Lufthansa and the Jülich Research Centre ( FZJ ) will today launch an innovative climate research project for the long-term observation of the Earth's atmosphere using scheduled Lufthansa services. The specially developed measurement devices on board the Lufthansa Airbus A340-300 Viersen will routinely record atmospheric trace substances, and in the future, aerosols and cloud particles as well, while in flight. This shall occur all over the world and on a broad basis. The generated data will be digitally sampled, processed and analysed after every landing. The goal is the creation of a worldwide measurement infrastructure that would allow the global observation of the Earth's atmosphere by means of civil aviation. This gathered data will be of major importance for climate research and numerical weather forecasting. The first flight will start in Frankfurt today at 12.30 p.m. to Lagos in Nigeria.

A several-year development phase involving 15 European project partners under the direction of the Jülich Research Centre ( FZJ ) has gone into the preparation of the research project named IAGOS ( In-service Aircraft for a Global Observing System ). The newly-developed instrument package is extremely robust, almost maintenance-free and can be efficiently integrated into an airline's flight operations. The use of civil aviation aircraft allows for the collection of large quantities of important measurement data, in a volume and resolution that would otherwise not be possible using only research flights or satellites.

Astronomers will celebrate a remarkable event on 11 July. It will be exactly one year since the planet Neptune was discovered. Readers should note a caveat, however. That year is a Neptunian one. The great icy world was first pinpointed 164.79 years ago - on 23 September 1846. And as Neptune takes 164.79 Earthly years to circle the sun, it is only now completing its first full orbit since its detection by humans. Hence those anniversary celebrations.

And there is much to commemorate - for Neptune's discovery marked a turning point in astronomy. Its existence was revealed, not through a serendipitous observation by an astronomer but by the careful work of mathematicians. They calculated that perturbations in the orbit of Uranus, then thought to be the sun's most distant planet, could only be explained by the existence of another, even remoter world whose gravity was affecting Uranus's path.

Oy! Where to start?

It seems there is a veritable fever going around at the moment, all centered on Comet C/2010 X1 (Elenin) and the possible connection it may have to Nibiru - or Planet-X as it's known in some circles. This is the supposed "12th planet" that's been prophesied to come plowing through the Solar System causing a doomsday scenario for us earth-dwellers. Right now, YouTube is awash with videos on Comet Elenin, making this and that claim. Last I checked, a search for "Comet Elenin" returned over 5,000 results on YouTube alone (and that says nothing about what's going on in the blogosphere).

As we've noted here on SOTT over the years, when the noise starts to overpower the signal, that's when there's usually something brewing behind the scenes. The Powers That Be don't just put resources into obscuring certain topics for nothing; and it seems that their disinfo machine is cranked into high gear for this one. Due to all this noise surrounding these topics many questions abound: Is there something special about Comet Elenin? Does Elenin have anything to do with Nibiru/Planet-X? Is Elenin related to the chaotic weather we've experienced lately? Is Comet Elenin really a spaceship from another galaxy? Is all of this somehow related to the end of the Mayan Calendar and the 2012 doomsday prophecies? These questions are understandable given all the lies we're swimming in and the frantic nature of the material we're dealing with. Hopefully a lot of these questions will clear up towards the end of this article.

To summarize the situation, it seems that we have certain folks claiming that Comet Elenin is everything from an elaborate hoax, to a piloted alien spacecraft, to a stray neutron star, to Planet-X itself, and on and on... All the while, NASA and friends seem to be sitting back comfortably in their chairs saying, "nothing to see here, folks!" So who's figured it out? Or hasn't anyone really put all the pieces together yet? Clearly, there's a lot of truth being mixed with lies - that is for certain. The hope here is to dissect some of the noise and inject a little sanity into what is otherwise an insane discussion.

Buried deep beneath the sediment of the North Atlantic Ocean lies an ancient, lost landscape with furrows cut by rivers and peaks that once belonged to mountains. Geologists recently discovered this roughly 56-million-year-old landscape using data gathered for oil companies.

"It looks for all the world like a map of a bit of a country onshore," said Nicky White, the senior researcher. "It is like an ancient fossil landscape preserved 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) beneath the seabed."

So far, the data have revealed a landscape about 3,861 square miles (10,000 square km) west of the Orkney-Shetland Islands that stretched above sea level by almost as much as 0.6 miles (1 km). White and colleagues suspect it is part of a larger region that merged with what is now Scotland and may have extended toward Norway in a hot, prehuman world.

AgResearch's genetically engineered (GE) goat experiments have a new bizarre twist with surviving GE pregnancies producing mostly transgender offspring, that AgResearch staff term 'goys,' according to the Soil & Health Association of NZ.

An AgResearch farm manager recently revealed to Soil & Health and GE Free NZ, during a tour of its Ruakura GE animal field trial site, that most of the GE goats produced were transgender. It appeared that about 75% were "goys" with the remainder female.

"The "goys", females in sterile male bodies, are to be induced into milking to ascertain whether the intended genetically engineered (GE) human protein will be expressed in the milk," said Soil & Health - Organic NZ spokesperson Steffan Browning.

