Science & TechnologyS


Igloo

'Warming' Not? Climate-Change Theory Faces Sudden Collapse

polar bear
© n/aNot threatened? The scientist behind the supposed crisis of “drowning polar bears” is now under investigation.
Every day it seems new evidence emerges that the "evidence" for global warming has been exaggerated, manufactured or just plain wrong.

Take the case of Charles Monnett of the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. On July 18, Monnett -- a longtime poster boy for global-warming orthodoxy -- was put on leave pending an investigation into the "integrity" of his work.

The specifics of the investigation are as yet unclear, but the Associated Press reports on indications that the questioning "has centered on observations that Monnett and fellow researcher Jeffrey Gleason made in 2004 . . . of four dead polar bears floating in the water after a storm. They detailed their observations in an article published two years later in the journal Polar Biology."

Monnett and Gleason claimed this was the first known observation of polar bears apparently drowning after being forced to swim long distances in the open sea. Naturally, they saw global warming -- which allegedly is shrinking the polar ice caps -- as the culprit. The dead bears, they wrote, "suggest that drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues."

Hardhat

Cavers Explore Mysterious Hidden Wonders

Much remains undiscovered in millions of caves worldwide
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© VOA - S. SchlenderStalactites in the commercial caves at Glenwood Caverns in Colorado

Caves have a subconscious hold on our imaginations - for our ancestors, they were not just shelter from the elements but also symbols of the womb, gateways to the underworld, places of wonder and mystery.

Not so mysterious today, but still full of wonder, caves and caverns continue to draw the adventurous, the curious and the scientific.

There are millions of caves around the world, on every continent, in every country. They are home to some of the strangest creatures on earth - eyeless spiders, hydrogen-eating bacteria, worms that glow and other organisms yet to be discovered.

Star

Earth used to have two moons... but one was destroyed in a giant collision

Earth may once have had two moons - the one that shines at night today and a smaller companion, according to a new theory.

A slow-motion collision between the two is believed to have created the mountainous highlands on the moon's far side, as debris from the second, smaller moon piled up.

The side of the moon facing the Earth and the side facing away have strikingly different topographies.

Image
© UnknownBefore the collision: Earth may once have had two moons - the one that shines at night today and a smaller companion
While the near side is relatively low and flat, the far side is high and mountainous with a much thicker crust.

Magic Wand

There are 14 different kinds of noses, study claims

Image
© Compiled by Rachel SlaffMay we present the "bumpy nose" -- found in 9 percent of noses surveyed
How many different shapes of human noses are there? Ten? Fifty? Hundreds?

The correct answer is 14, according to Abraham Tamir, an Israeli scientist. And while the study has its limitations, it is the first-of-its-kind survey detailing the shapes of schnozes.

Tamir set out to count, sort and categorize the shapes of human noses mainly because no one had ever done this experiment before. A professor of chemical engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel, Tamir also teaches a course on the interaction between art and science.

Attention

Dust is All That's Needed to Plunge the World into an Ice Age: Iron-rich Dust Fuelled 4 Million Years of Ice Ages

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© NASA/SPLDust storms bring a cool climate
Dust is all that's needed to plunge the world into an ice age. When blown into the sea, the iron it contains can fertilise plankton growth on a scale large enough to cause global temperatures to drop. The finding adds support to the idea of staving off climate change by simulating the effects of dust - perhaps by sprinkling the oceans with iron filings.


Comment: This is an insane idea, especially when Mother Nature is about to introduce us to the next Ice Age without any human intervention.


Iron-rich dust falling on the ocean has long been known to spark blooms of plankton, and researchers suspect the process could have intensified the ice ages that have occurred over the past few million years.

The thinking goes that, during warm periods, much of the Southern Ocean is an oceanic desert because it lacks the iron crucial for plankton growth. That changes at the start of ice ages, when a wobble in the planet's orbit causes an initial cooling that dries the continents, generates dust storms - particularly in central Asia - and sends dust onto the surface of the Southern Ocean.

Comment: No need for any further experiments, because the process of changes in the layers of the atmosphere due to comet dust loading has already started. The next Ice Age appears to be on our doorstep.

