Just when you have adjusted your daily rhythm to the Daylight Savings Time in your respective Time Zone, there comes a new proposal to do away with time zones altogether.

As the Washington Post reports, there are some thinkers that want you to get up “at midnight” rather than in the morning hours to do your day’s work. Well, I’ve exaggerated a bit. In truth, you would still get up when the sun rises but, depending on where you live, it could be any time of the day on your clock. You might rightly ask:

What’s that crazy Idea all about?

This silly idea is to have the whole world use clocks set not to any local (day/night-based) setting but to ONE ONLY setting all around the world. According to the proponents of that nonsense, the whole world would just have one time zone only, the “universal time zone.” The minds behind that idea think it would be good, perhaps even necessary, to spur global trade in these days of global markets and worldwide internet connectedness.

A new map of Mars’ gravity made with three NASA spacecraft is the most detailed to date, providing a revealing glimpse into the hidden interior of the Red Planet.

“Gravity maps allow us to see inside a planet, just as a doctor uses an X-ray to see inside a patient,” said Antonio Genova of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. “The new gravity map will be helpful for future Mars exploration, because better knowledge of the planet’s gravity anomalies helps mission controllers insert spacecraft more precisely into orbit about Mars. Furthermore, the improved resolution of our gravity map will help us understand the still-mysterious formation of specific regions of the planet.” Genova, who is affiliated with MIT but is located at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is the lead author of a paper on this research published online March 5 in the journal Icarus.

The improved resolution of the new gravity map suggests a new explanation for how some features formed across the boundary that divides the relatively smooth northern lowlands from heavily cratered southern highlands. Also, the team confirmed that Mars has a liquid outer core of molten rock by analyzing tides in the Martian crust and mantle caused by the gravitational pull of the sun and the two moons of Mars. Finally, by observing how Mars’ gravity changed over 11 years – the period of an entire cycle of solar activity — the team inferred the massive amount of carbon dioxide that freezes out of the atmosphere onto a Martian polar ice cap when it experiences winter. They also observed how that mass moves between the south pole and the north pole with the change of season in each hemisphere.

The map was derived using Doppler and range tracking data collected by NASA’s Deep Space Network from three NASA spacecraft in orbit around Mars: Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), Mars Odyssey (ODY), and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Like all planets, Mars is lumpy, which causes the gravitational pull felt by spacecraft in orbit around it to change. For example, the pull will be a bit stronger over a mountain, and slightly weaker over a canyon.

If we eliminated, worldwide, all anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide (CO2) the atmospheric concentration would only reduce by 11-12 ppmv taking us back to the 2003 level when it was warmer than 2008. See table below and the subsequent graph concerning this analysis. These clearly show CO2 concentration is not warming the earth. If we removed almost twice that amount (20 ppmv) we would go back to the 1998 level. It was warmer in 1998 than in 2008 (by ~0.6 C). This is so simple to see, isn’t this the first thing the UN IPCC should have looked at. However, they probably knew this because Table 1 below was subsequently eliminated from the 2001 report, even though it is still online in other reports.

Table 1. Global sources and  Absorption of CO2

tonto.eia.doe.gov – document page 6, pdf page 26, Table 3.

See www.tech-know.eu – for further references

We know how hard it can be to understand the atmosphere on earth, but maybe we should count ourselves lucky that we are not on the outer extremes of the solar system.

Pluto has always been seen as a bit of an oddball (its classification in the solar system is still an area of debate) and now it seems its atmosphere is pretty extreme too.

Nasa’s New Horizons probe passed by the planet back in 2015, however it is still sending information back to earth and recent research on the data has revealed just how varied the climate on this tiny outpost can be. 

It is easy to assume that this small rock on the outskirts of our solar system is just that, a lump of hard, dry rock, but now it seems that liquid nitrogen may have once flowed on the surface and may well do again.

Some parts of Pluto can spend around 50 years in perpetual night.”

The ash tree is likely to be wiped out in Europe, according to a review of the evidence.

The trees are being killed off by the fungal disease ash-dieback along with an invasive beetle called the emerald ash borer.

According to the research, published in the Journal of Ecology, the British countryside will never look the same again.

The paper says that the ash will most likely be “eliminated” in Europe.

This could mirror the way Dutch elm disease largely wiped out the elm in the 1980s.

European scientists are worried they could soon lose a vital tool for monitoring Earth’s ice fields.

The Cryosat-2 radar spacecraft has transformed studies of the Arctic, the Antarctic and Greenland, but is now operating beyond its design lifetime.

