Amateur astronomers worried that Big Astronomy would render them obsolete can relax: the kinds of techniques used to create huge virtual telescopes are now being applied to the huge collections of astro-pics published on the Internet. 

As keen astronomy-watchers know, the effective aperture of telescopes can be expanded by linking multiple instruments in different parts of the world – in radio-astronomy, this is the principle behind the Square Kilometre Array, and the same techniques can be applied to optical telescopes (for example, in this proposal).

Such linking, however, is tightly-managed so that the images can be correlated, corrected, and merged to create a single composite. What’s different about the proposal in this paper at Arxiv is that its authors, led by Dustin Lang of Carnegie Mellon University (along with David Hogg of New York U and Bernhard Scholkopf of the Max Planck Institute in Germany) is that they want to correlate and combine the vast store of astronomy images that amateurs publish on the Internet.

Shortly after my recent post on the War on Mercury, the SETAC journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry published a series of articles on mercury in the environment. Most prescient among these is a paper by K. Vijayaraghavan and coworkers with the title “Response of fish tissue mercury in a freshwater lake to local, regional, and global changes in mercury emissions.“ 

That paper concludes that fish mercury reductions may take 50 years to respond to any reduction in deposition such as from coal burning power plants in the U.S. It further states that recovery (I am not sure from what really) “could potentially be partially or completely offset by growth in non-U.S. mercury emissions.”

There you have it: The recently embarked upon “War on Mercury” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is not likely to result in any reduction of mercury levels in fish any time soon – if ever. Mercury is a Common Element in Nature Mercury is a common element in nature and is found in every rock, soil, and water sample; its abundance is similar to that of silver.

Naturally, mercury is also present in most organisms. Worldwide, annual “emissions” are estimated to be around 4,000 tons per year of which only 2{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} are from the U.S. and 60+{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} from natural sources (leachates of rocks and from volcanos). The accompanying picture from the SETAC paper demonstrates this clearly. It shows one of the worldwide mercury emission scenarios for the year 2050.

The strange organisms that eke out a living deep beneath our feet are finally being revealed by genetics. Many of them are small, co-dependent and fuelled by mysterious sources of energy. 

We know that billions of microorganisms inhabit the earth, the underground aquifers that supply our drinking water, and even the deep nether regions of Earth’s crust, far beneath the seabed. But we know nothing about what most of these microbes are and how they live. Some of them, in the so-called “dark energy biosphere”, are the deepest living organisms, somehow surviving hundreds of metres underground, far from the sun’s life-giving light.

“We know there are microbes living down there, but we have no idea what they do,” says Beth Orcutt of the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay, Maine. “We want to go after them.”

At the Goldschmidt conference in Sacramento, California, last week, Orcutt and Jill Banfield of the University of California, Berkeley, presented separate detailed surveys of these microbes, revealing what kinds of organisms live in such strange habitats and offering tantalising hints about their lifestyles. It is our first close look at an utterly alien world.

Evidence from Denmark of mass farming livestock deaths due to wind turbine low frequency noise pollution is now growing alarmingly.  We recently reported mass deaths at the mink farm of Kaj Bank Olesen. In a latest update he now complains that, when the wind blows from the South West (where the nearby wind turbines are), mother minks attack their own puppies – those that were born healthy after the 1,600 miscarriages of last month (1). 

As a result of their wounds, over twenty puppies had to be put down, and 40 put in observation. Mr Olesen, the owner and operator of the farm, made a short video showing the large wound inflicted to a young mink:

See the VIDEO embedded in the center of the article: click HERE

Online news agency BREITBART reported on this new mishap, the third one since the wind turbines started to operate in September 2013: More-Deaths-Linked-to-Wind-Turbines-near-Danish-Mink-Farm The news last fall of the first incident – minks attacking each other – was published by two Danish newspapers (1). That of the second tragedy, last month – the 1,600 miscarriages – was only covered outside Denmark (2). It’s not surprising: the wind industry is arguably the little kingdom’s first employer and exporter, and its influence is felt everywhere in Denmark, e.g. in the media, in government, and in scientific circles such as universities (3). Thus, by not publishing the shocking story, editors effectively protected the giant multinational company VESTAS, which manufactures wind turbines.

