A century's worth of records suggests that hurricanes are on the rise and a warming Atlantic is to blame

Using records dating back to 1855, hurricane researchers say they have uncovered an ongoing rise in the number of Atlantic hurricanes that tracks the increase in sea surface temperature related to climate change. Critics of such a link argue that this trend is merely because of better observations since the dawn of the satellite era in the 1970s. But the authors of the new study say the conclusion is hard to dodge.

"Even if we take the extreme of these error estimates, we are left with a significant trend since 1890 and a significant trend in major hurricanes starting anytime before 1920," say atmospheric scientists Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Update: You can read Holland and Webster's full paper here. [.pdf]. Chris Landsea (specialist with the National Hurricane Center) post a rebuttle here [.pdf] (interestinly enough, prior to the paper's release). Further discussion on both items can be found at Chris Mooney's blog, The Intersection.

More on this news item at National Geographic and New Scientist (UK). For further information, please see the links to the researchers' pages included above. Also, see Chris Mooney's recent book Storm World for more on the history of hurricane study, meteorology and climate science (my current reading).

[I'm going to be very strict in whatever I post here in the future. The public discussion for this seed is for related links and discussion of the science only. Non-related items, friendly or not, will be deleted unless relegated to a separate discussion. In other words, if you feel a need to comment on me or deny otherwise sound science, then clip this to some other group and start a new, private thread. Otherwise, your comment will be deleted. You have been warned. If you are in doubt, then don't post your comment.]

Forests, after all, cool the atmosphere by drinking in carbon dioxide from the air. A new study, however, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that forests' other climatic effects can cancel out their carbon cleaning advantage in some parts of the world. Using a three-dimensional climate model, the research team mimicked full global deforestation and also studied the effects of clear-cutting in different regions of latitude, such as the tropics and boreal zones. Apparently, these natural carbon sinks only do their job effectively in tropical regions; in other areas, they have either no impact or actually contribute to warming the planet. In fact, according to this model, by the year 2100, if all the forests were cut and left to rot, the annual global mean temperature would decrease by more than 0.5 degree Fahrenheit.

NASA scientists plan to announce a new open-source project this month called CosmosCode -- it's aimed at recruiting volunteers to write code for live space missions, Wired News has learned.

The program was launched quietly last year under NASA's CoLab entrepreneur outreach program, created by Robert Schingler, 28, and Jessy Cowan-Sharp, 25, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Members of the CosmosCode group have been meeting in Second Life and will open the program to the public in the coming weeks, organizers said.

If you want to really see quantum mechanics in action, you've got to turn the temperature down so low that even atoms stop moving. Physicists have come close to achieving this "absolute zero" state by using precision-tuned lasers, but the technique has only allowed researchers to freeze small groups of atoms at a time. Now members of an international team say they have managed to cool a dime-sized mirror to within one degree of absolute zero, the lowest laser-induced freeze yet achieved with a visible object.

So how simple can you make a model that contains the basic greenhouse physics? Pretty simple actually. You need to account for the solar radiation coming in (including the impact of albedo), the longwave radiation coming from the surface (which depends on the temperature) and some absorption/radiation (the 'emissivity') of longwave radiation in the atmosphere (the basic greenhouse effect). Optionally, you can increase the realism by adding feedbacks (allowing the absorption or albedo to depend on temperature), and other processes - like convection - that link the surface and atmosphere more closely than radiation does. You can skip directly to the bottom-line points if you don't want to see the gory details.

It's "the Sistine Chapel of crystals," says Juan Manuel García- Ruiz.

The geologist announced this week that he and a team of researchers have unlocked the mystery of just how the minerals in Mexico's Cueva de los Cristales (Cave of Crystals) achieved their monumental forms.

Buried a thousand feet (300 meters) below Naica mountain in the Chihuahuan Desert, the cave was discovered by two miners excavating a new tunnel for the Industrias Peñoles company in 2000.

The cave contains some of the largest natural crystals ever found: translucent gypsum beams measuring up to 36 feet (11 meters) long and weighing up to 55 tons.

"It's a natural marvel," said García-Ruiz, of the University of Granada in Spain.

The seismic jolt that unleashed the deadly Solomons tsunami this week lifted an entire island metres out of the sea, destroying some of the world's most pristine coral reefs.

In an instant, the grinding of the Earth's tectonic plates in the 8.0 magnitude earthquake Monday forced the island of Ranongga up three metres (10 foot).

Submerged reefs that once attracted scuba divers from around the globe lie exposed and dying after the quake raised the mountainous landmass, which is 32-kilometres (20-miles) long and 8-kilometres (5-miles) wide.

The second report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reveals that global warming impacts are already advancing, and will get worse

From space, climate change is obvious. For more than 20 years satellite images have shown springtime greenery bursting forth earlier and earlier in that season. Thanks to global warming, the growing season is lengthening in many parts of the world. And though this may boost crop yields in some areas, it will have a host of other, less benign impacts, such as transforming the eastern Amazon from rain forest to savanna, according to the second report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Spring is coming early to the western slope of Colorado's Rocky Mountains, providing continuing signs of a warming world, according to a conservation biologist.

"I'm anticipating there'll be some flowering again in April this year, which is something that never used to happen," said David Inouye, a professor at the University of Maryland in College Park.

This will be Inouye's 37th season at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) in Gothic, outside the resort town of Crested Butte.

Dozens of scientists make the annual trek to a meadow at RMBL about 9,500 feet (2,900 meters) above sea level to study everything from wildflowers to marmots.

Many of the studies indicate a warming planet.

In addition to the early flowers, robins return earlier from their wintering grounds, and marmots, chipmunks, and ground squirrels emerge earlier from hibernation than they once did, the scientists say.

UK fungi season now longer in autumn, with an extra fruiting in spring.

Climate change could turn the autumnal fungus foray in Britain into a year-round event, say researchers who have recorded changes in fruiting patterns over the past half-century.

In the autumn, the UK mushroom season has doubled in length, from about 33 days in the 1950s, to nearly 75 days now, they say. Fungi are starting to fruit earlier, and finishing later.

And some species are fruiting in both spring and autumn — a unique development in response to rising temperatures, says Alan Gange of Royal Holloway, University of London. Although it has been shown that climate change is making birds nest and flowers bloom earlier, he knows of nothing else that has added a complete extra breeding season to its life cycle.

Global warming threatens to extinguish hundreds of millions of human lives and nearly a third of the planet's wildlife, an international panel of climate scientists said in a report issued today.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that the world's poorer nations face spiraling rates of death and disease due to increased risk of droughts, floods, storms and other severe climate effects spurred by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

Up to 30 percent of animal and plant species could be wiped out by a global temperature rise of 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius), experts said.

The IPCC forecasts a rise of between 3.2 and 7.1 degrees Fahrenheit (1.8 and 4 degrees Celsius) by the end of this century.

The new findings, based on the work of some 2,500 scientists in more than 130 countries, follow an IPCC statement in February that global warming is "unequivocal" and that human activity is almost certainly the cause.

A star that survived a massive explosion – only to be destroyed in a second blast just two years later – has piqued the curiosity of astronomers. Its bizarre death might be due to the production of antimatter in its core towards the end of its life.

The star that exploded appears to have been a massive type called a Wolf-Rayet star, which begin their lives with more than 40 times the mass of the Sun.

Climate change is not a future problem but a present one that must be tackled now, concludes the latest chapter of a major climate report.

The report details how different amounts of global warming, ranging from 0°C to 5°C will impact on human society. It also underlines that those who will be most affected are the poor people who are least responsible for increasing levels of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. Read the summary for policy makers (PDF).

The warming of other solar bodies has been seized upon by climate sceptics; but oh how wrong they are, says Oliver Morton.

If the shooting of fish in barrels offends you, look away. The publication this week of a Nature paper on global warming on Mars offers a fantastic opportunity to kill off one of the silliest climate-sceptic arguments, and I'm more than happy to be pointing the gun at the water.

The sceptical 'argument' — using the word loosely — in question is that global warming on Earth should be seen as a natural, as opposed to anthropogenic, phenomenon because other planets and moons in the Solar System are getting warmer, too (which, indeed, they are). Since what the planets have in common is the Sun, they say, it must thus be the Sun that is driving the warming.

