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Solar System

Mars Red-Faced Without Water
September 21, 2009
The Martians are singing How dry I am.  Scientists have a new explanation for how Mars turned red without water: it’s just dry dust tumbling in the wind.  This new hypothesis was announced by Live Science, Science Daily, New Scientist, and Space.com, based on a presentation at the European Planetary Science Congress last week.1    […]
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Early Man

Human Evolution Story Confounded – Again
September 9, 2009
Human fossils in Georgia (Asia) have confounded the timeline of human evolution again.  The UK newspaper Independent reported that the 3 skulls of Homo erectus are rewriting the history of man.  If these are as old as claimed (1.8 million years), it would toss overboard the long held belief that modern humans first emerged in […]
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Fossils

Permian Extinction Recovery Story Stretches Credibility
September 4, 2009
It goes without saying that Darwin’s theory fits hand in glove with the geological dating scheme, but how reliable is the latter?  The textbook age names – Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Eocene and all the rest – have taken on their own life as assumed truths.  Every once in awhile, though, papers are published that require […]
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Physics

What’s Up With the Planets?
August 27, 2009
Here are planets and moons making news in our celestial neighborhood, the solar system.  Maybe we’ll drop in on another neighborhood while we’re looking around. Venus resurfacing:  Planetary geologists can’t get away from the evidence that Venus underwent a planet-wide volcanic resurfacing epoch.  Crater counts and lava flow surveys leave little room for doubt that, […]
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Biomimetics

Feather Technology Resurrected in Printer After 40 Million Years
August 26, 2009
A fossil bird feather from Germany still shows that melanosomes – the cell organelles that produce iridescent colors in feathers – are still visible after an alleged 40 million years.  The structures were long thought to be remnants of bacteria that fed on the organic matter, but now are seen to consist of original feather […]
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Geology

Paper View:  A Geology Paradigm Suffers a Paradox
August 7, 2009
A pair of geologists found a paradox in a paradigm.  That paradigm is the belief that ancient ocean levels rose and fell in cycles as ice sheets retreated and advanced, and the cause of the cycles was periodic changes in earth’s orbit.  They modeled this process and couldn’t get it to work.  They couldn’t get […]
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Dinosaurs

Dino Protein Confirmed
August 2, 2009
An independent study of bone marrow contents from a T. rex that was reported in 2007 to contain fragments of protein has confirmed the claim, reported Science Daily.  Seven peptides from collagen, and apparently traces from hemoglobin, were detected.  The findings are scheduled to be published in the Sept. 4 issue of Journal of Proteome […]
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Dinosaurs

Dakota Dino Reveals Skin Cells
July 1, 2009
“Absolutely amazing” and “absolutely gobsmacking” are exclamations made by scientists analyzing the fossilized skin of a hadrosaur.
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Uncategorized

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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