The oldest space dust yet found on Earth suggests that the ancient atmosphere of Earth had significantly more oxygen than previously thought, a new study finds.

Although oxygen gas currently makes up about one-fifth of Earth’s air, there was at least 100,000 times less oxygen in the primordial atmosphere, researchers say. Oxygen easily reacts with other molecules, which means it readily gets bound to other elements and pulled from the atmosphere.

Previous research suggests that significant levels of oxygen gas started permanently building up in the atmosphere with the Great Oxidation Event, which occurred about 2.4 billion years ago. This event was most likely caused by cyanobacteria — microbes that, like plants, photosynthesize and release oxygen. [Infographic: Earth’s Atmosphere Top to Bottom].

Astronomers have used observations from the Kepler space telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory to determine that the trans-Neptunian object “2007 OR10” is bigger than previously thought, and now ranks third in the solar system’s dwarf planet size league table, behind Pluto and Eris.

The distant body was first spied back in 2007, as its provisional name indicates, by skygazers Mike Brown, David Rabinowitz and Meg Schwamb during “a survey to search for distant solar system bodies using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California”, as NASA puts it.

While initial data from Herschel alone indicated a diameter of around 1,280 kilometers (795 miles), scientists needed to determine 2007 OR10’s rotational period “to estimate its overall brightness, and hence its size”.

No the Pacific islands are not drowning because of climate change – and all the media outlets who insist on claiming otherwise really need to get a grip.

This is the highly unusual message in the normally eco-hysterical Guardian from a scientific researcher evidently disgusted by the way any new paper even remotely connected with climate change is seized on by the usual media suspects as further proof of imminent “man-made global warming” catastrophe.

Dr Simon Albert, a researcher at the School of Biological Sciences at University of Queensland, was speaking out in irritation at the way a paper he had published in Environmental Research Letters on the Solomon Islands had been misrepresented by alarmists.

What’s so enticing about the (just-around-the corner) self-driving cars?

In view of my slightly advanced age, I may be forgiven to be a bit slow in learning — but now I understand: It’s all about what happens in the back seat! 

As the Globe and Mail reports, Kirk, of the Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre of Excellence, told the Canadian Press on Monday that “… once computers are doing the driving, there will be a lot more sex in cars.” Another (biased ?) pundit, Sergio Marchionne, is claimed to have stated that the new system “… will be fundamental to delivering automotive technology solutions that ultimately have far-reaching consumer benefits.”

Really, it’s a no-brainer. If people have hours of spare time while cruising along the highway, the mind wonders and the feelings can too…

Coming to think of it, the new technology may also spur the revival of an age-old tradition, namely hitchhiking.

A Canadian teenager has discovered the remains of a lost Mayan city — without ever stepping foot in Mexico.

Combining his love for the night sky and a childhood fascination with the Mayan “doomsday” calendar, 15-year-old William Gadoury, of Quebec, used satellite imagery and star charts to uncover what is believed to be one of the largest Mayan settlements to ever have existed.

“I was really surprised and excited when I realized that the most brilliant stars of the constellations matched the largest Maya cities,” Gadoury told the Journal de Montreal newspaper.

Dubbed K’aak Chi — which means Fire Mouth — the forgotten city was found buried deep in the Yucatan jungle, hidden beneath the region’s dense vegetation.

Europe’s rover mission to Mars is “drinking in the last chance saloon”, warns the European Space Agency’s director general.

Jan Woerner has told reporters of his deep frustration that the project to put the robot on the surface of the Red Planet has been delayed yet again.

The venture could not have an open-ended schedule or budget, he said.

The ExoMars six-wheeled vehicle was originally destined to leave Earth in 2011, but will not now go until 2020.

Inability of teams to meet hardware delivery deadlines has been cited as the reason for the latest delay.

SpaceX has made another successful landing of a rocket stage at sea.

The Falcon-9 booster returned to a drone ship off the Florida coast just a few minutes after it had sent a Japanese satellite on its way to orbit.

It is the second at-sea touchdown for California’s SpaceX company, having completed the same task last month.

