Science & TechnologyS


Sun

Changes In Solar Activity Affect Local Climate


Space Daily / SPX
Fri, 10 Dec 2010 10:04 UTC
Image
© UnknownWhen solar
activity is high, a small amount of the cosmic radiation reaches the atmosphere and thus a small number of cosmogenic isotopes are formed and stored.
Raimund Muscheler is a researcher at the Department of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences at Lund University in Sweden. In the latest issue of the journal Science, he and his colleagues have described how the surface water temperature in the tropical parts of the eastern Pacific varied with the sun's activity between 7 000 and 11 000 years ago (early Holocene).

Contrary to what one might intuitively believe, high solar activity had a cooling effect in this region.

"It is perhaps a similar phenomenon that we are seeing here today", says Raimund Muscheler.

"Last year's cold winter in Sweden could intuitively be seen to refute global warming. But the winter in Greenland was exceptionally mild. Both phenomena coincide with low solar activity and the sun's activity probably influences the local climate variations."
Read More...
Meteor

Flashback The Day the Earth Froze: Younger Dryas Ice Age caused by Storm of Comet Debris

David Derbyshire
UK Daily Mail
Fri, 02 Apr 2010 18:09 UTC
Image
© Alamy"New" theory: An hour-long hailstorm from space bombarded the Earth 13,000 years ago - plunging the planet into a mini-ice age
An hour-long hailstorm from space bombarded the Earth 13,000 years ago - plunging the planet into a mini-ice age, scientists claimed today.

The catastrophe was caused by a disintegrating comet and saw the planet sprayed by thousands of frozen boulders made of ice and dust.

The collisions wiped out huge numbers of animal species all over the world, disrupted the lives of our stone age ancestors and triggered a freeze that lasted more than 1,000 years.

The theory is the brainchild of Professor Bill Napier, from Cardiff University, who says it explains the mysterious period of extinction around 11,000 BC.

Scientists have long been puzzled by what caused a sudden cooling of up to 8C (14F) just as the Earth was warming up at the end of the last ice age.

The change in climate caused retreating glaciers to advance once again, and coincided with the extinction of 35 families of North American mammals.

Comment: Finally, some mainstream verification of what Sott.net has been saying for years is coming through the information blackout. In February media outlets carried reports that a swarm of comet debris may have caused the 'Dark Ages' circa 500 AD. Bill Napier, as well as Victor Clube, deserve major recognition for their dedication in putting many of the puzzle pieces together. The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes by Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith is the seminal book on this cometary bombardment, the Younger Dryas Impact Event, at the end of the last Ice Age.

Besides older comets that break up and leave debris trails through which the Earth periodically passes, Laura Knight-Jadczyk's tireless research has led us to consider the cyclical mechanism by which comets from the Oort Cloud surrounding the outer solar system are knocked into the inner solar system by the return of the Sun's dark star companion, 'Nemesis.'

We've been observing the steady increase in the number of fireball sightings, the cooling of the upper atmosphere, strange cloud formations and recent comet impacts on other planets in our solar system. Taken with research which reveals that our environment is constantly affected by interaction with comet dust (sometimes laden with larger fragments) and cosmic radiation, we've deduced that our Big Blue Marble is once again on the threshold of encountering a cosmic storm. In fact, it's overdue for the Perfect Storm as several cycles return together.

For more in-depth reading, see Laura Knight-Jadzyck's article Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls.

Something Wicked This Way Comes, a Sott.net production:



Read More...
Telescope

Cosmic 'enlightenment' dawned slowly

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Fri, 10 Dec 2010 09:12 UTC
Image
© Judd BowmanThe EDGES radio antenna in Western Australia (foreground) measured ancient cosmic radiation
The end of the universe's "dark age" was long and drawn out, according to the first direct measurement of the period when the first stars and galaxies heated up intergalactic gas.

Right after the big bang, the universe was a roiling soup of subatomic particles. These cooled and coalesced into neutral atoms within 400,000 years, beginning the cosmic dark age. This only ended when ultraviolet light from the first stars and giant black holes had once again ionised the fog of neutral atoms filling the universe. How long this process of "re-ionisation" took isn't clear.

To find out, Judd Bowman of Arizona State University in Tempe and Alan Rogers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology deployed a small radio antenna called EDGES in Western Australia.

