Few geological mysteries are as perplexing as the 'Great Unconformity' riddle at the Grand Canyon: More than a billion years of missing rock layers that for some reason weren't deposited and stacked like the rest of the geological record. It's as though those years never happened.

This strange gap was first spotted by geologist John Wesley Powell in 1869, as he journeyed down the Colorado River. Later, we would be able to date those layers. In some places, rocks dated to 1.4-1.8 billion years ago sit next to rocks that are just 520 million years old.

"There are beautiful lines," says geologist Barra Peak from the University of Colorado Boulder. "At the bottom, you can see very clearly that there are rocks that have been pushed together. Their layers are vertical. Then there's a cutoff, and above that, you have these beautiful horizontal layers that form the buttes and peaks that you associate with the Grand Canyon."

Where did the rest of these rocks go?

Climate scientist Dr. Ronan Connolly, Dr. Willie Soon and 21 other scientists claim the conclusions of the latest "code red" IPCC climate report, and the certainty with which those conclusions are expressed, are dependent on the IPCC authors' narrow choice of datasets. The scientists assert that the inclusion of additional credible data sets would have led to very different conclusions about the alleged threat of anthropogenic global warming.

Challenging UN, Study Finds Sun — not CO2 — May Be Behind Global Warming

New peer-reviewed paper finds evidence of systemic bias in UN data selection to support climate-change narrative

By Alex Newman August 16, 2021 Updated: August 16, 2021

The sun and not human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) may be the main cause of warmer temperatures in recent decades, according to a new study with findings that sharply contradict the conclusions of the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The peer-reviewed paper, produced by a team of almost two dozen scientists from around the world, concluded that previous studies did not adequately consider the role of solar energy in explaining increased temperatures.

The new study was released just as the UN released its sixth "Assessment Report," known as AR6, that once again argued in favor of the view that man-kind's emissions of CO2 were to blame for global warming. The report said human responsibility was "unequivocal."

But the new study casts serious doubt on the hypothesis.

Calling the blaming of CO2 by the IPCC "premature," the climate scientists and solar physicists argued in the new paper that the UN IPCC's conclusions blaming human emissions were based on "narrow and incomplete data about the Sun's total irradiance."

Indeed, the global climate body appears to display deliberate and systemic bias in what views, studies, and data are included in its influential reports, multiple authors told The Epoch Times in a series of phone and video interviews.

"Depending on which published data and studies you use, you can show that all of the warming is caused by the sun, but the IPCC uses a different data set to come up with the opposite conclusion," lead study author Ronan Connolly, Ph.D. told The Epoch Times in a video interview.

"In their insistence on forcing a so-called scientific consensus, the IPCC seems to have decided to consider only those data sets and studies that support their chosen narrative," he added.

The full article here and the statement released by the scientists can be found here.

People have known about magnets since ancient times, but the physics of ferromagnetism remains a mystery. Now a familiar puzzle is getting physicists closer to the answer.

The 15-puzzle asks players to slide numbered tiles around a grid. When the numbers are replaced by the spins of electrons, the puzzle can be used to explain how permanent magnets work.

For a few months in 1880, entire swaths of the United States succumbed to an addiction the likes of which had never been seen. "It has become literally an epidemic all over the country," wrote The Weekly News-Democrat in Emporia, Kansas, on March 12, 1880. "Whole cities are distracted, and men are losing sleep and going crazy over it." The epidemic spread to Europe and as far as Australia and New Zealand.

A woman buried 7,200 years ago in what is now Indonesia belonged to a previously unknown human lineage that doesn't exist anymore, a new genetic analysis reveals.

The ancient woman's genome also revealed that she is a distant relative of present-day Aboriginal Australians and Melanesians, or the Indigenous people on the islands of New Guinea and the western Pacific whose ancestors were the first humans to reach Oceania, the researchers found.

WEAK IMPACT

As predicted, a CME hit Earth's magnetic field on Aug. 27th (0100 UT). The impact was weak, lifting the solar wind speed by less than 50 km/s. Nevertheless, the CME's arrival did power a magnetic substorm over Canada with some brief but beautiful auroras. A stronger CME may be on the way, propelled by the "solar tsunami" explosion described below.

SOLAR TSUNAMI AND CME

Sunspot AR2859 erupted on Aug. 26th, producing a C3-class solar flare: movie. The flare, however, was not the main attraction. The eruption also caused a massive "solar tsunami." Watch the shadowy wave ripple across the sun in this false-color ultraviolet movie from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory:

A beam of light can only be seen when it hits matter particles and is scattered or reflected by them. In a vacuum, however, it is invisible. Physicists at the University of Bonn have now developed a method that allows laser beams to be visualized even under these conditions. The method makes it easier to perform the ultra-precise laser alignment required to manipulate individual atoms. The researchers have now presented their method in the journal Physical Review Applied.
When individual atoms interact with each other, they often exhibit unusual behavior due to their quantum behavior. These effects can, for instance, be used to construct so-called quantum computers, which can solve certain problems that conventional computers struggle with. For such experiments, however, it is necessary to maneuver individual atoms into exactly the right position. "We do this using laser beams that serve as conveyor belts of light, so to speak," explains Dr. Andrea Alberti, who led the study at the Institute of Applied Physics at the University of Bonn.

