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Amazing Facts

Glory Be Behind Saturn
October 12, 2006
Don’t look at this picture till you’re ready.  Switch off the phone, turn off the radio, rub your eyes, and sit down.  Ready?  Click Here.     This is a view of Saturn we could never see from Earth.  It’s the backside of the planet, with the sun shining through the rings.  According to a […]
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Astronomy

Nature Potpourri
October 11, 2006
Articles of interest from Nature have been piling up in the CEH queues.  Perhaps a brief mention is better than nothing, before they fall into archive oblivion. Carbon 14:  In the Sept 14 issue, there was a give & take between critics of a carbon-14-dated study and the author.  The critics pointed out, “We appreciate […]
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Intelligent Design

Intelligent Design Detected on Mars
October 9, 2006
Astronomy Picture of the Day used design detection reasoning to infer the presence of intelligent agents at work on another world.  “An unusual spot has been found on Mars that scientists believe is not natural in origin,” the caption says of a photo taken from orbit by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.  “The spot appears mobile […]
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Dating Methods

Supernova 80% Younger Than Thought
October 1, 2006
The age of a supernova remnant has dropped from 10,000 years to less than 2,000 years. How?
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Origin of Life

Europa: The Link Between OOL and SETI
September 30, 2006
Why would searchers for extraterrestrial intelligence be interested in Europa?  After all, despite the movie 2010 command to “attempt no landings there,” no astrobiologist believes it could host anything more than primitive life – certainly no one who could send messages to us.     Cynthia Phillips, a principal investigator for the SETI Institute, explained […]
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Astronomy

Deep Field Survey Shows Oldest Galaxies Yet
September 24, 2006
Astronomers continue to find mature galaxies at higher and higher redshifts.  The latest record, reported in Nature,1 is z=6.96, interpreted to mean the galaxy was present 700 million years after the big bang (usually dated at 13.7 billion years ago).  A survey of distant galaxies from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), also reported in […]
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Mind and Brain

Mars Radiation Would Fry Astronaut Brains
September 23, 2006
Imagine the first Martian astronauts coming home confused, impaired and demented. This is the risk from solar radiation on Mars, say a group of NASA medical researchers (see RxPG News). Among the gravest risks of a manned flight to Mars ranks the possibility that massive amounts of solar and cosmic radiation will decimate the brains […]
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Education

Farewell to the “Face on Mars” – A Teachable Moment
September 21, 2006
ESA’s Mars Express orbiter has just sent back pictures of the Cydonia region on Mars.  Objects seen in early Viking images of this region resembled a face, a skull and pyramids that gave rise to a cult following on late-night talk shows.  NASA always discounted these resemblances as coincidental, and when JPL released higher-resolution photos […]
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Solar System

Cassini Photographs Earth from Saturn, Discovers New Ring
September 19, 2006
A new ring, geysers from a distance, and our home planet from 930 million miles away – these and more wonders are visible in new photos taken by the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn.  Now at opposition (facing the sun), the orbiter’s cameras can pick out fainter details in backlighting.  Highlights of the three published photos […]
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Physics

Ethane Cloud at Titan: Too Little, Too Late?
September 14, 2006
Those following the Titan exploration by Cassini-Huygens have wondered where the ethane went.  Oceans of ethane hundreds of meters deep, if not kilometers deep, were predicted but not found, as reported previously (see 04/25/2003 and 10/16/2003 pre-Huygens reports, 01/15/2005 and 01/21/2005 Huygens early results, and 12/05/2005 review; see also New Scientist analysis of the “total […]
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Astronomy

Whistling in the Dark Matter Debate
September 7, 2006
Who’s right?  Douglas Clowe’s team at U of Arizona claimed two weeks ago that they found dark matter in the Bullet Cluster – they even had a picture of it.  The Chandra X-Ray Center called it “direct proof” of dark matter.  Two days later, EurekAlert posted a story about a new proposal to bring back […]
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Cosmology

Big Bang Fails Prediction: Is the Theory in Trouble?
September 5, 2006
Astronomers looking at WMAP data (03/20/2006, 05/02/2003) of the cosmic background radiation failed to find shadows predicted by the big bang, reported Science Daily.  So what?  Here’s what Dr. Richard Lieu (U of Alabama) said this means: “Either it (the microwave background) isn’t coming from behind the clusters, which means the Big Bang is blown […]
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Astronomy

Upset Update: Globular Clusters, Atmospheric Methane Tear Up Textbooks
August 28, 2006
Here are a couple of updates to stories we reported earlier in the category “Everything we thought was wrong.” Globular cluster ages:  Our 10/05/2003 entry reported that beliefs about globular cluster ages were undergoing a radical revision.  You can almost feel the rumblings in a related story on News@Nature; “In a complex Universe, astronomers thought […]
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Astronomy

Early Large Spiral Galaxy Resembles Milky Way
August 18, 2006
Astronomers using adaptive optics at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Paranal, Chile took spectra of a galaxy at red-shift 2.38 described as an “early young galaxy” that must have, according to current theory, formed very rapidly, because it looks like the Milky Way.  The observations by Genzel et al., published in Nature,1 were described […]
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Solar System

Mars Annually Pops Its Polar Cork
August 17, 2006
A unique geological phenomenon has been found on Mars.  Every year, when the southern polar cap heats up, carbon dioxide gas forms underneath a layer of translucent ice.  This gas levitates large portions of the ice cap until it finds weaknesses, and bursts out at over a hundred miles an hour in spectacular fumaroles (see […]
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