In big news for small dogs everywhere, researchers have found a tie that binds the small breeds, from Chihuahua to Pomeranian to Pekingese: they all share the same version of a gene for a growth hormone called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1). A group gathered DNA samples from thousands of dogs representing more than 100 breeds, looking for common genetic denominators amongst the great variety of shapes and sizes. Small breeds, it turns out, all have a piece of DNA that seems to repress the IGF1 gene and hence stunts their growth, researchers report.

Experts are still weighing whether the hitch will delay the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider

Researchers have identified the cause of a hiccup in the construction of the world's next top particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). During stress tests last week at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), a support structure tore loose from the housing of a key ultracold magnet because it simply was not strong enough for the job, according to a statement released today. CERN will decide later this month whether upgrades will set back the start date of the LHC, which is set to switch on in November at the CERN facility near Geneva, Switzerland.

Attosecond laser pulses permit the first direct views of an uncommon form of electron escape

To break free from an atom, the negatively charged electron typically has to absorb a high-energy photon, such as that from the ultraviolet (UV) or x-ray spectrum. The electron then gets excited enough to overcome the electrostatic attraction holding it to the positively charged nucleus and escapes, a process called ionization. A German-Dutch team has for the first time provided direct proof of an alternative mechanism. Powerful electric fields from a laser pulse can momentarily weaken the electrostatic bonds and enable the electron to quantum-mechanically tunnel away from the atom.

There is evidence that the world is already feeling the effects of climate change and has been for the past decade. This is what hundreds of UN-backed scientists and politicians will say on Friday 6 April, a source involved in last-minute discussions taking place in Brussels, Belgium, told New Scientist.

The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the first to be based on observations of recent changes in weather, rather than computer-model-based forecasts of future climate.

Geophysicists have probed deep into Earth's childhood and recorded the earliest measurement yet of the magnetic field that protects the planet from devastation by the solar wind.

The finding provides new insight into Earth's early years and could even reveal more about when life began.

The history of Earth's geomagnetic field plays a key role in scientists' understanding of the development of our planet's deep interior, its atmosphere, and even the early evolution of terrestrial life. But scientists have had a hard time pinning down how long ago the magnetosphere first formed.

Now geophysicist John Tarduno at the University of Rochester in New York, US, and colleagues, have made the earliest direct measurement of Earth's magnetic field. They discovered that the magnetosphere was already in existence 3.2 billion years ago, 500 million years earlier than scientists previously believed.

An early modern human from China dated to about 40,000 years ago adds to evidence that the first Homo sapiens sapiens occasionally mated with older human species such as Neandertals.

The remains—which represent the oldest known example of modern humans found in China—share a few characteristics with older human species, according to a new study.

Other experts have argued that early modern humans and Neandertals were genetically distinct and therefore couldn't interbreed.

Such findings support the long-held theory that modern humans out-competed and eventually replaced other species as the modern humans spread out of Africa.

But the Chinese skeleton and similarly dated specimens from Europe and Asia have traits that had already been lost in the earliest modern humans found in Africa, said Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

If the replacement theory is correct, the 40,000-year-old skeletons should look like modern human fossils from Africa or slightly more evolved, he explained.

"What we find is overwhelmingly they do," he said. "But these archaic characteristics that had been lost in African moderns keep popping up."

Dust storms and dark rocks are making the red planet hotter.

Mars is getting hotter. Measurements of the brightness of the planet's surface over the show that the thermometer has ratcheted up some 0.65 °C over a few decades.

Lori Fenton at the Carl Sagan Center, Mountain View, California, and colleagues looked at maps of Mars's 'albedo', a measure of how much light reflects off a surface. By comparing a map from 1976-78 with one from 1999-2000, they found "some pretty dramatic changes", says Fenton. In particular, the southern highlands region of Mars had darkened significantly.

Darkness and heat feed on each other in new simulations that predict a 20-year warming trend on the Red Planet

A darkening of the Martian surface may have slowly warmed the planet over the past 20 years. Based on a model of the Red Planet's climate, researchers report that the brightness or darkness of its sands have a strong effect on its atmospheric temperature. They found that the heat absorbed by dark rock kicks up winds that blow away shiny dust, leaving behind even darker rock. But the predicted warming is hard to confirm, researchers say, and could shift with the sands at any time.

Snapshots over the past three decades have shown vast regions of the Red Planet's surface have brightened or darkened by 10 percent or more, reflecting between 10 and 30 percent of incoming sunlight in total. To determine if albedo or reflectivity changes affect the climate, researchers compared Viking orbiter photos from 1976 to 1978, which mapped the planet's bright and dark spots, to those from 1999 to 2000, when the Mars Global Surveyor discovered a darker Mars.

Egyptian archaeologists today announced that they have unearthed traces of solidified lava on the northern coast of Sinai that date to around 1500 B.C.—supporting accounts that ancient Egyptian settlements were buried by a massive volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean, they say.

The archaeological team, led by Mohamed Abdel Maqsoud of Egypt's Supreme Council for Antiquities, found houses, military structures, and tombs encased in ash, along with fragments of pumice, near the ancient Egyptian fortress of Tharo, on the Horus military road. Tharo is located close to El Qantara, where the Nile Delta meets the Sinai peninsula.

According to Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the council, the lava and ash hail from Santorini, an eastern Mediterranean volcano that has been linked to the myth of Atlantis.

The new find seems to confirm accounts from ancient artwork and documents that recount the destruction of coastal cities in Egypt and Palestine during the 15th dynasty (1650-1550 B.C.), when foreigners known as the Hyksos ruled Egypt.

The Arctic is melting. But is it really the result of global warming? And if global warming is happening, how do we know humans have had anything to do with it? How can we be sure?

Here are ten of the questions most frequently posed by people who are skeptical about whether or not global warming is happening. Some of the answers may surprise you.

The fossilised remains of an amphibian which lived more than 245 million years ago have been found in Antarctica, suggesting that the climate during much of the Triassic era was remarkably balmy.

The 60-centimetre (24-inch) piece of skull was teased out of thick sandstone at Fremouw Peak in the Transantarctic Mountains, just six degrees short of the South Pole.

Palaeontologists in Europe and the United States have identified the beast as a Parotosuchus, a two-metre-long (6.5-feet) giant salamander-like predator that lived 40 million years before the first dinosaurs, inhabiting lakes and rivers.

During the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 70s, China persecuted scientists and sent the Red Guard to the farthest reaches of the country to promote anti-intellectualism. This year, China is again sending delegates to the countryside, but this time they are spreading a very different sort of message: the virtues of scientific progress.

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As China pours money into ambitious initiatives like nanotechnology, supercomputers, and its space program, surveys suggest that as much as 98 percent of the population lacks the education necessary to comprehend the basics of science. But scientific achievement is increasingly part of modern China's nationalism, and so the country's uneducated workers—traditional allies in government-engendered nationalism—must comprehend science. President Hu Jintao called recently on government workers to "on all fronts vigorously publicize scientific development...and to instill it in the hearts of the people."

Mount St. Helens may continue its current slow eruption for decades, eventually rebuilding the dome that was blasted away when the volcano erupted in 1980, according to a geologist.

But the volcano, located in Washington State, could also stop erupting today (see Washington State map).

Daniel Dzurisin with the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington, is one of many scientists trying to understand when Mount St. Helens's most recent eruption, which began in October 2004, will end.

Several lines of evidence, he said, suggest the volcano's magma chamber a few miles below the surface is consistently resupplied with magma from an even greater depth.

If so, Mount St. Helens could keep erupting for decades or even centuries, in a so-called open system.

However, if the system is closed, the volcano's magma chamber will eventually be depleted, and the eruption will end.

New high-resolution seismic images have produced the best estimate to date of the temperature of Earth's extremely deep interior, researchers report.

Using a method initially developed for oil and gas exploration, the scientists studied the core-mantle boundary, a region that lies about 1,860 miles (3,000 kilometers) below the planet's surface.

This technique allowed the team to piece together images based on seismic waves bounced off materials around the boundary.

