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Raising a Titanic Geological Plateau
June 24, 2009
The Colorado Plateau is a huge region covering parts of four states.  It’s over a mile higher than its surroundings, but its layers are remarkably flat.  How did this region, littered with marine fossils, rise into the sky?  Three American scientists writing in Nature last week believe they have a mechanism:1 it heated from underneath […]
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Uncategorized

How Old Is This Germ?
June 15, 2009
Rip Van Microbe has awakened after 120,000 years, said Live Science without batting an eye.  That’s strange; human observation only goes back 1/12 of that time max.  The bacterium came out of its suspended animation and grew as if nothing had happened.  “Such vigor is partially due to the microbe’s small size, the scientists speculate,” […]
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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

Mudstones Make Ripples
June 8, 2009
Most of the sediments in the world are mudstones – including shales and clays.  Until recently these were thought to form only in calm, placid seas.  Now, two geologists are continuing to show that they can form in flowing or turbulent water.     Two years ago, Schieber and Southard burst a paradigm by explaining […]
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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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Early Man

Hominids, Homonyms, and Homo sapiens
May 27, 2009
How’s the story of human evolution hanging together these days?  There’s no better place to look than the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences.  In the yearly issue released this month, Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey Schwartz gave a pretty thorough overview of the “Evolution of the Genus Homo.”1  Their account is fraught with controversy, […]
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Physics

Building Planets: Can’t Make Them, But Hurry
May 21, 2009
Constructing planets is a delicate business.  Trying to get tiny bits of dust to join up into balls has never been found to work.  It has to work fast, though, because unless the whole planet clears its dust lane, it will be dragged into the star in short order.  It seems you can’t get there […]
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Early Man

Early Man IQ: Et Tu, Brute?
May 12, 2009
Anthropologists are receiving a jolt about the intelligence of early man.  Long before the cave paintings showed our forebears exercising art appreciation, new findings suggest they were gifted individuals, not brutes.     The first report was about manufactured beads dated older than 82,000 years.  Science Daily said, “The shells are currently at the centre […]
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Solar System

State of the Moon Titan Addressed
May 6, 2009
Each May, a series of articles on major topics of geological interest, written by leading experts in the field, is published in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences.  This year’s issue includes a treatise on Titan, the large moon of Saturn, written by the two titans of Titan science, Jonathan Lunine and Ralph […]
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Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Blood Protein, Cells Recovered
April 30, 2009
It’s official: soft tissue, including blood vessel proteins and structures resembling cells, have been recovered from dinosaur bone.  Mary Schweitzer’s amazing claim in 2005 (03/24/2005) was subsequently disputed as possible contamination from biofilms (07/30/2008).  Now, Schweitzer and her team took exceptional precautions to avoid contamination by excavating hadrosaur bone from sandstone said to be 80 […]
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Physics

Are Secular Geologists Ready to Consider a Global Flood?
April 30, 2009
Everyone knows the Bible tells the story of a global flood in Noah’s day.  Creation scientists argue that its effects would have left visible evidence today – including most of the sedimentary layers and most of the fossil record.  Secular geologists have laughed off this story since the 18th century as nothing but myth, of […]
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Fossils

The Long Precambrian Fuse Gets Longer
April 28, 2009
Why did complex multicellular life explode on the scene some 550 million years ago?  That’s mystery enough, but finding complex single-celled life a billion years earlier makes it worse.  A new paper evaluated claims of Cambrian-like fossils from India dated 1.6 billion years old in the evolutionary timeline.  It did not explain the Cambrian explosion, […]
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Dumb Ideas

Mooning the Public: Life Sells
April 27, 2009
Advertisers have known for a long time that sex sells.  That’s why ads often include a scantily-clad woman standing next to the pickup truck for sale.  It seems that in planetary science, life sells.  An icy moon can be a pretty dull thing, but announce that there might be life there, and eye appeal jumps.  […]
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Geology

Geophysical King Dethroned?
April 17, 2009
Geologists have been speaking of a Great Oxygenation Event that may have never happened.
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Early Man

Did Early Man Have a Soul?
April 8, 2009
Some recent discoveries are surprising paleoanthropologists by much some early ancestors seem – well, human.  We’re talking about ancestors half a million years old in the evolutionary scheme.  They were supposed to be prior to Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals, but they seem to exhibit intelligence and compassion.     A report on New Scientist […]
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