On Wednesday night, June 15th, there's going to be a total lunar eclipse visible from every continent except North America. The Moon will spend 100 minutes fully engulfed in Earth's shadow, making this the longest lunar eclipse in nearly 11 years. Maximum coverage occurs on Wednesday night at 20:12 UT. [details] [animated map] [webcasts: #1, #2]

Exhaust from the erupting volcano in Chile could affect the appearance of the eclipse. For discussion, scroll past this picture of a similar eclipse in 2010:

Click here to listen to the interview with Chris Herd.

A meteorite found in B.C. contains evidence that asteroids are production sites for molecules such as amino acids that form the building blocks of life, a new study says.

"What we're saying is that amino acids are actually the result of the geology happening on the asteroid," said Chris Herd, the planetary geologist at the University of Alberta who led the study published Thursday in Science.

"It's like a little factory. It's taking even more primitive molecules that are coming in from space and doing them up a bit."

He added that the warmer temperatures in the asteroid and the presence of water and possibly certain minerals provide a better environment than interstellar space for certain chemical reactions. Those reactions are needed to produce organic molecules, a class of carbon-based chemicals that living things are largely made of.

Scientists say they're close to producing new "super varieties" of wheat that will resist a virulent fungus while boosting yields up to 15 percent, potentially easing a deadly threat to the world's food supply.

The research is part of a global drive to protect wheat crops from the Ug99 strain of stem rust. It will be presented next week at a conference in St. Paul that's part of the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative, based at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., organizers said Thursday.

Scientists will also report that Ug99 variants are becoming increasingly virulent and are being carried by the winds beyond Uganda and other East African countries where they were first identified in 1999. Once infected with the deadly fungus, wheat plants become covered in reddish-brown blisters.

According to a news release issued by the initiative ahead of the symposium, the fungus has now spread across all of eastern and southern Africa, and it might just be a matter of time before it reaches India or Pakistan, and even Australia and the Americas.

"We are facing the prospect of a biological firestorm, but it's also clear that the research community has responded to the threat at top speed, and we are getting results in the form of new varieties that are resistant to rust and appealing to farmers," Ronnie Coffman, who heads the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project at Cornell, said in the release.

Scientists in Argentina have created the world's first cow to boast two human genes that will enable it to produce human-like milk.

Genetic engineering was used to introduce the "mothers' milk" genes into the animal before birth, according to the National Institute of Agribusiness Technology in Buenos Aires.

As an adult the cloned cow "will produce milk that is similar to humans" in what will prove "a development of great importance for the nutrition of infants", it said in a statement.

"The cloned cow, named Rosita ISA, is the first bovine born in the world that incorporates two human genes that contain the proteins present in human milk," the statement said.

In April scientists in China published details of research showing that they had created GM Holstein dairy cows which produced milk containing proteins found in human breast milk.

The Scientific Establishment recently turned up the heat on scientist Allen West and the rest of the Younger Dryas Impact Event researchers by unleashing their attack dog, Rex Dalton, whose hitpiece is being used to smear West's good name and the Younger Dryas Impact Theory by proxy. While this is an unfortunate turn of events, we are not entirely surprised here given what we've seen of psychopaths in other quarters of society. If there is one overarching point that we wish SOTT readers to understand, it's that psychopaths do control our world - all of it. While this should be plainly obvious when it comes to corrupt governments, corporations and religious institutions, the world of science and academia is no exception to this fact.

The assumption of Uniformitarianism underpins many if not all scientific disciplines. Its proponents argue that the "present is the key to understanding the past," that the slow gradual processes we see in nature today have been constant throughout history. An enormous number of scientists across many fields have staked their careers (whether they're aware of it or not) on this fundamental assumption. This Uniformitarianist, or gradualist, approach is used to explain things like geological features, celestial events, species evolution, civilization advancement, technological progress and so on. When it comes to catastrophic events, the Uniformitarian-dominated sciences permit only consideration of those which may have happened on a timescale of millions of years, like the Cretaceous - Tertiary extinction event 65 million years ago that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs. To admit that catastrophic impact events occur on the timescale of human history would mean surrendering the comfortable notion we live in a safe and stable world that has evolved in splendid isolation, shielded from cosmic intervention. Few people, even scientists, are prepared to examine the overwhelming data indicating the reality of cyclic catastrophism. The elite of our world have gone to enormous lengths to prevent the masses from knowing this, so it's not difficult to see how today's Uniformitarianist approach serves a lot of interests.