The resulting 3-D map of the region revealed minerals and pressure levels that indicated the surrounding temperature.

The dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice in recent years is the result of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions combined with natural cycles, according to a new study.

The loss of ice will likely change water temperatures and affect the circulation of ocean currents, which may alter climates around the world, the study suggests.

The study reviewed previous research of Arctic sea ice, which showed that the ice has been steadily disappearing since 1979.

In September 2005 satellite images revealed that the Arctic ice was at its lowest level in some 50 years of observation.

"If we compare how much ice we had in September 2005 with a typical September, we've lost an amount of ice about twice the size of Texas," said lead author Mark Serreze, senior researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

"So we're talking about a lot of real estate."

There have been previous periods of Arctic warmth not attributed to human causes, Serreze said, and ice cover grows each winter only to shrink in summer.

But the current loss probably can't be ascribed to natural cycles alone, Serreze believes.

In the March 16 issue of the journal Science, Serreze and colleagues report that the evidence "strongly suggests" the ice loss is caused by human-induced global warming.

Chemistry meeting grants audience to low-energy nuclear work.

After an 18-year hiatus, the American Chemical Society (ACS) seems to be warming to cold fusion. Today that society is holding a symposium at their national meeting in Chicago, Illinois, on 'low-energy nuclear reactions', the official name for cold fusion.

Some say the move shows that researchers are re-opening their eyes to work in this field. Others maintain that there is still no evidence for cold fusion and see the session only as a curiosity.

Mediterranean corals could strip, but not die, in response to climate change.

Reef-building corals may be more resilient against climate change than scientists had previously thought. Researchers have discovered that some species are able to survive an increase in seawater acidity, even though it strips the individual coral polyps of their protective calcium carbonate skeletons. This may be good news for individual polyps, but it doesn't change the gloomy outlook for reef ecosystems.

As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, so do the levels of dissolved carbon dioxide in sea water. This leads to an increase in ocean-borne carbonic acid, which is capable of dissolving calcium carbonate. "This is a major problem for corals," says Maoz Fine, a marine zoologist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. "Essentially, acidification leads to naked coral."

Environmental contamination can cause cancer and birth defects. Of particular concern are a group of toxic chemicals called endocrine-disrupters, which interfere with reproductive hormones and may cause sterility. A new study, published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that these chemicals can change reproductive behavior as well, and that these behavioral changes can be passed on from parents to offspring. If correct, these changes could alter the course of evolution by giving natural selection new targets to act on.

One person in 10 worldwide, including one in eight city-dwellers, live less than 10 metres above sea-level and near the coast – an "at-risk zone" for flooding and stronger storms exacerbated by climate change, a new study reveals.

The research, led by Gordon McGranahan at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, UK, is the first ever to map the location of low, coastal urban centres around the world. "These are areas where the risk of sea-level rise and stronger storms needs to be taken seriously," says McGranahan.

One month on, Indonesian physicists think their concrete plan might be working.

Physicists in Indonesia are about to embark on the second phase of their effort to smother a mud volcano with chains of concrete balls. The physicists say increased gas emissions from the vent indicate that their plan might be working, although it is too early to tell for certain.

Worst-case warming scenario may bring totally new kinds of tropical climate and cause others to disappear

If global warming continues unabated, many of the world's climate zones may disappear by 2100, leaving new ones in their place unlike any that exist today, according to a new study. Researchers compared existing patterns of temperature and precipitation with those that may exist at the turn of the century, based on scenarios put forth in the recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue rising at the same rate, up to 39 percent of Earth's continental surface may experience totally new climates, primarily in the tropics and adjacent latitudes as warmer temperatures spread toward the poles.

One of Italy's finest wines now has an even bigger claim to fame.

Paleontologists have unearthed the 33-foot-long (10-meter-long) skeleton of an ancient whale under the vineyards of Castello Banfi, one of the producers of the renowned red wine Brunello di Montalcino.

"The skeleton is almost complete and well preserved. That's an uncommon find," said Michelangelo Bisconti, who is supervising the excavation at Banfi, an 11th-century castle near the town of Montalcino in Tuscany.

The find resembles a modern rorqual whale—the group of large baleen whales that includes the blue, humpback, and fin whales—said Bisconti, a paleontologist at the Museum of Natural History of the Mediterranean in Livorno.

A 95-million-year-old marine lizard with minuscule front legs may shed new light on the evolution of modern reptiles, particularly snakes, scientists have reported.

The fossilized remains of the reptile represent the earliest known example of a lizard evolving toward a limbless state, according to experts who described the new species.

The creature's vestigial, or no longer functional, forelimbs barely protrude from its long, snakelike body.

Although its rear legs were of normal size, researchers said the lizard was probably an eel-like swimmer that spent little time on land.

Michael Caldwell, of the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, led the team that made the discovery. He said the lizard, dubbed Adriosaurus microbrachis or "small-armed Adriosaurus," belongs to the lizard group most closely related to snakes.

The plastic lenses of your glasses bend light to focus it, but a new high-tech material bends visible light in the "wrong" direction. The advance may open the way for a number of new optical applications, including a revolutionary type of lens that could resolve finer details than now possible.

If you want to protect people from malaria, keep the disease out of mosquitoes. It's an intriguing approach, but implementing it is harder than it sounds: In the wild, malaria-free mosquitoes tend to fare worse than their susceptible counterparts. Enter a mosquito genetically engineered to fight the disease. According to a new study, these transgenic bugs beat out nonengineered mosquitoes when both are feeding on parasite-infected blood. If confirmed, the study means that plans to replace entire mosquito populations with disease-resistant ones may have better chances of success.

So has Pacific Northwest snowpack declined? Emphatically yes. I say "emphatically yes" for three reasons. First, because Albright illustrates the supposed lack of a trend by comparing specific periods (e.g. 1940-1946 vs. 1997-2006), in which snowpack has increased in some locations. This is not very informative, because both the spatial and temporal variability is large, and any question of decline can only be correctly addressed using all the data together, and over a statistically significant time period (30 years or more would be preferred). According to a summary statement prepared by Dennis Hartman to try to clarify the situation for the media and government, the decline is quite evident when the analysis is done correctly. (Hartmann is currently Chair of the Atmospheric Sciences Department at the University of Washington).

One of the largest supervolcanoes in the world lies beneath Yellowstone National Park and scientists say activity there is increasing.

Though the Yellowstone system, which spans parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, is active and expected to eventually blow its top, scientists don't think it will erupt any time soon. Supervolcanoes can sleep for centuries or millennia before producing incredibly massive eruptions that can drop ash across an entire continent.

Yet significant activity continues beneath the surface. And the activity has been increasing lately, scientists have discovered. In addition, the nearby Teton Range, in a total surprise, is getting shorter.

As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise, scientists have counted on the ground beneath our feet to soak up some of this greenhouse gas. But fungi living in the soil could throw a wrench into that plan, according to a new study, which finds that the microbes could actually cause soil to lose carbon to the atmosphere.

Pollution from industrialized countries is heating the Arctic atmosphere faster than any region on Earth, a new study warns.

European researchers writing in today's issue of the journal Science report that temperature spikes in the Arctic are mainly caused by "human-induced emissions of long-lived greenhouse gases."

Ship emissions, smoke from summer forest fires, and air pollutants such as aerosols and ozone coming from the lower latitudes are contributing to "significant warming trends," the report authors say.

Surface air temperatures in the region have risen faster than the global average over the past few decades and "are predicted to warm by 5 degrees Celsius [9 degrees Fahrenheit] over a large part of the Arctic by the end of the 21st century," the authors note in their study.

Previous climate models have suggested that the Arctic's summer sea ice may completely disappear by 2040 if warming continues unabated.

"The Arctic is at risk because global warming is proceeding fastest there," said study co-author Andreas Stohl of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research.

"This is mainly a consequence of the increasing trends of long-lived greenhouse gases and feedbacks in the climate system, which are strongest in the Arctic."

Ice shed from the giant sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland is responsible for just 12% of the current rate of global sea level rise, according to a new review.