This latest effort was all the more impressive however because the rocket was carrying much more speed when it made its return.

They call it the “Jacuzzi of Despair” and it’s not another teen horror movie … unless you’re a teenage fish trying to swim through it. Marine scientists have discovered a hot, toxic undersea pool on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico that kills every living thing attempting to cross it.

While researching corals in the Gulf using a remotely-controlled underwater robot, Temple College biology professor Erik Cordes found the mysterious lake-in-a-gulf in 2014. He returned in 2015 with a three-man sub for a better look.

What he saw belongs in an underwater monster flick.

“You go down into the underside of the ocean and you’re looking at a lake or a river flowing. It seems like you aren’t on this world. We have been in a position to see the primary opening of a canyon … we noticed the brine falling over this wall like a dam. It was this stunning pool of purple white and black colors.”

A strange new behavior of water molecules has been observed inside crystals of beryl, a type of emerald, caused by bizarre quantum-mechanical effects that let the water molecules face six different directions at the same time.

Under normal conditions, the two hydrogen atoms in each water molecule are arranged around the oxygen atom in an open “V” shape, sometimes compared to a boomerang or Mickey Mouse ears.

But in a new experiment, scientists have found that hydrogen atoms of some water molecules trapped in the crystal structure of the mineral beryl become “smeared out” into a six-sided ring. [The Surprisingly Strange Physics of Water].

The ring shape is caused by the “quantum tunneling” of the molecules, a phenomenon that lets subatomic particles pass or “tunnel” through seemingly-impossible physical barriers.

There can be little doubt that the entire human caused climate fraud has been an intentional politically motivated movement. This has involved an elaborate network of direct government involvement and indirect government funding to provide the illusion of ‘consensus’ that would be beyond any further debate. Fortunately for the future of science, truth and humanity many honest scientists and analysts from many lands have objectively looked at the hypothesis of Anthropomorphic Global Warming and found it invalid. No analysis of this failed hypothesis is complete without examining what has been endorsed by the AGW supporters as the ‘solution’ to this non-existent problem.

The proposed ‘Green Energy Solution’ is as defective as the AGW science, with defects so obvious that endorsement must also qualify as an intention deception. The ‘Green Energy Solutions’ are primarily focused on wind energy and solar energy, with fictional claims for future tidal and geothermal which have been fictional claims for over a half century already. If stopping the release of hydro-carbons was the highest priority, then nuclear and hydro-electric would be considered ‘green’, but these power sources have long been on the eco-zealot ‘hit’ list. The Eco-religion could not allow reclassification of these two carbon-free energy systems and maintain peace between the devout tree-huggers and the obsessed warmists. Demise of the warmist orthodoxy will reopen debate and action on all reliable systems of energy production. For now, some further analysis of the unreliable ‘green energy’ systems.

I am pleased to announce that as of the middle of April, my Elsevier publications had received 30,752 page views and 2,025 citations. I got these numbers in a promotional e-mail from Elsevier, and although I’m not sure what they mean, I presume that it would be even better to have even bigger numbers.

Indeed, the widespread availability of bibliometric data from sources such as Elsevier, Google Scholar and Thomson Reuters ISI makes it easy for scientists (with their employers looking over their shoulders) to obsess about their productivity and impact, and to compare their numbers with those of other scientists.

Abstract

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states with high confidence that the warming of global temperatures since 1901 has been driven by increased radiative forcing. The gases responsible for this enhanced forcing are ‘greenhouse gases’ of anthropogenic origin, and include carbon dioxide, methane, and halocarbons. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change has challenged these findings and concludes that the forcing from greenhouse gases is minimal and diminishing. They add that modelling attempts of past and future climate states are inaccurate and do not incorporate important solar inputs, such as magnetic strength and total irradiance. One geophysical variable that has been overlooked by both groups is geothermal flux.