The writer formerly employed by Nature, Rex Dalton, recently implied in a Miller-McCune blog that Allen West is a criminal charlatan. That is untrue. I have spoke over the last month to Allen, as well as a number of his collaborators, and determined the true story to the satisfaction of the Tusk. I have also assembled and shared a number of primary documents linked below, not identified or referenced by Dalton, et. al.

The true story is consistent with my experience that Allen West is an honest-to-goodness, if imperfectly credentialed, key contributor to the hypothesis and the papers.

I am very biased in this matter. For instance, Allen is my most frequent (if only) house guest. My wife Pam and I have allowed Allen to stay with our young family on several occasions. The little guy has been a close friend for over five years. I know Allen West as well as anyone on the Younger Dryas team or its collaborators.

I suppose Allen West could appear to readers of Dalton's article to be a liar salting his samples at his own expense to get on TV. But I have reason to believe this is untrue.

For one, I have spoken regularly over the last decade with the laboratory techs, supervising scientists and co-authors dealing with the hundreds of samples from dozens of locations around the world and it would simply be impossible for Allen to direct from his "laboratory" in Arizona a fraud of this complexity, scale and nature.

New 3-D images reveal for the first time what happens inside the brain when a person loses consciousness, suggesting the mysterious sleeplike state occurs as electrical activity deep in the brain dims and connections between certain neurons suddenly break down.

"We have produced what I think is the first video in existence in the entire world of [the brain of] a patient being anesthetized," said study researcher Brian Pollard, of the University of Manchester. "We are seeing different parts of the brain, different areas, being activated and deactivated."

Loss of consciousness occurs when the brain is no longer aware of one's surroundings and so the body stops reacting to the world around it. Scientists and doctors aren't sure how this happens, but distinguish it from consciousness, or the ability to understand, be self-aware and think in the unique way that humans do.

Golden Valley, Minnesota. -- They look cool, but do you know what flips the switch on the Northern Lights?

Major solar flares from the sun have sent massive amounts of particles into the Earth's atmosphere, meaning that we may see the Northern Lights over the next few days.

These particles from the solar flare also called a solar wind are pulled into the Earth's atmosphere and then the particles glow when they interact with the gasses in the Earth's atmosphere.

The glowing particles are called the Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis. The most common color seen with the Northern Lights is green, but sometimes other colors like red and blue are visible.

A team of researchers has found that evaporation from the land only modifies the frequency of summertime rainfall, and not its quantity.

"This is a major shift in our understanding of the coupling between the land surface and the atmosphere, and fundamental for our understanding of the prolongation of hydrological extremes like floods and droughts," said Pierre Gentine, assistant professor of Applied Mathematics at The Fu Foundation School for Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University.

They discovered that higher evaporation increases the probability of afternoon rainfall east of the Mississippi and in Mexico, while it has no influence on rainfall over the Western U.S. The cited the difference is due to the humidity present in the atmosphere. The researchers explained that the atmosphere over the western regions is so dry that no matter what the input of moisture via evaporation is from the surface, an added source of moisture will not trigger any rain.

Seismologists and other scientists at eight universities in Japan are collaborating with a team of American and Russian researchers to try to devise a reliable system for predicting destructive earthquakes. This comes after the release of preliminary research following the March 11th earthquake in Japan indicating changes were detected in the atmosphere in the days before and after the destructive tremor.

When a potentially destructive earthquake strikes, the Japanese sometimes are able to receive a warning - although usually just a few seconds before the ground starts shaking.

These warnings are broadcast on radio and television and sent to mobile phones and computers. This automated alarm is triggered by the initial elastic P-wave of a tremor, which immediately precedes the slower but more destructive secondary wave, which then shakes the ground back and forth perpendicular to the direction it is moving.

Researchers around the world have been seeking a way to reliably give indications of quakes hours or days before they occur.