The authors emphasise that it is now clear that the ice caps are losing ice faster than it is being replenished by snowfall. But exactly why this is happening remains unknown, making it difficult to predict the extent of future sea level rises.

The remaining 88% of the current rise is due to the expansion of water as it warms, and melting from mountain glaciers and ice caps outside Greenland and Antarctica. Yet the shrinking of Greenland and Antarctica remains crucial because together they hold enough water to make sea levels rise by 70 metres, submerging vast swathes of land and displacing millions.

There's no doubt that the term is useful. A consensus view in any field of science represents humanity's best guess as to what's going on. The guess might well be wrong, but what else is there to go on? It's not as though there are answers in the back of the book to look at. People often say that science isn't a democracy; scientific questions aren't decided by majority rule. Well, then, what are they decided by? Experiments and observations, surely. But who runs the experiments and makes the observations? Who interprets the outcome? Who double-checks them? It is a social process.

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n an attempt to emulate this natural process, Goettmann and colleagues Arne Thomas and Markus Antonietti developed their own nitrogen-based catalyst that can produce carbamates. The graphite-like compound is made from flat layers of carbon and nitrogen atoms arranged in hexagons.

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So while I think there's a role for mentioning scientific consensus, it should be used very sparingly. Telling people that there is a consensus cannot substitute for explaining why there is a consensus. As much as climate scientists may be wearying of debate, they need to press onward and treat each question as though it was the first time they had ever heard it.

Contrary to popular belief, the 'hot spots' of evolution are actually quite cool: a study suggests that new species emerge more frequently in temperate regions than in the tropics.

Scientists had assumed that new species develop faster in the tropics, since they are home to greater species diversity than at higher latitudes. But the researchers behind the new analysis say the explanation for this is that fewer species have gone extinct near the equator.

Jason Weir and Dolph Schluter at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, compared how animal species across the Americas have evolved. They looked at pairs of 'sister species', which share an immediate common ancestor and so are the most closely related species.

The mammal ear is a very precise system for hearing—enabling everything from human appreciation of music to the echolocation of bats. Three tiny bones known as ossicles—the hammer (malleus), anvil (incus) and stirrup (stapes)—work together to propagate sound from the outside world to the tympanic membrane, otherwise known as the eardrum. From there, the sound is transmitted to the brain and informs the listener about pitch, intensity and even location.

But it has been a mystery how this delicate system evolved from the cruder listening organs of our reptilian ancestors. Paleontologists have scoured fossil records in search of signs of how the jawbones of reptiles migrated and became the middle ear of mammals. Now Zhe-Xi Luo of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and his colleagues have found one: Yanoconodon allini, an intermediate between modern mammals and their distant ancestors. "It helps to show a transit

In the experiment, electrons moving in the interface between two semiconductors behaved as though they were made up of particles with only a fraction of the electron's charge. This so-called fractional quantum hall effect (FQHE) suggested that electrons may not be elementary particles after all. However, it soon became clear that electrons under certain conditions can congregate in a way that gives them the illusion of having fractional charge - an explanation that earned Laughlin, Horst Störmer and Daniel Tsui the Nobel prize.

Wen suspected that the effect could be an example of a new type of matter. Different phases of matter are characterised by the way their atoms are organised. In a liquid, for instance, atoms are randomly distributed, whereas atoms in a solid are rigidly positioned in a lattice. FQHE systems are different. "If you take a snapshot of the position of electrons in an FQHE system they appear random and you think you have a liquid," says Wen. But step back, and you see that, unlike in a liquid, the electrons dance around each other in well-defined steps.

A rogue ball of ice as big as Pennsylvania smashes into an Alaska-sized dwarf planet, spewing debris across the solar system and furnishing the planet with two new moons. Although it could be a disaster scene from a sci-fi movie, the event actually took place in the outer realms of our solar system a few billion years ago. "It's just a spectacular story," says planetary scientist Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, whose team has discovered the fragments of the cosmic catastrophe. What's more, the find sheds new light on the early history of our solar system.

Scientists for the first time have seen a specific particle of matter spontaneously turn into its antimatter twin--a discovery that might require some rewriting of the fundamental theory that governs nature at the subatomic level.

Particle physics is like studying fine wristwatches by slamming them together to see which parts fall out. Except that the particles set loose by giant accelerators tend to exist for the briefest wisps of time--only billionths or even trillionths of a second. As a result, scientists can only observe the results of the decay of these particles, collecting data on their mass and electrical charge. Most of the time, these properties fit the Standard Model, the grand theory that has defined the nature of matter for nearly 4 decades. But sometimes, researchers see a particle behave in a new way that could crack open the door to an entirely new category of forces governing particle interactions.

A new report confirms that coal has a large role to play in meeting the world's energy demands, but to avoid runaway climate change, technologies to sequester its carbon need to advance quickly

The world emitted 25 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2003—more than one third, 9.3 billion metric tons, came from burning coal. The dirty rock provides half of the electricity in the U.S. and its role (or the nation's dependence on it) is likely to grow, according to a new report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's cheap, there's lots of it and there's lots of it in places with high demand, namely the U.S., China and India," says co-author and M.I.T. physicist Ernest Moniz. "Sequestration," he adds, "is a key enabling technology for coal use in a carbon-constrained world."

Sequestration, as envisioned in the report, involves capturing the CO2 from coal-fired power plants, compressing it into a liquid and injecting it deep beneath the earth into old oil fields or saline aquifers. There, according to geologists, the CO2 would be trapped by sealing cap rock to prevent it from seeping back to the surface and into the air. It is relatively cheap to get it there, the report says. The difficulty is capturing it at the power plant without sapping too much energy or pushing electric costs up too high. For example, one 500-megawatt coal-fired power plant (there are the equivalent of 500 of these in the U.S. and China is building the equivalent of two of them each week) produces three million tons of CO2 annually. Adding carbon capture technology to that plant sucks up 40 percent of the power it can produce and adds at least 2.7 cents to the retail price of that electricity.

We criticized William Broad previously for a piece that misrepresented the scientific understanding of the factors that drive climate change over millions of years, systematically understating the scientifically-established role of greenhouse gases, and over-stating the role of natural factors including those as speculative as cosmic rays (see our recent discussion here). In this piece, Broad attempts to discredit Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" by exaggerating the legitimate, but minor, criticisms of his treatment of the science by experts on climate science, and presenting specious or unsubstantiated criticisms by a small number of the usual, well-known contrarians who wouldn't agree even if Gore read aloud from the latest IPCC report.

The combination of polar bears and melting ice is a heady mix - so much so that the animal's plight has become a rallying cry in the fight against climate change. Simon Garfield reveals how activists have used dramatic pictures of the Arctic's most fearsome predator to give their cause real bite and to ignite an emotive PR campaign.

…

One photograph in particular has captured the imagination. In a neat piece of marketing, the Canadian Ice Service made available a stunning image to coincide with the IPCC report. Two bears, probably a mother and her cub, are pictured on a spectacular ice block off northern Alaska that might have been modelled by Henry Moore. They appear to be howling against injustice. The drama is clear: this is truly the tip of an iceberg, the bears are desperately stranded as the water swells around them. The first thought among viewers is surely one of pity and concern, but this is to misjudge the situation: polar bears are reasonable swimmers, and certainly climbed upon such sculptures centuries before we climbed into our 4x4s.

The reach of the spooky quantum link called entanglement keeps getting longer. A team has transmitted entangled photons some 144 kilometers (89 miles) between La Palma and Tenerife, two of Spain's Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco. Physicist Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna, the group's leader, presented the results to his colleagues this week at the American Physical Society conference.

The distance achieved is 10 times farther than entangled photons have ever flown through the air. When two photons or other particles are in this state, what happens to one determines the fate of the other, no matter how far apart they are. Zeilinger compares the phenomenon with throwing a pair of dice that land on matching numbers every time.

Mountains are fountains. Humid air crashes into upthrusted rock and releases its water in the form of rain, snow or ice. But the tiny particles created when fuel is burned—aerosols—can interfere with this process by providing even more impurities in the air on which water can condense. The many more resulting smaller droplets collide less often, thus forming fewer raindrops and, ultimately, less rainfall. Or so the theory goes. And now, records stretching back 50 years for a mountaintop in China strongly support this idea.

