B25-ScienceC.txt
==
Graham L. Kendall
Modified 11/13/2008
Email grahamkendall74135@yahoo.com
I am found on IRC Efnet/Undernet/Dalnet as glk
http://www.grahamkendall.net/
All are free to use any of this material without limit.
*******************************************************************************
==
While they have no electric charge, neutrinos carry a magnetic field.
==
Annuals versus Perennials -- Not a Garden Variety Solution
Scientists with the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology in Gent, Belgium,
have determined what makes plants either "annual," meaning they live one
growing season and die, or "perennial," meaning they regrow every spring. The
difference, according to work done by scientist Siegbert Melzer, comes down to
two critical flower-inducing genes that, when turned off, can turn an annual
into a perennial. The rapid growth of flowers, and then seeds, is the strategy
most annuals use to propagate from one generation to the next and one growing
season to the next. Annuals experience "rapid growth following germination
and rapid transition to flower and seed formation, thus preventing the loss of
energy needed to create permanent structures," said a statement about the
research from the institute. "They germinate quickly after the winter so that
they come out before other plants, thus eliminating the need to compete for
food and light. The trick is basically to make as many seeds as possible in
as short a time as possible." Perennials instead build "structures" such
as overwintering buds, bulbs or tubers, that contain cells that are not
yet specialized and, when the next growing season begins, can be converted
into stalks and leaves. An annual uses up all of its non-specialized cells
making flowers, and thus, after dropping seeds, it dies. The growth of the
flowers is triggered by the plant sensing the length of day and amount of
sunlight. When the light is just right, "blooming-induction genes" are
triggered. By deactivating two of the genes that induce flower growth
in the thale cress, a flowering plant whose genome has been entirely
sequenced, the researchers created mutant plants that "can no longer
induce flowering, but . . . can continue to grow vegetatively or come
into flower much later." Because the plants don't use up the store of
non-specialized cells making flowers, they become perennials, able
to continue to grow for a long time. And, like true perennials,
the altered annuals show secondary growth with wood formation.
==
Dusty Shock Waves Generate Planet Ingredients

Shock waves around dusty, young stars might be creating the raw materials for
planets, according to new observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

The evidence comes in the form of tiny crystals. Spitzer detected crystals
similar in make-up to quartz around young stars just beginning to form
planets. The crystals, called cristobalite and tridymite, are known to reside
in comets, in volcanic lava flows on Earth, and in some meteorites that land
on Earth.

Astronomers already knew that crystallized dust grains stick together to form
larger particles, which later lump together to form planets. But they were
surprised to find cristobalite and tridymite. What's so special about these
particular crystals? They require flash heating events, such as shock waves,
to form.

The findings suggest that the same kinds of shock waves that cause sonic booms
from speeding jets are responsible for creating the stuff of planets throughout
the universe.

"By studying these other star systems, we can learn about the very beginnings
of our own planets 4.6 billion years ago," said William Forrest of the
University of Rochester, N.Y. "Spitzer has given us a better idea of how the
raw materials of planets are produced very early on."Forrest and University of
Rochester graduate student Ben Sargent led the research, to appear in the
Astrophysical Journal.

Planets are born out of swirling pancake-like disks of dust and gas that
surround young stars. They start out as mere grains of dust swimming around in
a disk of gas and dust, before lumping together to form full-fledged planets.
During the early stages of planet development, the dust grains crystallize and
adhere together, while the disk itself starts to settle and flatten. This
occurs in the first millions of years of a star's life.

When Forrest and his colleagues used Spitzer to examine five young
planet-forming disks about 400 light-years away, they detected the signature
of silica crystals. Silica is made of only silicon and oxygen and is the main
ingredient in glass. When melted and crystallized, it can make the large
hexagonal quartz crystals often sold as mystical tokens. When heated to even
higher temperatures, it can also form small crystals like those commonly found
around volcanoes.

It is this high-temperature form of silica crystals, specifically cristobalite
and tridymite, that Forrest's team found in planet-forming disks around other
stars for the first time. "Cristobalite and tridymite are essentially
high-temperature forms of quartz," said Sargent. "If you heat quartz crystals,
you'll get these compounds."

In fact, the crystals require temperatures as high as 1,220 Kelvin (about
1,740 degrees Fahrenheit) to form. But young planet-forming disks are only
about 100 to 1,000 Kelvin (about minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit to 1,340
Fahrenheit) -- too cold to make the crystals. Because the crystals require
heating followed by rapid cooling to form, astronomers theorized that shock
waves could be the cause.

Shock waves, or supersonic waves of pressure, are thought to be created in
planet-forming disks when clouds of gas swirling around at high speeds
collide. Some theorists think that shock waves might also accompany the
formation of giant planets.

The findings are in agreement with local evidence from our own solar system.
Spherical pebbles, called chondrules, found in ancient meteorites that fell to
Earth are also thought to have been crystallized by shock waves in our solar
system's young planet-forming disk. In addition, NASA's Stardust mission found
tridymite minerals in comet Wild 2.
==
Very intelligent people can reach a state of cognitive
dissonance, and the history of science is littered with examples. How
many brilliant scientists have been caught, unable to accept that a
pet notion has been refuted, even as the evidence steadily mounts against them?
===
How Water Made Earth Livable for Us - The Peroxy Way
Living on a planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere we tend to forget that our
planet is an anomaly.
About 4.5 billion years ago, when the solar system accreted out of a disk of
gas and dust, the Earth was thoroughly reduced. Over the course of the first
1-2 billion years our planet became slowly, but inextricably ever more
oxidized. Vast amounts of iron rich sediments precipitated out of the oceans,
known as "Banded Iron Formations" or BIFs, indicating that reduced ferrous
iron, Fe2+, converted into ferric iron, Fe3+. This required a large, sustained
supply of oxidizing power.
In his 1984 book, "The Chemical Evolution of the Atmosphere and Oceans," H. D.
Holland estimated that, over the 2+ billion years during which the BIFs
precipitated, at least 1012 gram oxygen had to be injected into the Earth's
oceans every year. Sometime around 2.4 to 2.3 billion years ago, the global
oxidation accelerated. During this remarkable period, known as the "Great
Oxidation Event," free O2 appeared in Earth's atmosphere and soon increased to
the over 20% O2, which we now enjoy.
The Great Oxidation Event is attributed to the invention of photo-synthesis:
the capacity of living organisms, using sunlight, to split H2O and CO2 into O2
plus reduced H and C, which in turn combine to produce organic compounds. New
forms of life appeared that could harness the newly available chemical energy:
first microbial and later multi-cellular organisms prospered in the oceans and
eventually conquered the land.
If the Great Oxidation Event can be linked to oxygenic photo-synthesis, the
question remains what process might have driven the earlier slow oxidation of
Earth.
One school of thought has promoted the idea that some form of oxygenic
photo-synthesis was invented very early on, soon after the origin of life.
Maybe colonies of photosynthetic bacteria, similar to today's cyanobacteria,
were building stromatolites in shallow waters along the coasts of early
continents, pumping out enough oxygen to precipitate the BIFs and prepare the
way for the stupendous rise of free O2 in Earth's atmosphere during the Great
Oxidation Event.
The "invention" of oxygenic photosynthesis so early in Earth's history poses
serious problems. Oxygen is one of the most reactive elements in nature, and
is toxic to life adapted to reducing environments. Before pumping out oxygen
as part of their metabolism, the microorganisms must have learned how to
handle this dangerous by-product of their cellular biochemistry and how to
extract the energy. They must have learned how to detoxify those Reactive
Oxygen Species, commonly referred to in microbiologists' circles as ROS, which
are the scourge of all forms of life.
One possible solution to this dilemma is that, long before the Great Oxidation
Event, the Earth might have been slowly oxidized by some non-biological
process. Such a process would have given the microorganisms time to adapt to
the changing environment or, as Dr. Lynn Rothschild of the NASA Ames Research
Center said, "It would have provided a training ground for early life to learn
how to handle oxygen."
Indeed, such a non-biological process exists. When rocks crystallize from
magmas that contain dissolved gases, mostly H2O, or when minerals
re-crystallize at high temperatures in H-2Oladen environments, water becomes
an impurity in their crystal matrices, usually in the form of hydroxyl, OH.
Even minerals that do not normally contain hydroxyl invariably take up small
amounts of water giving O3Si-OH, more generally O3X-OH, where X can be Si4+,
Al3+, etc. Most of those will occur in the form of O3X-OH OH-XO3 pairs.
In the Earth Sciences redox reactions are broadly discussed, usually involving
transition metal cations that change their valence states such as Fe2+
oxidizing to Fe3+. Redox reactions involving anions are also quite popular
such as reactions with sulfur that can change from sulfide, S2-, to sulfate,
SO42-, where sulfur is in the valence state S6+. However, for some unknown
reason, oxygen anions are always considered to be frozen into their 2 valence
state, O2-.
Years ago, while studying impurity hydroxyls in MgO, I discovered an unusual
redox reaction that involves OH pairs: during cooling OH pairs in the MgO
matrix change into peroxy anions, O22, plus H2, as indicated in Equation 1. In
other words, two oxygens change their valence from 2- to 1-, meaning that they
become oxidized, while two protons become reduced to molecular H2:

OH + OH o O22- + H2

[Equation 1]

In subsequent years it became clear that hydroxyls in silicate minerals, also
due to some "water" being incorporated during crystallization or
re-crystallization, undergo the same type of redox reaction, oxidizing two
oxygens to the peroxy state while splitting off an H2 molecule, as depicted in
this graphic of Equation 2.
H2 is capable of diffusing away over time, even escaping to grain boundaries
and beyond. Thus, an interesting situation arises: Rocks that contain minerals
with impurity hydroxyl  essentially any rock  will acquire peroxy as a memory
of their solute H2O content. A peroxy, however, is nothing but an extra O atom
stored in the mineral structure, equivalent to half an oxygen molecule, O2:

O3Si-OO-SiO3 o O3Si-O-SiO3 + 12 O2

[Equation 3]
There are numerous consequences. One is rooted in semiconductor physics. A
peroxy is composed of two O, which are tightly bound together and inactive for
all practical purposes. However, when a peroxy bond breaks, the rock becomes a
semiconductor. The reason is that an O in a matrix of O2- is a defect electron
or "hole". It is associated with energy levels in the valence band of the
otherwise insulating silicate minerals. All mineral grains in a rock that are
in physical contact with others are also in electric contact, as far as their
valence bands are concerned. In other words, a hole in any given mineral grain
in a rock is able to pass to any neighboring grains. In fact, the holes
associated with O states have been shown in the laboratory to travel through
meters of rock as well as through sand and soil. There is little doubt that
these electronic charge carriers are able to travel large distances through
the Earth's crust, through tens of kilometers at least.
All that is needed for these electric currents to start flowing are: (i) a
process to break the peroxy bonds, (ii) a pathway for the charge carriers to
flow.
It has been shown that stressing rocks causes peroxy bonds to break and to
release hole charge carriers that travel fast and far. This photograph shows a
4-meter long piece of granite squeezed at one end. Upon running a wire from the
stressed end to the front end, where a copper electrode is attached, a current
of about 1 nanoampere is obtained. This current runs along the stress gradient
for hours, even days, as long as the load on the rock is kept constant. Taking
off the load causes the current to fade. Re-stressing the rock causes to the
current to come back. The process can be repeated many times. The rock is a
battery that is charged by stress and can be recharged by re-applying stress.
When we replace the copper contact with a water bath, into which we introduce
a copper electrode, the same current flows. Using a slab of gabbro, a rock
mineralogically similar to basalt, we measure a current on the order of 100
nanoamperes. It has been flowing for over 4 weeks without loosing more than
30% of its initial strength. However, with water, we see a new reaction: the
holes that flow through the rock and pass through the rock-water interface
oxidize water to hydrogen peroxide, H2O to H2O2. The reaction is quantitative,
generating one H2O2 molecule for every two hole charge carriers that cross the
rock-water interface.
What does this mean for the early Earth? The geological literature provides
convincing evidence that our home planet has been tectonically active since
the earliest times. There must have been plenty of tectonic stresses acting on
the rocks that built the continents. There must have been plenty of stress
gradients, along which the same type of hole currents were flowing that we can
now demonstrate in laboratory experiments. Wherever these currents crossed
rock-water interfaces, for instance along continental margins at subduction
zones or other mountain-building regions, water must have been oxized to
hydrogen peroxide, which in turn decomposes rapidly into water plus oxygen:

H2O2 o H2O + 12 O2

[Equation 4]
This electrochemical oxidation of water must have helped our planet to become
ever more oxidized, contributing to the early slow oxidation of Earth.
Yet, electrochemical oxidation of water was surely not the only reaction that
pushed the early Earth toward an ever higher degree of oxidation. Global
weathering has to be taken into consideration, too. Weathering is a powerful
process that dissolves rocks and wears down mountains. Today about 3 km3 of
rocks pass through the global weathering cycle every year. When the Earth was
young, the continents were bare and the rain was more acid than today due to
the higher CO2 content in the early atmosphere. Hence, weathering rates must
have been higher too, say 10 km3 per year. When weathering eats into a rock,
water hydrolyzes the peroxy and produces hydrogen peroxide, even if the H2
molecules formed according to equation 5 still linger around:

O3Si-OO-SiO3 + 2 H2O o O3Si-OH + OH-SiO3 + H2O2

[Equation 5]

If we take a conservative estimate for the average peroxy content in rocks,
300 parts per million, the amount of H2O2 released globally at a weathering
rate of 10 km3 per year translates into 1013 grams per year. This is 10x the
amount that H. D. Holland estimated to be necessary to precipitate the BIFs.
Thus we come to the tentative conclusion that, through weathering and
electrochemistry, peroxy in rocks provided enough oxidation power to change
the course of our planet's history. Over the course of 1.5 to 2 billion years,
peroxy forced the early Earth to slowly but inextricably become ever more
oxidized. Along the way dangerous Reactive Oxygen Species, constantly produced
at rock-water interfaces and during peroxy hydrolysis, challenged the early
microbes, archaea and bacteria. As Dr. Rothschild so aptly put it, the ROS
might have provided a "training ground" for those early micro-organisms to
learn how to deal with oxygen. They developed the basic enzymatic defenses,
which our bodies still use today to fend off the detrimental side effects of
our oxygen-based metabolism.
Thus, while the Earth was still overwhelmingly reduced, eukaryotes joined the
archaea and bacteria. Under the onslaught of those ROS, the eukaryotes
"learned" how to survive in an oxygen-spiked environment long before free O2
gas appeared in Earth's atmosphere. At some point the eukaryotes learned how
to take advantage of the large chemical energy that oxygen can provide. They
adapted to do oxygenic photosynthesis, to tap the energy in O2. This lead to
the Great Oxidation Event and to plenty of free O2 in Earth's atmosphere that
made our planet livable for us...and it all started with water and a
little-known solid state reaction in the rocks.


