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That contention would be at odds with reports of a possible coming "Little Ice Age" due to the current Maunder-type sunspot minimum.

It is also at odds with reports of no global warming since the late 1990's.

And on a macro scale, it's a bit odd to judge planetary data on merely human timescales. Technically, we're still in an Ice Age, and are merely between continental glacial advances.

Your astonomy now link gives lots of good information, except for one thing: the magnitude of the cooling effect proposed. It also contains drivel, like someone claiming to be a serious scientist saying "There is no strong evidence, that global warming is caused by human activity" and "In the days of the Maunder minimum... Greenland was covered by glaciers”
A two year old article from the Daily Mail saying that there has been no warming since 1998, a year chosen in many of these stories because it was the hottest year on record at the time, is just laughable when all 10 of the 10 hottest years on record have been since 1998.
As for us still being in an ice age, most people here know that. Yes, the earth has been hotter in the past, even with the dimmer sun of the past (it is getting slowly and steadily brighter over millions of years). Changes are not the big problem. The speed of them is.

That contention would be at odds with reports of a possible coming "Little Ice Age" due to the current Maunder-type sunspot minimum.

It is also at odds with reports of no global warming since the late 1990's.

And on a macro scale, it's a bit odd to judge planetary data on merely human timescales. Technically, we're still in an Ice Age, and are merely between continental glacial advances.

https://astronomynow.com/2016/... If you're going to post breaking stuff like this, at least use a fucking reputable source!

Radio is very noisy. Why would any advanced civilization think that it would be a great way to communicate over long distances?

Because microwaves near the 21cm band pass through dust clouds that would block visible light and various other frequency bands, so its good for really long distance communication. Hydrogen 21cm detectors are also a good way to measure the large scale structure of the universe. See The Watering Hole.

Congrats to Hubble. The whole thing is only 2" across!
http://astronomynow.com/wp-con...

There was a theory put out earlier this year about Jupiter 'roving' about the inner solar system and eliminating the super-earth that is seen in other solar systems
http://astronomynow.com/2015/0...

Is there any correlation between these two theories?
Like Jupiter breaking up an earlier Super Earth, and then the remnants of that larger world becoming the Earth and Moon...

Is there any chance of Jupiter having drug the leftovers into a more distant orbit and forming the asteroid belt with them?

Or you can check this out:

"The big bang theory assumes that when the Universe was created there was nothing outside it. Therefore, for the big bang to be rotating when it occurred suggests that it was rotating relative to something. “The simple answer is that it was spinning relative to other Universes in some larger space,” says Longo. “We could never see outside of our Universe in principle, but if we could show that the present Universe still retains the initial angular momentum within its galaxies, it would be evidence that our Universe exists within some larger space.”"

I guess they lifted it from his Wikipedia page, if you bother to click through you get to the list, although they only have 326. The 1000 comes from reprints, different editions and different languages, which to me is a bit spurious.

Anyway, a bad write up doesn't take away from the mans greatness. He will be missed.

If you look at the actual data you'll note that the rate of sea level rise has decreased since 2002.

No, he'll see a denialist bufoon trying to split a 20 year graph of noisy data into two distinct sections. He won't see the scientist that actually created that data doing something so dumb.

First of all, genius, the scientists collecting that data apply a linear regression right there on the chart, to the "noisy data". If you do the same thing to the most recent ten years worth (I have) you'll see that there's a significant decrease in the trend. That is all perfectly legitimate analysis.

I'm a realist, and believe in emperical verification of theory. So far the warmist alarmist predictions have been quite poor. They are adept at constant revisionism though.

You tried exactly the same back in 2009, to claim that global warming had stopped in 1998. However, 3 years more data of climing temperatures showed that you were exactly the idiot people said you were. Trying to make patterns out of short term noise.

I guess you're unaware that temperatures have in fact not climbed statistically significantly since 1998. You should know your subject matter better - that will prevent you from making a fool of yourself.

We'll see how the trends go as the Sun continues into the next solar Grand Minimum.

According to three independent studies of the Sun's interior, visible surface and corona, solar cycle 25 will have significantly reduced activity, or may not even appear at all.

We're currently approaching the weak maximum of Cycle 24, so we're most likely looking at a minimum of twenty years of low solar activity - similar to that during the Little Ice Age. That will be a great empirical test of the dominance of CO2 concentration as a warming influence.

Dear god this must be a slow news day - I have never seen such a blatant slashvertisment in all the time I have wasted here.