Atmospheric scientist Daniel Rosenfeld of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jin Dai and colleagues from the Meteorological Institute of Shaanxi Province in China and Zhanyu Yao of the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences studied the records of precipitation and visibility at Mount Hua in central China. The site, one of five sacred mountains in China (familiar to many as a backdrop in martial arts films), has had a meteorological observatory on its peak since 1954.

Sunlight can speed up or slow down the spin of small asteroids, according to a trio of related papers appearing this week. The discovery offers the first direct evidence of a predicted asteroid behavior.

"The solar system is a very dynamic place, and our star affects all worlds—even small ones," said Patrick Taylor, a graduate student at Cornell University in New York State.

Taylor co-authored two studies that will appear tomorrow in the early online journal Science Express.

The third study, led by Mikko Kaasalainen of the University of Helsinki in Finland, appears today in the early online edition of the journal Nature.

All three papers looked at a phenomenon called the YORP (Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack) effect.

When the sun warms an asteroid's surface, the rocky object reradiates heat into the void.

Heat emissions produce a slight recoil that alters the asteroid's spin—the same principle by which light shined on a pinwheel can sometimes cause it to rotate even without a breeze.

Trying to save high-altitude glaciers? Then sprinkle them with dirt, say researchers, to increase the formation of ice spikes that shade large areas on the glaciers, slowing their melting.

Meredith Betterton of the University of Colorado at Boulder, US, and colleagues in France have been sprouting ice spikes in a lab freezer. They say the spikes mimic those found on mountain glaciers, notably above 4000 metres in the Andes. The real spikes can be up to 5 m high and are known as "penitentes" because they resemble precessions of white-hooded monks.

Betterton's replicas, however, are only a few centimetres high. She created them by putting blocks of snow in a freezer with a transparent lid and shining a spotlight onto them, mimicking sunlight. Within a few hours, sublimation of the snow had left spikes up to 5 centimetres high protruding from the surface (see image, top right).

When Charles Darwin first noticed penitentes while travelling through Chile, he noted that locals believed they were formed by strong winds. Betterton's lab experiments confirm what she had previously suggested after computer modelling: that sunlight forms the spikes independently of wind.

Signs of recent liquid water on Mars may have instead been caused by mini-avalanches of dirt. In December, NASA released photos of Martian gullies that showed enigmatic tracks of material suddenly appearing in the last five years. Researchers interpreted the deposits as having possibly come from trickling water.

The problem with that theory is that such features can be reproduced in the lab by letting small particles slide away, says granular materials researcher Troy Shinbrot of Rutgers University. "You find that every single thing that geologists say, 'Ah, that means there's water,' you can duplicate," says Shinbrot, who described his research on sliding grains at this week's meeting of the American Physical Society here.

What's good for the ozone layer has been even better for Earth's climate. According to a new study, a 20-year-old ban on ozone-depleting chemicals has been extremely effective at curbing greenhouse gases as well. In fact, it has already had more impact than a fully implemented Kyoto Protocol would have accomplished, even though the protocol was specifically designed to target atmospheric warming. The findings, say the authors, emphasize the importance of ridding the planet of these powerful greenhouse substances.

Also in New Scientist

High levels of pesticides are wafting into protected rain forests in Costa Rica, even though the lowland farms being sprayed with the chemicals are miles away, a recent study reports.

Modern pesticides dissolve more easily in water than older, longer-lasting ones, such as DDT. This means the chemicals break down faster in the environment and are less likely to travel long distances.

But because of a unique atmospheric system created by mountain ranges, large concentrations of pesticides are able to drift with the wind and fall with the rain into sensitive habitats previously thought to be unreachable.

"These chemicals have shown they can make it from the places where they are used to the places that are protected," said study leader Frank Wania of the University of Toronto in Canada.

Wania and colleagues reported their findings in two related papers published in the January 10 issue of the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Wania said the discovery could explain why amphibian extinctions in Costa Rica's protected forests are more common at higher altitudes.

Scientists are using gene chips to monitor the effects of global warming on marine life. It's time to get worried.

Using novel genomic technology, marine biologists have found troubling clues that marine life could be extremely vulnerable to climate change. By mimicking future ocean climes and using gene chips to detect how marine organisms respond, the researchers can evaluate how well different organisms deal with environmental stress. The findings, while still preliminary and incomplete, are worrisome.

When Associated Producers, the production company behind the new documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus, contacted Andrey Feuerverger, he was, to put it mildly, surprised. "This is not in the usual run of things one gets to do," notes the University of Toronto statistician dryly, alluding to Associated Producers's somewhat unusual request that he calculate the odds of a tomb in Israel being the last resting place of Jesus Christ.

Despite his previous lack of interest in biblical archaeology, Feuerverger would spend two years on what turned out to be a labor of love. At the end of all of his figuring, he told the documentarians, including director James Cameron of Titanic fame and award-winning investigative journalist Simcha Jacobovici, that there was a one in 600 chance that the names—Jesus, Matthew, two versions of Mary, and Joseph—scribbled on five of the 10 ossuaries (or caskets for bones) found in the Talpiot tomb could have belonged to a different family than the one described in the New Testament.

Mathematical trickery borrowed from string theory raises hopes of understanding the densest stuff in the universe

For decades researchers have tried to wrest testable predictions from string theory, the leading candidate for a more fundamental understanding of the universe. Now physicists say they have used one of the most sophisticated pieces of string theory to predict properties of the ultradense matter created in an atom smasher in Long Island, N.Y. If confirmed, however, the prediction would not offer evidence for string theory, which requires the existence of extra dimensions of space full of higher-dimensional stringlike objects and other widgets. Instead, it would establish that some of string theory's mathematics could be used to study the forces at work inside an atom's nucleus.

Glacial deposits could help to protect against sea-level rise.

Antarctic ice is protected from the sea by rocky wedges of debris that act as 'sandbags' to protect glaciers from rising waters, a survey of one of the continent's major ice flows has revealed. If much of Antarctica's ice is protected in this way, it may help to fend off ice melting as a result of rising sea levels.

Researchers led by Sridhar Anandakrishnan of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, conducted a radar survey of the final 25 kilometres of the Whillans Ice Stream, a 500-kilometre-long glacier that sprawls towards the Ross Ice Shelf in West Antarctica. They focused on the 'grounding line' — the region where the ice stops flowing over land and passes out onto the floating ice shelf. Underneath this grounding line they found a pile of debris up to 31 metres thick, on top of which is a 10-metre-thick bulge of ice.

At least 20 previously unknown species of sharks and rays have been found during a survey of local fish markets in Indonesia, scientists say.

The five-year study focused on catches from tropical seas around the Southeast Asian country, which encompasses more than 17,000 islands.

So far six of the new species have been described in scientific journals. These include the Bali catshark, the Jimbaran shovelnose ray, and the Hortle's whipray.

Scientists are preparing to describe a further 14 of the species.

In total more than 130 species were sampled between 2001 and 2006 at 11 ports across Indonesia.

The Australian-led team behind the study says their work will provide the first ever detailed description of Indonesia's sharks and rays, including information critical to the marine animals' conservation.

Indonesia has the most diverse ray and shark fauna in the world, said study co-author William White, of the marine research division of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) based in Hobart, Tasmania.

National Geographic also has a photo of one of the newly discovered species of rays.

A giant blob of water the size of the Arctic Ocean has been discovered hundreds of miles beneath eastern Asia, scientists report.

Researchers found the underground "ocean" while scanning seismic waves as they passed through Earth's interior.

But nobody will be exploring this sea by submarine. The water is locked in moisture-containing rocks 400 to 800 miles (700 to 1,400 kilometers) beneath the surface.

"I've gotten all sorts of emails asking if this is the water that burst out in Noah's flood," said the leader of the research team, Michael Wysession of Washington University in St. Louis.

"It isn't an ocean. [The water] is a very low percentage [of the rock], probably less than 0.1 percent."

Given the region's size, however, that's enough to add up to a vast amount of water.

Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human-induced—cause, according to one scientist's controversial theory.