==
The last interglacial period about 100 kya was much warmer than now,
as shown by raised beaches in Alaska. Hippos lived in the Thames at
London. Scandinavia was an island. Yet no evidence of a coal-burning
Neanderthal Industrial Revolution has been found.
The Holocene Climatic Optimum, which ended about 5000 years ago, was
also warmer than the current phase of the present interglacial. Since
then, warmer & colder periods have alternated with some regularity.
The Roman Warm Period around the time of Christ was followed by the
Dark Ages Cold Period. During the subsequent Medieval Warm Period,
England grew better wine grapes than France & the Norse established
dairy farms in Greenland. The Little Ice Age wiped them out & buried
their farms under tundra. Recently, during the present Modern Warm
Period, which began around 1850, sheep but not cattle have returned to
Greenland. Wine is also again being made in England, although it's
not very good & the industry remains tiny.
==
Gamma Ray burst
Scientists using NASA's Swift satellite found one with a red shift of
6.7 or 12.8 billion light years away. So far, that's the record.
==
Extreme supernova explosions of the type that produce GRBs require stars of
both great mass and low metallicity. (In astronomy, "metals" are any elements
heavier than hydrogen or helium.) "Larger galaxies tend to be more metal-rich
than smaller ones.
"Metals in a star produce strong stellar winds -- the metals' atoms reflect
the star's light and act like a solar sail, getting an extra push that
hydrogen and helium alone would not get," says Fruchter. "This activity
causes some of the star's mass to flow out into space."
So, stars with high metallicity tend to lose a lot of their mass before
they explode. "[Metals] can cause such great mass loss that instead of
turning into black holes upon collapse, some stars may only turn into
neutron stars. It's quite possible that a black hole may need to be
present to create a gamma-ray burst."
==
The criteria desired for index fossils are that they are common, widely 
distributed and with a restricted stratigraphic range, though to a 
degree the latter requirement can be relaxed by using the range of 
co-occurrence of two or more taxa. (The typical rank of a taxon used as 
in index fossil is a species; sometimes infraspecific taxa are used;
==
Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions
(Paperback) by Lisa Randall
==
Isochron, Ar-Ar and Uranium concordia all agree generally in dating formations.
==
Limestone covers about 10% of the earth surface.
A flood does not deposit limestome.
==
The early iron items, prior to about 900BC, was
so valuable that only kings could afford it.
==
http://www.physorg.com/    science news
==
Let me define fact for you.
It is data that has been proven, tested and confirmed to such a degree, that
we would be astounded to find any evidence to its contrary.
==
"In ancient times, half our children would have died by the age of 20. Now,
in the Western world, 98 per cent of them are surviving to age 21.
==
The "deepest ever" living fish have been discovered, scientists
believe.
A UK-Japan team found the 17-strong shoal at depths of 7.7km (4.8
miles) in the Japan Trench in the Pacific - and captured the deep sea
animals on film.
The scientists have been using remote-operated landers designed to
withstand immense pressures to comb the world's deepest depths for
marine life.
Monty Priede from the University of Aberdeen said the 30cm-long
(12in), deep-sea fish were surprisingly "cute".
"Nobody has really been able to look at these depths before - and I
think we will see fish living much deeper" Alan Jamieson, Oceanlab.
The fish, known as Pseudoliparis amblystomopsis , can be seen darting
about in the darkness of the depths, scooping up shrimps.
Alan Jamieson, from the University of Aberdeen, said: "It was an
honour to see these fish.
"No-one has ever seen fish alive at these depths before - you just
never know what you are going to see when you get down there."
The deepest record for any fish is Abyssobrotula galatheae , which was
dredged from the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench at a depth of more
than 8km (5 miles) in 1970. However, it was dead by the time it
reached the surface.
The previous record for any fish to have been spotted alive was
thought to have stood at about 7km (4 miles).
Pressure points
The Hadeep project, which began in 2007, is a collaboration between
the University of Aberdeen's Oceanlab and the University of Tokyo's
Ocean Research Institute (Ori) and aims to expand our knowledge of
biology in the deepest depths of the ocean.
It is funded by the Nippon Foundation and the Natural Environment
Research Council (Nerc).
The researchers have been looking at the Hadal zone - the area of
ocean that sits between 6,000 and 11,000m (20,000-36,000ft). It
consists of very narrow trench systems, most of which are found around
the Pacific Rim.
[DEEP SEA DIVISIONS
Bathyal zone: 1,000-3,000m (3,000-10,000ft)
Abyss: 3,000-6,000m (10,000-20,000ft)
Hadal: 6,000m-11,000m (20,000-36,000ft)]
The researchers are able to explore them using specially designed
remote operated vehicles that are fitted out with cameras.
Professor Priede, director of Oceanlab, said: "There is the question
of how do animals live at all at these kinds of depths.
"There are three problems: the first is food supply, which is very
remote and has to come from 8km (5 miles) above.
"There is very high pressure - they have to have all sorts of
physiological modifications, mainly at the molecular level.
"And the third problem is that these deep trenches are in effect small
islands in the wide abyss and there is a question of whether these
trenches are big enough to support thriving endemic populations."
But this species appears to have overcome these issues, added
Professor Priede.
"We have spotted these creatures at depths of 7,703m (25,272ft) - and
we have actually found a massive group of them.
"And this video is pretty tantalising - the fact that there are 17 of
them implies that they could well be a family group, begging the
question of whether some form of parental care exists for these fish."
Vibration sensors
The researchers said they were surprised by the fish's behaviour.
"We certainly thought, deep down, fish would be relatively inactive,
saving energy as much as possible, and so on," Professor Priede told
BBC News.
"But when you see the video, the fish are rushing around, feeding
accurately, snapping at prey coming past."
Because the fish live in complete darkness, they use vibration
receptors on their snouts to navigate the ocean depths and to locate
food.
Professor Priede added: "Nobody has seen fish alive before at these
depths - only pickled in museums - and by the time they come up from
the depths they look in a pretty sorry state.
"But these fish are actually very cute."
Alan Jamieson added that he believed the team would find more fish
during their next expedition in March 2009, which would probe the
ocean between depths of 6,000m and 9,000m.
He told BBC News: "Nobody has really been able to look at these depths
before - I think we will see some fish living much deeper."

==
Before the Glen Canyon Dam was built, the average sediment transport rate
through the Grand Canyon was measured to be around 500,000 tons per day.
==
Galaxy Diversity Reveals Clues to Cosmic Evolution
Astronomers peering out into our cosmic backyard have long understood that the
Milky Way's galactic neighbors only seem similar on the surface. Now a detailed
survey from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revealed the diversity of those
galaxies as they evolve over time.
The ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury (ANGST) program zeroed in on 14 million
stars in 69 nearby galaxies. Such galaxies sit close enough so that Hubble's
sharp eyes could single out the brightest stars instead of seeing a giant
smear of light, and may help settle raging debates over how galaxies and their
stars form in the first place.
"Instead of picking and choosing particular galaxies to study, our survey will
be complete by virtue of looking at 'all' the galaxies in the region," said
Julianne Dalcanton, head of the ANGST survey at the University of Washington
in Seattle. "This gives us a multi-color picture of when and where all the
stars in the local universe formed."
A galactic fossil record
The survey covered galaxies ranging 6.5 million light-years to 13 million
light-years from Earth. A light-year is the distance light will travel in a
year, or about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).
Many nearby galaxies contain stars that are positive relics compared with the
younger stars in more distant galaxies. Astronomers can guess how those
younger stars may evolve based on the older nearby stars.
"Using the galaxies in the nearby universe as a 'fossil record,' we can
compare them with young galaxies far away," Dalcanton said. "This comparison
gives us a history of star formation and provides a better understanding of
the masses, structures and environments of the galaxies."
The formation of galaxies remains poorly understood, although evidence is
mounting that massive galaxies grow by clumping together and merging with
smaller brethren. This step-by-step evolution of gradually larger galaxies
competes with the theory that galaxies simply start from scratch.
However, some observations suggest that galaxies do have the power to expand
rapidly. Astronomers found a star factory 12.3 billion light-years away that
churns out 4,000 stars per year, compared with our Milky Way's 10 stars
annually. That burst of star-making activity suggests such a galaxy would only
need 50 million years to grow into one of the largest ever observed.
Stellar evolution
Many such large spiral galaxies created most of their stars early on,
according to a separate new study. Also relying on data from the Hubble
galactic survey, the astronomers examined the outer disk of M81 and found that
most stars formed more than 7 billion years ago, when the universe was half its
current age. The supernova deaths of massive stars within such mammoth galaxies
rapidly enriched them with heavy elements such as carbon.
"We were surprised by how quickly the elements formed and how the subsequent
star-formation rate for the bulk of the stars in M81 changed after that," said
Benjamin Williams, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Astronomers had believed that star populations become increasingly younger
further out within galaxies, but Hubble data indicated that older stars can
also lurk in a galaxy's outer arms. Recent simulation work has presented
another possible explanation  stars may wander all over spiral galaxies. The
survey should provide further data to flesh out current theories.
"With this information, we will be able to trace the complete cycle of star
formation in detail," Dalcanton said.
==
Science isn't in the business 
of proving anything. Science offers us models with which we can better 
understand natural phenomenon. It gives us a testable, reliable, 
dynamic (always subject to revision) means of interpreting reality.
==
Writing in about 300 BC, Theophrastus attempts to classify plants, as well 
as describing their structure, habits and uses. His remarks are based on 
observations carried out in Greece, but he also includes information brought 
back from the new Hellenistic empire in the Middle East, Persia and India, 
resulting from the conquests of Alexander the Great.
=
http://www.ethicalatheist.com/docs/flat_earth_myth_ch8.html   flat earth
==
Discovery of world's oldest rocks challenged
Geologists in Canada may have discovered the oldest rocks on Earth. But a
controversy over the techniques used to date the rocks is threatening to
overshadow the discovery.
Finding the oldest rocks on Earth is important because they should help
scientists solve one of geology's great mysteries: how the surface of our
planet was transformed from the ocean of magma that existed in the Hadean  the
earliest era in Earth's history  into the floating tectonic plates we have
today.
For the last four years, Jonathan O'Neil of McGill University and colleagues
have been studying a large band of ancient rocks in northern Quebec known as
the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt. However, the team has used a controversial
method for dating the rocks.
The dating method relies on the amount of the common isotope neodymium-142 in
the rock. All rocks contain some neodymium-142, but rocks older than 4.2
billion years should contain more of it.
That's because it is produced by the radioactive decay of samarium-146, which
had largely disappeared 4.2 billion years ago. Any rocks that formed while
samarium-146 was still around would today contain larger than usual quantities
of neodymium-142.
"You can precisely measure the amount of neodymium-142 and calculate a precise
age for the rock," explains O'Neil. "In our case it gave us an age of 4.28
billion years." That's significantly older than any rock yet found on Earth.
Moon-forming blow
This could make the greenstone belt the oldest known rocks on Earth, just 300
million years younger than our solar system. It also dates them close to the
time when a massive object the size of Mars dealt Earth a glancing blow 4.53
billion years ago, knocking off the debris which formed the Moon.
The energy of the blow was such that the Earth's upper layers melted into an
ocean of magma. The next period for which we have evidence in the evolution of
Earth is around 3.8 billion years ago, by which time most geologists agree
plate tectonics were in place.
"What we really want to get to is what Earth looked like before 4 billion
years ago," says Martin Whitehouse of the Swedish Museum of Natural History,
who was not involved in the study.
"We want to understand how the early Earth transitioned from a magma ocean
through to the Earth at 3.8 billion years. Somewhere in those 700 million
years something changed. Any shred of evidence is important in trying to
reconstruct this evolution."
Ancient magma?
"To study how early crust formed we need to have samples of these rocks," says
O'Neil. With rocks in hand, it becomes possible to analyse every aspect of them
and retrace their history. O'Neil's latest find could help with that process.
However, the neodymium-142 levels may not be an indicator of the rock's age.
O'Neil himself admits his team may instead be measuring the age of the magma
from which the rocks formed. "All rocks have precursor, something that came
before they formed," says Whitehouse.
O'Neil's team has also used a conventional method to date the rocks which
suggests the greenstone belt is only 3.8 billion years old  about 200 million
years younger than the current oldest rock  Acasta gneiss, which was
discovered in Canada in 1999.
It is clear that O'Neil and his colleagues have discovered one of the oldest
signals from the very early stages in our planet's development. But how the
signal should be interpreted "is going to be very controversial", says
Whitehouse.
"On the weight of evidence from other studies in the area, I would still
consider that 3.8 billion years is more likely the actual age of the rocks,"
says Simon Wilde of the Institute for Geoscience Research in Australia.
Journal reference: Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.116
==
GRB 080913 exploded Sept. 13 at a whopping distance of 12.8 billion
light-years away in the constellation Eridanus. his image merges the view
through Swift's UltraViolet and Optical Telescope, which shows bright stars,
and its X-ray Telescope, which captures the burst (orange and yellow). Credit:
NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler
An explosion originating near the edge of the universe has been seen by an
orbiting NASA telescope. The burst of gamma rays is the farthest such event
ever detected.
The blast, designated GRB 080913, arose from an exploding star 12.8 billion
light-years away. It was detected by the Swift satellite and announced today.
==
The Sun Will Eventually Engulf Earth--Maybe
Researchers debate whether Earth will be swallowed by the sun as it expands
into a red giant billions of years from now
The future looks brightmaybe too bright. The sun is slowly expanding and
brightening, and over the next few billion years it will eventually desiccate
Earth, leaving it hot, brown and uninhabitable. About 7.6 billion years from
now, the sun will reach its maximum size as a red giant: its surface will
extend beyond Earths orbit today by 20 percent and will shine 3,000 times
brighter. In its final stage, the sun will collapse into a white dwarf.
==
Sept 14,1752 - The British Empire adopts the Gregorian calendar,
skipping eleven days (the previous day was September 2).
Dates 5 October 1582 to 14 October 1582  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar
==
WORLD VIEW 
330 BC Aristotle provides evidence of spherical earth 
240 BC Eratosthenes of Cyrene accurately calculates circumference of globe 
8th Century AD work by Bede shows acceptance of sphere idea 