 This study will show that increasing seismic activity for the globe’s high geothermal flux areas (HGFA), an indicator of increasing geothermal forcing, is highly correlated with average global temperatures from 1979 to 2015 (r = 0.785). By comparison, the correlation between carbon dioxide loading and global temperatures for the same period is lower (r = 0.739). Multiple regression indicates that HGFA seismicity is a significant predictor of global temperatures (P < 0.05), but carbon dioxide concentrations do not significantly improve the explained variance (P > 0.1). A compelling case for geothermal forcing lies in the fact that 1) geothermal heat can trigger thermobaric convection and strengthen oceanic overturning, important mechanisms for transferring ocean heat to the overlying atmosphere, and 2) seismic activity is the leading indicator, while global temperature is the laggard.

Introduction

 The prevailing thought in the scientific community is that human-induced alterations to the earth-atmosphere system are the primary drivers of climate change in the 20th and 21st centuries. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently completed its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and they argue that there has been unprecedented warming of both the oceans and the atmosphere since the 1950s [1].The bulk of this warming has occurred over the past three decades, and the Northern Hemisphere has probably seen its warmest temperatures in the past 1,400 years. Temperatures at these levels have caused sea levels to rise, snow and ice extent to decline, and they have amplified extreme events in the atmosphere, to include increases in tropical cyclone intensity, drought intensity, hot spells, and heavy precipitation episodes. Central to the report’s findings is that there is a very high chance that recent warming has been caused by enhanced radiative forcing (RF) via increased concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG), to include carbon dioxide (CO2, primary), methane, nitrous oxide, and halocarbons (secondary). The jump in GHG loadings is mostly anthropogenic and is strongly driven by the burning of fossil fuels (primary) and land-use change (secondary).

The EU’s Sentinel-3a satellite has given a sneak peek at what will be one of its most fundamental products – a map of sea surface height anomalies.

Launched in February, the spacecraft carries an altimeter to sense the oceans’ “hills” and “valleys”.

It is basic information that is needed to track currents and eddies, inform ocean forecasts and track variability in climate-driven sea-level rise.

This first Sentinel-3a global map contains just one month’s data.

The acquisition was made between 3 March and 2 April 2016.

Red shows (positive) areas where the sea surface is higher than the reference sea level, and blue (negative) areas reveal where it is lower.

Skywatchers across the globe have enjoyed an opportunity to see Mercury transit the Sun.

Mercury’s sojourn between Earth and our star lasted from 11:12 until 18:42 GMT.

It was the third such pass of 14 this century; Mercury will not make another transit until 2019 and then 2032.

The event is impossible – and dangerous – to view with the naked eye or binoculars, but astronomy groups worldwide are offering the chance view it through filtered telescopes.

Live views from space and ground telescopes were also available online.#

Scientists have had a literal breakthrough off the coast of Mexico.

After weeks of drilling from an offshore platform in the Gulf of Mexico, they have reached rocks left over from the day the Earth was hit by a killer asteroid.

The cataclysm is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs. “This was probably the most important event in the last 100 million years,” says Joanna Morgan, a geophysicist at Imperial College in London and a leader of the expedition.

Since the 1980s, researchers have known about the impact site, located near the present-day Yucatan Peninsula. Known as Chicxulub, the crater is approximately 125 miles across. It was created when an asteroid the size of Staten Island, N.Y., struck Earth around 66 million years ago. The initial explosion from the impact would have made a nuclear bomb look like a firecracker. The searing heat started wildfires many hundreds of miles away.

It has been going on for so long now. For far too long the scientifically illiterate have hurled abuse at Climate Sceptics for the great sin of believing in Great Nature and the scientific method. So now in the United States of America you have the real possibility of electing a President who does not believe in man-made Global Warming, but in Sun-made Global Warming, who actually believes that the Sun makes us warm, and believes that the Sun is inconstant with Solar flares and mighty Solar storms.

Is it not amazing that such a collective madness could have troubled mankind for so long? In the United Kingdom there was a well-loved Botanist who appeared regularly on BBC television, who suddenly disappeared from the networks. His contracts were not renewed. He became persona non grata.

What was his great sin in the eyes of the scientifically illiterate mob? He believed and declared that Carbon Dioxide was, and is, a food for green plants, and that these same green plants produce for us and for all mankind the Oxygen of life.