A group of 179 researchers is concerned the ageing mission could die in orbit at any time.

They have urged the European Commission (EC) and the European Space Agency (Esa) to start planning a replacement.

“The mission is now central to international efforts to monitor the state of the cryosphere,” they write in a letter to top officials at the EC and Esa.

In recent times, some new political movements have arisen in Germany. For example the political party “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD), founded just three years ago, has won several seats in German State parliaments at the most recent election, a few days ago.

In Dresden (a city in the German State of Saxony), thousands of people go regularly on quiet “walkabouts” on Mondays, without any disturbance, unless provoked by others.

What’s their “Beef?” 

Among their various complaints is one specific and rather novel term: “Die Lügenpresse,” a term that means “liar’s press.”  What the people mean by that term simply is purposely false or misleading information propagated by a large segment of the media, from newspapers to television reportages and – as much of that information is frequently “fed” to them by government sources and, by extension, also such governments.

“One is disturbed each day by verifiably untrue statements touted as incontrovertible facts about hot-button issues.”
— Richard S. Lindzen

“CO₂ absorbs in the infrared and reradiates heat downward, thus heating the earth.”
— Richard S. Lindzen

Okay then, let’s examine that particular “incontrovertible fact.” You know how a solar oven works.

 

Much of the debate about Global Warming stems from a lack of knowledge of basic Physics. The Sun does not send ‘heat’ through space, but radiation. This is a concept that is difficult to grasp for the average layman. Likewise Outer Space is a vacuum, which is by definition empty, and therefore has no temperature, although it is given a nominal Kelvin figure owing to what strays there.

Radiation has to encounter mass for heat to be produced. The Sun sends radiation across 90 – 95 million miles. This radiation passes through the 99{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of our atmosphere, which is composed of Nitrogen and Oxygen (which are transparent to both incoming and outgoing infrared) and then strikes or encounters the substance or mass of the Earth and Oceans. The Oceans and the Earth (that is the soil, the rocks, the sands, the buildings, the lakes, rivers and seas) warm up and they warm the atmosphere from the bottom up. That is why we have Standard Atmosphere used by all Airline Pilots and the Adiabatic Lapse Rate used in Physics.

That means that the air is 2ºC. cooler for every 1,000 feet of altitude, which is also why there is snow on the tops of mountains.  Were it otherwise the summits of Mt Blanc and Mt Everest would be amongst the hottest and not amongst the coldest places on Earth.

A handwritten manuscript from nearly 400 years ago has revealed a glimpse of the recipe for the mythical ‘philosopher’s stone.’

The 17th century document was penned by Isaac Newton, and is a copy of another known alchemist’s text.

After decades in a private collection, the text was purchased by the Chemical Heritage Foundation in the US, which has revealed the early steps in a process alchemists thought could turn lead to gold.

In the text, the alchemist describes the process for making ‘philosophic mercury,’ according to Chemistry World.

Shortened as ‘sophick,’ philosophic mercury was thought to be a key substance in the creation of the philosopher’s stone, researchers say.

‘Philosophic mercury was [thought to be] a substance that could be used to break down metals into their constituent parts,’ James Voelkel, the CHF’s curator of rare books, told Chemistry World.

Abstract

A paper by C. Corda (A Clarification on the Debate on “the Original Schwarzschild Solution”, EJTP 8, No. 25 (2011) 65-82) purports equivalence of Schwarzschild’s original solution (1916) and Hilbert’s subsequent solution (1917), the latter commonly but incorrectly called ‘Schwarzschild’s solution’. The derivation of Schwarzschild’s actual solution by Corda is, in fact, a copy of Schwarzschild’s original derivation with only changes in notation and equation numbering. It adds nothing new to the problem. Corda’s subsequent arguments on gravitational collapse follow those advanced by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler for Hilbert’s solution, in their book ‘Gravitation’, and suffer thereby from the very same shortfalls. Consequently, Corda has failed to prove his alleged equivalence of the Schwarzschild and Hilbert solutions. Moreover, it is not difficult to prove that these are not equivalent. Furthermore, all methods employed to otherwise ‘extend’ Droste’s solution into Hilbert’s solution thus producing a black hole constitute a violation of the rules of pure mathematics and are invalid.

