Only Natural
Surgeons have found and removed an embryonic twin, complete with hair bone and teeth, from deep in the brain of a PhD computer science student.
Yamini Karanam 26, had been experiencing health problems for some time, including trouble with concentrating and reading, and eventually walking.
Astronomers have discovered a curious empty section of space which is missing around 10,000 galaxies. … Although the Big Bang theory allows for areas that are cooler and hotter, the size of the void does not fit with predicted models. Simply put, it is too big to exist. …
Researchers in Hawaii are recruiting girls as young as 14 to participate in second trimester abortions, where the preborn baby is 18-24 weeks gestation, in order to test whether or not oxytocin can reduce bleeding in mothers during and after abortion.…
…Would it really be possible to bring back mammoths, or at least creatures resembling and behaving as them, using the synthetic life technology of molecular genetics and cloning? …
Most of us think of Europe as the ancestral home of white people. But a new study shows that pale skin, as well as other traits such as tallness and the ability to digest milk as adults, arrived in most of the continent relatively recently. The work, presented here last week at the 84th annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, offers dramatic evidence of recent evolution in Europe and shows that most modern Europeans don’t look much like those of 8000 years ago.…
Climate change is a moral challenge threatening the rights of the world’s poorest people and those who deny it are not using God’s gift of knowledge, says presiding [US Episcopal]] bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori…
Scientists have long been puzzled by the difference in topography between different sides of the moon, with the near side being flat and the far side much more mountainous.
Now astronomers believe that the moon was struck by a huge object in a ‘big splat’, which gave our solar companion its giant peaks and coated one side of it with a crust tens of kilometres thick.…
…Although Jastrow was an "agnostic, and not a believer,” in an interview with Christianity Today, Jastrow said "Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact." …
…8,000 fans at a concert in Leipzig jumped so energetically that they set off a "mini-earthquake".… strong enough to rip the wall paper in houses in the Waldstrassen neighbourhood. …Geophysical Observatory in nearby Collm was alerted.…
…new insights into the life of the world's oldest and most primitive primate. …Purgatorius… tiny and agile animal spent much of its time eating fruit and climbing trees 66 million years ago… first known below-the-head bones for Purgatorius… previously only teeth… 'The ankle bones show that it had a mobile ankle joint like primates today that live in trees…. This mobility would have allowed for rotating the foot in different directions as it adjusted to different angles presented by tree trunks and branches. It also shows that the first primates did not have elongate ankles that you see in many living primates today that are thought to be related to leaping behaviours….'
…The problem, the scientists report Monday in Nature, is that while the tiny galaxy dates from just 700 million years or so after the big bang, it's far more dusty than something this young and small has any right to be. …
Before throwing the snowball, Inhofe said, "In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair, 'You know what this is?' It's a snowball. Just from outside here. So it's very, very cold out, very unseasonal. So here Mr. President, catch this."
…Milky Way galaxy is part of a newly identified ginormous supercluster of galaxies, which they have dubbed “Laniakea,” which means “immense heaven” in Hawaiian.
This discovery clarifies the boundaries of our galactic neighborhood and establishes previously unrecognized linkages among various galaxy clusters in the local Universe.
"Goddard Space Flight Center just released this collection of images from the SDO mission on it’s fifth anniversary." [Video at link]
…unnamed woman… had tissue from her nose implanted in her spine… [trying to] repair… nerve damage… treatment failed. …eight years after… the woman… complained of increasing pain in the area. … Doctors discovered a three-centimetre-long growth… mainly nasal tissue, as well as bits of bone and nerve branches that had not connected with the spinal nerves.
Holland, Oklahoma’s seismology chief, is determined to find the cause of an unprecedented earthquake epidemic in the state. And he suspects pumping wastewater from oil and gas drilling back into the Earth has a lot to do with it.