Earth is currently experiencing rapid warming, which the vast majority of climate scientists says is due to humans pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide "ice caps" near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.

Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.

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The conventional theory is that climate changes on Mars can be explained primarily by small alterations in the planet's orbit and tilt, not by changes in the sun.

"Wobbles in the orbit of Mars are the main cause of its climate change in the current era," [planetary physicist at Oxford University, Colin] Wilson explained.

"Mars has no moon, which makes its wobbles much larger, and hence the swings in climate are greater too," Wilson said.

When earthquakes strike in sandy soil, the ground can turn to a liquid-like state that proves disastrous for buildings. The phenomenon, called liquefaction, is common around bays and near the sea. It destroyed several buildings in low-lying areas in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco.

Now scientists hope to turn such sandy soils into solid rock by injecting live bacteria into the ground. Civil engineers already know they can inject chemicals into loose soil to bind grains together. But the chemicals are toxic.

Reporting in this week's issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team led by David Ballantyne of the University of Arizona in Tucson concludes that the Milky Way's central black hole is strong enough to generate a powerful but chaotic magnetic field that extends out a distance of about 10 light-years. To reach their conclusions, the researchers used computer programs to calculate the hypothetical trajectories of some 220,000 protons, which are ejected from the Milky Way's black hole and get bounced around by its magnetic field like in a galactic-sized version of a pinball machine. They then compared those paths with recent observations by ground-based instruments of the location of the gamma-rays and found that 69% of the computer-generated trajectories matched what the observed data were showing. The protons were slamming into hydrogen atoms within huge clouds of gas that slowly orbit the black hole about 10 light-years out. These collisions produce the gamma radiation astronomers have observed at the center of the Milky Way.

California agriculture may provide more than just avocados, artichokes, and grapes. Crops could also be keeping the state cooler, according to a new climate modeling study.

Most discussion to date about how land use can influence climate has focused on urban heat islands. Pavement and buildings trap the sun's warmth and block evaporation, raising the local temperature. But other land uses may also have an impact. California is by far the U.S.'s largest agricultural producer: 13.5% of the state, or more than 34,000 square kilometers, is agricultural land, and the majority of that land is irrigated. A team of climate scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, led by ecosystems scientist Lara Kueppers, now at the University of California, Merced, wondered if all this water being sprayed around could have a measurable effect on climate.

Indonesian physicists have started deploying chains of concrete balls in an attempt to stem the flow of mud in East Java.

For nine months Indonesian officials have been reacting to the torrent of mud that started erupting from a rice paddy in the village of Porong, East Java, with embankments and evacuations. This weekend they began experimenting with a new strategy for controlling the flow.

The hope is that by dropping 300-400-kilogram concrete balls, connected by chains, into the volcano's mouth they can stem the torrent of mud that has so far covered some 450 hectares of land and submerged four villages. Disaster management officials fear thousands more are at risk.

Human Events hopes to undermine climate science by spreading their own myths. Color me shocked. No actual science publication supports these claims but of course that doesn't stop a conservative political magazine from publishing them. However, since someone has to set the record straight, I might as well try.

1. The U.S. is going it alone on Kyoto and global warming. – So far, the US isn't doing really anything on the issue of climate change. The notion that Kyoto is a "European Treaty" is false, as there are many non-European who have signed and ratified the agreement (something they forgot to tell you when they mentioned we signed it in this article). As for the claim that it's not working because in Europe, the statistic quoted doesn't really present the whole picture, unless it's already 2012.
2. Global-warming proposals are about the environment. – I'm not sure who is demanding energy rations, but it's not the people proposing solutions to climate change. The key is alternate energy and reducing energy needs. Being more efficient has nothing to do with going without. Of course, if you're "lifestyle" is all about throwing your own money down the toilet, then by all means don't let me tell you have to save money while helping the environment.
3. Climate change is the greatest threat to the world's poor. – Anyone who tells you that climate chang is "more accurately" described as weather is simply mistaken or lying to you; it's that simple. The only "adaption" we need in the way of technological advancements is in the form of alternate energy and more efficient energy uses. It's much harder to adapt to worsening drought or flooding.
4. Global warming means more frequent, more severe storms. – It certainly may, as is pointed out in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment. From the SPM:
   

   Based on a range of models, it is likely [greater than 66% confidence] that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of tropical SSTs.

   Oh, did I just quote that from where they said I couldn't? That's odd.

5. Global warming has doomed the polar bears! – Polar bears can swim, just not forever. Arctic ice is melting and that's where polar bears live. The melting ice has been driving them further south. As for the Arctic cooling, the Arctic is the fastest warming region on the entire planet and any local, short term annomolies will be just that.
6. Climate change is raising the sea levels. – The lie that somehow the IPCC report is distorted just doesn't hold water, especially when the level's rising. This remains a conservative and highly reviewed document, possibly the most peer-reviewed science document ever written. The fact that some opinion editors with no background in science would tell you otherwise means very little.
7. The glaciers are melting! – The global ice mass held is glaciers is receding. Period. You simply cannot point to a few outliers and claim that is science. Of course, there's really no science in this article, anyway.
8. Climate was stable until man came along. – Who even says that? Of course climate changes. The problem is that is currently changing at a rate an entire order of magnitude faster than previously known. Further, we are now most likely warmer than any time in the previous 1,300 years. Oh, the so-called "hockey stick" graph? It's still in the IPCC report, just in written format (sorry, but you have to read and not just look at pretty pictures):
   

   Paleoclimatic studies use changes in climatically sensitive indicators to infer past changes in global climate on time scales ranging from decades to millions of years. Such proxy data (e.g., tree ring width) may be influenced by both local temperature and other factors such as precipitation, and are often representative of particular seasons rather than full years. Studies since the TAR draw increased confidence from additional data showing coherent behaviour across multiple indicators in different parts of the world. However, uncertainties generally increase with time into the past due to increasingly limited spatial coverage. Paleoclimate information supports the interpretation that the warmth of the last half century is unusual in at least the previous 1300 years. … Average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th century were very likely higher than during any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely the highest in at least the past 1300 years.

   The notion that the "hockey stick" graph is wrong was proven false last summer when the National Academy of the Sciences determined that it was in fact, correct. Too had Human Events doesn't bother to read the news. Then again, it's not like paleoclimate is the only reason that we know global warming is happening.

9. The science is settled -- CO2 causes global warming. – Man-made greenhouse gases have been determined to be the main cause of the recent changes in climate. The relation between the change in levels of CO₂ and global average temperature is complicated, not simply a one-to-one. However, a relationship has been clearly established and while there are certainly other sources for climate change, the world's body of climatologists are very confident (with greater than 90% certainty) that it is us (man) that is doing the major influencing on the climate.
10. It's hot in here! – It is most likely the warmest that it has been in over 1,300 years, based on paleoclimate proxies. Based on recorded temperatures, we are even more confident in the claim that it is hotter now than ever recorded. Playing shell games with what data you compare it to just doesn't change that. Pretending that being hot is so much better than an ice age is also a red-hearing; as is the case with saying that some problem you are not facing would be so much worse than the one you are doesn't make it go away.

Please consider this article to be on-going, as I'll add more information and links when I get the chance. For an even longer list of climate change myths, please see my previous article "25 Reasons Why You Should Understand Neil Boortz is Wrong."

Jason Coleman is a structural engineering who lives, practices, and writes in Richmond, VA, where he hope the truth wins out so his child will enjoy a better climate. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial- Share Alike 3.0 License.

Greener film soundtracks win Academy Award.

As the film world awaits the tearing of envelopes at Sunday's Oscar ceremony, some are already clutching their Academy Awards. Among them are the 12 technicians who, in the name of reducing pollution, have de-silvered the silver screen for good.

The team worked to replace the silver used in soundtracks with cyan dye, reducing the need for harmful chemicals and saving 2,000 kilograms of silver and more than 150 million litres of water each year.

Black-and-white films were made with silver printed on celluloid. The soundtracks ran alongside the frames as a silvery strip of varying thickness. A tungsten filament light shone through the soundtrack, and a photocell on the other side captured the light, and converted it into sound.