For a salamander, the loss of a limb isn’t a terrible event.  If a leg or a tail is suddenly amputated, the amphibious creature can simply regrow the lost body part, as if it had never been damaged at all. 

Because of this incredible natural ability, the salamander has long been a point of interest for many in the field of regenerative medicine.  And now, researchers at the University College London are unlocking the secrets behind the salamander’s limb regeneration techniques, hoping to one day apply it to human amputees.

In a new study published in Stem Cell Reports, researchers have discovered the importance of the ‘ERK pathway’ – a chain of proteins that must be constantly activated in order for the salamander to generate new body parts.  According to the scientists, the constant activation of these proteins triggers the salamander’s cells to reprogram themselves and divide, slowly turning into the structures that have been lost.

Additionally, the researchers at UCL have identified a significant difference between the ERK pathway in humans and the one in salamanders, providing a better understanding as to why people’s limbs don’t grow back when severed.

Almost one in five children born to mothers taking antidepressants during pregnancy have a brain defect – called a “Chiari type 1 malformation” – according to a groundbreaking study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

The study, titled Rate of Chiari I Malformation in Children of Mothers with Depression with and without Prenatal SSRI Exposure, was published May 19 in the peer-reviewed journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

The researchers found that “children of depressed mothers treated with a group of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) during pregnancy were more likely to develop Chiari type 1 malformations than were children of mothers with no history of depression,” according to their press statement.

So-called SSRI antidepressants encompass almost all of today’s major brands, including Prozac, Paxil, Luvox, Zoloft, Celexa and Lexapro. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2010 an astonishing 254 million prescriptions for antidepressants were written for Americans. And between 7 and 13 percent of all pregnant women in the U.S. are currently taking them, even though virtually every study performed to date demonstrates that mothers taking SSRIs – especially in the first trimester of pregnancy – significantly increase the risk of their giving birth to children with autism, as well as other disorders and birth defects.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — New evidence implicates one of Earth’s biggest impact craters in a mass extinction that occurred 33.7 million years ago, according to research presented here Wednesday (June 11) at the annual Goldschmidt geochemistry conference.

Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles precisely dated rocks from beneath the Popigai impact crater (pictured) in remote Siberia to the Eocene epoch mass extinction that occurred 33.7 million years ago.  Popigai crater is one of the 10 biggest impact craters on Earth, and in 2012, Russian scientists claimed the crater harbors a gigantic industrial diamond deposit.

The new age, which is later than other estimates, means the Eocene extinction — long blamed on climate change — now has another prime suspect: an “impact winter.” Meteorite blasts can trigger a deadly global chill by blanketing the Earth’s atmosphere with tiny particles that reflect the sun’s heat.

“I don’t think this will be the smoking gun, but it reopens the door to Popigai being involved in the mass extinction,” said lead study author Matt Wielicki, a UCLA graduate student.

This isn’t the first time flying space rocks have been implicated in the Eocene’s mass die-offs. Other possible culprits besides Popigai crater include three smaller Earth-meteorite smashups between 35 million and 36 million years ago: Chesapeake Bay crater offshore Virginia, Toms Canyon crater offshore New Jersey and Mistastin crater in Labrador, Canada.

Previously, all four craters were ruled out because of their ages. Earlier dating attempts had pinned Popigai’s impact age at 35.7 million years ago, Wielicki said.

Thwaites Glacier, the large, rapidly changing outlet of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is not only being eroded by the ocean, it’s being melted from below by geothermal heat, researchers at the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin (UTIG) report in the current edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

The findings significantly change the understanding of conditions beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet where accurate information has previously been unobtainable.