“If my research takes me to the point where we determine the safest thing to do is to shut down injection -- and consequently production -- in large portions of the state, then that’s what we have to do,” Holland said. “That’s for the politicians and the regulators to work out.”
[Of course, confirmation bias could not be possible when he's looking for confirmation of his theory.]
Republican congressional candidate Lenar Whitney released a video Friday calling global warming "the greatest deception in the history of mankind." Calling Al Gore and other liberal politicians pushing global warming "delusional," Whitney reminds viewers that "The earth has done nothing but get colder each year since the film's release." Whitney then goes on to cite a litany of other scientific facts to rebut and mock global warming believers, including President Obama, whom she calls "foolish" for blaming his lousy economy on warming. [Watch on YouTube]
…found seven partial skeletons, amounting to around 150 bones…. "Given the size of these bones, which surpass any of the previously known giant animals, the new dinosaur is the largest animal known that walked on Earth…. Its length, from its head to the tip of its tail, was 40m. Standing with its neck up, it was about 20m high - equal to a seven-storey building." …lived in the forests of Patagonia between 95 and 100 million years ago….
Astronomers believe they have found the sun’s ‘long-lost brother’ – a stellar body born from the same gas cloud as our own star. The researchers claim there is even a ‘small’ chance that this solar sibling could host planets that harbour life. … 15 per cent more massive than our sun and located 110 light-years away in the constellation Hercules…
Pterodaustro guinazui… lived about 100 million years ago… had about 1,000 teeth… had a diet similar to that of flamingos: small crustaceans like brine shrimp… flamingos do get their pink color from what they eat…
It appears that news media and some pro-environmental organizations have the tendency to accentuate or even exaggerate the damage caused by climate change. This article provides a rationale for this tendency…. We find that the information manipulation has an instrumental value, as it ex post induces more countries to participate…
A new carnivore shaped like a candelabra has been spotted in deep ocean waters off California's Monterey Bay. The meat-eating species was dubbed the "harp sponge," so-called because its structure resembles a harp or lyre turned on its side.
The outer reaches of our solar system may have been shaped long ago by a close encounter with another star that tore up both nascent planetary systems like colliding buzz saws, astronomers said today.
The dramatic encounter, if it occurred, might even have deposited an alien world into our midst.
The scenario was devised to describe unexplained observations of the solar system but is based on speculation about actual events. The resulting computer simulations suggest a range [of] possible outcomes for a close celestial brush shortly after the planets formed, about 4.5 billion years ago.
[4,500,000,000 years ago the enormous Angona system began its approach to the neighborhood of this solitary sun. The center of this great system was a dark giant of space, solid, highly charged, and possessing tremendous gravity pull. -Urantia Paper 57 (1934)]
New data from the spacecraft, which I will discuss below, indicate Voyager 1 may have exited the solar system for good. If true, this would mark a truly historic moment for the human race — sending a spacecraft beyond the edge of our home solar system.
At last check, NASA scientists said they were not yet ready to officially declare that Voyager 1 had officially exited the solar system by crossing the heliopause.
334 . 700 million years ago the Earth was completely encased in ice and it wasn't the first time.
There's a long cycle periodicity of hundreds of millions of years for the whoppers. We're at the extreme tail end of a warm period between them right now.
Everything from Lucy onward for the past several million years has been a "warm" period that's due to end very soon.
The long period Ice ages come on hard/fast too, like within 50-200 years and you're in the shit. Its like flipping a light switch. You don't ease into them.
Posted by: @PurpAv at September 30, 2012 11:32 AM
246 But at cruise altitude, flying in the lower stratosphere at 35,000’ or higher, switching to tanks with high-sulfur jetfuel would create denser, wider contrails with sulfate aerosols serving as cloud condensation nuclei, mimicking the effect of cosmic rays. The clouds so created would be long-lasting, and brighter with a high albedo reflecting more sunlight back into space.