Flat earth theory is still around. On the internet and in small meeting rooms
in Britain and the US, flat earth believers get together to challenge the
"conspiracy" that the Earth is round.
"People are definitely prejudiced against flat-earthers, " says John Davis, a
flat earth theorist based in Tennessee, reacting to the new Microsoft
commercial.
"Many use the term 'flat-earther' as a term of abuse, and with connotations
that imply blind faith, ignorance or even anti-intellectualis m."
Mr Davis, a 25-year-old computer scientist originally from Canada, first
became interested in flat earth theory after "coming across some literature
from the Flat Earth Society a few years ago".
"I came to realise how much we take at face value," he says. "We humans seem
to be pleased with just accepting what we are told, no matter how much it goes
against our senses."
Mr Davis now believes "the Earth is flat and horizontally infinite - it
stretches horizontally forever".
"And it is at least 9,000 kilometres deep", he adds.
James McIntyre, a British-based moderator of a Flat Earth Society discussion
website, has a slightly different take. "The Earth is, more or less, a disc,"
he states. "Obviously it isn't perfectly flat thanks to geological phenomena
like hills and valleys. It is around 24,900 miles in diameter."
Mr McIntyre, who describes himself as having been "raised a globularist in the
British state school system", says the reactions of his friends and family to
his new beliefs vary from "sheer incredulity to the conviction that it's all
just an elaborate joke".
So how many flat-earthers are around today? Neither Mr Davis nor Mr McIntyre
can say.
Disappearing ships
Mr McIntyre estimates "there are thousands", but "without a platform for
communication, a head-count is almost impossible", he says. Mr Davis says he
is currently creating an "online information repository" to help to bring
together local Flat Earth communities into a "global community".
"If you will forgive my use of the term 'global'", he says.

And for the casual observer, it is hard to accept that all of this is not some
bizarre 21st Century jape. After all, most schoolchildren know that ships can
disappear over the horizon, that satellites orbit the earth and that if you
head along the equator you will eventually come back on yourself.
What about all the photos from space that show, beyond a shadow of doubt, that
the Earth is round? "The space agencies of the world are involved in an
international conspiracy to dupe the public for vast profit," says Mr McIntyre.
John Davis also says "these photos are fake".
And what about the fact that no one has ever fallen off the edge of our
supposedly disc-shaped world?
Mr McIntyre laughs. "This is perhaps one of the most commonly asked
questions," he says. "A cursory examination of a flat earth map fairly well
explains the reason - the North Pole is central, and Antarctica comprises the
entire circumference of the Earth. Circumnavigation is a case of travelling in
a very broad circle across the surface of the Earth."
Ultimate conspiracy
Mr Davis says that being a flat-earther doesn't have an impact on how one
lives every day. "As a rule of thumb, we don't have any fears of aircraft or
other modes of transportation, " he says.
Christine Garwood, author of Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, is
not surprised that flat-earthers simply write off the evidence that our planet
is globular.
"Flat earth theory is one of the ultimate conspiracy theories," she says.
"Naturally, flat earth believers think that the moon landings were faked, as
were the photographs of earth from space."
Perhaps one of the most surprising things in Garwood's book is her revelation
that flat earth theory is a relatively modern phenomenon.
Ms Garwood says it is an "historic fallacy" that everyone from ancient times
to the Dark Ages believed the earth to be flat, and were only disabused of
this "mad idea" once Christopher Columbus successfully sailed to America
without "falling off the edge of the world".
In fact, people have known since at least the 4th century BC that the earth is
round, and the pseudo-scientific conviction that we actually live on a disc
didn't emerge until Victorian times.
Theories about the earth being flat really came to the fore in 19th Century
England. With the rise and rise of scientific rationalism, which seemed to
undermine Biblical authority, some Christian thinkers decided to launch an
attack on established science.
Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816-1884) assumed the pseudonym of "Parallax" and
founded a new school of "Zetetic astronomy". He toured England arguing that
the Earth was a stationary disc and the Sun was only 400 miles away.
In the 1870s, Christian polemicist John Hampden wrote numerous works about the
Earth being flat, and described Isaac Newton as "in liquor or insane".
And the spirit of these attacks lives on to the present day. The flat-earth
myth remains the outlandish king in the realm of the conspiracy theorist.
And while we all respect a degree of scepticism towards the authorities, says
Ms Garwood, the flat-earthers show things can go too far.
"It is always good to question 'how we know what we know', but it is also good
to have the ability to accept compelling evidence - such as the photographs of
Earth from space."
==
 Arab/Muslim civilization.
As an Assyrian, a non-Arab, Christian native of
the Middle East, whose ancestors reach back to
5000 B.C., I wish to clarify some points you
made in this little story, and to alert you to
the dangers of unwittingly being drawn into the
Arabist/Islamist ideology, which seeks to
assimilate all cultures and religions into the
Arab/Islamic fold.
I know you are a very busy woman, but please
find ten minutes to read what follows, as it is
a perspective that you will not likely get from
anywhere else. I will answer some of the
specific points you made in your speech, then
conclude with a brief perspective on this
Arabist/Islamist ideology.
Arabs and Muslims appeared on the world scene in
630 A.D., when the armies of Muhammad began
their conquest of the Middle East. We should be
very clear that this was a military conquest,
not a missionary enterprise, and through the use
of force, authorized by a declaration of a Jihad
against infidels, Arabs/Muslims were able to
forcibly convert and assimilate non-Arabs and
non-Mulsims into their fold. Very few indigenous
communities of the Middle East survived this --
primarily Assyrians, Jews, Armenians and Coptics
(of Egypt).
Having conquered the Middle East, Arabs placed
these communities under a Dhimmi (see the book
Dhimmi, by Bat Ye'Or) system of governance,
where the communities were allowed to rule
themselves as religious minorities (Christians,
Jews and Zoroastrian). These communities had to
pay a tax (called a Jizzya in Arabic) that was,
in effect, a penalty for being non-Muslim, and
that was typically 80% in times of tolerance and
up to 150% in times of oppression. This tax
forced many of these communities to convert to
Islam, as it was designed to do.
You state, its architects designed buildings
that defied gravity. I am not sure what you are
referring to, but if you are referring to domes
and arches, the fundamental architectural
breakthrough of using a parabolic shape instead
of a spherical shape for these structures was
made by the Assyrians more than 1300 years
earlier, as evidenced by their archaeological
record.
You state, its mathematicians created the
algebra and algorithms that would enable the
building of computers, and the creation of
encryption. The fundamental basis of modern
mathematics had been laid down not hundreds but
thousands of years before by Assyrians and
Babylonians, who already knew of the concept of
zero, of the Pythagorean Theorem, and of many,
many other developments expropriated by
Arabs/Muslims (see History of Babylonian
Mathematics, Neugebauer).
You state, its doctors examined the human body,
and found new cures for disease. The
overwhelming majority of these doctors (99%)
were Assyrians. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth
centuries Assyrians began a systematic
translation of the Greek body of knowledge into
Assyrian. At first they concentrated on the
religious works but then quickly moved to
science, philosophy and medicine. Socrates,
Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and many others were
translated into Assyrian, and from Assyrian into
Arabic. It is these Arabic translations which
the Moors brought with them into Spain, and
which the Spaniards translated into Latin and
spread throughout Europe, thus igniting the
European Renaissance.
By the sixth century A.D., Assyrians had begun
exporting back to Byzantia their own works on
science, philosophy and medicine. In the field
of medicine, the Bakhteesho Assyrian family
produced nine generations of physicians, and
founded the great medical school at Gundeshapur
(Iran). Also in the area of medicine, (the
Assyrian) Hunayn ibn-Ishaq's textbook on
ophthalmology, written in 950 A.D., remained the
authoritative source on the subject until 1800
A.D.
In the area of philosophy, the Assyrian
philosopher Job of Edessa developed a physical
theory of the universe, in the Assyrian
language, that rivaled Aristotle's theory, and
that sought to replace matter with forces (a
theory that anticipated some ideas in quantum
mechanics, such as the spontaneous creation and
destruction of matter that occurs in the quantum
vacuum).
One of the greatest Assyrian achievements of the
fourth century was the founding of the first
university in the world, the School of Nisibis,
which had three departments, theology,
philosophy and medicine, and which became a
magnet and center of intellectual development in
the Middle East. The statutes of the School of
Nisibis, which have been preserved, later became
the model upon which the first Italian
university was based (see The Statutes of the
School of Nisibis, by Arthur Voobus).
When Arabs and Islam swept through the Middle
East in 630 A.D., they encountered 600 years of
Assyrian Christian civilization, with a rich
heritage, a highly developed culture, and
advanced learning institutions. It is this
civilization that became the foundation of the
Arab civilization.
You state, Its astronomers looked into the
heavens, named the stars, and paved the way for
space travel and exploration. This is a bit
melodramatic. In fact, the astronomers you refer
to were not Arabs but Chaldeans and Babylonians
(of present day south-Iraq), who for millennia
were known as astronomers and astrologers, and
who were forcibly Arabized and Islamized -- so
rapidly that by 750 A.D. they had disappeared
completely.
You state, its writers created thousands of
stories. Stories of courage, romance and magic.
were too steeped in fear to think of such
things. There is very little literature in the
Arabic language that comes from this period you
are referring to (the Koran is the only
significant piece of literature), whereas the
literary output of the Assyrians and Jews was
vast. The third largest corpus of Christian
writing, after Latin and Greek, is by the
Assyrians in the Assyrian language (also called
Syriac); see:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14408a.htm
You state, when other nations were afraid of
ideas, this civilization thrived on them, and
kept them alive. When censors threatened to wipe
out knowledge from past civilizations, this
civilization kept the knowledge alive, and
passed it on to others. This is a very
important issue you raise, and it goes to the
heart of the matter of what Arab/Islamic
civilization represents. I reviewed a book
http://www.aina.org/aol/peter/greek.htm
titled How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs, in
which the author lists the significant
translators and interpreters of Greek science.
Of the 22 scholars listed, 20 were Assyrians, 1
was Persian and 1 an Arab. I state at the end of
my review: The salient conclusion which can be
drawn from O'Leary's book is that Assyrians
played a significant role in the shaping of the
Islamic world via the Greek corpus of knowledge.
If this is so, one must then ask the question,
what happened to the Christian communities which
made them lose this great intellectual
enterprise which they had established. One can
ask this same question of the Arabs.
Assyrians first
settled Nineveh, one of the major Assyrian
cities, in 5000 B.C., which is 5630 years before
Arabs came into that area. Even the word 'Arab'
is an Assyrian word, meaning Westerner (the
first written reference to Arabs was by the
Assyrian King Sennacherib, 800 B.C., in which he
tells of conquering the ma'rabayeh --
Westerners. See The Might That Was Assyria, by
H. W. F. Saggs).
==
Gamma-ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the Universe. Most occur
when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As a star's core collapses, it
creates a black hole or neutron star that, through processes not fully
understood, drive powerful gas jets outward. These jets actually punch
through the collapsing star, carrying matter and beaming radiation into space.
==
The Persian scholar Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (980-1037) had more
than 450 books attributed to him. His writings were concerned with
many subjects, most notably philosophy and medicine. His medical
textbook was used as the standard text in European universities for
centuries. His work on Aristotle was a key step in the transmission of
learning from ancient Greeks to the Islamic world and the West. He
often corrected the philosopher, encouraging a lively debate in the
spirit of ijtihad. His thinking and that of his follower ibn Rushd
(Averroes) was incorporated into Christian philosophy during the
Middle Ages, notably by Thomas Aquinas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam
How Islam Influenced Science


