March 8, 2018 Durham, New Hampshire – In mid-February 2018, solar activity was as low as 2007 levels, which was one year before that solar minimum began. That’s why solar physicists now project that the Solar Cycle 24 minimum leading up to Solar Cycle 25 will begin a year from now in the spring of 2019.

Some solar physicists have even placed bets about whether low energy Solar Cycle 24 will keep extending into Solar Cycles 25 to 26 ending up in a Maunder Minimum of 1645 to 1715, when our Sun was blank without sunspots most of the time and coincided with a Little Ice Age.

Here’s a polar bear habitat update for early March: some folks are wringing their hands over the relative extent of ice this season but ice maps show that as far as polar bear habitat is concerned, conditions are not materially different this year from what they were in 2006 or 2017.

JUST two generations back, in the 1960s, mainstream Australian society shunned both unmarried pregnant women and also homosexuals. They were loathed, and it would have been considered reasonable for the local police to turn-a-blind eye should misfortune befall members of either group – should they be killed.

Canada exports a variety of goods to the world market. A good chunk of that is semi-processed materials like metal ores, zinc ingots, coils of rolled steel, sheets of aluminum, lumber and plywood, crude oil and “syncrude” (a liquefied form of bitumen), natural gas, agricultural livestock and its products, grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, processed products from the seafood industry, and so forth.

The large Larsen C ice floe (size of Delaware) is stuck along the Antarctic Peninsula due to the Coriolis effect. Antarctic scientists from the British Antarctic Research group and the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) aren’t impressed. It happens every one or two decades.

If you read the New Zealand Herald, you’re (a) probably a Kiwi, and (b) building a bunker because you expect a Chinese space station to drop on your head.

Or you could be a Newsweek reader, in which case you’re digging bunkers because it’s going to drop on your head, not some Kiwi’s. If you’re in Western Australia, you’re probably hoping to issue China’s space agency with a littering fine (that’s happened before).

Literature on the galactic rotational anomaly seems to be divided between whether this implies spiral arm stability, necessitating constant angular rotation speed, or something else, namely constant tangential rotational speed (as rotation curves are often shown).

The latter, as shown here, would “unwind” the spiral arms over time, so mainstream physics postuiates “density waves” as an explanation for galactic spiral arm stability.  This paper hypothesizes that, if exhibiting constant tangential rotational speed so as to imply spiral arm unwinding (unless one accepts the density wave theory), possibly an optical illusion is at play.

Tropical storms have plagued humans since the start. Today we will shed some light on the activity pattern of the Pacific region.

Toomey et al. 2016 examined tropical storm activity in the South Pacific for the past 3000 years. Conclusion: During the period from 2600 to 1500 years B.P., storms were at their worst.

There is a lot of mystique connected to science, indeed mystery.  And scientists themselves foster this mystery as it gives them a sort of invulnerability and unaccountability. When I was at school I was interested in literature and poetry and in science not at all.

When historians write about the Vaccine Decades (1976–2020), there are two names that will live in infamy: Dr. Frank DeStefano, and Dr. Coleen Boyle.

Why Are the Same People Who Failed at Science on Agent Orange in Charge of Vaccine Safety and Developmental Disorders at the CDC?