We know for a fact that life can exist on planets that orbit yellow dwarf stars like our sun and are optimistic about the chances for smaller red dwarf systems like Trappist-1. When it comes to their awkward brown dwarf cousins, however, astronomers don’t think life is possible — they’re too small and cool to support it. So it’s a bit of a bummer that astronomers have discovered as many as 100 billion brown dwarfs in our galaxy, out of a maximum 400 billion stars in total.
The infamous “hockey stick” alarmist Prof. Michael Mann, condoned by Pennsylvania State University, tried to shut down the criticism of Dr. Tim Ball (pictured above), a Canadian climatologist, by claiming that Dr. Ball had defamed him. Dr. Ball had backed up his criticism with publicly available science and challenged Dr. Mann to make his government-funded research data available for public examination.
There haven’t been any sunspots for the last 44 days, and some scientists believe that the sun is entering a period called a “deep solar minimum,” with unpredictable but potentially devastating effects.
Satellite temperature data still shows about 40 percent less warming than the average climate model trend, despite more warming being added to the satellite record after researchers corrected for decaying satellite orbits.
Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann doubles down on his crumbling SLAPP lawsuit versus Tim Ball with a statement of denial from his lawyer posted on Mann’s Facebook page and tagged with #FakeNews. In a screed of hand-waving assertions, the statement fails to deny Mann abused process, breached a written undertaking during the trial and, as a consequence, now faces the most serious court sanctions.
Yellowstone National Park, which covers parts of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, lies on top of a supervolcano that could effectively wipe out the United States if it were to explode. The last time it did, 640,000 years ago, it expelled 240 cubic miles (think about that) of rocky debris into the sky.
IC 342 is a challenging cosmic target. Although it is bright, the galaxy sits near the equator of the Milky Way’s galactic disk, where the sky is thick with glowing cosmic gas, bright stars, and dark, obscuring dust.
Reporting in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers led by British Antarctic Survey (BAS) explains that wind-driven incursions of warm water forced the retreat of glaciers in West Antarctica during the past 11,000 years.
Scientists from the University of Granada (UGR) have designed a computer system based on new artificial intelligence techniques that automatically detects in real time when a subject in a video draws a gun.
Last year, the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner committed to spending $100 million on “Breakthrough Starshot,” a massive engineering project with the intention of developing a fleet of miniature spacecraft capable of travelling to our nearest neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri — some 20 to 30 years away from Earth travelling at less than a quarter the speed of light.
How low can they go? Almost as low as you can go, it seems. For the first time, transistors of the sort used in computers, smartphones, and other consumer devices have been tested successfully at temperatures a whisker above absolute zero.
Volcanologists are warning over the destructive power of the Phlegraean Fields, also known as Campi Flegrei, near to Naples, Italy, as it is showing signs of erupting.
As NASA inches closer to launching new missions to the solar system’s outer moons in search of life, scientists are renewing their focus on developing a set of universal characteristics of life that can be measured.