Astronomers have detected a strong magnetic field emanating from a star that computer models say shouldn't be able to produce one. The field is coming from a star called AB Aurigae--located about 460 light-years away--and its existence lends further credence to one of the more bizarre astronomical discoveries in recent years.

Powerful magnetic fields aren't easy for stars to generate. Until now, astronomers assumed that they only arose inside the fierce internal furnaces of hot, young stars much larger than the sun, or from the violent interaction between two closely orbiting stars in a binary system. Neither situation is true for AB Aurigae. The star is only about 2.7 times the mass of our sun, which should make it too small and cool to produce a strong magnetic field. But when a team led by Manuel Guedel of the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland, used the European Space Agency's orbiting XMM-Newton x-ray observatory to scan the young star, they picked up an x-ray signal, evidence of strong magnetism. What's more, AB Aurigae's x-ray, optical, and ultraviolet radiation all vary in intensity during the same 42-hour cycle, meaning the star itself is the only possible x-ray source.

Let's take a closer look at the children of "All My Children." We might even learn something.

Me: Did you watch "One Life to Live" today?
Kristina (my sister): Yeah, can you believe that Nicki claimed that her twins were fathered by two different men?
Me: And I'm supposed to buy the fact that it happened a week apart? Seriously, I'm not dumb!
Both of us: Ha! Ha!
Both of us: (Silence)
Me: Do you think that can really happen?

Well, it turns out it can. It's called heteropaternal superfecundation and it's ridiculously rare, but it's not impossible. So, my defiant attitude toward soap operas tempered, I decided to investigate strange-but-hey-maybe-it-could-happen story lines of the legendary character Erica Kane, a former actress, model, author, and talk-show host played to immense popularity by Susan Lucci. Her life on "All My Children" was full of mysteries:

A new kind of low-energy lightning has been discovered, crackling and sparking in the mouth of an erupting volcano.

Traditional, thunderstorm-style lightning has long been associated with volcanic eruptions. As large plumes of ash and rock rise into the air, oppositely charged particles separate into layers. These layers build until the difference between them is great enough that a connection forms, releasing energy in a flash of electricity.

But in a new study researchers have shown conclusively that a new form of low-energy lightning is also active during eruptions, arcing between particles as they exit the volcanic vent at around 100 metres per second.

A European comet-chasing spacecraft is set for a nail-biting close encounter this weekend with Mars.

The billion-euro (1.3-billion-dollar) probe Rosetta will come within 250 kilometers (156 miles) of the Red Planet's surface, using Martian gravity to correct its course in one of the longest and costliest treks in the history of unmanned space exploration.

The European Space Agency (ESA) probe, launched in March 2004, is designed to rendezvous with Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014 after a voyage of 7.1 billion kilometers (4.4 billion miles).

It will send a refrigerator-sized lab, called Philae, to the comet's surface to investigate the rock's chemistry.

Whatever flow glass manages, however, does not explain why some antique windows are thicker at the bottom. Other, even older glasses do not share the same melted look. In fact, ancient Egyptian vessels have none of this sagging, says Robert Brill, an antique glass researcher at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y. Furthermore, cathedral glass should not flow because it is hundreds of degrees below its glass-transition temperature, Ediger adds. A mathematical model shows it would take longer than the universe has existed for room temperature cathedral glass to rearrange itself to appear melted.

Dating study suggests it wasn't the makers of the Clovis culture.

For decades many archaeologists have believed that the first Americans belonged to what is called the Clovis culture — hunter-gatherers who lived in parts of North America roughly 13,000 calendar years ago.

A new study counters this notion by showing that the Clovis culture is nearly 500 years younger than previously thought, and may have lasted for as little as 200 years. There is evidence of other cultures in the Americas well before this new date.

The Clovis culture is characterized by sophisticated stone weapons, first found in Clovis, New Mexico. They would have been used to hunt mammals, including mammoths and mastodons.

The 'Clovis-first' model posits that the original Americans crossed a land bridge linking Siberia and Alaska during the last ice age, and headed south down the eastern side of the Rockies through a gap in the two ice sheets that covered Canada.

A new study suggests that they do, and that they should take it into account in experiments involving knockout mice.

In yet another collision of nature versus nurture, a team of scientists at the University of Arizona says the genetic research community must control for the environment when conducting experiments, because it may well affect the results.

Medieval Islamic designers used elaborate geometrical tiling patterns at least 500 years before Western mathematicians developed the concept.

The geometric design, called "girih", was widely used to decorate Islamic buildings but the advanced mathematical concept within the patterns was not recognised, until now. Physicist Peter Lu at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, realised the 15^th-century tiles formed so-called Penrose geometric patterns, when he spotted them on a visit to Uzbekistan.

Scholars had thought the girih were created by drawing a zigzag network of lines with a straight edge and compass. But when Lu looked at them, he recognised the regular but non-repetitive patterns of Penrose tiling - a concept developed in the West only in the 1970s.

Simple periodic patterns can be generated easily by repeating a unit cell of several elements, a technique widely used in tile patterns, but the rotational symmetry possible is limited. In the 1970s, Roger Penrose at the University of Oxford in the UK showed, for the first time, that "thick" and "thin" rhombus-shaped tiles could cover a plane, creating a non-repetitive pattern with five-fold rotational symmetry.

Embraces calm tension between rival gangs.

When British politician David Cameron advocated affection as a solution to antisocial behaviour and petty crime, his speech was mockingly labelled 'Hug-a-Hoodie'. But no one realized that there is a precedent in the animal kingdom — spider monkeys in Mexico have been observed embracing to avoid gang violence.

Hugging diffuses the tension when two bands of monkeys meet, say the British researchers who made the discovery. Without these calming embraces, the situation can escalate into aggression and even physical attacks, they report.

The researchers studied wild spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi), which live in the forests of Central and South America. These monkeys live in large groups, but split into short-lived, constantly changing groups of a few individuals to travel more easily in search of food.

Ten years ago, the birth of Dolly the sheep sparked a media frenzy and a prolonged ethical debate. Today, the arguments have switched focus to stem cells, and the research itself is beginning to change tack.

Meredith Wadman
"Scientists clone adult sheep — triumph of UK raises alarm over human use," ran the first headline announcing the cloning of an adult mammal ten years ago this week. Ian Wilmut at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh and his colleagues at PPL Therapeutics in East Lothian reported on 27 February 1997 that they had produced a lamb named Dolly, born the previous July, that was the first mammalian clone created using the genetic material from an adult cell.

Some people may be able to smell a good fight. But some male lizards can smell a bad one too, giving the animals clues as to whether to stand their ground or turn tail, a new study suggest.

Male Iberian rock lizards secrete a cholesterol-laden scent from glands in their thighs that signals their fighting ability and social status, according to scientists reporting in the online edition of the journal Biology Letters last month.

The bigger, more dominant the lizard is, the more cholesterol he secretes.

Residents of the western U.S. could be in for droughts worse than they have ever seen, a blue ribbon panel warned today. The severe, recurrent droughts that parched the region in past centuries could strike again--and could even be exacerbated by a regional warming trend.

Much of the western U.S. was gripped by drought from 2002 to 2005. During these years, water flow in the Colorado River--which supplies tens of millions of people in seven states--dropped to as low as a quarter of its usual value. That crisis spurred several federal and state water agencies to ask the National Academy of Science's National Research Council (NRC) to examine the state of science on the future of the river's water.

Moving satellites may have caused falling measurements of cloud cover.

Satellite evidence that cloud levels are decreasing could just be pie in the sky. The trend might simply be a result of where the satellites are positioned.

Data from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) have shown that cloud levels have decreased by up to 4% over the past 20 years. Clouds increase the Earth's ability to reflect sunlight back into space, cooling the planet. So reduced cloud cover has been linked to global warming.

But Amato Evan at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and his colleagues have taken a closer look at the ISCCP data. Cloud cover decreases abruptly when satellites are moved, the team reports in Geophysical Research Letters1.

As more satellites were launched from the mid 1980s through the 1990s, each satellite could narrow its field of view, looking straight down rather than at an angle. And when observed straight on, clouds appear less cloudy.

