Only Natural
"I think the F ring is Saturn's weirdest ring, and these latest Cassini results go to show how the F ring is even more dynamic than we ever thought," Carl Murray, a Cassini imaging team member based at London's Queen Mary University, said in a statement. "These findings show us that the F ring region is like a bustling zoo of objects from a half mile in size to moons like Prometheus a hundred miles in size, creating a spectacular show." The F ring is held in check by two tiny moons, Prometheus and Pandora, which weave inside and outside the outer ring. Sometimes these moons perturb the ring, creating channels and snowballs. Now scientists think that some of these snowballs survive to become the weird objects punching new holes in the ring. [Video here, after commercial]
Now add to that three more potentially dangerous faults in the Bellingham Basin, a tectonically active area along the coast of Washington, near the Canadian border. A team of researchers has discovered active tectonic faults in this region nearly 40 miles (60 kilometers) north of any previously known faults. ... capable of triggering magnitude-6.0 to -6.5 earthquakes ... "...if they ruptured again along their entire length, some of that rupture would be out in the water, and there might be a tsunami hazard related to that...."
Researchers at a Texas university have designed a chip that could give smartphones the long-envied ability of comic book her Superman to see through walls, clothes or other objects. ... "The combination of CMOS and terahertz means you could put this chip and a transmitter on the back of a cell phone, turning it into a device carried in your pocket that can see through objects." ...
[The relative scale of things. Javascript required.]
[XKCD explores the depths around the world.]
Just as Jim Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has recently likened man-made global warming to “a great moral issue” like “slavery,” a group of 49 former NASA scientists issued a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolton asking for the administration refrain from including “unproven and unsupported remarks” about climate science in its communications.
No matter how many times they step on the rake of reality, left-wing ideologues can’t figure out how the handle came to fly up and whack their slack-jawed faces.
Mind-bending ‘psychotronic’ guns that can effectively turn people into zombies have been given the go-ahead by Russian president Vladimir Putin.
a new tyrannosaur species in northeastern China that lived 60 million years before T. rex. The fossil record preserved remains of fluffy down, making it the largest feathered dinosaur ever found.
If a T. rex relative had feathers, why not T. rex? Scientists said the evidence is trending in that direction
[h/t Ace of Spades]
It's a terrifying way to get a temporary tattoo. To get the feathery looking, fern-like pattern running down this man's left arm, he first needed to be struck by lightning.
"It wasn't in your arm.It's moved into your vascular system. It may be in your heart, or elsewhere. We are prepping you immediately to have the Interventional Radiologist attempt to use a catheter to find and extract the lost tubing, but if that fails, and it is still in your heart, we will have to perform open heart surgery on you."
The Washington Monument, which is slated for repairs after it was damaged in an earthquake last year, appears to be sinking, according to preliminary data collected by the National Geodetic Survey.
206 I love this singularity bubkis. Computer technology is advancing so fast, yadda yadda yadda.
The logic has not changed since they were invented. We're still playing out all the variations on the same thing, is all, it's still rather infant.
Computer technology has advanced in much the same way internal combustion technology has advanced. Cars keep getting faster and faster and faster... soon no doubt they will develop conciousness and rebel against their human masters.
Um no, it's just a car. Obviously that's silly. But with computers, lots of people assert we're somehow getting closer to conciousness, based on the fact that we are getting calculators to do basic arithmetic faster.
Researchers have discovered an elaborate 44,000-year-old Neanderthal house in Molodova, eastern Ukraine, made from mammoth bones, delicately decorated with carvings and pigments.... suggests the early human ancestors settled in areas where they built structures to live for extended periods of time....
Using a powerful laser, researchers have created water droplets in the air. The technique, called laser-assisted water condensation, could one day unlock the secrets of weather cycles and enable humans to decide where and when it rains. [Some long, far-off, distant day....]
The earthquake Tuesday in the Eastern United States was felt at 13 locations with nuclear power plants, from North Carolina to Michigan, but reactors shut down at only one, North Anna in Virginia, 10 miles from the epicenter. There was no damage to nuclear systems at any of the sites, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. [And we believe them! They're from the government!]
The Federal Communications Commission says it is looking into the failures of cell phone service that occurred Tuesday afternoon after the East Coast earthquake. For as long as an hour after the quake, wireless customers in Washington and elsewhere reported being unable to get calls through. Jamie Barnett, chief of the FCC's Public Safety & Homeland Security Bureau, said that when the cell phone networks get overloaded by call volume, crucial calls might fail to go through. "We were very concerned with the fact that 9-1-1 calls were also congested," he said. "We want to make sure that people who need emergency help are able to get it."
Shortly after the rare 5.8 earthquake in Virginia rattled Washington D.C. Tuesday, a Park Service spokesman said there was "absolutely no damage" to the Washington Monument. A more thorough assessment discovered a crack in the landmark. Not long after, additional damage was found, including three or four "significant" cracks. The monument has been closed indefinitely for further inspection and repairs, which will take at least a few weeks
altering chicken DNA to create embryos with alligator-like snouts instead of beaks. Experts changed the DNA of chicken embryos in the early stage of their development, enabling them to undo evolutionary progress and give the creatures snouts which are thought to have been lost in the cretaceous period millions of years ago. The scientific revelation of 'rewinding' evolution could pave the way for scientists altering DNA in the other direction and use the same process to create species better able to adapt to Earth's climate. [Yeah, right. Or, they could just be mucking things up for fun and profit. Which is more likely?]
reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim. Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth's atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control — and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain. [AND THE ALIENS ALL VOTE FOR DEMOCRATS? Sheesh!]
A little nature lesson for ya, bubala; these people were camping amid wild animals.Wild animals have three tasks in life — eat, defecate, procreate. Been doing it a long time. The bear was underweight because midsummer is not peak feeding season.... —Pistol Pete at PoliNation
The Moon's highlands, long a mystery, may have been thrown up billions of years ago by a slow-motion collision with a smaller companion moon knocked off its orbit.... At least one such mini-moon, about a third the diameter of the one we see today, could have been suspended between the gravitational pulls of the Moon and Earth for tens of millions of years, they calculated. Eventually, however, it would have lost its moorings and crashed into the Moon.... "According to our simulations, a large 'moon-to-Moon' size ratio and a subsonic impact velocity lead to an accretionary pile rather than a crater," Jutzi and Asphaug concluded. This scenario would also help explain why the farside's crust is so much thicker, and why certain minerals are concentrated there
Quite a whopper of a claim -- human actions rivaling the asteroid strike that waylaid the dinosaurs. The "Humans as Gods" belief is a nice carryover from the global change wars that raged for decades. ... The upshot is that scientists are speculating based on very incomplete data and records. This is what passes for modern doomsday science. But gloomy scientists have an ace up their sleeve. They're citing Haiti as a prime example of humans' ability to devastate the animal kingdom. ... Never mind that Haiti is a grossly dysfunctional, poverty-wrenched society occupying a portion of a small Caribbean island. And never mind that frog species on Haiti's side of the island are dying off in no small measure due to a fungus brought by African frogs. Haiti, suggest biologists, is the world's future. Hubris, thy name is modern science
People in a vast seismic zone in the southern and midwestern United States would face catastrophic damage if a major earthquake struck there and should ensure that builders keep that risk in mind, a government report said on Thursday. The Federal Emergency Management Agency said if earthquakes strike in what geologists define as the New Madrid Seismic Zone, they would cause "the highest economic losses due to a natural disaster in the United States."
NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted.... study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.... "There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans." ... data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted.
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