If you are tired of reading ads then read about the interesting stuff the mars rover found the other day, or maybe about this interesting comet

Please Slashdot - don't make me hate you!

I'm in the same boat. My first degree is physics, but now I'm doing my PhD is computer science. My particular interests are in particle physics, dark matter and astronomy/cosmology. The best place to scratch my itch I find is http://www.arxiv.org./ It's a preprint archive for physics, math, computer science and so-on. http://www.science20.com/ has some interesting blogs, but you have to be careful as there are a number of people there who use it as a platform to advance their own ideas. For more general science reading I have http://www.sciencedaily.com/ and http://www.astronomynow.com/ bookmarked. On the educational side I have Leonard Susskind's general education courses in physics bookmarked. They can be found at http://newpackettech.com/Resources/Susskind/.

Kim Stanley Robinson has massive aquifers on Mars as part of his trilogy of novels set there. Dunno how far reaching such a speculation is, this piece from Oct mentions them at the end as the likely suspect in flooding events: Underground aquifers formed Martian lakes. If KSR is correct obtaining water won't be much of an issue in colonizing Mars ourselves.

And it does... here
and here

use google for the rest.

I thought that "Artists Conception" looked oddly familiar. Then I remembered this; http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/Discoveries/2009/0729/are-astronomers-watching-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-betelgeuse

I seem to remember it was also in a Slashdot article that references this.

Uhm... so which is it, people? Or is it just clip art?

Seeking more water. Water equals fuel, right? The livestream should be here

You know, Rev, you seem to have gotten so bogged down in eating your words that your point is lost. So I'll give it a shot.

If this phenomenon is so colossal in size, if there is so much plastic swirling around in the ocean, if humans have fouled up the water to such a massive extent that we all need to sit up and take notice right f-ing now, then why isn't there any imagery? I've seen pictures of viruses and pictures of surface plumes on a distant star and pictures of a puppy in utero . X-rays let us see our bones and EEG's let us see our thoughts, and Britney lets us see it all.

So is this phenomenon really so hard for somebody to image? It seems like the kind of thing people are good at, and it must be important to us or we wouldn't spend so much time, energy, and money on it. I'm not saying the whole thing is made up, or the whole thing is inconsequential. I'm just saying some of us would have a whole lot better idea what to think of this thing if we could see some pictures.

And thank you in advance.

The first one found in 2005 made big news. Since then there have been seven more suspected.

Wait a minute, don't we have math and engineering to deal with all those problems (we certainly did in the 60's and 70's)?

But the units matter.

Is it just me, or does anyone else detect a sloppiness in our current program that didn't exist before? Maybe it's a symptom of the "Me! Now!" generation-X (and now gen-Y) attitude (disclaimer: I'm not even 30 yet).

This is why we missed Mars.

Mod parent up Funny, sort of: obscure Mars Climate Orbiter reference.

Fair distinction - I will amend what I originally wrote. There are two groups working on this, one from Huntsville, AB, and one from Planck/Italy. Here are two quotes from these guys, the first one from Planck, the second from UAH:

"You don't see a universe that is blurred," he said. "If you take any Hubble Space Telescope Deep Field image you see sharp images, which is enough to tell us that the light has not been distorted or perturbed by fluctuations in space-time from the source to the observer." (Roberto Ragazzoni, Planck)

"If time doesn't become 'fuzzy' beneath a Planck interval, this discovery will present problems to several astrophysical and cosmological models, including the Big Bang model of the universe," (Richard Lieu, UAH).

Now, I have no problem with Ragazzoni's statement, but Lieu's is ridiculous - having the audacity that this result will cause problems to the big bang model? I think it's a bit early to even think of saying that.

This Lieu guy has given multiple interviews, and they all have similarly "grand" conclusions. The Planck guy, who is established, speaks cautiously, while the Associate Professor at UAH (read: still doesn't have an endowed position) plugs himself as much as possible. I don't have any problem with being optimstic that you do something amazing, but this guy doesn't seem to have that degree of cautiousness and suspicion about one's results that scientists HAVE to have. Lacking that, embarassment will result. It's something we all learn...most of us.

Additionally, this isn't the first time he's done this. Back in 99, he made a moderately interesting discovery regarding some phantom radiation from what seemed like empty space. He then insinuated that he had found a major source of dark matter - a big stretch given what he actually did. I'm just saying, this guy has a pattern of drumming up PR and overstating claims.