 'In the ninth century, the library of the monastery of St.
Gall was the largest in Europe. It boasted 36 volumes. At the same
time, that of Cordoba contained over 500,000!'.
The idea of the college was a concept which was borrowed from Muslims.
The first colleges appeared in the Muslim world in the late 600's and
early 700's. In Europe, some of the earliest colleges are those under
the University of Paris and Oxford they were founded around the
thirteenth century. These early European colleges were also funded by
trusts similar to the Islamic ones and legal historians have traced
them back to the Islamic system. The internal organization of these
European colleges was strikingly similar to the Islamic ones, for
example the idea of Graduate (Sahib) and undergraduate (mutafaqqih) is
derived directly from Islamic terms.
In the field of Mathematics the number Zero (0) and the decimal system
was introduced to Europe, which became the basis for the Scientific
revolution. The Arabic numerals were also transferred to Europe, this
made mathematical tasks much easier, problems that took days to solve
could now be solved in minutes. The works of Al-Khwarizmi
(Alghorismus) were translated into Latin. Alghorismus, from whom the
of astronomical tables. He, more importantly, laid the ground work for
algebra and found methods to deal with complex mathematical problems,
such as square roots and complex fractions. He conducted numerous
experiments, measured the height of the earth's atmosphere and
discovered the principle of the magnifying lens. Many of his books
were translated into European languages. Trigonometric work by
Alkirmani of Toledo was translated into Latin (from which we get the
sine and cosine functions) along with the Greek knowledge of Geometry
by Euclid. Along with mathematics, masses of other knowledge in the
field of physical science was transferred.
Islamic contributions to Science were now rapidly being translated and
transferred from Spain to the rest of Europe. Ibnul Hairham's works on
Optics, (in which he deals with 50 Optical questions put to Muslim
Scholars by the Franks), was translated widely. The Muslims discovered
the Principle of Pendulum, which was used to measure time. Many of the
principles of Isaac Newton were derived from former Islamic scientific
contributions. In the field of Chemistry numerous Islamic works were
translated into Latin. One of the fields of study in this area was
alchemy. The Muslims by exploring various elements, developed a good
understanding of the constitution of matter. Jabir ibn-Hayyan (Geber)
was the leading chemist in the Muslim world, some scholars link the
introduction of the 'scientific method' back to him. A great number of
terms used in Chemistry such as alchohol, alembic, alkali and elixir
are of Islamic origin.
Medicine was a key science explored by Muslims. Al-Rhazes is one of
the most famous Doctors and writers of Islamic History. Every major
city had an hospital, the hospital at Cairo had over 8000 beds, with
separate wards for fevers, ophthalmic, dysentery and surgical cases.
He discovered the origin of smallpox and showed that one could only
acquire it once in one's life, thus showing the existence of the
immune system and how it worked. Muslim doctors were also aware of the
contagious qualities of diseases. Hundreds of medical works were
translated into Latin.
All of this knowledge transferred from the Muslims to the Europeans
was the vital raw material for the Scientific Revolution. Muslims not
only passed on Greek classical works but also introduced new
scientific theories, without which the European Renaissance could not
have occurred. Thus even though many of the Islamic contributions go
unacknowledged, they played an integral role in the European
transformation.
==
Galaxy structure
Bars form when stellar orbits in a spiral galaxy become unstable and deviate
from a circular path. "The tiny elongations in the stars' orbits grow and they
get locked into place, making a bar.
==
The Sun Will Eventually Engulf Earth--Maybe
The future looks brightmaybe too bright. The sun is slowly expanding and
brightening, and over the next few billion years it will eventually desiccate
Earth, leaving it hot, brown and uninhabitable. About 7.6 billion years from
now, the sun will reach its maximum size as a red giant: its surface will
extend beyond Earths orbit today by 20 percent and will shine 3,000 times
brighter. In its final stage, the sun will collapse into a white dwarf.
Although scientists agree on the suns future, they disagree about what will
happen to Earth. Since 1924, when British mathematician James Jeans first
considered Earths fate during the suns red giant phase, a bevy of scientists
have reached oscillating conclusions. In some scenarios, our planet escapes
vaporization; in the latest analyses, however, it does not.
The answer is not straightforward, because although the sun will expand beyond
Earths orbit, or one astronomical unit (AU), it will lose mass along the way.
As a result, Earth should drift outward as the gravitational tug lessens over
time. (At its maximum radius of 1.2 AU, the sun will have lost about one third
of its mass, compared with its current heft.) In this way, Earth could escape
solar envelopment.
But other factors complicate the analysis. Drag on the planet from the suns
outermost, tenuous layers will cause Earth to drift inward. Smaller forces
from the other planetsall in turn reacting to the same reducing, expanding
sunare even more difficult to account for completely.
Earlier this year two teams reported different kinds of calculations
indicating that Earth will be swallowed up by the sun. In a calculation that
would thrill any college junior studying classical mechanics, Lorenzo Iorio of
Italys National Institute of Nuclear Physics used perturbation theory. It
simplifies analyses by dropping relatively small factors, thereby making
complex equations of motions that describe the interactions between the sun
and Earth mathematically manageable. Assuming that the suns yearly mass loss
(currently about one part in 100 trillion) remains small for the duration of
its evolution to the red giant phase, Iorio calculates that Earth will move
outward at about three millimeters a year, or only 0.0002 AU by the suns red
giant phase. But at that point the sun will balloon up, in only a million
years, to 1.2 AU in radius, thus vaporizing Earth.
Iorios paper, submitted to Astrophysics and Space Science, has not yet been
peer-reviewed. Several scientists question whether quantities that Iorio
assumes are small will indeed remain small throughout the suns evolution.
Even if Iorio got his number crunching wrong, he may have the right answer. In
an analysis published in the May Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical
Society, Klaus-Peter Schroder of the University of Guanajuato in Mexico and
Robert Smith of the University of Sussex in England also conclude that Earth
is doomed, by using more exact solar models and by considering tidal
interactions. As the sun loses mass and expands, its rotation rate must also
slow downphysics students learn this relation as the conservation of angular
momentum. The slowed rotation causes a tidal bulge on the suns surface. The
gravity exerted by this bulge pulls Earth inward. With such a consideration,
the researchers find that any planet with a present-day orbital radius of less
than 1.15 AU will ultimately perish.
Could Earth be saved if someone is still left at home? In a bold piece of
astronomical engineering, Don Korycansky of the University of California,
Santa Cruz, and his colleagues have proposed nudging Earth with a large
asteroid arranged to pass nearby periodically. It could take one billion years
to move our planet out to somewhere safe, like the orbit of Mars. Our moon,
though, might have to be left behind, and any miscalculation could mean
extinction. Needless to say, more study is required.
==
One copy of the X chromosome is inactivated in virtually all the cells in a
woman's body. Women, like men, need only one copy of the X chromosome to
survive, and inactivation of the second copy prevents "doubling up" on the
expression of genes residing on the X chromosome.
==
Current observations suggest that this is about 13.73 billion years, 
with an uncertainty of about 120 million years.
==
Cell Division Study Resolves 50-year-old Debate, May Aid Cancer
Research
ScienceDaily (Sep. 3, 2008)  A new study at Oregon State University
has finally resolved a controversy that cellular biologists have been
arguing over for nearly 50 years, with findings that may aid research
on everything from birth defects and genetic diseases to the most
classic "cell division" issue of them all  cancer.
The exact mechanism that controls how chromosomes in a cell replicate
and then divide into two cells, a process fundamental to life, has
never been completely pinned down, researchers say. You can find the
basics in any high school biology textbook, but the devil is in the
details.
"Researchers have been debating cell cleavage ever since the cell was
discovered, with two basic models proposed around 1960 of how a
contractile ring pulls together and allows a single cell to split into
two," said Dahong Zhang, an OSU associate professor of zoology. "Part
of the problem is that until now there was no decisive way to
manipulate the cytoskeleton, such as the microtubules and filaments
that are involved, and see what was happening as it occurred."
To address that, Zhang developed some new instrumentation that uses
"microneedles" and state-of-the-art imaging techniques which allow
direct manipulation of the cytoskeleton, while capturing the results
of contractile ring formation. The system has not only solved this
decades-old riddle, but "the technology is a very powerful new
approach," Zhang said, that should find applications in other cell
biology research issues.
It has been known for some time, scientists say, that a "contractile
ring," which is composed of some of the same fibers used in muscle
contraction, move into the correct position, pull and split a cell in
two after its chromosomes have been separated. This is distribution of
genetic materials at its most basic level, and it has to be done at
exactly the right place and time. When the process breaks down, cancer
and other serious medical or genetic issues can be a result.
But if you think of the cell as a sphere, what was less clear was
whether the "equator" contracted or the "poles" relaxed to allow this
contraction and division. Two distinct theories were formed, called
polar relaxation and equatorial stimulation, to explain this aspect of
cell division  and some scientists have spent much of their careers
arguing for one side or the other.
Turns out, Zhang said, that both sides were correct. Nature and
evolution have actually created a basic way for a cell to divide with
a backup system that can work if the other approach fails.
"Accurate cell division is one of the most critical of all life
functions, and there clearly is an evolutionary value to having
redundancy, a system able to do it two different ways," Zhang said.
"It makes perfect sense when you think about it. The findings speak
plainly for themselves, and there should no longer be a question over
which model is right."
By labeling cells and moving microtubules around while still being
able to see them and their impact on microfilaments, OSU researchers
were able to selectively inhibit one mechanism of cell division or the
other. They discovered that in the same cell type, it could divide
either by polar relaxation or equatorial stimulation  the two
mechanisms are not mutually exclusive.
The findings, Zhang said, add significantly to the basic understanding
of cell biology, and should be of special interest to cancer
researchers. Cancer is essentially the loss of normal control over
cell division and migration. In fact, a compound used in Zhang's
laboratory to inhibit cell division while they studied it was taxol
a commonly used cancer drug.
Accurate and effective cell division, researchers say, is also key to
the understanding of some genetic diseases, miscarriages, birth
defects and other issu
==
The Birth of the Sun
New Observations Show Sun-like Star in Earliest Stage of Development
Located in the Eagle Nebula, E42 is thought to be a very early embryo of a
star much like Earth's Sun.
Members of a research team led by the University of Colorado at Boulder have
used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to peer at the embryo of an infant star
in the nearby Eagle Nebula, which they believe may someday develop into a
virtual twin of Earth's Sun.
The object, known as an evaporating gas globule, or EGG, has the same mass as
the Sun and appears to be evolving in a violent environment much like the one
believed to have produced Earth's Sun, said researcher Jeffrey Linsky of JILA,
a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and
Technology. Located in a region called the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle
Nebula roughly 7,000 light-years from Earth, the object -- dubbed E42 -- is
thought to be in the earliest stage astronomers have ever detected a star like
the Sun, said Linsky.
A new image of the Pillars of Creation, consisting of a Hubble Space Telescope
image overlaid with Chandra X-ray data, was released Feb. 15 by the Chandra
X-ray Observatory Center in Cambridge, Mass. The image, which shows red, green
and blue dots representing low-, medium- and high-energy X-rays, indicates
there are relatively few X-ray sources in the pillars and suggests the Eagle
Nebula is past its star-forming prime, said Linsky.
Linsky and colleagues from West Chester University in Pennsylvania, the
University of Exeter in England and the University of Arizona analyzed visual
and infrared emissions from the pillars to identify E42, the Sun-like
proto-star. E42 is located in the left pillar on the right edge of a node
jutting out to the right about two-thirds of the way down the pillar.
"We think this is a very, very early version of our own Sun," said Linsky.
This image of NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory following deployment from the
Space Shuttle Columbia was taken Mission Specialist Cady Coleman, during the
STS-93 mission.
E42 is one of 73 EGGs discovered in the Pillars of Creation in 1996 with the
Hubble Space Telescope by Arizona State University astronomer Jeff Hester and
his team. While 11 of the EGGs have been determined to contain infant stellar
objects, only four are massive enough to form a star. Of those, E42 is the
only one that has a Sun-sized mass, said Linsky.
"The four proto-stars that we have identified on the edges of the pillars are
probably the youngest stars ever imaged by astronomers," Linsky said.
While Linsky and his team used Chandra to zero in on more than 1,100 hotter,
more mature stars in the Eagle Nebula, neither E42 nor the other three EGGs
believed massive enough to form stars were observed to be emitting any X-rays,
he said. "The results indicate young, evolving stars like E42 have not yet
developed the magnetic structures needed to produce X-rays," he said.
Earth's Sun is thought to have formed some 5 billion years ago after clouds of
dust and gas were seared by ultraviolet radiation and pounded by shockwaves
from one or more supernovae explosions, Linsky said. "The Sun was likely born
in a region like the Pillars of Creation because the chemical abundances in
the solar system indicate that a supernova occurred nearby and contributed its
heavy elements to the gas of which the Sun and the planets formed." Studying
E42 and how it continues to develop will help astronomers understand how our
own Sun formed and how it affected the environment of the early solar system.
The Sun influences Earth in many ways. On one hand it provides the light and
heat that sustains life on our planet. On the other hand it bathes the Earth
in ultraviolet light, showers it with x-rays, gamma-rays, electrons, and
atomic nuclei, and wraps the Earth in the folds of its own magnetic field.
A January 2007 study by an astronomy team from France suggested the pillars
were toppled some 6,000 years ago by a nearby supernova explosion, as
evidenced by a glowing cloud of scorched dust adjacent to the pillars. Since
the pillars are roughly 7,000 light years away, the French team contends they
will still be visible from Earth as "ghost images" for another thousand years
or so.
"My guess is that the shock wave from the supernova may have been far enough
away so that E42 and some of the other stars may have survived," said Linsky.
"But I guess we will have to wait another thousand years or so to get the
==
Earth's Early Temperature
Doctoral student Nicole Cates and Assistant Professor Stephen Mojzsis survey a
landscape of ancient rocks in Hudson Bay, Quebec confirmed by the CU-Boulder
team to date back roughly 3.75 billion years, making them among the most
oldest known rocks on Earth.
Credit: University of Colorado at Boulder
Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that has become a bane of modern society, may
have saved Earth from freezing over early in the planet's history, according to
the first detailed laboratory analysis of the world's oldest sedimentary rocks.
Scientists have theorized for years that high concentrations of greenhouse
gases could have helped Earth avoid global freezing in its youth by allowing
the atmosphere to retain more heat than it lost. Now a team from the
University of Chicago and the University of Colorado at Boulder that analyzed
ancient rocks from the eastern shore of Hudson Bay in northern Quebec, Canada,
have discovered the first direct field evidence supporting this theory.
The study shows carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere could have sustained
surface temperatures above freezing before 3.75 billion years ago according to
the researchers, led by University of Chicago Assistant Professor Nicolas
Dauphas. Co-authors on the study, which appeared online Jan. 16 in the journal
Earth and Planetary Science Letters, included Assistant Professor Stephen
Mojzsis and doctoral student Nicole Cates of CU-Boulder's geological sciences
department and Vincent Busigny, now of the Institut de Physique du Globe in
Paris.
A rock from a banded iron formation in northern Quebec, Canada.
Credit: University of Chicago
The new study helps explain how Earth may have avoided becoming frozen solid
early in its history, when astrophysicists believe the sun was 25 percent
fainter than today. Previous studies had shown liquid water existed at Earth's
surface even though the weak sun should have been unable to warm the planet
above freezing conditions. But high concentrations of CO2 or methane could
have warmed the planet, according to the research team.
The ancient rocks from Quebec contain iron carbonates believed to have
precipitated from ancient oceans, according to the study. Since the iron
carbonates could only have formed in an atmosphere containing far higher CO2
levels than those found in Earth's atmosphere today, the researchers concluded
the early Earth environment was extremely rich in CO2.
"We now have direct evidence that Earth's atmosphere was loaded with CO2 early
in its history, which probably kept the planet from freezing and going the way
of Mars," said Mojzsis.
The CO2 could even have played a role as a "planetary thermostat," since cold,
icy conditions on Earth would have decreased the chemical weathering of rocks
and increased the amount of CO2 moving into the atmosphere, ratcheting up
Earth's surface temperatures, according to Dauphas.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may have prevented Earth from freezing over
completely early in the planet's history.
Credit: USC
In a companion article that appeared online Feb. 2 in Earth and Planetary
Science Letters, Mojzsis, Cates and CU-Boulder undergraduate Jon Adam used a
technique known as uranium-lead dating to establish the ancient age of the
Hudson Bay rocks. Discovered by Canadian scientists in 2001, the rocks were
confirmed by Mojzsis and his team to be at least as old as an isolated
outcropping of West Greenland rocks previously believed by researchers to be
the oldest on Earth.
The CU-Boulder team analyzed the rocks by crushing them into powder and dating
zircon crystals present in the rock, said Mojzsis. The technique allowed them
to calculate the geologic age of the crystals based on the radioactive decay
rate of the uranium and lead isotopes in relation to each other, a technique
known to be accurate to 1 percent or less.
"Zircon is nature's best timekeeper," said Mojzsis. "The tests show that the
rocks in Quebec are roughly 3.75 billion years old, about the same as the West
Greenland rocks."
The landscape of the Hudson Bay region under study today, marked by hills of
grassland and marsh peppered by lakes, streams and craggy outcroppings, is
much different from the alien Earth of 3.8 billion years ago, said Mojzsis. In
much earlier times, a dense atmosphere of CO2 would have given the sky a
reddish cast, and a greenish-blue ocean of iron-rich water would have lapped
onto beaches, he said.
While scientists have been concerned that the limited sample of Earth's oldest
known rocks from West Greenland provided a biased view of early Earth, the
Hudson Bay discovery essentially doubles the known amount of extremely ancient
rocks, and there appear to be a number of similar, ancient outcrops in the
vicinity. "We are now finding Earth's oldest rocks are not as rare as we once
thought," Mojzsis said.
==
Why Early Earth Did Not Freeze
Early in Earth's history, our solar system was a much different place. When
the sun was very young, it was faint and provided little heat for the Earth.
However, even in its chilly beginnings, the surface of the Earth was ice-free.
For years, scientists have proposed theories for this "faint young sun
problem."
Most of these theories are based on the idea that the early Earth must have
had extremely high amounts of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) in
the atmosphere in order to warm the planet. According to a team of German
scientists, geological evidence of atmospheric CO2 seems to indicate that
levels were "far too low to keep the surface from freezing." However, their
new study may provide a new answer to the problem.
The study, under lead author Philip von Paris of the Institut fur
Planetenforschung (Institute for Planetary Research) at the Deutsches Zentrum
fur Luft- und Raumfahrt (German Centre for Air and Space Travel) in Berlin,
was recently published in the journal Planetary and Space Science.
Classic problem
According the geological record of Earth, liquid water was present on the
Earth's surface as early as 3.7 billion years ago (the Earth itself is thought
to be about 4.5 billion years old). This means that the average temperature of
the early Earth, 3.7 billion years ago, must have been above freezing.
Scientists aren't sure how warm the Earth was, but it's generally accepted
that the planet has been ice-free for most of its history.
However, by looking at sun-like stars of different ages around the universe,
astronomers believe that the sun's luminosity 3.7 billion years ago was
significantly less than today. If the early Earth's atmosphere was the same as
it is now, there wouldn't have been enough sunlight to warm the planet.
Temperatures would have been well below freezing up until 2 billion years ago.
Most proposed answers to the "faint young sun problem" involve some degree of
greenhouse warming on the early Earth in order to keep it from freezing over.
In fact, many scientists believe that warming of the Earth occurred at much
higher levels than those seen today due to the presence of gases like carbon
dioxide (CO2), methane, ethane or ammonia. However, there are many
uncertainties concerning whether or not each of these gases could have been
present on the early Earth.
Impact of asteroids
The new study by the German team is now causing scientists to reconsider the
role of CO2 in warming the early Earth.
They applied a new model to the atmosphere of the early Earth that includes
updated information about how radiation could have been absorbed to cause
heating. The study also included important parameters concerning the surface
albedo (how much light is reflected away by the planet's surface) and the
humidity of the atmosphere.
The new model was used to examine interesting points in the history of Earth,
such as the end of a period of frequent asteroid impacts known as the Late
Heavy Bombardment (3.8 billion years ago), the first evidence of oxygen
production by cyanobacteria (2.9 billion years ago) and the first known
oxidation event (2 billion years ago).
A warm breath
"Our new model simulations suggest that the amount of CO2 needed to keep the
surface of the early Earth from freezing is significantly less than previously
thought," the authors stated in their paper. In fact, the amount of CO2 might
be ten times less than previous studies indicated.
The model showed that a partial pressure of only 2.9 millibars of CO2 would
have been needed during the late Archaean and early Proterozoic periods in
order to bring the surface temperature of the Earth above freezing. This
result, although contrary to previous studies, agrees with current geological
data. For this period of time, the contradictions of the "faint young sun
problem" disappear.
The result improves our understanding of how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
can affect the global temperature of Earth.
Today, carbon dioxide levels on Earth are increasing, primarily as a result of
human activities. This increase is one of the most important causes of climate
change on Earth. Understanding how carbon dioxide affected the ancient climate
of Earth might provide clues about the future of Earth's climate and global
biosphere.
==
"The Road to Reality" by Roger Penrose

