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Astronomy

Planet-Makers Ask Miracles to Evade Death Spiral
August 21, 2009
Remember the old artwork of planets gently forming out of dust orbiting a young star? That’s all gone. Reality has set it. Clumps of material a meter across need help – almost miraculous help – to avoid getting sucked into the star in a giant death spiral. If you don’t believe it, ask John Chambers […]
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Physics

Faint Young Sun Paradox Resolved
August 18, 2009
For decades, astronomers and geologists have worried about a paradox.  Stellar evolution theory claims sunlight on the early earth would have been 20-30% dimmer than it is today, but geology shows the oceans were liquid in the earliest (Archean) rocks.  For that matter, so does the book of Genesis, but that record is not usually […]
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Dumb Ideas

Twitter the ET Bandwidth Wagon
August 16, 2009
If you have nothing better to do, send a message to an alien.  Leonard David reported on Space.com that a website in Australia is collecting messages to beam up to a planet named Gliese 581d that is 20.3 light-years away.  Even a Senator who is Australia’s Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research got involved.  […]
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Origin of Life

Comet-Ocean Theory Gets Another Splash
August 13, 2009
National Geographic News gave some halfway-enthusiastic press to another recurrence of a theory that circulates from time to time – that earth got its ocean water from comets.  They gave air time to work by Uffe Jorgensen and a team from the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark that concludes “comets were the culprits” in the […]
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Origin of Life

Mars Looks More Hostile to Life
August 6, 2009
The methane Mars produces gets destroyed rapidly.  This is leading some planetary scientists to get depressed about the possibility of finding life there.     The BBC News, Space.com and New Scientist all reported on the paper in Nature,1 saying this represents bad news for life.  In models by Franck Lefevre and Francois Forget, patterns […]
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Cosmology

Cosmologist Has a Sobering Thought: We Are Forever in the Dark About Dark Energy
August 3, 2009
An evangelist for the standard model of cosmology is having a moment of penitence.  He is admitting to himself, and to the world, that “we will remain resolutely in the dark about dark energy.”     In a piece in New Scientist, Pedro Ferreira [Oxford] has revealed the vicious circle of assumptions that undermine confidence […]
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Cosmology

Dark Matter: Where Is It?
July 30, 2009
If physicists and astronomers are going to continue to tell us that 95% of the mass in the universe is hidden in some unobservable dark matter, they had better find it soon.  Two articles on PhysOrg (#1, #2) reported on continuing efforts to find the elusive stuff – if it exists at all.  The first […]
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Dumb Ideas

Aliens Are Not Bodybuilders
July 16, 2009
Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute is willing to bet “dollars to Devil Dogs that any extraterrestrials we detect won’t be muscular guys with deep voices and corrugated foreheads, or even big-eyed, hairless grays.”  It all has to do with the way evolution works.     In the weekly SETI column for Space.com, Shostak opined […]
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Dumb Ideas

Origin-of-Life Researchers Caught Playing With Toys
July 7, 2009
A “virtual primordial soup” cooks up life in a computer program in a “toy universe,” according to reporter Leslie Mullen at Space.com.  She wrote, “The power of computer processing could one day solve the riddle of life’s origin.”     EvoGrid is “a computer creation concept that would be a digital version of the primordial […]
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Media

Salting News with the L Word Life
June 25, 2009
Small amounts of sodium were detected in ice particles erupting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus.  Deduction: this might lower the melting point of underground ice, forming subsurface pockets of liquid water – perhaps an ocean.  Conclusion: Life!  It doesn’t matter that Enceladus has no other factors conducive to life than water, or that salt is generally […]
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Cosmology

We Know Less Than We Think
June 23, 2009
Strange reports come from science news outlets on occasion that call into question facts we thought we understood.  These raise a question: do we really know what we think we know? Cutting dinosaurs down to size:  Dinosaurs may have been half as heavy as thought, said Science Daily.  Some paleontologists are claiming that widely-used methods […]
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Origin of Life

This Place Really Has Atmosphere
June 11, 2009
Of all the bodies in the solar system, only eight have a substantial atmosphere.  If you add in those with tenuous atmospheres, you can add in Triton and Mercury, and maybe a few others, till it becomes pedantic to call it an atmosphere if there are only a few short-lived molecules hovering over a moon.  […]
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Physics

Planets Can’t Grow Past the Electric Fence
June 9, 2009
In the artwork, it looks so simple: dust clumps into planets that grow into nice, orbiting solar systems – like ours.  It’s not so simple when you try to nail down the real physics.  Planet-building models have to contend with a host of variables and barriers to growth (accretion).  Another barrier was discussed in Astrophysical […]
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Mammals

“Social Brain Hypothesis” Discredited
June 4, 2009
According to evolutionary theory, the extra processing required for living in social groups should make brains bigger.  Not so, found a couple of scientists who looked into the question.  There’s no general correlation.     According to Live Science, John Finarelli (University of Michigan) and John Flynn (American Museum of Natural History in New York) […]
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Solar System

Milankovitch Cycles Indistinguishable from Randomness
June 2, 2009
A claim has often been made by geologists that the rock sediments record cyclical changes in Earth’s orbit.  Milankovitch cycles, named for the man who analyzed them, are a set of regular periodic changes to the orbital eccentricity, obliquity, and axial precession of the Earth over tens and hundreds of thousands of years.  These subtle […]
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