Such a conveyor belt of light contains countless pockets, each of which can hold a single atom. These pockets can be moved back and forth at will, allowing an atom to be transported to a specific location in space. If you want to move the atoms in different directions, you usually need many of these conveyor belts. When more atoms are transported to the same location, they can interact with each other. In order for this process to take place under controlled conditions, all pockets of the conveyor belt must have the same shape and depth. "To ensure this homogeneity, the lasers must overlap with micrometer precision," explains Gautam Ramola, the study's lead author.

There are new discoveries to be made, even in the inner solar system. This was highlighted this past week with the announcement of the discovery of tiny asteroid 2021 PH27. The asteroid orbits the Sun in just 113 days, the shortest orbital period for any known asteroid and the second shortest orbital period for any object in the solar system next to the planet Mercury, at 88 days.

The discovery was made by astronomer Scott S. Sheppard (Carnegie Institution for Science) after searching through images taken by Ian Dell'Antonio and Shenming Fu (both Brown University) at evening twilight on August 13, 2021. Subsequent observations with multiple telescopes around the world enabled astronomers to confirm the asteroid's orbit.

The initial discovery observations were made using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) based at the National Science Foundation's Blanco 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) complex in Chile. Although the primary mission for the Dark Energy Camera is the study of cosmic expansion, the Brown University astronomers agreed to use DECam at the beginning of their observing run to take wide-field images in the fading twilight.

Renowned psychologist Dan Ariely literally wrote the book on dishonesty. Now some are questioning whether the scientist himself is being dishonest.

A landmark study that endorsed a simple way to curb cheating is going to be retracted nearly a decade later after a group of scientists found that it relied on faked data.

According to the 2012 paper, when people signed an honesty declaration at the beginning of a form, rather than the end, they were less likely to lie. A seemingly cheap and effective method to fight fraud, it was adopted by at least one insurance company, tested by government agencies around the world, and taught to corporate executives. It made a splash among academics, who cited it in their own research more than 400 times.

Picture an anthill. What do you see? A small mound of sand and crumbly dirt poking up through the lawn? A tiny hole disappearing into the ground? A few ants scrambling around busily. Not very impressive, right?

But slip beneath the surface and the above-ground simplicity gives way to subterranean complexity. Tunnels dive downward, branching and leading to specialized chambers that serve as home for the colony's queen, as nurseries for its young, as farms for fungus cultivated for food, and as dumps for its trash. These are not just burrows. They are underground cities, some of them home to millions of individuals, reaching as far as 25 feet underground, often lasting for decades.

Massive study finds that genetic markers associated with same-sex encounters might aid reproduction. But some scientists question the conclusions.

To evolutionary biologists, the genetics of homosexuality seems like a paradox. In theory, humans and other animals who are exclusively attracted to others of the same sex should be unlikely to produce many biological children, so any genes that predispose people to homosexuality would rarely be passed on to future generations. Yet same-sex attraction is widespread in humans, and research suggests that it is partly genetic.

In a study of data from hundreds of thousands of people, researchers have now identified genetic patterns that could be associated with homosexual behaviour, and showed how these might also help people to find different-sex mates, and reproduce. The authors say their findings, published on 23 August in Nature Human Behaviour¹, could help to explain why genes that predispose people to homosexuality continue to be passed down. But other scientists question whether these data can provide definitive conclusions.

Evolutionary geneticist Brendan Zietsch at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues used data from the UK Biobank, the US National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and the company 23andMe, based in Sunnyvale, California, which sequence genomes and use questionnaires to collect information from their participants. The team analysed the genomes of 477,522 people who said they had had sex at least once with someone of the same sex, then compared these genomes with those of 358,426 people who said they'd only had heterosexual sex. The study looked only at biological sex, not gender, and excluded participants whose gender and sex did not match.

In earlier research, the researchers had found that people who'd had at least one same-sex partner tended to share patterns of small genetic differences scattered throughout the genome². None of these variations seemed to greatly affect sexual behaviour on its own, backing up previous research that has found no sign of a 'gay gene'. But the collection of variants seemed to have a small effect overall, explaining between 8% and 25% of heritability.

Next, the researchers used a computer algorithm to simulate human evolution over 60 generations. They found that the array of genetic variations associated with same-sex behaviour would have eventually disappeared, unless it somehow helped people to survive or reproduce.