Objectivity  by Lorraine Daston & Peter Galison
===
'Complexity' of Neanderthal tools

Neanderthal tools were just as efficient as those made by our ancestors
Early stone tools developed by our species Homo sapiens were no more
sophisticated than those used by our extinct relatives the Neanderthals.
That is the conclusion of researchers who recreated and compared tools used by
these ancient human groups.
The findings cast doubt on suggestions that more advanced stone technologies
gave modern humans a competitive edge over the Neanderthals.
The work by a US-British team appears in the Journal of Human Evolution.
The researchers recreated wide stone tools called "flakes", which were used by
both Neanderthals and early modern humans.

We know that the Neanderthals were very capable technicians

They also reconstructed "blades" - a narrower stone tool later adopted by Homo
sapiens.
Some archaeologists often use the development of stone blades and their
assumed efficiency as evidence for the superior intellect of our species.
The team analysed the data to compare the number of tools produced, how much
cutting edge was created, the efficiency in consuming raw material and how
long tools lasted.
They found no statistical difference in the efficiency of the two stone
technologies.
In some respects, the flakes favoured by Neanderthals were even more efficient
than the blades adopted by modern humans.
Pros and cons
The result casts doubt on the idea that blades were a significant
technological advance, helping our ancestors out-compete, and eventually
eradicate, their evolutionary cousins the Neanderthals.
The Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) appear in the fossil record about
400,000 years ago.
At their peak, these squat, physically powerful hunters dominated a wide area
spanning Britain and Iberia in the west, Israel in the south and Siberia in
the east.
Meanwhile, Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, and displaced the Neanderthals
after spreading into Europe about 40,000 years ago.
The last known evidence of Neanderthals comes from Gibraltar and is dated to
between 28,000 and 24,000 years ago.
Lead author Metin Eren, from the University of Exeter, UK, said:
"Technologically speaking, there is no clear advantage of one tool over the
other.
"When we think of Neanderthals, we need to stop thinking in terms of 'stupid'
or 'less advanced' and more in terms of 'different'."
He added: "Our research disputes a major pillar holding up the long-held
assumption that Homo sapiens was more advanced than Neanderthals.
"It is time for archaeologists to start searching for other reasons why
Neanderthals became extinct while our ancestors survived."
Greater variety
Professor Chris Stringer, head of human origins at London's Natural History
Museum, said: "There are now very few palaeoanthropologists who consider the
Neanderthals to have been 'stupid', or who consider that they died out because
they made flake rather than blade tools."
Professor Stringer, who was not connected with the study, added: "We know that
the Neanderthals were very capable technicians, and that their tools would have
been excellent for activities such as butchery, working skins or wood.
"However, the blade tools manufactured by early modern humans in Europe were
often modified for specialisation as piercers, chisels or engravers, and as
parts of composite tools, such as harpoons.
"With modern humans we not only find a greater variety of tools, but also much
greater working of difficult materials like bone, antler and ivory."
The authors of the paper in Journal of Human Evolution suggest that, since
they conferred no technological advantage, modern humans may have used blades
because they had cultural meaning.
"For early Homo sapiens colonizing Ice Age Europe, a new shared and
flashy-looking technology might serve as one form of social glue by which
larger social networks were bonded," said Mr Eren.
==
In sedimentary rock that had previously been dated to 3.7 billion years ago or
older, researchers found an isotope of the element tungsten in amounts that do
not typically occur on Earth and so are thought to be of extraterrestrial
origin. Isotopes are particles with identical chemical properties, but
different masses.
The material comes from two regions, one the Isua Greenstone Belt in Greenland
and another in northern Labrador, Canada.
The researchers did not find actual meteorites or chunks of asteroids,
explained lead scientist say Ronny Schoenberg of the University of Queensland
in Australia. Instead, they studied material that had long ago been mixed with
Earth's crust to form so-called metamorphosed sediments.
"These sediments consist of bits and pieces of weathered rocks which have been
transported by rivers into an ocean, where they first formed soft layers, which
were then compacted by more overlying sediments and later deeply buried back
into Earth's crust by subduction," Schoenberg said in an e-mail interview.
High pressure and temperatures crystallized the sediments, and later they were
returned to the surface.
==
In 1929 Edwin
Hubble's measurements of the red-shift in the optical spectra of light from
distant galaxies,{9} which was taken to indicate a universal recessional
motion of the light sources in the line of sight, provided a dramatic
verification of the Friedman-Lemaitre model. Incredibly, what Hubble had
discovered was the isotropic expansion of the universe predicted by Friedman
and Lemaitre. 
==
As Bertrand Russell put it so succinctly in his BBC radio debate with
Frederick Copleston, The universe is just there, and that's all.
==
J.L. Schellenberg, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (1993). 

Ted Drange, Nonbelief and Evil (1998).

Nicholas Everitt, The Non-Existence of God (2003). 

Brian Skyrms, Choice and Chance (4th ed., 1999). 

Hugh Gauch, Jr., Scientific Method in Practice (2002).

Ronald Giere, Understanding Scientific Reasoning (1996). Susan Haack, Evidence
and Inquiry (1995) and Defending Science (2003). 

Mario Bunge, Emergence and Convergence (2003), : Philosophy of Science I:
From Problem to Theory and Philosophy of Science II: From Explanation to
Justification (1998). 

