Life (in any form) never ceases to amaze.

“Gigantism is very common in Antarctic waters — we have collected huge worms, giant crustaceans and sea spiders the size of dinner plates.”

Via:Breitbart

Much more interesting than politics and a lot less controversial. I must admit that when I read the headline I thought they were talking about someone like Gary Coleman. I know it’s a stupid thing to say.

Astronomers have spotted a space oddity in Earth’s neighbourhood - a dead star with some unusual characteristics.
The object, known as a neutron star, was studied using space telescopes and ground-based observatories.

But this one, located in the constellation Ursa Minor, seems to lack some key characteristics found in other neutron stars.

Details of the study, by a team of American and Canadian researchers, will appear in the Astrophysical Journal.

If confirmed, it would be only the eighth known “isolated neutron star” - meaning a neutron star that does not have an associated supernova remnant, binary companion, or radio pulsations.

The object has been nicknamed Calvera, after the villain in the 1960s western film The Magnificent Seven.

“The seven previously known isolated neutron stars are known collectively as The Magnificent Seven within the community,” said co-author Derek Fox, of Pennsylvania State University, US.

“So the name Calvera is a bit of an inside joke on our part.”

The authors estimate that the object is 250 to 1,000 light-years away. This would make Calvera one of the closest neutron stars to Earth - and possibly the closest.

Story

There have been numerous theories over the years about aliens and what might be their planet of origin. What if we found out that planet was none other than earth and they were living right beneath us?

Since ancient times the exploration of the North was of immense interest to humans. It was an attraction for adventurers and researchers seeking mysterious land and unexplored islands there.

Legends say that an entry to the underground realms was located somewhere in the North, and legendary ancient tribes living on the planet centuries ago used the entries to have a good shelter under the Earth’s surface. Mystics believe that the entry to the legendary Hyperborea, Shambala and Plutonia is carefully concealed from outsiders somewhere close to the North Pole. Recently, a reliable edition reported that UFOs coming to this planet start not from space but burst out from huge holes under the surface in the North Pole.

While I have my reservations about this theory it was nonetheless an interesting and entertaining read at Pravda.

A few days ago there was some question as to whether a growing majority of scientists agree that there such a thing as global warming, and that humans are contributing to it (ergo, this round of global warming is not like past cycles).

If you’ve already decided that you don’t believe scientists or polls or any news that comes from mainstream media, then just ignore this posting.

One example of this growing consensus is found in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is a sort of clearing house for peer reviewed research and writing on global warming; it synthesizes all this material and comes up with recommendations.

Here’s how one scientist describes the IPCC method of deliberations:

Q: The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report isn’t an original document. It’s a political document, a consensus of many, many studies that’s edited by politicians, is it not?

A: Dessler: Well, no. The Summary for Policymakers is gone over in a plenary session, line by line, and you have scientists in the room and then country representatives can object to various statements. But the document ultimately is written by scientists, and they can walk out. It’s a compromise of something the scientists can live with and the governments can live with. And generally, that almost always involves watering down the science, not the other way around. So to the extent there is political interference in the Summary for Policymakers, it’s to make the science less alarming than the scientists actually wanted. And there’s a reason the IPCC does this, and the reason is, they want buy-in from all the member governments. That way, the government can’t turn around and say they don’t believe this, because that government has agreed to every line in the summary. That’s why the IPCC allows the summary to have some interference from governments, so governments cannot distance themselves from it.

According to Naomi Oreskes of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the

IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members’ expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. For example, the National Academy of Sciences report, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, begins: “Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise.” The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and answers yes: “The IPCC’s conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue.”

Others agree. The American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling.

The left-wing Guardian (London) worries that the effort to build consensus may water the science too much while the right-leaning Weekly Standard (London) criticizes The Guardian’s reporting and argues that the debate over climate change has been so politicized as to be untrustworthy. The Weekly Standard apparently believes there’s a growing consensus, too, but one that it distrusts and dislikes.

There’s evidence that until recently, the Bush Administration had suppressed climate change findings that contradicted its position against the Kyoto accords (see this report by the Union of Concerned Scientists). So it’s a bit surprising that President Bush, shortly after the release of the latest IPCC report, announced a change of heart, apparently acknowledging this growing scientific consensus. Most of the main newspaper dailies and networks covered this (including the Weekly Standard; I imagine the Washington Times did too, but I can’t access its archives).

According to the New York Times

President Bush, fending off international accusations that he was ignoring climate change, proposed for the first time on Thursday to set ”a long-term global goal” for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and he called on other high-polluting nations to join the United States in negotiations aimed at reaching an agreement by the end of next year.

If carried through, such an agreement would be the first in which the United States, the world’s biggest source of the emissions that scientists say are warming the planet, has committed itself to a specific target for cutting them.

It would be a major shift for Mr. Bush, who has resisted such absolute goals in part for economic reasons. The president has also steadfastly rejected the so-called Kyoto Protocol, which limits greenhouse gas emissions, on the grounds that two other major polluters — China and India — are not bound by the accord in the same way as the United States would be if it joined. The proposal, delivered in a speech at the United States Agency for International Development here, reflects the difficulties the Bush administration is facing in grappling with climate change as the scientific consensus has continued to build in favor of action to control the buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.

Oreskes makes this sensible point:

The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.

A bit of light Friday night reading here, with a shout out to Professor Reynolds for the lead.

Enjoy!

We may have to do a rewrite of many history books in the world if the DNA studies in this story are factual.

Which came first–the chicken or the European?

Popular history, and a familiar rhyme about Christopher Columbus, holds that Europeans made contact with the Americas in 1492, with some arguing that the explorer and his crew were the first outsiders to reach the New World.

But chicken bones recently unearthed on the coast of Chile—dating prior to Columbus’ “discovery” of America and resembling the DNA of a fowl species native to Polynesia—may challenge that notion, researchers say.

“Chickens could not have gotten to South America on their own—they had to be taken by humans,” said anthropologist Lisa Matisoo-Smith from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Polynesians made contact with the west coast of South America as much as a century before any Spanish conquistadors, her findings imply.

Just joking about the history books. Through the years there have been several theories about who was the first to discover the Americas but there would be a certain humor in finding that fowl bones would be the determinate of the disagreements.