The telescope detects radio waves that have been emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms. These have a wavelength of 21 centimetres when they are emitted, but this gets stretched as they travel across space due to the universe's expansion.
Read More...
Blackbox

Quartet of giant planets puzzles astronomers

Stephen Battersby
New Scientist
Wed, 08 Dec 2010 09:08 UTC
The discovery of a fourth giant world around the star HR 8799 is straining the two leading theories of how planets form.

Planets are thought to coalesce from a dusty disc around a young star. One model, called core accretion, says that giant planets form when the dust gathers into a rocky core, which then draws in gas to form a massive atmosphere. Another, called disc instability, says that these planets collapse suddenly from sections of the disc.

Read More...
Meteor

Lucky strike gave Earth its gold?

Michael Marshall
New Scientist
Thu, 09 Dec 2010 08:59 UTC
Image
© Steve Winter/GettyGlittering prospect
Prospectors who lost out in the gold rush probably wouldn't agree but Earth has more gold than it should. The shiny stuff is one of several metals that are puzzlingly common. Now it seems a last-minute bombardment, after Earth formed, may have supplied these extra elements.

The planets formed when tiny rocks collided, forming ever larger lumps. Then, after Earth was born a second planet about the size of Mars crashed into it. This cataclysmic shock blasted a huge cloud of material into orbit, where it coalesced to form the moon.

Rich planet

This neatly explains the moon, but poses a problem. The collision re-melted the solidifying Earth, allowing heavy materials like iron to sink into the core. But some elements, called siderophiles, dissolve in molten iron, including gold, platinum and palladium.

"We shouldn't have any siderophiles in the crust or mantle," says William Bottke of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "But actually we see them in surprising abundance."
Read More...
Cow Skull

103 million-year-old first horned dino identified in South Korea


IndiaTalkies
Tue, 07 Dec 2010 01:31 UTC
Image
© Unknown
An international team of scientists has identified a new horned dinosaur that lived about 103 million years ago, in South Korea. The newly identified genus, hwaseongensis, lived during the late Early Cretaceous period. It is the first specimen of the Ceratopsian dinosaur found in the Korean peninsula.

The partial skeleton includes a significant portion of the animal's backbone, hip bone, partial hind limbs and a nearly complete tail.

The Koreaceratops hwaseongensis is named for Korea and Hwaseong City, which yielded the fossil. It was discovered in 2008 in a block of rock along the Tando Basin reservoir. It is one of the first articulated dinosaurs known from Korea.

"This is a rare find," said Michael J. Ryan of The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who co-authored the research. "Fossils of dinosaurs have not typically been found in this region, whereas evidence of dinosaur eggs and footprints occur more commonly. This specimen is significant because it fills in a missing 20 million-year gap in the fossil record between the origin of these dinosaurs in Asia and their first appearance in North America," said Ryan.

At approximately 5 to 6 feet long and weighing about 60 to 100 pounds, the animal was relatively small compared to the geologically younger, giant relatives like Triceratops found in North America.
Read More...
Info

Ozone Hole Smallest in Five Years


Earthweek
Thu, 09 Dec 2010 21:08 UTC
Ozone Hole
© NASAThe Antarctic stratospheric ozone hole has probably peaked for the season, according to researchers.

The ozone hole above Antarctica is now the smallest it has been in five years, according to New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research.

The institute says the hole in the protective layer of stratospheric ozone decreased in size to about 8.5 million square miles, compared to 9.25 million square miles last year.

The ozone hole forms during the end of the southern winter in August and September of each year, then breaks up in November or December, according to the institute.

"We have now had a few years in succession with less-severe holes. That is an indication we may be beginning to see a recovery," institute scientist Stephen Wood said in a statement.

Recent studies point to a nearly complete recovery of the ozone hole by the middle of this century, thanks to an international agreement to phase out the use of ozone-depleting chemicals, such as Freon in refrigerators and aerosol cans.
Read More...
Question

Mysterious Object or Planet Moves Over the Sun on SOHO Imagery


FromTheOld
Tue, 07 Dec 2010 22:42 UTC
Mystery Object
© Fom The Old
NASA has no explanation or announcements on what this could be so we can only guess that this is another planet moving past the SOHO imagery. The question is what planet could this be? Is it a asteroid, Venus or Mercury maybe?