 Giulio Agostini, Bayesian Reasoning in Data Analysis (2003)

Dean Hamer,The God Gene (2004).

Eugene D'Aquili and Andrew Newberg, The Mystical Mind
(1999) and Why God Won't Go Away (2001). 

John Horgan, Rational Mysticism (2003).

Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained (2002). 

Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust(2002). 

Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds (1993). 

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today (2002).

Richard Carrier, The Big Debate (2004).

G. Veneziano, The Myth of the Beginning of Time, Scientific American 
290.5 (2004): pp. 54-65.  

James Haught, Holy Horrors (1999).
Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History (1995).

: Bruce Metzger, The Text Of The New Testament (4th
ed., 2005) and The Canon of the New Testament (1997). 

Bart Ehrman, The New
Testament (3rd ed., 2003), The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (1996), and
Lost Christianities (2003). 

Udo Schnelle, The History and Theology of the New
Testament Writings (1998). 

Robert E. Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament (2000). 

Charles H. Talbert, What is a Gospel? (1977). 

Gerd Ludemann, The Resurrection of Jesus (1995), The
Resurrection of Christ (2004), and What Really Happened to Jesus (1996). 

Bob Price, Deconstructing Jesus (2000) and The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man
(2003). 

G. A. Wells, The Jesus Legend (1996) and The Jesus Myth (1998). 

Earl Doherty, Challenging the Verdict and The Jesus Puzzle (1999).

Richard Carrier, What We Are Debating in Naturalism vs. Theism: The
Carrier-Wanchick Debate (2006); 

Richard Carrier, Sense and Goodness without
God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism (2005), pp. 65-70, 211-12;  

Richard Carrier, Defending Naturalism as a Worldview: A Rebuttal to Michael
Rea's World Without Design (2003).

Richard Carrier, The Argument from Biogenesis: Probabilities Against a 
Natural Origin of Life,
Biology and Philosophy 19.5 (November 2004): pp. 739-64. 

Geoffrey Zubay, Origins of Life (2nd ed., 2000). 

Tom Fenchel, Origin and Early Evolution of Life (2003). 

Andri Brack, The Molecular Origins of Life (1998). 

Noam Lahav, Biogenesis (1998). 

Iris Fry, The Emergence of Life on Earth (2000).

Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada, The Spark of Life (2000). 

J. William Schopf, Life's Origin (2002). 

John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary, The Origins of Life (1999). 

Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth (2000).


Chris Colby, Introduction to Evolutionary Biology (2nd ed., 1996).

Monroe Strickberger, Evolution (3rd ed., 2000). 

Mark Ridley, Evolution (3rd ed., 2003). 

Douglas Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology (3rd ed., 1998).

Eugenie Scott, Evolution vs. Creationism (2004). 

Niall Shanks, God, the Devil, and Darwin (2004). 

Matt Young & Taner Edis, eds., Why Intelligent Design Fails (2004). 

Douglas Futuyma, Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution (1995).

Joseph Ledoux, Synaptic Self (2002).
William Libaw, How We Got to Be Human (2000). 

Gerald Edelman, Wider than the Sky (2004). 

Steven Johnson, Mind Wide Open (2004). 

Christof Koch, The Quest for Consciousness (2004). 

Susan Blackmore, Consciousness (2003). 

Julian Paul Keenan, et al., The Face in the Mirror (2003). 

Robert Aunger, The Electric Meme (2002). 

V. S. Ramachandran, Brief Tour of Human Consciousness (2004),
Phantoms in the Brain (1999), and the Encyclopedia of the Human Brain (2002).

John Gribbin, The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of
Everything (2000). 

L.E. Lewis, Jr., Our Superstring Universe (2003). 

Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004) and The Elegant Universe.

Rosemary Wright, Cosmology in Antiquity (1995). 

Sam Sambursky, The Physical World of the Greeks (1956), The Physical World of
Late Antiquity (1962), and Physics of the Stoics (1959).
==
Galileo helped pave the way for classic
mechanics and made huge technological and observational leaps in astronomy.
Most famously, he championed the Copernican model of the universe, which put
the sun at its center and the earth in orbit. The Catholic Church banned
Galileo's 1632 book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, forced
Galileo to recant his heliocentric views and condemned him to house arrest. He
died in his Florence home in 1642.
==
The last major change in the field took place some 780,000 years ago during a
magnetic reversal, although such reversals seem to occur more often on
average. A flip in the north and south poles typically involves a weakening in
the magnetic field, followed by a period of rapid recovery and reorganization
of opposite polarity.
The Milky Way is believed to be more than 13 billion years old, which is
estimated to be virtually as old as the entire Universe itself. The Milky Way
galaxy is actually just one of billions of galaxies contained within the
Universe, although very little is currently known about its seemingly infinite
galactic counterparts.
The Milky Way galaxy has a whopping circumference of roughly 250-300 thousand
light years! Within the main body of the Milky Way there are estimated to be
between 200 and 400 billion stars. The Earths solar system is believed to
exist very close to the Galaxys galactic plane, due to the fact that the Milky
Way essentially divides the night sky into two virtually equal hemispheres.
Scientists now estimate that in roughly three billion years, the Milky Way
galaxy will actually collide with the Andromeda Galaxy, which is very slowly
working its way towards us at a modest speed of about 1,800 kilometers per
minute.
==
The Oort Cloud is a huge spherical cloud surrounding the solar system.
It extends about 18 trillion miles (30 trillion kilometers) from the sun and
was first proposed in 1950 by Dutch astronomer Jan Oort. 
==
http://www.astronomy.net/
==
www.galaxyzoo. org
==
gen 30:37 Then Jacob took fresh rods of poplar and almond and plane, and
peeled white streaks in them, exposing the white of the rods.
gen 30:38 He set the rods which he had peeled in front of the flocks in the
runnels, that is, the watering troughs, where the flocks came to drink. And
since they bred when they came to drink,
gen 30:39 the flocks bred in front of the rods and so the flocks brought forth
striped, speckled, and spotted.
==
Universe's first star born tiny, grew huge: study
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The first object to brighten the dark, primordial
universe after the Big Bang was the tiny seed of a star that rapidly grew into
a behemoth 100 times more massive than the sun, scientists said on Thursday.
This first generation of stars apparently lived hard and died quickly. While
our sun may live 5 billion years, this first generation of stars likely lasted
only a slim fraction of that -- about 1 million years, the researchers said.
Scientists think the universe was born in a Big Bang explosion 13.7 billion
years ago and has been expanding ever since. But they have struggled to
understand how the first stars formed in the aftermath of this cataclysm.
Japanese and U.S. astronomers ran a sophisticated computer simulation that
showed how some of the hydrogen and helium gases strewn throughout the young
universe came together to form the first generation of stars.
"These stars are thought to be the first sources of light and also the first
sources of heavy elements such as carbon, oxygen and iron," Naoki Yoshida of
Nagoya University in Japan, who worked on the study published in the journal
Science, said in a telephone briefing.
"If we want to understand how things came about and look the way they do now,
we have to go back in time and understand how stars looked when they first
began to form," added Lars Hernquist of Harvard University in Massachusetts.
COMPACT UNIVERSE
At the time, the universe was about 20 times as compact as it is now,
Hernquist said. "We think that early in the universe, the only elements that
existed were hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of lithium," Hernquist
added.
This matter was generally very smoothly distributed throughout the universe,
but some regions had greater concentrations of it than others, the researchers
said.
The effects of the gravity from this matter drew in more and more material
over time, setting in motion clouds of hydrogen and helium that came together
as a "protostar" -- the seed of a much larger star.
The first protostar was born about 300 million years after the Big Bang, the
researchers said. Nuclear reactions inside the protostar made it the first
object to cast starlight in what some astronomers call the "cosmic dark ages,"
they added.
It was a relatively tiny object at first, 1 percent the mass of the sun. But
within about 10,000 years -- "the blink of an eye," according to the
researchers -- it grew into a giant full-fledged star at least 100 times the
sun's mass.
While none of the stars survive today, their influence remains.
The processes churning inside the stars synthesized the universe's first heavy
elements. In dying, these stars may have blasted this stuff back into space to
become building blocks of future stars and planets composed of many more
elements.
Hernquist said these stars may have died in a very bright supernova or might
have collapsed in on themselves, forming black holes with relatively little of
their material ejected into space as ingredients for future stars.

==
The Age of the Earth by Brent Dalrymple
==
"Quaternary Dating Methods" by Mike Walker
==
http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page
==
Science uses logic and experimental methods to measure and describe the
material world. It yields knowledge about the workings of molecules and
machines, mitosis and momentum. Science has no moral valence. It is neutral.
DNA technology can craft a cure for a cancer or produce a weapon of
bio-terrorism. It is only a person's application of science that takes on
a moral dimension where ethics comes on the scene.
==
 The earliest recorded eclipse was in China on October 22, 2134 BC
==
The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory
George Musser 
==
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/DatingMethods.html

http://sciwebserver.science.mcmaster.ca/geo/research/age/beyond_carbon.htm
==
London's Natural History Museum pride themselves on being able to identify
species from around the globe.
The museum has more than 28 million insect species in its collection, 
==
Great Pyramid Consensus is that it was built from around 2580 to 2560 BC.  
==
Molecules of oxygen are paramagnetic, but that's due to the way the electrons
are arranged. In most stable compounds of oxygen (particularly organic ones),
the electrons are paired up so as to be diamagnetic. 
==
That's the major difference between science and superstition -Science still
works, even if you don't believe in it.
==
But a society that does not value critical thinking, the laying out of
rational arguments, and the use of logic in debating its issues, is a society
in decline and risking a return to obscurantism. The irony here is that the
most important documents regulating American life, the Constitution and the
Bill of Rights, were in fact a direct product of the philosophy of the
Enlightenment, and were drafted by people like Thomas Jefferson, with a very
keen interest in philosophy and rational discourse. Of course, the
Constitution has been under constant assault over the past few decades, in
synch with the rising tide of religious fundamentalism and irrationalism.
Appreciating what philosophy is about and how it works may make a significant
contribution toward reversing that tide.
==
Philosophy can never settle anything because,
unlike science, it does not rely on experimental evidence.
==
fallacies:
http://www.nizkor. org/features/ fallacies/
http://www.don- lindsay-archive. org/skeptic/ arguments. html
http://www.onegoodm ove.org/fallacy/ toc.htm
http://www.austhink .org/critical/ pages/fallacies. html
==
Magnetic Field Weakening in Stages, Old Ships' Logs Suggest

