article was entertaining, humorous and was written from a scientific perspective:
SPACE.com — Big Apes and Bad Biology
[ . . . ]
Skull Island’s a happening place. Sauropods stampede to a booming death, insect carnivores the size of phone booths writhe out of the swamps, and Kong – stricken by the sight of blonde hair – develops an inappropriate interest in the one woman who’s aboard ship. Eventually, the entrepreneurs who have initiated this less-than-idyllic odyssey capture Kong and take him back to Manhattan as an E-coupon sideshow attraction.
Let me give that a bit of emphasis: these guys find an island filled with living, prehistoric dinosaurs. And they bring back the mammal.
Now some will see this classic cinema tale as a touching love story between two primates who share their affections but only 98% of their genes. A recent opinion piece in the New York Times suggested that this film was motivated by Soviet experiments in the 1920s designed to produce a human-chimpanzee hybrid (in an attempt to discredit religion, while simultaneously offending chimp family values). Then there’s the now-forgotten prewar habit of bringing back wild beasts and natives from distant lands to exhibit as living exotica. As recently as 1931, you could observe caged humans (Africans and Inuit were favorites) on display in Europe.
[more]
Yep, long after slavery was abolished in this country, enlightened Europeans kept people of color in cages – and these days they preach to America about our so-called injustices – but I digress – that’s not the point of the article. I just thought it was yet another good example of Euro-hypocrisy.
John Hinderaker at PowerLine found more evidence of science tampering with the numbers in order to get the results that support their political position. One of the issues is Global Warming.
This is a good read: Power Line: A Bad Mix
Caving into the almighty quest for capital, a famous London company will shut down a popular planetarium & science exhibit in favor of shows featuring celebrities. In essence, celestial stars are out, superficial stars are in.
From Sky and Telescope: London Planetarium to Close
February 22, 2006 The stars at one of central London’s well-known tourist attractions will go dark for good this July. Madame Tussauds waxworks, the owner of the London Planetarium, has decided to close the facility as the company shifts its focus from science education to entertainment. The planetarium (renamed the Auditorium) will soon replace its shows with programs about celebrities.
Built in the 1950s, the London Planetarium seats around 330 under its green 18-meter (60-foot) dome. Although Madame Tussauds had cut the screenings of its shows to just one 10-minute program called “Journey to Infinity,” the planetarium has remained very popular with local schoolchildren and their teachers.
“The London Planetarium has inspired generations of schoolchildren,” notes Robin Scagell, vice president of Britain’s Society for Popular Astronomy. “Many parents can still remember their first visit to it when they were young. To lose the planetarium now would be a tragedy.”
The Royal Observatory’s new, state-of-the-art 120-seat planetarium in Greenwich Park, about 30 minutes from downtown London by boat or rail, is currently under construction and won’t be completed until early 2007. “The only other planetarium of any size within striking distance of London,” says Scagell, “is the South Downs Planetarium near Chichester on the South Coast, about 60 miles from the capital, which is certainly not readily accessible unless you happen to be in the area.”
“I don’t think the Madame Tussauds management wants to sell or lease out the London Planetarium,” he adds. “It’s a valuable bit of real estate in a very expensive part of the world, and I’m sure they want to hang on to it. The dome itself is not a listed building, that is, not protected as being of historic or architectural value, but I doubt that they would want to pull it down just yet.”
It’s a shame to trade science for sensationalism. Most celestial stars are in their main sequence and will glow for billions of years to come. Terrestrial stars might be compared to final sequence giant stars, which have only a short time left before they collapse into the dwarfs they are all destined to become.
Of course, the left will ignore the hard science and embrace the “blame US industry” and “blame Bush” for not signing up for the flawed Kyoto Accord.
Unusually high solar “X-flare” activity may explain the unusually intense 2005 hurricane season. The numbers and intensity of the flares since the last solar maximum have relentlessly bombarded the Earth with high-energy particles and magnetic flux. The effect of these flares includes a high number of hurricanes, and lightning in the eyewalls of the most intense storms.
First, the cause:
[On September 7, 2005] a huge sunspot rounded the sun’s eastern limb. As soon as it appeared, it exploded, producing one of the brightest x-ray solar flares of the Space Age. In the days that followed, the growing spot exploded eight more times. Each powerful “X-flare” caused a shortwave radio blackout on Earth and pumped new energy into a radiation storm around our planet. The blasts hurled magnetic clouds toward Earth, and when they hit, on Sept 10th and 11th, ruby-red auroras were seen as far south as Arizona. (Photo: the skies above Payson AZ on Sept. 11, 2005. Photo credit: Chris Schur.)
. . .
“That’s a lot of activity,” says solar physicist David Hathaway of the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Compare 2005 to the most recent Solar Max: “In the year 2000,” he recalls, “there were 3 severe geomagnetic storms and 17 X-flares.” 2005 registers about the same in both categories. Solar minimum is looking strangely like Solar Max.
One unusual effect:
January 9, 2006: The boom of thunder and crackle of lightning generally mean one thing: a storm is coming. Curiously, though, the biggest storms of all, hurricanes, are notoriously lacking in lightning. Hurricanes blow, they rain, they flood, but seldom do they crackle.
Surprise: During the record-setting hurricane season of 2005 three of the most powerful storms–Rita, Katrina, and Emily–did have lightning, lots of it. And researchers would like to know why.
Right: An infrared GOES 11 satellite image of Hurricane Emily. Yellow + and – symbols mark lightning bolts detected by the North American Lightning Detection Network. The green line traces the path of the ER-2 surveillance aircraft.
Lightning has been seen in hurricanes before. During a field campaign in 1998 called CAMEX-3, scientists detected lightning in the eye of hurricane Georges as it plowed over the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The lightning probably was due to air forced upward — called “orographic forcing” — when the hurricane hit the mountains.
“Hurricanes are most likely to produce lightning when they’re making landfall,” says Blakeslee. But there were no mountains beneath the “electric hurricanes” of 2005—only flat water.
For more about our opinions on global warming and for more reference articles, see this article.