The Thwaites Glacier has been the focus of considerable attention in recent weeks as other groups of researchers found the glacier is on the way to collapse, but more data and computer modeling are needed to determine when the collapse will begin in earnest and at what rate the sea level will increase as it proceeds. The new observations by UTIG will greatly inform these ice sheet modeling efforts.

Using radar techniques to map how water flows under ice sheets, UTIG researchers were able to estimate ice melting rates and thus identify significant sources of geothermal heat under Thwaites Glacier. They found these sources are distributed over a wider area and are much hotter than previously assumed.

The sun is always changing [unless you’re a climate scientist!] and NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is always watching. Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, SDO keeps a 24-hour eye on the entire disk of the sun, with a prime view of the graceful dance of solar material coursing through the sun’s atmosphere, the corona. 

SDO’s fourth year in orbit was no exception: NASA is releasing a movie of some of SDO’s best sightings of the year, including massive solar explosions and giant sunspot shows.Information about the individual clips used in this video is available at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011400/a011460/SDO_Year_4_Visuals_List.html

SDO captures images of the sun in 10 different wavelengths, each of which helps highlight a different temperature of solar material. Different temperatures can, in turn, show specific structures on the sun such as solar flares, which are giant explosions of light and x-rays, or coronal loops, which are streams of solar material traveling up and down looping magnetic field lines.

Has an Australian scientist been instrumental in helping discover a new species of human? And what does this mean for our understanding of human evolutionary history? These are two questions at the heart of a new documentary screening this week on ABC1. 

With Enigma Man we follow the groundbreaking research of Aussie paleoanthropologist Darren Curnoe and his Chinese colleague, paleontologist Ji Xueping. Their study of ancient human remains found in a remote cave in South-west China looks at the idea there may have been another species of human existing alongside our ancestors as recently as 11,000 – 14,000 years ago.

Dubbed the ‘‘Red Deer Cave people’’, these ancient people, or, more precisely, their remains – so similar, yet so physically different from us – are much, much younger than our Neanderthal relatives, posing some seriously interesting questions. Were they really another human species? And if so, what happened to them? Why did they die out? How did they live? And what were their interactions with our own early relatives? These are indeed big questions, Curnoe says, and that’s what makes the search for answers so fascinating.

“The documentary is about the process of deciding: do we have a new species or not?” Curnoe, who is Associate Professor of evolutionary biology in the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at UNSW, explains. “The fossils just don’t fit with the dominant view in science at the moment about who was around 11,000 years ago or 14,000 years ago, how they relate to us, and how we think of ourselves as humans in relation to nature.

“We tend to think of ourselves as special. So it raises some pretty deep and challenging questions. “There are views, which I subscribe to, and quite a lot of other people do too, that there are at least 30 different species that are in the fossil record that would be relatives of ours in some sense – some may be ancestors, some may be side-branches that went extinct.

Who would have thought it: The Emperor penguin colony located near Pointe Géologie in Antarctica has been observed for more than 60 years. In the 1970s, the number of penguins in the colony declined by 50 percent. Researcher groups had earlier expressed fear that the penguins are not able to survive the (supposedly) warming temperatures in the region. 

Now a research team lead by the University of Minnesota has found evidence that the penguins are simply shifting their place. Sort of like you hiding in the shade of a tree or house when the sun is shining too hot or hiding behind a wind break when the breeze is too cold. In other words, they just moved to a more hospitable area.

The scientists concluded that “the penguins are more adaptable and smarter than previously thought.” Given the recent record advance of ice cover in the Antarctic, it is more likely than not that the penguins were actually trying to get better shelter from the biting cold than any torching heat. Well, at 50 F below I would be inclined to seek better shelter too and would tell the global warming believers to go to the nearest expletive.

Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser Most recent columns

Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser is author of CONVENIENT MYTHS, the green revolution – perceptions, politics, and facts convenientmyths.com

Dr. Kaiser can be reached at: ma**@*************hs.com

“[man-made] Climate change” is a theory for which there is “no scientific proof at all” says the co-founder of Greenpeace. And the green movement has become a “combination of extreme political ideology and religious fundamentalism rolled into one.” 

Patrick Moore, a Canadian environmentalist who helped found Greenpeace in the Seventies but subsequently left in protest at its increasingly extreme, anti-scientific, anti-capitalist stance, argues that the green position on climate change fails the most basic principles of the scientific method.

“The certainty among many scientists that humans are the main cause of climate change, including global warming, is not based on the replication of observable events. It is based on just two things, the theoretical effect of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, predominantly carbon dioxide, and the predictions of computer models using those theoretical calculations. There is no scientific “proof” at all.”

 Moore goes on to list some key facts about “climate change” which are ignored by true believers.

1. The concentration of CO2 in the global atmosphere is lower today, even including human emissions, than it has been during most of the existence of life on Earth.

2. The global climate has been much warmer than it is today during most of the existence of life on Earth. Today we are in an interglacial period of the Pleistocene Ice Age that began 2.5 million years ago and has not ended.

3. There was an Ice Age 450 million years ago when CO2 was about 10 times higher than it is today.

4. Humans evolved in the tropics near the equator. We are a tropical species and can only survive in colder climates due to fire, clothing and shelter.

5. CO2 is the most important food for all life on earth. All green plants use CO2 to produce the sugars that provide energy for their growth and our growth. Without CO2 in the atmosphere carbon-based life could never have evolved.

The Wikimedia Foundation has changed its terms of use to insist that anyone paid to edit Wikipedia articles discloses their affiliation. 

LONDON (Reuters) – Scientists have found a way of genetically modifying mosquitoes to produce sperm that only creates males, offering a potential fresh approach to fighting and eventually eradicating malaria. 

Researchers from Imperial College London tested a genetic method that distorts the sex ratio of Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes, the main transmitters of the malaria parasite, so that the female mosquitoes that bite and pass the disease to humans are no longer produced.

In a study published in the journal Nature Communications, the team reported that in the first laboratory tests, the technique created a fully fertile mosquito strain that produced 95 percent male offspring.

“For the very first time, we have been able to inhibit the production of female offspring in the laboratory and this provides a new means to eliminate the disease,” said Andrea Crisanti, who led the research at Imperial’s department of life sciences.

Nikolai Windbichler, who co-led the work, said what was most promising about the results is that they are self-sustaining.

“Once modified mosquitoes are introduced, males will start to produce mainly sons, and their sons will do the same, so essentially the mosquitoes carry out the work for us,” he said.

A brief survey of the literature concerning volcanogenic carbon dioxide emission finds that estimates of subaerial emission totals fail to account for the diversity of volcanic emissions and are unprepared for individual outliers that dominate known volcanic emissions. 

Deepening the apparent mystery of total volcanogenic CO2 emission, there is no magic fingerprint with which to identify industrially produced CO2 as there is insufficient data to distinguish the effects of volcanic CO2 from fossil fuel CO2 in the atmosphere.

Molar ratios of O₂ consumed to CO2 produced are, moreover, of little use due to the abundance of processes (eg. weathering, corrosion, etc) other than volcanic CO2emission and fossil fuel consumption that are, to date, unquantified. Furthermore, the discovery of a surprising number of submarine volcanoes highlights the underestimation of global volcanism and provides a loose basis for an estimate that may partly explain ocean acidification and rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels observed last century, as well as shedding much needed light on intensified polar spring melts.

Based on this brief literature survey, we may conclude that volcanic CO2 emissions are much higher than previously estimated, and as volcanic CO2 contributions are effectively indistinguishable from industrial CO2 contributions, we cannot glibly assume that the increase of atmospheric CO2 is exclusively anthropogenic.