Basically, I think the space.com interview might be best done AFTER publication, and it might be best to let others decide how good your work is. And as for blaming this on an overzealous PR department - I don't know where his university's PR flunkies would have gotten this info if not from him, and for this to happen twice - I dunno about that. I don't want to sound too critical, but I've seen this stuff too often at conferences and such, and it always gets disproven/retracted/downplayed.

For what it's worth, I still think it was a really cool, and even important experiment. I think it stood on its own without the suspicious and grandiose claims...but that's what it needed to get in MSNBC. Hope his tenure committee considered MSNBC to be a publication.

there is only so many times in a day you can "go make coffee" or "check your email".

Geek Slack List

• http://www.subgenius.com/
• http://www.slackersguild.com/
• BBC News
• http://www.memepool.com/
• http://www.plastic.com/
• http://www.arstechnica.com/
• http://www.metafilter.com/
• http://www.techdirt.com/
• http://www.bottomquark.com/ (Science News)
• http://newsforge.com/
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/
• http://www.anandtech.com/
• http://www.bjorn3d.com/
• http://cellar.org - Image of the Day
• http://www.collegehumor.com/
• http://www.everything2.com/
• http://www.kuro5hin.org/
• http://www.theonion.com/
• NASA - Astronomy Picutre of the Day
• http://www.majorgeeks.com - Windows Shareware / Freeware
• http://www.advogato.org/
• http://www.sweetcode.org/
• http://www.disinfo.com/ - Disinformation
• http://www.somethingawful.com/
• http://www.astronomynow.com/ - Astronomy News
• http://www.aip.org/ - American Institue of Physics - News
• http://www.adequacy.org/

• The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking 1 on Large Computations

Hope this helps =)

That's the kind of sh*t that pisses me off, I don't pay taxes to have the government simply hand that money to a corp.

Actually, that's exactly what you do. Of course you could delude yourself into thinking that your particular share of the money was going into Condoleezza Rice's pocket, or perhaps Colin Powell's paycheck instead.

Of course, your money is probably going to TRW, Lockheed Martin, or Boeing, or perhaps all 3.

Remember, it might be neat to think about Bill Gate's money, or how much cash Microsoft has, but really. Call me when Microsoft gets awarded a multibillion dollar contract that has the potential to blow up or get shot down.

I've never seen Windows crash quite like that.

Mars Climate Orbiter<cough>

UoSAT-1, if I remember correctly (details are sparse on the net) was build on a budget of 60,000 as a student project and piggybacked into orbit on an Ariane-4 comsat launch. A number of subsequent UoSATs are part of the OSCAR series of radio amateur satellites, and a commercial spin-off of the University, SSTL (Surrey Satellite Technology Limited) build and sell minisats in the 200-500Kg rangefor commercial purchasers; see, for example, this report of the launch of UoSAT-12 (from 1999).

The English may well beat the Americans to be the first to discover if water exists on Mars.

The Beagle 2, named after the ship used by Charles Darwin, is due to travel to Mars aboard the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission, also planned for 2003.

The 60-kg, clam-shaped probe is scheduled to land on the surface of Mars on Christmas Day 2003. It will drill into the surface to extract soil samples which will be scanned for signs of water and life.

An artists impression of the probe can be found here

These calculations have been done, and the result is that the best achievable resolution is on the order of 10 centimeters. Enough to read tail numbers on airplanes, not enough to read license plates or newspapers.

Not so fast.

Astronomers have found a way to overcome the atmosphere's turbulence: adaptive optics. If I recall correctly, they shine a laser upwards to create an artificial star, and then by monitoring the twinkling of the artificial star, the telescope mirror is dynamically distorted hundreds of times per second to compensate.

Such a mirror is now in place at Mauna Kea... the resolution rivals Hubble's, at a fraction of the cost. See Gemini North Sees the Light (scroll down to "Friday, June 25"), or the media fact sheet from the Gemini Project.

See also this picture of Pluto and Charon.

Now, the question is: can adaptive optics be used in the other direction, to observe the ground from space?

Did astronomers actually invent adaptive optics, or is it just another Cold War technology spinoff? Makes you go Hmmmmm.....

The latest breaking news on the Mars Orbiter can be found at Astronomy Now.

It's got to be Elvis. Not only did the Mars Observer "disappear" in early 1993, but the Soviets/Russians had two spacecraft fail (and disappear) just the year before.

Joe