Previous GE cattle pregnancies have only 5% success, with the goats reported to have a success rate of possibly 15%, although one flock of about 18 recipient does failed to hold one GE embryo of a particular experiment. AgResearch has a track record of resultant GE offspring prone to a variety of disabilities including arthritis, respiratory distress, deformities and ruptured ovaries.(1)

"The 15 "goys" we saw had four true sisters, with one induced to milking at six months following AgResearch's in-house ethics committee approval."(2)

Ontario researchers say after decades of research they've discovered the "motherlode" stem cell that has the potential to endlessly replenish human blood and better treat diseases.

The research, published Friday in the journal Science, moves scientists closer to the hope of helping leaukemia patients who are forced to wait -- some until it's too late -- for bone marrow transplant matches, said principal investigator Dr. John Dick, a senior scientist at Toronto's University Health Network.

"Ever since stem cell science began, scientists have been searching for the elusive motherlode -- the single, pure stem cell that could be controlled and expanded in culture (i.e. grown in a lab) prior to transplantation into patients," Dick said in a statement Friday.

Stem cells are so powerful, one can regenerate the entire blood system of a mouse.

A scientist has stumbled on the fossil remains of a 'scary' predator, writes Catherine Woulfe.

Scientists have discovered the skeleton of an ichthyosaur - a huge dolphin-like reptile that lived in the time of the dinosaurs - in a Marlborough riverbank.

The fossil is an exciting, significant find, says Wellington palaeontologist James Crampton, who stumbled across it last March. A handful of individual ichthyosaur bones have been found in New Zealand before, but never so many in one place.

This fossil has not yet been excavated from the boulder it was found in, so Crampton is not sure whether it is a complete skeleton, or exactly how big it is. But he can see "loads of bones - maybe 40, 50, 60" - including sections of rib, paddle and vertebrae.

Each vertebrae measures 15cm across.

"In comparison, a cow's vertebrae is about 4cm across, so this thing was really much, much bigger than a cow. This was a big beast."

Most ichthyosaurs were between two and four metres long, Crampton said, but some were bigger than 15m. They were common in the time of the dinosaurs and lived like dolphins, or orca, giving birth to live young, and hunting fish - or each other.

Researchers in the US claim to have overturned our understanding of the way in which the visual process is initiated by light entering the eye. They suggest that the initial trigger is provided by electrical processes rather than structural changes in the retina, as has been believed for the past 50 years. The work was carried out by a team led by Kenneth Foster at Syracuse University in the US.

It is long established that the first stage in vision is when light arrives at the retina at the back of the eye and individual photons are absorbed by photoreceptor molecules. Biophysicists have noted that this absorption causes parts of these molecules known as chromophores to change shape. It was believed that this process, in turn, electrically polarizes the chromophores, thereby establishing an electric field that triggers further molecular chemical processes that result in a signal being sent to the brain.

But Foster and his colleagues had their doubts about this explanation and they wanted to determine whether this shape-changing - a process known as isomerization - is in fact the first process in vision. So, the researchers set out to suppress the chromophores to prevent them from changing shape to see what effect this had.

Ann Arbor, Michigan - Physicists and astronomers have long believed that the universe has mirror symmetry, like a basketball. But recent findings from the University of Michigan suggest that the shape of the Big Bang might be more complicated than previously thought, and that the early universe spun on an axis.

To test for the assumed mirror symmetry, physics professor Michael Longo and a team of five undergraduates catalogued the rotation direction of tens of thousands of spiral galaxies photographed in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The mirror image of a counter-clockwise rotating galaxy would have clockwise rotation. More of one type than the other would be evidence for a breakdown of symmetry, or, in physics speak, a parity violation on cosmic scales, Longo said.

The researchers found evidence that galaxies tend to rotate in a preferred direction. They uncovered an excess of left-handed, or counter-clockwise rotating, spirals in the part of the sky toward the north pole of the Milky Way. The effect extended beyond 600 million light years away.

A study by USDA scientists finds that raising cows on grass, instead of in factory farms, produces fewer greenhouse-gas emissions and other pollutants.

Perhaps a study conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), entitled "Putting Dairy Cows Out to Pasture - An Environmental Plus," won't put an end to the controversy over whether cows raised outdoors on grass are better for the environment than cows raised on grain in confinement. But the USDA's findings on the matter are all the more remarkable considering that it's only in recent years that the agency has acknowledged there's a type of agriculture besides industrial agriculture, and it's called sustainable.

The Details

Unknown to most of the general public, there have, in fact, been Ag Dept scientists toiling away at experiments that confirm the value of sustainable agriculture, producing reports like "Pecan Growers Boost Revenue by Growing Organically," and "Organic Cover Crops: More Seeds Means Fewer Weeds."

Still, the research conducted about dairy cows may be the USDA's most controversial yet. In fact, both sides continue to argue about which method of raising cattle is better for the environment.

C. Alan Rotz, PhD, an agricultural engineer for the USDA's Agricultural Research Service at University Park, Pennsylvania, and an adjunct professor at Penn State, was the lead researcher for the dairy cows study. And he says he is "tired of all the criticism" about cows raised on pasture. "There's a place for grass-fed cows. There's nothing wrong with grass-based systems, and from an environmental point of view there are a lot of benefits," he says.

According to the USDA's Agricultural Research magazine for May/June 2011, Rotz's peer-reviewed study, first published in a research journal in 2009, concludes that "a dairy cow living year-round in the great outdoors may leave a markedly smaller ecological hoofprint than her more sheltered sisters."