 

1 Introduction

One hundred years ago, on the 13th of January 1916, Karl Schwarzschild communicated his solution to Einstein’s gravitational field for a `mass point’. Then, less than five years ago, on the 25th of May 2011, a paper by Christian Corda was published which reproduced most of Schwarzschild’s paper. In a prelude on page 70 of his paper, Corda stated,

“In our approach we will suppose again that a(r,t) = 0, but, differently from the standard analysis, we will assume that the length of the circumference centred in the origin of the coordinate system is not 2πr. We release an apparent different physical assumption, i.e. that arches of circumference are deformed by the presence of mass of the central body M. Note that this different physical hypothesis permits to circumnavigate the Birkhoff Theorem [4] which leads to the ‘standard Schwarzschild solution’ [3].”

NEW YORK (AP) — Scientists have deleted nearly half the genes of a microbe, creating a stripped-down version that still functions, an achievement that might reveal secrets of how life works.

It may also help researchers create new bacteria tailored for pumping out medicines and other valuable substances.

The newly created bacterium has a smaller genetic code than does any natural free-living counterpart, with 531,000 DNA building blocks containing 473 genes. (Humans have more than 3 billion building blocks and more than 20,000 genes).

But even this stripped-down organism is full of mystery. Scientists say they have little to no idea what a third of its genes actually do.

“We’re showing how complex life is, even in the simplest of organisms,” researcher J. Craig Venter told reporters. “These findings are very humbling.”

Some of the mystery genes may be clues to discovering unknown fundamental processes of life, his colleague Clyde Hutchison III said in an interview. Both researchers, from the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, California, are among the authors of a paper on the project released Thursday by the journal Science.

The DNA code, or genome, is contained in a brand-new bacterium dubbed JCVI-syn3.0.

The US space agency’s Dawn satellite continues to return remarkable images from the dwarf planet Ceres.

Now just 385km above the surface (lower than the space station is above Earth), the probe has revealed new features inside the mini-world’s Occator Crater.

This is the 92km-wide depression that has multiple bright spots of what arethought to be exposed salts.

The new imagery reveals a dome in a smooth-walled pit in the centre-most bright area of the crater.

With a resolution now of 35m per pixel, Dawn can make out numerous fractures that cut across the top and down the flanks of this dome.

The Moon used to spin on a different axis and show a slightly different face to the Earth, a new study suggests.

Using data collected by Nasa’s Lunar Prospector mission in the late 1990s, scientists spotted two hydrogen-rich regions near the Moon’s poles, probably indicating the presence of water ice.

The icy patches are opposite each other – the line between them passes through the middle of the Moon – so it appears that this used to be its spin axis.

The work appears in the journal Nature.

It describes a gradual wobble, or “true polar wander”, adding up to about a six-degree shift altogether.

Climate change activist James Hansen has released a peer-reviewed study yesterday that claims an increase in temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius is imminent and would be catastrophic. He originally released a preview of his paper last July and it came under heavy fire for conflicting with established climate science. Now that the final version has been released, it warns that humanity could face an abrupt climate shift in a few decades, as illustrated in the implausible movie ‘The Day after Tomorrow.’

Even climate scientist Michael E. Mann from Pennsylvania State University said that “some of the points highlighted in Hansen’s study conflict with what is generally known about climate change, so much so that they require a high standard of proof.” Hansen’s proof is based on interpretations of the historical record from 120,000 years ago. He says it was about 1 degrees Celsius warmer than it is today and that this period had much more powerful storms, even though his proof is largely theoretical. One item is a giant boulder in the Bahamas that Hansen contends was moved by a super storm.

Part of Hansen’s problematic study is that his reputation as being the godfather of global warming has been tarnished by his climate activism. He has been arrested numerous times, gone after museums that get donations from fossil fuel companies, and has joined in frivolous lawsuits against the government for not doing more to prevent global warming. As Tech Times noted, “This may have turned Hansen into an inspiration to advocates of climate change prevention, but it has also caused some colleagues to doubt whether his findings have been skewed to suit his political goals.”

Scientists have unveiled a see-through wrist cuff that measures the level of glucose in the bloodstream of diabetic patients and administers a drug to lower that level if needed. It’s not yet a full-blown treatment—for one thing, the experimental version can’t provide enough of the drug to do the trick—but it should be of great use in monitoring patients.

It’s also an actual application for a newfangled material in sore need of one: graphene, a superthin form of carbon with interesting electronic properties. By itself, graphene can’t sense glucose, but if you dope 2-D carbon properly, it can become quite a useful elecrochemistry set. The inventors—working in South Korea, Massachusetts and Texas—doped the graphene with minute quantities of gold to get the effect they wanted. They describe their work in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.