Among the many physical risks facing astronauts sent to the Moon or Mars, the biggest danger will also be the least visible: radiation.

This is nuclear particles that are spewed out by the Sun—and which in storms called solar flares can be potentially lethal—or arrive at almost light speed from beyond the Solar System, a phenomenon called cosmic rays.

The particles slice through strands of DNA, boosting the risk of cancer and other ailments.

Manned missions in low orbit, such as the US space shuttle, the Soviet-era Mir and the International Space Station (ISS), are mostly protected by Earth's magnetic field, the magnetosphere.

Darwin gave a lot of thought to the strangest creatures on this planet, wondering how they had evolved from less strange ancestors. Whales today might be fish-like warm-blooded beasts with blowholes and flukes, but long ago, Darwin argued, their ancestors were ordinary mammals that walked on land with legs. His suggestion was greeted with shock and disbelief; neverthless, scientists have found bones from ancient walking whales. Humans, Darwin argued, evolved from apes, most likely in Africa where chimpanzees and gorillas are found today. And today scientists have found about twenty different species of hominids, from chimp-like creatures that lived six million years ago to not-quite humans that lived alongside our own species. Darwin also pondered the origins of barnacles, orchids, and many other strange creatures. But for some reason--perhaps thanks to his famously weak stomach--Darwin didn't write a single word about tapeworms. It's a pity, because tapeworms are as strange as animals can get...

These flat, ribbon-like creatures live inside the digestive tracts of vertebrates. The tapeworms that live in humans can get up to sixty feet long. They feed on our food, despite the fact that they have neither a mouth nor a digestive tract. Their bodies are like a kind of inside-out intestine, rippling with finger-like projections that absorb nutrients. Once inside us, tapeworms can live for decades, deftly escaping the notice of the immune system despite their being as long as an anaconda. Some tapeworms have hooks or suckers on their front end ("head" is too generous a term), which they use to anchor themselves in place. They can also swim upstream to meet food coming out of the stomach and drift back down the intestines to feed, releasing chemicals to slow down their host's peristalsis so that they don't get swept away.

Mountain glaciers are melting faster than ever, a leading climate expert announced yesterday, and eerie effects of the thaw are being seen from the summits of South America to the highest peak in Africa.

In Peru alone, ice fields are disappearing so quickly that giant lakes have formed where meadows recently stood.

And retreating glaciers are exposing ancient plants that haven't been seen in 5,000 years.

Lonnie Thompson, an expert in ancient climates at Ohio State University, announced his findings yesterday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco, California.

Thompson's latest research has focused on measuring glaciers in the Andes mountain range, which spans seven South American countries, and on Mount Kilimanjaro in eastern Africa.

"One of the things that's very clear … is that the climate changes in those areas are unusual—unprecedented—in the thousands of years of history that we can look at in these places," Thompson said.

Greenhouse gases widely blamed for causing global warming have climbed to record highs in the atmosphere, an Arctic researcher has revealed.

"Levels are at a new high," said Kim Holmen, research director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, which oversees the Zeppelin measuring station on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, about 1200 kilometres (750 miles) from the North Pole.

He said that concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, emitted largely by burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars, had risen to 390 parts per million from 388 ppm a year ago.

Levels have hit peaks almost every year in recent decades and are far above 270 ppm level seen before the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century.

Pinpointing the genes involved in cancer will help chart a new course across the complex landscape of human malignancies

"If we wish to learn more about cancer, we must now concentrate on the cellular genome." Nobel laureate Renato Dulbecco penned those words more than 20 years ago in one of the earliest public calls for what would become the Human Genome Project. "We are at a turning point," Dulbecco, a pioneering cancer researcher, declared in 1986 in the journal Science. Discoveries in preceding years had made clear that much of the deranged behavior of cancer cells stemmed from damage to their genes and alterations in their functioning. "We have two options," he wrote. "Either try to discover the genes important in malignancy by a piecemeal approach, or & sequence the whole genome."

Dulbecco and others in the scientific community grasped that sequencing the human genome, though a monumental achievement itself, would mark just the first step of the quest to fully understand the biology of cancer. With the complete sequence of nucleotide bases in normal human DNA in hand, scientists would then need to classify the wide array of human genes according to their function--which in turn could reveal their roles in cancer. Over the span of two decades Dulbecco's vision has moved from pipe dream to reality. Less than three years after the Human Genome Project's completion, the National Institutes of Health has officially launched the pilot stage of an effort to create a comprehensive catalogue of the genomic changes involved in cancer: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).

Monster-size, deep-sea squid that use their glowing arms to blind and stun their prey have been filmed in the wild for the first time, scientists say.

The mysterious creatures were videotaped as they hunted deep in the North Pacific Ocean off southeastern Japan.

The footage shows the animals—Dana octopus squid, or Taningia danae—targeting prey with bright flashes of light emitted from their arms. (See a video of the squid attacking [at the linked site].)

The squid appear to use the tactic to illuminate and stun their victims, writes the team that made the discovery.

Other glowing signals seen from the bioluminescent species may represent a form of communication, possibly for attracting a mate, the researchers add. (See a video of the squid flashing in the darkness as it swims around dangling prey [at the linked site].)

The human-size squid were filmed at depths of 780 to 3,100 feet (240 to 940 meters) off the Ogasawara Islands during a scientific expedition led by Tsunemi Kubodera of the National Science Museum in Tokyo, Japan.

Astrophysicist Pawan Kumar of the University of Texas in Austin and colleagues argue that the jets giving rise to GRBs are not made of matter but actually are powerful magnetic fields transporting energy away from the collapsing stars. The researchers analyzed data from 10 GRBs collected by NASA's Swift satellite and found that the sources of the bursts were located about 10 billion kilometers from the sites of the stellar collapses--about 100 times farther than expected. By the time jets of ordinary matter would have reached that distance, they could not have retained enough energy to generate gamma rays.

The largest carbon burial experiment in the world began in earnest on Thursday when the drilling of a 2100-metre well began in the Otway Basin, on the coast of southern Australia. The project promised the most comprehensive monitoring for leaks to date.

If all goes well, researchers from the Canberra-based Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies (CO2CRC) will start injecting carbon dioxide into the new well in July. They will start by extracting CO2 from a nearby natural geological reservoir and compressing it into a "supercritical fluid" – a gas-liquid hybrid. This will be injected via the new well into a sandstone reservoir.

The reservoir is shaped liked an upside-down saucer that is partially-filled with methane gas, and covered by a series of impermeable rock layers. Over the following six to nine months, 100,000 tonnes of supercritical CO2 will be injected.

The finding of a parrot with an almost unparalleled power to communicate with people has brought scientists up short.

The bird, a captive African grey called N'kisi, has a vocabulary of 950 words, and shows signs of a sense of humour.

He invents his own words and phrases if he is confronted with novel ideas with which his existing repertoire cannot cope - just as a human child would do.

N'kisi's remarkable abilities feature in the latest BBC Wildlife Magazine.

N'kisi is believed to be one of the most advanced users of human language in the animal world.

Update: A comment below pointed out something I apologize for not noting myself. This story is from 2004. Further, this particular piece leaves out some of the more far-fetched parts of N'kisi the parrot's story, such as that the tests involved were to test claims that the bird is/was psychic (something I highly doubt). While testing and research in animal intelligence is an ongoing and interesting field, this does not appear to be anything new nor of serious scientific value.

When Rep. Bart Gordon gavels the House Science and Technology Committee to order Thursday morning, it will mark Congress's first hearings on the latest United Nations-sponsored report on global warming.

But even before several authors of the prestigious report discuss its findings, other authors say the process is too slow.

The problem: Climate science is moving too quickly for the ponderous reporting system to keep up, they argue. Besides receiving a written consensus once every six years, policymakers need some form of interim report to keep abreast of the science of global warming and make important decisions, they add.

"Some of us believe that going to some updates, especially as the science is changing very rapidly, might be a very good tack to take," says Linda Mearns, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and one of 15 lead authors on the chapter dealing with projections of global warming's regional effects.

Updates could come from the UN-affiliated group itself, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), or some other organization, such as the World Climate Research Program.