Something did move past the sun, people online believe it could everything from the "nibiru" / planet x theory to a camera anomaly but no one has come out with an official answer yet.

That planet scientists talked about a few days ago, throwing ice bullets and causing chaos on earth, maybe it came for a visit.

The imagery is from 2010/12/06.

What could this be?

Update: You might want to look at around 10 second into the video, it happens fast because the video is actually in fast forward mode,not real time. You can see the "object" coming in from the right side at around 10 or 11 seconds into the video.

Comment: This object is the moon. The author of this video confused the SOHO satellite with the SDO satellite. AIA 304, referred to above, is an instrument on SDO, and not on SOHO. You can see on this archive site that the images actually come from the SDO satellite. SDO is in geosynchronous orbit because of the high data bandwidth and its 36000 km orbit is well within the lunar orbit. This video shows another example of a lunar transit as seen by the SDO satellite.

Additionally, SOTT.net made an approximate simulation with the Celestia solar system simulator. SDO is always positioned about 36000 km over Mexico/Ecuador/Chile. Inside the Celestia program, we've positioned ourselves approximately at those coordiates, and set the time to 6th of December, about 3 a.m. The result:



Read More...
Info

Lost Civilization May Have Existed Beneath the Persian Gulf

Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience
Thu, 09 Dec 2010 12:29 UTC
Persian Gulf
© WikipediaPersian Gulf from space.
Veiled beneath the Persian Gulf, a once-fertile landmass may have supported some of the earliest humans outside Africa some 75,000 to 100,000 years ago, a new review of research suggests.

At its peak, the floodplain now below the Gulf would have been about the size of Great Britain, and then shrank as water began to flood the area. Then, about 8,000 years ago, the land would have been swallowed up by the Indian Ocean, the review scientist said.

The study, which is detailed in the December issue of the journal Current Anthropology, has broad implications for aspects of human history. For instance, scientists have debated over when early modern humans exited Africa, with dates as early as 125,000 years ago and as recent as 60,000 years ago (the more recent date is the currently accepted paradigm), according to study researcher Jeffrey Rose, an archaeologist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K.

"I think Jeff's theory is bold and imaginative, and hopefully will shake things up," said Robert Carter of Oxford Brookes University in the U.K. in an e-mail to LiveScience. "It would completely rewrite our understanding of the out-of-Africa migration. It is far from proven, but Jeff and others will be developing research programs to test the theory."

Viktor Cerny of the Archaeogenetics Laboratory, the Institute of Archaeology, in Prague, called Rose's finding an "excellent theory," in an e-mail to LiveScience, though he also points out the need for more research to confirm it.
Read More...
Info

Spacecraft Saw ULF Radio Emissions over Haiti before January Quake


Technology Review, MIT
Thu, 09 Dec 2010 11:50 UTC
A French satellite observed a dramatic increase in ultra low frequency radio waves over Haiti in the month before the M7.0 earthquake earlier this year.

ULF Waves Over Haiti
© Technology Review, MIT

Back in 2004, the French space agency CNES launched a small satellite called DEMETER into polar orbit some 700 km above the Earth's surface.

DEMETER's is an unusual mission. Its job is to monitor low frequency radio waves generated by earthquakes.

Today, a group of geoscientists release the data associated with the M 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti in January. They say that DEMETER saw a clear increase in ultralow frequency radio waves being emitted from the Earth's the crust in that region in the build up to the quake.

The anecdotal evidence of electromagnetic effects associated with earthquakes is legion. Various accounts link earthquakes with mysterious light and heating effects. Then there is the widespread evidence that certain animals can sense impending quake, possibly because of a sensitivity to low frequency electric fields.

But good data is hard to come by. Geoscientists have been measuring the currents that flow through Earth beneath our feet for over 100 years. These so-called telluric currents are thought to be generated by friction and piezoelectric effects within rock. And the flow of electrons they cause has been linked to various atmospheric phenomena such as thunderstorms.

But the role these currents play in earthquake physics is unknown. It makes sense that any currents generated by friction and piezoelectric effects should be dramatically influenced by the relative movement of different parts of the crust.
Read More...