Earth's magnetic field is weakening in staggered steps, a new analysis of
centuries-old ships logs suggests.
The finding could help scientists better understand the way Earth's magnetic
poles reverse.
The planet's magnetic field flipsnorth becomes south and vice versaon average
every 300,000 years. However, the actual time between reversals varies widely.
The field last flipped about 800,000 years ago, according to the geologic
record.
Since 1840, when accurate measures of the intensity were first made, the field
strength has declined by about 5 percent per century.
If this decline is continuous, the magnetic field could drop to zero and
reverse sometime within the next 2,000 years.
But the field might not always be in steady decline, according to a new study
appearing in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science. The data show that field
strength was relatively stable between 1590 and 1840.
"It now looks as though it happens in steps rather than just one continuous
fall," said David Gubbins, an earth scientist at the University of Leeds in
the United Kingdom.
Records and Math
The magnetic field protects Earth from cosmic radiation. In its absence,
scientists say, Earth would be subjected to more electrical storms that
disrupt power grids and satellite communications (sun storm photos).
Humans and other animals would possibly be exposed to additional health
hazards.
For time periods before 1840, when more accurate techniques came available,
scientists have been able to measure the field's intensity by looking at the
orientation of magnetic minerals in rocks and pottery shards.
But this technique, dubbed paleomagnetism, has an error margin of 10 percent.
"A 10 percent error in field strength is bigger than the change we've seen in
the past 200 or 300 years," Gubbins said
To more accurately measure older samples of the field's rate of decline,
Gubbins and his colleagues used new data from historic sources, including
ships' logs.
The ships' logs provide information on declinationthe direction compasses
pointand, beginning around 1700, inclinationthe angle a magnetic needle makes
relative to the horizon.
Using statistics to combine intensity measurments starting in 1590 with the
data from the ships' logs allowed the team to reduce the inaccuracies, Gubbins
explained.
What they determined is that the field was relatively stable for about 250
years.
Gary Glatzmaier is an earth scientist at the University of California, Santa
Cruz. He models the processes deep inside the Earth that create the magnetic
field and lead to reversals over hundreds of thousands of years.
He says the results of the new study confirm his own ideas based on his models
that the magnetic-field strength doesn't change at a constant rate but is
always erraticincreasing, decreasing, or staying flat for varying lengths of
time.
"If [the field's activity] stayed constant, that would be worth noting," he
said.
Growing Patches
When Gubbins and his colleagues analyzed their data, they found that the most
recent decline can be explained by patches of reverse magnetic field that have
been growing in and migrating around the Southern Hemisphere since about 1800.
"It does look like the patches first formed toward the end of the 18th
century, when Captain Cook was busy sorting out navigation and measuring
magnetic field all over the world," Gubbins said.
Captain James Cook was an English explorer famous for his voyages to the
Pacific Ocean (Oceania map) and for mapping Australia's east coast, the
Hawaiian Islands, Newfoundland, and New Zealand.
Glatzmaier agrees that the patches of reverse magnetic field are responsible
for the measured decrease in field intensity over the past two centuries.
He added, however, that the patches are not the cause of the weakening
magnetic field but rather a "manifest of what is happening deep below in the
core. The field is changing because of the dynamo well below the surface."
The dynamo is the geologic process that creates the magnetic field, maintains
it, and causes it to reverse.
Scientists believe the dynamo occurs where heat from the solid inner core
churns the liquid outer core of nickel and iron.
Since the last field reversal about 800,000 years ago, the field has tried but
failed to reverse somewhere between 10 and 20 times, Gubbins says.
"So the field [intensity] is continually zigzagging all the time," he said.
Studying the most recent change in intensity, he adds, will provide a new
window on the physical processes of how the magnetic field reverses.
==
Earth's Core, Magnetic Field Changing Fast, Study Says
Rapid changes in the churning movement of Earth's liquid outer core are
weakening the magnetic field in some regions of the planet's surface, a new
study says.
"What is so surprising is that rapid, almost sudden, changes take place in the
Earth's magnetic field," said study co-author Nils Olsen, a geophysicist at the
Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen.
The findings suggest similarly quick changes are simultaneously occurring in
the liquid metal, 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) below the surface, he said.
The swirling flow of molten iron and nickel around Earth's solid center
triggers an electrical current, which generates the planet's magnetic field.
The study, published recently in Nature Geoscience, modeled Earth's magnetic
field using nine years of highly accurate satellite data.
Flip-Flop
Fluctuations in the magnetic field have occurred in several far-flung regions
of Earth, the researchers found.
In 2003 scientists found pronounced changes in the magnetic field in the
Australasian region. In 2004, however, the changes were focused on Southern
Africa.
The changes "may suggest the possibility of an upcoming reversal of the
geomagnetic field," said study co-author Mioara Mandea, a scientist at the
German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam.
Earth's magnetic field has reversed hundreds of times over the past billion
years, and the process could take thousands of years to complete.
The decline in the magnetic field also is opening Earth's upper atmosphere to
intense charged particle radiation, scientists say.
Satellite data show the geomagnetic field decreasing in the South Atlantic
region, Mandea said, adding that an oval-shaped area east of Brazil is
significantly weaker than similar latitudes in other parts of the world.
"It is in this region that the shielding effect of the magnetic field is
severely reduced, thus allowing high energy particles of the hard radiation
belt to penetrate deep into the upper atmosphere to altitudes below a hundred
kilometers (62 miles)," Mandea said.
This radiation does not influence temperatures on Earth. The particles,
however, do affect technical and radio equipment and can damage electronic
equipment on satellites and airplanes, Olsen of the Danish space center said.
The study documents just how rapidly the flow in Earth's core is changing.
By using satellite imagery, researchers have a nearly continuous measurement
of changes, he said.
==
"All models are wrong, but some are useful." 
So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago,
==
Your Brain Lies to You
FALSE beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun
revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less
egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator
Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created
a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult
than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories 
and mislead us along the way.
The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computers hard
drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the
brain about the size and shape of a fat mans curled pinkie finger. But the
information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it
down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the
fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the
context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the
capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably dont remember how you
learned it.
This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget
whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer,
people often later remember it as true.
With time, this misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a
noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during
the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage
to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and
its implications gain strength. This could explain why, during the 2004
presidential campaign, it took some weeks for the Swift Boat Veterans for
Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry to have an effect on his standing in
the polls.
Even if they do not understand the neuroscience behind source amnesia,
campaign strategists can exploit it to spread misinformation. They know that
if their message is initially memorable, its impression will persist long
after it is debunked. In repeating a falsehood, someone may back it up with an
opening line like I think I read somewhere or even with a reference to a
specific source.
In one study, a group of Stanford students was exposed repeatedly to an
unsubstantiated claim taken from a Web site that Coca-Cola is an effective
paint thinner. Students who read the statement five times were nearly
one-third more likely than those who read it only twice to attribute it to
Consumer Reports (rather than The National Enquirer, their other choice),
giving it a gloss of credibility.
Adding to this innate tendency to mold information we recall is the way our
brains fit facts into established mental frameworks. We tend to remember news
that accords with our worldview, and discount statements that contradict it.
In another Stanford study, 48 students, half of whom said they favored capital
punishment and half of whom said they opposed it, were presented with two
pieces of evidence, one supporting and one contradicting the claim that
capital punishment deters crime. Both groups were more convinced by the
evidence that supported their initial position.
Psychologists have suggested that legends propagate by striking an emotional
chord. In the same way, ideas can spread by emotional selection, rather than
by their factual merits, encouraging the persistence of falsehoods about
Coke  or about a presidential candidate.
Journalists and campaign workers may think they are acting to counter
misinformation by pointing out that it is not true. But by repeating a false
rumor, they may inadvertently make it stronger. In its concerted effort to
stop the smears, the Obama campaign may want to keep this in mind. Rather than
emphasize that Mr. Obama is not a Muslim, for instance, it may be more
effective to stress that he embraced Christianity as a young man.
Consumers of news, for their part, are prone to selectively accept and
remember statements that reinforce beliefs they already hold. In a replication
of the study of students impressions of evidence about the death penalty,
researchers found that even when subjects were given a specific instruction to
be objective, they were still inclined to reject evidence that disagreed with
their beliefs.
In the same study, however, when subjects were asked to imagine their reaction
if the evidence had pointed to the opposite conclusion, they were more
open-minded to information that contradicted their beliefs. Apparently, it
pays for consumers of controversial news to take a moment and consider that
the opposite interpretation may be true.
In 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Supreme Court wrote that the
best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the
competition of the market. Holmes erroneously assumed that ideas are more
likely to spread if they are honest. Our brains do not naturally obey this
admirable dictum, but by better understanding the mechanisms of memory perhaps
we can move closer to Holmess ideal.
===
n., pl. par·tis pris (pär'te¯).
An inclination for or against something or someone that affects judgment; 
prejudice or bias.
==
 It is a great mistake here to suppose that a little knowledge is dangerous;
every grain of pure truth is precious, and will bear precious fruit. 
==
Far off in universe, the same laws found
Natures laws appear to be the same in the distant universe as they are here, a
study has found.Astronomers determined that one of the key numbers in physics
is about the same in a galaxy six billion light years away as it is on Earth.
A light-year is the distance light travels in a year.Scientists have debated
whether the laws of physics may change at different cosmic times and places.
The study suggests these laws are the same in this galaxy half way across the
visible Universe as they are here, said astrophysicist Michael Murphy of
Swinburne University in Australia, lead author of a paper on the findings. The
work appears in the June 20 issue of the research journal Science.The number
studied was the weight or mass ratio between the proton and electron, parts of
the atom. The ratio is found to be about 1836.15. The astronomers examined the
issue by effectively looking back in time at a quasar, the luminous core of a
distant galaxy, whose light took 7.5 billion years to reach us. Along the way,
it was partly absorbed by ammonia gas in another galaxy.Not only is ammonia
useful in bathroom cleaning, its a good molecule to test our understanding of
physics, Murphy said. Ammonia absorbs the quasars radio waves, a form of
light, but only waves with certain energies. These precise absorption
characteristics are sensitive to the proton-electron mass ratio, and can be
measured from Earth using devices known as spectroscopes.The researchers used
a spectroscope on the Effelsberg 100m radio telescope near Bonn, Germany. By
comparing the ammonia absorption with that of other molecules, we were able to
determine the value of the proton-electron mass ratio in this galaxy, and
confirm that it is the same as it is on Earth, said Christian Henkel of the
Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, a co-author of the study.The
astronomers said they plan to continue testing natures laws in different cosmic
places and times, but they need to find more absorbing galaxies. The studied
galaxy, designated B0218+367, is the only target for this kind of research so
far. There must be many more target galaxies out there, as soon as the right
telescopes to find them are available.Murphy said this problem could be
overcome with the proposed Square Kilometre Array, or SKA, telescope, which
scientists also believe could pick up distant civilizations television
signals.The SKA is the largest, most ambitious international telescope project
ever conceived. When completed it will have an enormous collecting area, and
will allow us to search for more absorbing galaxies, Murphy said. The
telescopes location, which has been short-listed to Western Australia or
Southern Africa, is to be announced within two years.By continuing their
research into natures forces, the astronomers also hope to find a window into
the extra dimensions of space that many theoretical physicists think may exist.
==
 memes - 
: n. A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or
idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to
another.
==
A team figured out how salmonella is able to get your immune system to
ignore it while it grows.
The culprit is a protein called AvrA. Here is how it works: Usually, when your
body is invaded by a bacteria, the bug causes tissue damage, releasing
chemicals that lead to swelling and inflammation. Physically, inflammation can
isolate the invaders, making it difficult for them to travel to other parts of
the body. Chemically, it attracts phagocytes, white blood cells that kill bad
bacteria.
Salmonella has the ability to punch through the tight links of cells that make
up the intestinal wall, using an arsenal of proteins and toxins it can inject
into cells. Sun said scientists always thought AvrA was one of these, but, as
her team reported June 4 in the online journal PloS One, AvrA actually has an
opposite function.
The study found that AvrA can maintain the tight structure of cell junctions
in the intestinal cells, she said.
AvrA temporarily stops salmonella from breaking apart the cell links. Because
the bug doesn't damage tissue during this phase, there's no inflammatory
response. Instead, salmonella is mostly left alone, free to grow and multiply
into a formidable invasion force. Only then does it break through the
intestinal walls, beginning its reign of terror and making you sick.
==
Huxley  _Manual of the Anatomy of the Invertebrated Animals_ (1878)
==
Ion Microprobe Technology Reveals Earth was Habitable 4.3 Billion Years Ago
A team of scientists led by University of Wisconsin-Madison geologists
Takayuki Ushikubo, Valley and Noriko Kita have completed an analysis of
ancient minerals called zircons which shows liquid water existed at least 4.3
billion years ago and that heavy weathering by an acrid climate possibly
destroyed the surface of the Earth's earliest continents when the planet was a
mere 150 million years old.
Zircons, the oldest known materials on Earth, offer a window in time back as
far as 4.4 billion years ago. Because these crystals are exceptionally
resistant to chemical changes, they have become the gold standard for
determining the age of ancient rocks, says UW-Madison geologist John Valley.
Valley previously used these tiny mineral grains  smaller than a speck of
sand  to show that rocky continents and liquid water formed on the Earth much
earlier than previously thought, about 4.2 billion years ago.
Ushikubo, the first author on the new study, says that atmospheric weathering
could provide an answer to a long-standing question in geology: why no rock
samples have ever been found dating back to the first 500 million years after
the Earth formed.
"Currently, no rocks remain from before about 4 billion years ago," he says.
"Some people consider this as evidence for very high temperature conditions on
the ancient Earth."
Previous explanations for the missing rocks have included destruction by
bombardment of meteorites and the possibility that the early Earth was a
red-hot sea of magma in which rocks could not form.
The current analysis suggests a different scenario. Ushikubo and colleagues
used a sophisticated new instrument called an ion microprobe to analyze
isotope ratios of the element lithium in zircons from the Jack Hills in
western Australia. By comparing these chemical fingerprints to lithium
compositions in zircons from continental crust and primitive rocks similar to
the Earth's mantle, they found evidence that the young planet already had the
beginnings of continents, relatively cool temperatures and liquid water by the
time the Australian zircons formed.
"At 4.3 billion years ago, the Earth already had habitable conditions,"
Ushikubo says.
The zircons' lithium signatures also hold signs of rock exposure on the
Earth's surface and breakdown by weather and water, identified by low levels
of a heavy lithium isotope. "Weathering can occur at the surface on
continental crust or at the bottom of the ocean, but the [observed] lithium
compositions can only be formed from continental crust," says Ushikubo.
The findings suggest that extensive weathering may have destroyed the Earth's
earliest rocks, he says.
"Extensive weathering earlier than 4 billion years ago actually makes a lot of
sense," says Valley. "People have suspected this, but there's never been any
direct evidence."
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can combine with water to form carbonic acid,
which falls as acid rain. The early Earth's atmosphere is believed to have
contained extremely high levels of carbon dioxide  maybe 10,000 times as much
as today.
At those levels, you would have had vicious acid rain and intense greenhouse
effects. "That is a condition that will dissolve rocks," Valley says. "If
granites were on the surface of the Earth, they would have been destroyed
almost immediately  geologically speaking  and the only remnants that we could
recognize as ancient would be these zircons."
==
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pscindx.htm  science
==
"The analysis of all the stars studied with HARPS shows that about one third
of all solar-like stars have either super-Earth or Neptune-like planets with
orbital periods shorter than 50 days."
==
Drake Equation, a set of mathematical assumptions that attempts to predict how
many advanced civilizations might exist in the Milky Way galaxy.

The equation is N = R* x fp x ne x fe x fi x fc x L. It says that the number
of civilizations we might communicate with (denoted by N) equals the rate of
star formation (R*) multiplied by the fraction of stars that have planets (fp)
multiplied by the average number of planets around a star that can support life
(ne) multiplied by the number of those planets that actually develop life (fe)
multiplied by the fraction that develop intelligent life (fi) multiplied by
the fraction that develop technology that can be detected from Earth (fc).

