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Weird Geological Features Spied On Mars
astroengine writes "The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera carried by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted a strange geological feature that, for now, defies an obvious explanation. Found at the southern edge of Acidalia Planitia, small pits with raised edges appear to hug a long ridge. So far, mission scientists have ruled out impact craters and wind as formation processes, but have pegged the most likely cause to be glacial in nature."
Given that the blurb on the HiRISE page say "but for now this is a mystery," I'm not seeing any evidence of scientists being scared of saying they don't know. In fact, making a high profile general public article highlighting stuff you don't understand seems like the exact opposite of the scientists being scared to point out what you don't know.
Those are acne scars from when Mars was much younger, you insensitive clods!
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Instead of "I don't know" they can just throw massive error bars on the figure. For example, the earth may be 4.5 billion years old +- 20 billion years. (Thats right, it may not be created until the future...)
The earth is 4,500,000,027 years old.
They told my it was 4.5 billion years old when I took high school geology back in 1986.
Have gnu, will travel.
They look more like solifluctations, or possibly something related to palsas or pingos.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:San_Andreas_Fault_Aerial_View.gif
"Yea, I mean, seriously 4.4 billion years old? It could just as easily be 4.5 or 4.3 billion years old."
Precise Dating is everything.
Some tourists in the Chicago Museum of Natural History are marveling at the dinosaur bones. One of them asks the guard, "Can you tell me how old the dinosaur bones are?"
The guard replies, "They are 70 million, four years, and six months old."
"That's an awfully exact number," says the tourist. "How do you know their age so precisely?"
The guard answers, "Well, the dinosaur bones were 70 million years old when I started working here, and that was four and a half years ago."