This image displays a galaxy known as ESO 486-21 (with several other background galaxies and foreground stars visible in the field as well).

(h/t Gregg) Each year, Earth Day is accompanied by predictions of doom.

Let’s take a look at past predictions to determine just how much confidence we can have in today’s environmentalists’ predictions. (Video after the jump)

Emerging technologies in robotics and automation have the potential to improve operations in the oil and gas industry by reducing costs, and increasing safety, efficiency and speed of the processes.

Scientists have spent decades debating whether asteroids and comets hit the Earth at regular intervals. At the same time, a few studies have found evidence that the large extinction events on Earth – such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 66m years ago – repeat themselves every 26m to 30m years.

Popular Science reports that humans are overheating the planet, and have raised Earth’s temperature to almost 59F.

Don’t believe our planet is warming up? Look at this. | Popular Science

They say fossil fuels cause both global warming and global cooling.

A major strategic think-tank suggested that assuring U.S. victory in a space war requires the military to develop a network of small satellites capable of rapidly replacing destroyed space assets.

At any given moment, as many as 10 million wild jets of solar material burst from the sun’s surface. They erupt as fast as 60 miles per second, and can reach lengths of 6,000 miles before collapsing. These are spicules, and despite their grass-like abundance, scientists didn’t understand how they form.

Some 100 million years ago, much of what is now North America was underwater. The body of water scientists calls the Western Interior Seaway covered a swath of land that stretched over the entire Midwest. But its secrets have been preserved in countless fossils—and now, over 100,000 of these fossils are being digitized.

Last week, twenty-one prominent scientists issued a sharp critique to one of their own. Mark Jacobson of Stanford said America could easily become 100{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} renewable by mid-century, but refused to acknowledge sound scientific principles in his research and address major errors pointed out by the scientific community.

This post is different from my usual rants. It’s a brief (6 second) video recorded by our trail camera around June 10, 2017. It shows an unusual scene, only a few feet from our hide-out in the boonies. In fact, the “path” shown is frequently travelled by bipeds, myself included. (Video after the jump)

A scientific consensus has emerged among top mainstream climate scientists that “skeptics” or “lukewarmers” were not long ago derided for suggesting — there was a nearly two-decade-long “hiatus” in global warming that climate models failed to accurately predict or replicate.

Researchers at Harper Adams University in Shropshire are trying to sow, look after and then harvest a field of barley using only robots and autonomous vehicles. No humans are allowed into the pilot-plot at all.

NOAA has been very slow in releasing the final tornado data for 2016, but it is finally out now. As the provisional indicated at the time, last year was another very quiet year for tornadoes and continued the pattern of a lower level compared to the 1970s.

http://www.spc.noaa.gov/wcm/#data

This week, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) sent a letter to DOE Secretary Rick Perry, scolding him [for saying oceans have a greater impact on the climate than CO2] when he spoke with CNBC on June 19.

A cry for help has come from planetary scientists pleading for a Next Mars Orbiter—or NeMO for short.

Astronomers have yet to confirm the existence of a ninth planet lurking beyond Pluto. But a new analysis of the Kuiper Belt suggests a planetary mass is likely hiding in the outer reaches of the solar system.