All this is then multiplied by the length of time a technological civilization
can exist (L).
==
The Universe in a Mirror 
By Robert Zimmerman 
(Princeton University Press, 287 pages, $29.95)
==
Missing Matter Of Universe Found; Cosmic Web Discovered
Now, in an extensive search of the relatively recent, local universe,
University of Colorado at Boulder astronomers said they have definitively
found about half of the missing normal matter, called baryons, in the spaces
between the galaxies. This important component of the universe is known as the
intergalactic medium and it extends essentially throughout all of space, from
just outside our Milky Way galaxy to the most distant regions of space
observed by astronomers.
The questions "where have the local baryons gone, and what are their
properties?" are being answered with greater certainty than ever before. "We
think we are seeing the strands of a web-like structure that forms the
backbone of the universe," said CU-Boulder Professor Mike Shull. "What we are
confirming in detail is that intergalactic space, which intuitively might seem
to be empty, is in fact the reservoir for most of the normal, baryonic matter
in the universe."
Hubble observations made nearly a decade ago by Todd Tripp and colleagues
first reported finding the hottest portion of this missing matter in the local
universe. That study utilized spectroscopic observations of one quasar to look
for absorbing intergalactic gas along the path to the quasar.
Writing in the May 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal, doctoral student
Charles Danforth and Shull of CU-Boulder's astrophysical and planetary
sciences department reported on observations taken along sight-lines to 28
quasars. The analysis probably represents the most detailed look to date at
the intergalactic matter within about 4 billion light-years of Earth, Shull
said.
Baryons are protons, neutrons, and other subatomic particles that make up
ordinary matter such as hydrogen, helium and heavier elements. Baryonic matter
forms stars, planets, moons and even the interstellar gas and dust from which
new stars are born, said Shull. Astronomers caution that the missing baryonic
matter is not to be confused with "dark matter," a mysterious and exotic form
of matter that is only detected via its gravitational pull.
Danforth and Shull looked for the missing baryonic matter by using the light
from distant quasars -- the bright cores of galaxies with active black holes
-- to probe the spider web-like structure that permeates the seemingly
invisible space between galaxies, much like a flashlight shining through fog.
Using the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph aboard NASA's Hubble Space
Telescope and NASA's Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, the astronomers
found hot gases -- mostly oxygen and hydrogen -- which provide a
three-dimensional probe of intergalactic space. The two spacecraft helped the
researchers find the spectral "fingerprints" of intervening oxygen and
hydrogen superimposed on the quasars' light.
The bright quasar light was measured to penetrate more than 650 filaments of
hydrogen in the cosmic web. Eighty-three filaments were found laced with
highly ionized oxygen in which five electrons have stripped away, said Shull.
The presence of highly ionized oxygen and other elements between the galaxies
is believed to trace large quantities of invisible, hot ionized hydrogen in
the universe. These vast reservoirs of hydrogen have largely escaped detection
because they are too hot to be seen in visible light, yet too cool to be seen
in X-rays, the researchers said.
The oxygen "tracer" was probably created when exploding stars in galaxies
spewed the oxygen back into intergalactic space where it mixed with the
hydrogen and then was shocked and heated to very high temperatures, Shull
said. The team also found that about 20 percent of the baryons reside in the
voids between the web-like filaments.
Within these voids could be dwarf galaxies or wisps of matter that could turn
into stars and galaxies in billions of years, said the CU-Boulder researchers.
Probing the vast cosmic web will be a key goal for the Cosmic Origins
Spectrograph, or COS, a $70 million instrument designed and built by
CU-Boulder with Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder to probe the
nearby galaxies and the distant universe. Astronauts plan to install it on
Hubble during a servicing mission later this year.
"COS will allow us to make more robust and more detailed core samples of the
cosmic web," Shull said. "We predict that COS will find considerably more of
the missing baryonic matter in weaker filaments.
"Our goal is to confirm the existence of the cosmic web by mapping its
structure, measuring the amount of heavy metals found in it, and measuring its
temperature," he said. "Studying the cosmic web gives us information on how
galaxies built up over time."
The COS team hopes to observe 100 additional quasars and build up a survey of
more than 10,000 hydrogen filaments in the cosmic web, many laced with heavy
elements from early stars.

==
New Evidence From Earliest Known Human Settlement In The Americas
New evidence from the Monte Verde archaeological site in southern
Chile confirms its status as the earliest known human settlement in
the Americas and provides additional support for the theory that one
early migration route followed the Pacific Coast more than 14,000
years ago.
The study was conducted by a team of anthropologists, geologists and
botanists headed by Vanderbilt University's Distinguished Professor of
Anthropology Tom Dillehay and was reported in the May 9 issue of the
journal Science.
The paper, which includes the first new data reported from the site in
10 years, includes the identification of nine species of seaweed and
marine algae recovered from hearths and other areas in the ancient
settlement. The seaweed samples were directly dated between 14,220 to
13,980 years ago, confirming that the upper layer of the site, labeled
Monte Verde II, was occupied more than 1,000 years earlier than any
other reliably dated human settlements in the Americas.
The Monte Verde site was discovered in 1976. It is located in a peat
bog about 500 miles south of Santiago and has revealed well-preserved
ruins of a small settlement of 20 to 30 people living in a dozen huts
along a small creek. A wide variety of food has been found at the
site, including extinct species of llama and an elephant-like animal
called a gomphothere, shellfish, vegetables and nuts.
In 1979, when Dillehay and his colleagues first reported that the
radiocarbon dating of the bones and charcoal found at Monte Verde
returned dates of more than 14,000 years before the present, it
stirred up a major controversy because the early dates appeared to
conflict with other archaeological evidence of the settlement of North
America.
Since at least 1900, the prevailing theory had been that human
colonization began at the end of the last Ice Age about 13,000 years
ago, when groups of big game hunters, called the Clovis culture,
followed herds from Siberia to Alaska over a land bridge across the
Bering Strait and then gradually spread southward. None of the Clovis
artifacts were dated earlier than 13,000 years ago. So having a
substantially older human settlement in southern Chile was difficult
to reconcile with this view.
It wasn't until 1997 that the controversy was resolved by a prominent
group of archaeologists who reviewed the evidence, visited the Monte
Verde site and unanimously approved the dating.
Most scholars now believe that people first entered the new world
through the Bering land bridge more than 16,000 years ago. After
entering Alaska, it is not known whether they colonized the hemisphere
by moving down the Pacific coast, by inland routes or both. The
general view is that the early immigrants would have spread down the
coast much faster than they could move inland because they could
exploit familiar coastal resources more readily and get much of their
food from the sea. However, evidence to support the coastal migration
theory has been particularly hard to find because sea levels at the
time were about 200 feet lower than today: As the sea level rose, it
would have covered most of the early coastal settlements.
==
Gram staining (or Gram's method) is an empirical method of differentiating
bacterial species into two large groups (Gram-positive and Gram-negative)
based on the chemical and physical properties of their cell walls.
The method is named after its inventor, the Danish scientist Hans Christian
Gram (1853  1938), who developed the technique in 1884 to discriminate between
pneumococci and Klebsiella pneumoniae bacteria.
1Gram-negative bacteria are those bacteria that do not retain crystal violet
dye in the Gram staining protocol Gram-positive bacteria will retain the
crystal violet dye when washed in a decolorizing solution. In a Gram stain
test, a counterstain (commonly safranin) is added after the crystal violet,
coloring all Gram-negative bacteria a red or pink color. The test itself is
useful in classifying two distinct types of bacteria based on structural
differences in their cell walls.
Many species of Gram-negative bacteria are pathogenic, meaning they can cause
disease in a host organism. This pathogenic capability is usually associated
with certain components of Gram-negative cell walls, in particular the
lipopolysaccharide (also known as LPS or endotoxin) layer. In humans, LPS
triggers an innate immune response characterized by cytokine production and
immune system activation. Inflammation is a common result of cytokine
production, which can also produce host toxicity.
==
Science tells us what is happening while we are not there to watch.
==
Kuhn Structure of Scientific Revolutions    Great classic
==
Galileo credited Cardinal Baronius with the 1598 aphorism, "The Bible was
written to show us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.
==
Combining data over a period of
three years, they have produced an image containing over 100,000
galaxies over an area four times the size of the full Moon. 
==
God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion
(Hardcover) by Guy Consolmagno (Author) 
==
"Quaternary Dating Methods" by Mike Walker.
==
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley said they had used new
rock dating methods to pinpoint the extinction of the dinosaurs more precisely
than ever before.
Their improved argon-argon dating method places the Cretaceous-Tertiary,
or K/T, boundary at 65.95 million years ago, give or take 40,000 years.
Earlier estimates had put it at 65.5 million years ago, with a 300,000-year
margin of error.
==
 Evolving Brain by R. Grant Steen Stung:  
The Accidental Mind by David J. Linden
===
Genetic variations that have been inherited together are known as haplotypes.
==
Moon's birth changed the length of days on Earth
THE collision that formed our moon may have defined the length of our planet's
day and set the direction in which it spins.
The moon is widely thought to have formed after an object roughly the size of
Mars crashed into the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, throwing up a cloud of
debris that eventually coalesced into a rocky sphere. Robin Canup of the
Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, wanted to find out if this
process was influenced by the spin of the Earth at the time - something
previous models of the moon's formation did not take into account.
Canup built a computer model that used as many as 120,000 pieces of virtual
rock to simulate the two colliding bodies. Her model showed that the Earth's
rotation beforehand may have been very different to what it is today (Icarus,
DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2008.03.011). Prior to the impact, the Earth's axis of
rotation may have been steeply tilted, and the planet would have spun much
faster, with a day lasting as little as 4 hours. The model also showed that
the direction in which the Earth spins could have been reversed by the impact.
If the Earth had previously rotated in this way, its current spin and that of
the moon can be accounted for, Canup says. What's more, if the Earth had once
spun faster, enough material would have been thrown up by the impact to make
the moon the size it is.
==
Gansser, A., 1964. Geology of the Himalayas, John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.,
New York.
==
STOCKHOLM - Scientists have found a cluster of spruces in the mountains in
western Sweden which, at an age of 8,000 years, may be the world's oldest
living trees.
The hardy Norway spruces were found perched high on a mountain side where they
have remained safe from recent dangers such as logging, but exposed to the
harsh weather conditions of the mountain range that separates Norway and
Sweden.
Carbon dating of the trees carried out at a laboratory in Miami, Florida,
showed the oldest of them first set root about 8,000 years ago, making it the
world's oldest known living tree, Umea University Professor Leif Kullman said.
California's "Methuselah" tree, a Great Basin bristlecone pine, is often cited
as the world's oldest living tree with a recorded age of between 4,500 and
5,000 years.
Two other spruces, also found in the course of climate change studies in the
Swedish county of Dalarna, were shown to be 4,800 and 5,500 years old.
"These were the first woods that grew after the Ice Age," said Lars Hedlund,
responsible for environmental surveys in the county of Dalarna and
collaborator in climate studies there.
"That means that when you speak of climate change today, you can in these
(trees) see pretty much every single climate change that has occurred."
Although a single tree trunk can become at most about 600 years old, the
spruces had survived by pushing out another trunk as soon as the old one died,
Professor Kullman said.
Rising temperatures in the area in recent years had allowed the spruces to
grow rapidly, making them easier to find in the rugged terrain, he added.
"For quite some time they have endured as bushes maybe 1/2 meter tall," he
said.
"But over the past few decades we have seen a much warmer climate, which has
meant that they have popped up like mushrooms in the soil."
==
A Meat-Eating Neanderthal from Jonzac
There is a new isotopic dietary analysis of Neanderthals at the site of Jonzac
(Chez Pinaud), in SW France, available in the Journal of Human Evolution
(Richards et al., 2008). Here's the abstract:
We report here on the isotopic analysis (carbon and nitrogen) of collagen
extracted from a Neanderthal tooth and animal bone from the late Mousterian
site of Jonzac (Charente-Maritime, France). This study was undertaken to test
whether the isotopic evidence indicates that animal protein was the main
source of dietary protein for this relatively late Neanderthal, as suggested
by previous studies. This was of particular interest here because this is the
first isotopic study of a relatively late Neanderthal associated with
Mousterian of Acheulian Tradition (MTA, dating to approximately 55,000 to
40,000 BP) technology. We found that the Jonzac Neanderthal had isotopic
values consistent with a diet in which the main protein sources were large
herbivores, particularly bovids and horses. We also found evidence of
different dietary niches between the Neanderthal and a hyena at the site, with
the hyena consuming mainly reindeer.
This is a good, empirically strong study with many comparative data points
drawn from associated faunal remains, and the conclusions are robust. It is
also original in its use of collagen extracted from tooth dentine as opposed
to bone, the latter being the material on which all previous isotopic studies
of diet have been done. This is important because:
"Unlike bone, tooth dentine likely does not alter
over a lifetime, and therefore it reflects a specific period of
time of formation. Therefore, the isotopic data from this Neanderthal
premolar do not reflect the lifetime average, but instead
the diet at the ages of later childhood/early adolescence.
Our isotopic results for the Jonzac Neanderthal are compared
to the those reported for other European Neanderthals
in Table 3. The isotopic values are remarkably similar for all
of the Neanderthals, and in all cases, the authors of the various
studies concluded, as we have for Jonzac, that the main source
of dietary protein was animal protein, likely from large herbivores.
In no case do we see isotopic evidence for the significant
consumption of aquatic (marine or freshwater) protein,
as has been observed from Gravettian humans in Europe (Richards
et al., 2001; Pettitt et al., 2003). The results of our isotopic
study of the Jonzac Neanderthal therefore support the
emerging picture from isotopic studies that Neanderthals
have a similar dietary adaptation over a wide range of environments
and over a relat