Re:never underestimate gravitational potential ene
on
Planet-Gobbling Star
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· Score: 1
You made a mistake, though. (The same one I made at first with this calculation.)
Nobody made any mistakes, because nobody knows what really happened. Elsewhere there are examples of gas giants orbiting within 3-7 million miles of their stars' surfaces. Perhaps the enormous mass loss rate is bleeding the gas giant of its orbital angular momentum and essentially driving it into the star that is frying it. Or if the star is rotating slower than the planet is revolving around it (the previously mentioned evaporating gas giants have a period of 3-4 days, about a tenth of the rotational period of our own sun), then the induced tidal bulges will cause the planet to transfer its orbital angular momentum to the star's rotational angular momentum (and this could increase convection, allowing the star's energy to escape faster as light). Notice that in this case the planet is transferring energy to the star without even touching it while simultaneously falling towards it (the reverse process is happening here on Earth, where the rapidly rotating Earth is using its tidal bulges to slowly increase the orbital radius of the Moon, and we've actually been able to measure that increase). So there are a variety of ways a star could eat a planet. You seem to favor the expanding red giant model, so I'll quote from this article:
"In principle, that explanation seems OK," says John Lattanzio, director of the Centre for Stellar and Planetary Astrophysics at Monash University. But he says the star was too hot to have been a red giant. "It was probably one that was on its way there - that could fit the parameters."
And also the equation in my previous post is surprisingly robust. It should work quite well once the planet dips into the outer layers of star, no matter whether the star grew to meet it or it fell in. Also, one factor that I ignored but that works in my favor is the mass lot rate of m. The energy per unit radius lost by the planet decreases linearly with a decrease in m. Therefore the planet will be losing most of its energy when it still has most of its mass and before it gets far enough into the star that the force of gravity actually weakens (note that I've been treating M as the mass of the star interior to the radius of the planet's orbit, outside M is merely the mass of the star, but inside it decreases to 0). Once the star ate the first planet, it did increase in size, so your idea of how it eats is valid for the second and third planets.
never underestimate gravitational potential energy
on
Planet-Gobbling Star
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· Score: 1
Without looking at the numbers, I'd suspect that most of the energy that they do add gets added rather far down into the star, so that it won't leak out as one, bright flash.
The mechanical (potential + kinetic) energy E of a small mass m and velocity v a distance r from mass M is given by
E=mv^2/2-GMm/r
If we assume m is orbiting in an approximately circular orbit (the argument works even if the radius is slowly decaying), then v = (GM/r)^.5. Thus
E = mGM/(2r)- GMm/r
= -GMm/(2r)
Differentiating w/ respect to radius,
dE/dr = GMm/(2r^2)
. Suppose m is the mass of 10 Jupiters and M is 5 solar masses, and that m is at the surface of M at ~ 4 solar radii (astronomers can't agree whether the star is a red giant or a pre-red giant, so these numbers are very mushy.). To release our sun's output of energy over an entire year, m's orbit would only have to decay 15 kilometers. Notice also that once m is inside M, M becomes a variable that decreases to 0 at r=0 (the force of gravity at the center of a spherically symmetrical mass is 0). This means that at a certain point inside M, the amount of energy m is losing per unit change in radius actually starts to decrease the closer to the center of M it gets (assuming M is proportional to r^a with a>2 near the center). Also one might suspect that m wouldn't be able to descend much further then the layer of M with the same density as the core of m. All-in-all, it seems like most of the energy and the contents of the planet will be deposited in the outermost layers of the star.
You may have noticed the extremely low resolution of the images produced by Chandra. In fact, other craft have gotten much better pictures of elemental compositions of the lunar surface, especially common elements like titanium and iron. For instance, Galileo returned this and Clementine (some very high res images here) returned this iron map and this titanium map.
Chandra detected magnesium, silicon, aluminum, and oxygen, but its already known that the lunar highlands are composed mostly of anorthosite, a rock which contains all of those elements but magnesium (I would like to know why magnesium and not calcium was detected). This is more of a proof-of-concept than anything. The most important information to come from these first observations is the discounting of the anomolous farside x-ray emissions.
A natural, intuitive understanding, sans any self-justifying nit-picking shows that a clear, harmonious exists within the Genesis account, one that is not particularly vulnerable to specific translations.
The text I use is The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha (aka the New Revised Standard Version). It is a direct descendent of the Revised Standard Version, the Bible with the distinction of being officially authorized by all major Christian churches: Protestant, Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox. It is the translation preferred by biblical scholars. In the commentary on Gen2:4b-25, the editors say "This is a different tradition from 1.1-2.3 as evidenced by the flowing style and the different order of events of creation." So when you argue that there are no inconsistencies, you are disagreeing with the National Council of the Churches of Christ, the body that authorized this translation. If it comes to a choice between believing either a body of scholars from the major Christian Churches and a Jewish scholar (for the Old Testament) or a/. troll, I'll side with the scholars.