Thousands of jetliners flying high over the planet every day would create a cooler earth, and no more global warming. The sulfate aerosols are high enough in the stratosphere not to precipitate and cause acid rain - and high-sulfur jetfuel is less expensive than low-sulfur.
This solution to global warming isn’t just cost-free, it saves money. It’s perfectly designed to drive human-hating eco-fascists completely nuts.
-- Jack Wheeler
Posted by: Up with people! at September 30, 2012 10:47 AM
The evidence suggests that the Indo-Australian plate began to be ripped apart between 8 million and 10 million years ago. The 2012 earthquake is just one of many that have likely ripped along the same region since this process began.
After millions more years of similar earthquakes, the ruptures will begin to favor a particular path, giving rise to a new plate boundary, and separating today's existing plate into two.
Delescluse said that the singular earthquake measured in 2012 offers a glimpse of this process in unprecedented detail.
The most powerful sky-scanning camera yet built has begun its quest to pin down the mysterious stuff that makes up nearly three-quarters of our Universe.
The Dark Energy Survey's 570-million-pixel camera will scan some 300 million galaxies in the coming five years.
The goal is to discover the nature of dark energy, which is theorised to be responsible for the ever-faster expansion of the Universe.
Instead of localising the origin of modern humans to a single geographic region in Africa, the researchers discovered a complex record of interbreeding and genetic stratification, challenging the view of evolution in one place. … According to the study, the Khoe-San diverged from other populations more than 100,000 years ago but the genetic structure within the populations dated back to about 35,000 years ago, when it split into a northern and a southern group. [35Kya. There's that number again.]
On June 27, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a statement saying it had "complete[d] the process of implementation of a set of recommendations issued in August 2010 by the InterAcademy Council (IAC), the group created by the world's science academies to provide advice to international bodies."
Hidden behind this seemingly routine update on bureaucratic processes is an astonishing and entirely unreported story. The IPCC is the world's most prominent source of alarmist predictions and claims about man-made global warming… cited by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the U.S. and by national academies of science around the world as "proof" that the global warming of the past five or so decades was both man-made and evidence of a mounting crisis.
The "recommendations" issued by the IAC were not minor adjustments to a fundamentally sound scientific procedure. Here are some of the findings of the IAC's 2010 report. … In plain English: the IPCC reports are not peer-reviewed. … authors are selected from a "club" of scientists and nonscientists who agree with the alarmist perspective favored by politicians.… The scientists they interviewed commonly found the Synthesis Report "too political" (p. 25).
Plenary sessions to approve a Summary for Policy Makers last for several days and commonly end with an all-night meeting. Thus, the individuals with the most endurance or the countries that have large delegations can end up having the most influence on the report (p. 25).
How can such a process possibly be said to capture or represent the "true consensus of scientists"?
Another problem documented by the IAC is the use of phony "confidence intervals" and estimates of "certainty" in the Summary for Policy Makers (pp. 27-34). Those of us who study the IPCC reports knew this was make-believe when we first saw it in 2007. Work by J. Scott Armstrong on the science of forecasting makes it clear that scientists cannot simply gather around a table and vote on how confident they are about some prediction, and then affix a number to it such as "80% confident." Yet that is how the IPCC proceeds.
The IAC authors say it is "not an appropriate way to characterize uncertainty" (p. 34), a huge understatement. Unfortunately, the IAC authors recommend an equally fraudulent substitute, called "level of understanding scale," which is more mush-mouth for "consensus."
… The news release means that the IAC report was right. That, in turn, means that the first four IPCC reports were, in fact, unreliable. Not just "possibly flawed" or "could have been improved," but likely to be wrong and even fraudulent.
It means that all of the "endorsements" of the climate consensus made by the world's national academies of science -- which invariably refer to the reports of the IPCC as their scientific basis -- were based on false or unreliable data and therefore should be disregarded or revised. It means that the EPA's "endangerment finding" -- its claim that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and threat to human health -- was wrong and should be overturned.
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