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New bill to allow controversial science topics in classroom in Louisiana, US

Amy Fagan
The Washington Times
Thu, 12 Jun 2008 02:34 UTC
A battle over science education could soon spill into the courts in Louisiana, where looming legislation would allow teachers to bring up scientific criticisms of evolution, global warming and other hot-button topics.

The state House approved the bill Wednesday on a 94-3 vote. Because the Senate already approved a near-identical measure, supporters expect the upper chamber to pass this bill also.

A spokeswoman for Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal would not say whether he will sign the bill, saying only that he will review it when it gets to his desk.
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Cloud Lightning

Summer Solstice Brings Glow-in-the-Dark Clouds


SpaceWeather.com
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:50 UTC
Summer Solstice: Northern summer and southern winter begin today, June 20th, at precisely 23:59 UT (7:59 pm EDT) when the sun ascends to its highest latitude on the celestial sphere: +23.5o. In the Northern Hemisphere, we have the longest day and shortest night of the year, and the reverse in the Southern Hemisphere. The seasons are changing--Happy Solstice!

Intense NLCs: Summer is the season for noctilucent clouds and this morning, right on cue, a wave of bright NLCs rolled over the British Isles. "The display appeared quite suddenly ... probably the brightest I've ever seen," reports Paul Evans of Larne, Northern Ireland. Nearby Maghaberry resident John C McConnell snapped this picture of the clouds at daybreak:

noctilucent clouds
©John C McConnell
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Sherlock

Flashback Mapping the Moon's Strange Gravity


RedOrbit
Fri, 23 May 2008 14:31 UTC
Meet MIT professor of physics Maria Zuber. She's dynamic, intelligent, intense, and she's on a quest for the Grail.

No, not that Grail.

Zuber is the principal investigator of the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory - "GRAIL" for short. It's a new NASA mission slated for launch in 2011 that will probe the moon's quirky gravity field. Data from GRAIL will help scientists understand forces at play beneath the lunar surface and learn how the moon, Earth and other terrestrial planets evolved.

"We're going to study the moon's interior from crust to core," says Zuber. "It's very exciting."

Image
©NASA
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Star

Lavas From Hawaiian Volcano Contain Fingerprint Of Planetary Formation


Science Daily
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:28 UTC
Hikers visiting the Kilauea Iki crater in Hawaii today walk along a mostly flat surface of sparsely vegetated basalt. It looks like parking lot asphalt, but in November and December 1959, it emitted the orange glow of newly erupted lava.

Now, a precision analysis of lava samples taken from the crater is giving scientists a new tool for reconstructing planetary origins. The results of the analysis, by the University of Chicago's Nicolas Dauphas and his associates, will be published in the June 20 issue of the journal Science.

A close examination of iron isotopes--the slight variations the element displays at the subatomic level--can tell planetary scientists more about the formation of crust than they previously thought, according to Dauphas and co-authors Fang-Zhen Teng of the University of Arkansas and Rosalind T. Helz of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Image
©Steve Koppes
The sparsely vegetated Kilauea Iki Trail crosses the floor of a volcanic crater that was filled with molten lava in in late 1959. Today the University of Chicago's Nicolas Dauphas and his associates use samples collected from the crater to learn how minerals and elements separate as magma cools and hardens.
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Better Earth

Surprisingly rapid changes In Earth's core discovered


AlphaGalileo
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:00 UTC
The movements in the liquid part of the Earth's core are changing surprisingly quickly, and this affects the Earth's magnetic field, according to new research from DTU Space.

The Ørsted satellite's very precise measurements of the Earth's magnetic field over the past nine years have made it possible for Nils Olsen, Senior Scientist with DTU Space, and several German scientists, to map surprisingly rapid changes in the movements in the Earth's core. The results have just been published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.
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Snowman

Sun Seems Eerily Calm

Andrea Thompson
Space.com
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 04:49 UTC
The sun's surface has been fairly blank for the last couple of years, and that has some worried that it may be entering another Maunder minimum, the sun's 50-year abstinence from sunspots, which some scientists have linked to the Little Ice Age of the 17th century.
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Butterfly

Zebra's Stripes, Butterfly's Wings: How Do Biological Patterns Emerge?


Newswise
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:00 UTC
A zebra's stripes, a seashell's spirals, a butterfly's wings: these are all examples of patterns in nature. The formation of patterns is a puzzle for mathematicians and biologists alike. How does the delicate design of a butterfly's wings come from a single fertilized egg? How does pattern emerge out of no pattern?

butterflies
©iStockphoto/Ismael Montero Verdu
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Telescope

Earth DNA is From Space

Joseph Stedul
javno
Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:05 UTC
An analysis of meteor fragments that fell in Australia have revealed that DNA's ancestor probably formed in space and fell to earth.

Some of the raw materials for life, it seems, come from space, according to a new analysis of an Australian meteorite, writes National Geographic.
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Display

Storm worm version uses China earthquake to lure victims

Elinor Mills
c/net News
Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:55 UTC
If you want information about the earthquake in China get it from a news site and not from a link to a video that arrives in your e-mail inbox.

That's the message from the US-CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) on Thursday.

The group has received reports of a new variant of the Storm worm that targets people interested in the May 12 earthquake that killed nearly 70,000 people and left 5 million homeless. Some of the e-mails also have subject lines that deal with the Olympic Games that China is hosting.
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Info

There Will Be No Armageddon?

Yury Zaitsev
RIA Novosti
Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:51 UTC
Moscow -- A black hole will appear in mid-July on the border between France and Switzerland, swallowing up first Europe and then the entire planet. Such are the apocalyptic forecasts being made ahead of the scheduled launching, in three weeks, of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The ambitious research project, aimed at looking into superconductivity, high energies and god or devil knows what else, is an international effort involving several countries, including Russia. The report that the LHC will also produce a black hole is the most talked about item.

Remarkably, the most powerful sources of radiation in the universe are not those driven by thermonuclear reactions or annihilation processes. Much more powerful are high-density objects called black holes and neutron stars.

The force of gravity around these bodies is tremendous, and accelerates any matter caught by its pull to immense speeds. Matter impacting on the surface of a neutron star does so at half the speed of light. The efficiency at which energy is released from such impacts is more than ten times that of nuclear or thermonuclear reactions.

The general theory of relativity says black holes appear when matter is compressed into a more compact shape than that of a neutron star.

As a result, a black hole has a gravitational field so strong that neither a material body nor any kind of radiation (including light) is able to escape its embrace. The black holes are, therefore, impossible to see. They can only be identified indirectly, by observing the matter they absorb from a neighboring visible star, for example.
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