He was, of course, referring to the fact that we now know a quite
largish meteor crashed into the earth, released poisonous Iridium chemicals into
our atmosphere and created a killer cloud above the Earth that blocked out the
sun for a prolonged period of time.
A science writer who is unaware of science. Nobody ever blamed the death of the dinosaurs on iridium from the asteroid. The iridium was merely used as a marker, as the concentration in the asteroid was much higher than Earth's. Iridium compounds may be toxic, but there was not enough to poison an entire planet, just enough to label the ejecta blankets from the impact. The real problems were numerous: tsunamis, spontaneous combustion near secondary impacts, acid rain, release of CO2 and sulfuric acid from vaporized carbonates and evaporites, and light-blocking dust.
Did you even read your own link? There you'll find that geologists consider ridge push to be less important then slab pull, which often occurs near continental margins, not open oceans. And an atmosphere or ocean is going to act like a thermal blanket, actually reducing temperature extremes. After all, space is a 3 K cold sink and the sun is a 5800 K heat lamp.
YDNRC. Trudeau started penning Doonesbury in 1970 and had won a Pulitzer by 1975. The first TRS-80 came out in 1977. Bloom County started in syndication in 1980. TRS-80s were made until at least 1986. But yeah, the FFFBs! It's all a haze, man....
Birds and sea monsters were created on day 5 (Gen 1:20-23). Cattle, creeping things, wild animals, and humans were all created on day 6 (Gen. 1:24-31). If the scriptures you are reading aren't clear enough on the matter, then you are reading a bastard version of the Bible.
Genesis chapter 2 should merely retell the story from ch.1 if there's any truth to it. But Gen. 2:4-7 says that God made the first man on the same day He made the earth and the heavens, i.e. on what ch.1 calls day 1, not day 6. When you say that before man the existing plant and animal life was watered by a mist, you are basically conflating your own imagination into the story. "[W]hen no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up- for the Lord God had not yet caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground, but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground" (Gen 2:5-6) is the way it reads. There is no written evidence for any life at all during this period, and instead of a mist it reads more like a stream periodically floods the entire planet. Also, chapter 1 never mentions God making wild plants first, then making man, and then finally getting around to making the cultivatible plants. I see no evidence in chapter 2 for plant life until after man was created. I'm afraid the Genesis in your head is not the Genesis on paper.
The JWs have conveniently placed their anti-evolution literature all over the globe, including my own library, so I used them as an example. i think they are a good example, as they believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. That was their own list of the order of creation word for word, not mine. What is really ironic is that Genesis 2:5 claims that man was created even before the plants, while 1:11-13 and 1:26-31 say plants were created on the 3rd day and man on the 6th.
And as for the birds vs. winged/flying creatures debate, the exact meaning is irrelevant, though there is some evidence from Leviticus 11:20-23 that the word owph, commonly translated bird, applies to flying insects as well. The first winged insect came after the first land insect, according to science. The Bible says the flying things came before "cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind." (creeping things widely regarded as including crawling insects)
The real point is that the order of creation events in the Bible is inconsistent, so there is no possible way to claim they "are absolutely in agreement with modern evolution accounts."
the odds of forming even the simplest protien by pure chance is 10^113
Your arguments on probabilties of certain protein sequences occurring are pointless. Consider a protein whose job is to catalyze a particular chemical reaction (a.k.a. an enzyme). It does so by momentarily capturing the chemical reactants at a site on its surface know as the active site, comprised of only a few of thehundreds of amino acids in the protein. The rest of the protein holds it together, and the actual order of the non-active site amino acids is not so important (i.e. any one of a large number of sequences will suffice). It doesn't end there. Even in the active site, one amino acid can be switched with another because there are several families of amino acids with similar properties (polar (itself split into charged vs. uncharged) vs. nonpolar, acidic vs. basic, etc.). The chances of forming any active site that will do the job is thus even larger. Case in point: the serine protease in Bacillus subtilis, subtilisin, has been shown to have only 3 important amino acids (His, Asp, Ser) in common with serine proteases in mammals.
the order of events given in the creation account are absolutely in agreement with modern evolution accounts, and is completely accurate based on current science's view of the order of events
Spoken like a true Jehovah's Witness. Their book "Life - How Did It Get Here? By evolution or by creation?" lists the following ten stages in chronological order:
(1) a beginning (2) a primitive earth in darkness and enshrouded in heavy gases and water (3) light (4) an expanse or atmosphere (5) large areas of dry land (6) land plants (7) sun, moon, and stars discernible in the expanse, and seasons beginning, (8) sea monsters and flying creatures (9) wild and tame beasts, mammals (10) man
They then claim that since the chances of randomly guessing the correct order in one try is 1 in 3,628,800, the author must have had help (implying divine help).