Read the following articles to learn more on the topic:

The Harbingers of Change Can Now Be Seen All Around the World! Mysterious Noctilucent Clouds Brighten Up Night Skies
Are Ice Crystals Really to Blame? US: Halo Appears Around The Sun Over The Central Savannah River Area
Another spiral formation points to Earth's changing atmosphere
Chemtrails? Contrails? Strange Skies


Magic Wand

First opal-like crystals discovered in meteorite

Scientists have found opal-like crystals in the Tagish Lake meteorite, which fell to Earth in Canada in 2000. This is the first extraterrestrial discovery of these unusual crystals, which may have formed in the primordial cloud of dust that produced the sun and planets of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago, according to a report in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Katsuo Tsukamoto and colleagues say that colloidal crystals such as opals, which form as an orderly array of particles, are of great interest to for their potential use in new electronics and optical devices. Surprisingly, the crystals in the meteorite are composed of magnetite, which scientists thought could not assemble into such a crystal because magnetic attractions might pack the atoms together too tightly. "We believe that, if synthesized, magnetite colloidal crystals have promising potential as a novel functional material," the article notes.

Info

Researchers Resurrect 'Multiverse' Theory

Multiverse
© redOrbit

Researchers have resurrected the theory that other universes lie within "bubbles" of space and time, known as the "Multiverse" theory.

Studies of the low-temperature glow left from the Big Bang suggest that these "bubble universes" have left marks on our own.

The theory is popular in modern physics, but experimental tests have been hard to perform.

A team of scientists used data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) to help reignite this theory.

This probe measures detail of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which s the faint glow left from the formation of the Universe.

The multiverse theory said these bubble universes are popping into and out of existence and colliding all the time, with the space between them rapidly expanding.

Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist at University College London, and her colleagues say that when these universes are created adjacent to our own, they may leave a characteristic pattern in the CMB.

"I'd heard about this 'multiverse' for years and years, and I never took it seriously because I thought it's not testable," Dr Peiris told BBC News. "I was just amazed by the idea that you can test for all these other universes out there - it's just mind-blowing."

Info

Earth Had Two Moons That Crashed to Form One, Study Suggests

Moon Collision
© Martin Jutzi and Erik AsphaugThis computer illustration depicts a collision between Earth’s moon and a companion moon that is 750 miles wide and about 4 percent of the lunar mass. This late, slow accretion could explain the moon's farside highlands, scientists say.
A tiny second moon may once have orbited Earth before catastrophically slamming into the other one, a titanic clash that could explain why the two sides of the surviving lunar satellite are so different from each other, a new study suggests.

The second moon around Earth would have been about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) wide and could have formed from the same collision between the planet and a Mars-sized object that scientists suspect helped create the moon we see in the sky today, astronomers said.

The gravitational tug of war between the Earth and moon slowed the rate at which it whirls, such that it now always shows just one side to Earth. The far side of the moon remained a mystery for centuries until 1959, when the Soviet Luna 3 spacecraft first snapped photos of it. (The far side is sometimes erroneously called the dark side, even though it has days and nights just like the near side.)

Question

"Does an Unknown Level of Technology Beyond Matter Exist?"

Alien Life Forms
© Jerry Taylor / Flickr
Last year, Stephen Hawking warned that contact with an advanced extraterrestrial civilization could have dire consequences for the human species. Arthur C Clarke once made the famous observation that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.

Following in their footsteps, world-renowned experts from physicist Sir Martin Rees of Cambridge University to astrobiologist Paul Davis of Arizona State have asked if we were to encounter alien technology far superior to our own, would we even realize what it was. A technology a million or more years in advance of ours could appear miraculous or be undetectable.

In fact, Davies writes in his new book, Eerie Silence, that advanced technology might not even be made of matter. That it might have no fixed size or shape; have no well-defined boundaries. Is dynamical on all scales of space and time. Or, conversely, does not appear to do anything at all that we can discern. Does not consist of discrete, separate things; but rather it is a system,or a subtle higher-level correlation of things.

Einstein

Why Aren't We Smarter?

Einstein
© Life's Little Mysteries

Albert Einstein was mind-bogglingly smart. His brain, no bigger than an average man's, somehow worked better, making unprecedented mental leaps between space and time and ultimately linking them together to form spacetime, a strange and (to most people) almost inconceivable entity. Einstein's brain saw the universe and got it.

Why can't we all be that smart?

"You have two separate lines of research converging for the first time to suggest an answer," said Edward Bullmore, a neuroscientist at Cambridge University in England. "Brains have evolved not just to minimize cost, and not just to become as intelligent as possible, but to reach a balance between those things."

Bullmore is currently using brain-imaging techniques to look at how much energy the functioning brain uses. Brains are extremely expensive, energy-wise, he noted: Though they take up only 2 percent of our body mass, they burn 20 percent of our energy.