Firstly, you'd have to be an idiot not to put "the beginning" at the beginning, nor would it be hard to imagine land appearing before land plants and land animals. A more rigorous reading of Genesis shows that the ancient writer saw the earth born as a water world. Land appears later, and the first life is plant life on land. "[F]lying creatures" is the JW way of hiding the actual word "birds" that appears in Genesis, suggesting that birds appeared before land animals, whilst science thinks that birds descended from land animals (dinosaurs). Also, plants appear before the sun is made (literal reading) or before the "sun [is] discernible in the expanse" (JW interpretation of '"and God made the two great lights'"). There is no hint of here of the scientific theory that the water came with comet bombardment (nor is it thought the entire surface was flooded) or that the moon was formed from the remnants of a collision of the earth and a Mars-sized object.
So in other words, "the order of events given in the creation account are absolutely in agreement with modern evolution accounts, and is completely accurate based on current science's view of the order of events" is a false statement.
They use injection wells. The nanoparticles then get carried from the injection site by groundwater. The method relies on the fact that the contaminants are generally soluble in water, and so the nanoparticles should get carried to wherever the contaminants are. They suggest one well and 11.2 kilograms of iron will treat 100 m^2. But they need to use a lot more iron then to just reduce the contaminants, as the soil naturally has plenty of reducible compounds. Presumably there is more or less a constant amount of these materials per square area of soil (for instance, most organic compunds are confined to the uppermost layer). In fact, in order to drive the contaminant reduction to completion, one should probably use even more than enough iron to reduce all the reducible compounds, natural and contaminant. That's how one could come up with a constant cost per square area.
Having said that, I'm sure the actual dose does vary depending on the hydrology, geology, biology, and type and scope of contamination. The importance of the 5$/m^2 figure is to compare it with the price before they reduced the cost of making the iron nanoparticle, which was about 50$/m^2. Reducing the cost by an order of magnitude is very significant.
RTFA. The shuttle-induced noctilucent clouds form in the mesosphere, and so are well above the ozone and the stratospheric ice clouds that help destroy the ozone layer. The Anchorage Daily News was careful to call the phenomenon "benign."
our earth viewed from Mars, would appear clearly blue, due to the 70% water coverage in connection with refraction of light in the atmosphere. With a reverse relation of the water land distribution however, rather a brown-green planet would be to be seen from space. The color of the atmosphere, caused by Rayleigh Scattering[4] at gas molecules, determines thus only in very small amount the color of a planet as seen from space and also directly on the surface! Bullshit. I live hundreds of km's from the nearest ocean and the scale height of the atmosphere above my head is only 8 km. It appears blue, not from refraction of light from an ocean hundreds of miles away, but from Rayleigh scattering. Oddly enough, when the nearby forest fires start adding particulates to the air, the sky appears on the pink side of gray.
the white ground frost (water ice!) supplies a natural color calibration to the white alignment. Shine a flashlight with a red filter on a snowbank. Does it appear to be white? No.
Astronomers at the Hubble Spacetelescope and amateur-astronomers[8] are observing, since long time now, white water-clouds and blueish atmosphere. How it appears from above the atmosphere does tell you how it would appear from the ground.
Am I claiming the Martian sky is never blue? No. But it woud have been silly and pointless for NASA to mess with the data in a misleading manner.
This did not fit with NASA thinking and so they were color corected to present the red sky we all know.
Backwards, my friend. They thought it was going to be a blue sky, so the color in the first pictures was tweaked to make the sky look look blue. It really is pink, looking from the surface. This is due to scattering from dust, which we may assume is limited to the lower atmosphere. The air molecules in the upper atmosphere can still scatter light, and short wavelength light (blue) gets scattered best (by gases). If you look well above the limb of Mars itself you'll be seeing the light scattered by the upper atmosphere imposed on the blackness of space.
Wrong. The long distances do matter a lot. The main reason far away objects seem to be speeding away from us is that the space between has been expanding in size. A photon traveling through this expanding space also stretches, and the further it has to go the more it stretches. Doppler has nothing to do with it.
Carbonate precipitation generally occurs in shallow waters (on Earth). Partly this is because the solubility of calcium carbonate increases with depth, so there is a depth in the ocean (known as the Carbonate Compensation Depth, or CCD) where the rate of downfalling Ca carbonate precipitate equals the rate of dissolution of Ca carbonate. Below this depth, little Ca carbonate survives.
CO2 + H2O + CaCO3 => Ca2+ + 2*HCO3-
The reaction will be driven to the left by the removal of CO2. from the water. As your flat Mountain Dew can attest, depressurizing and warming a liquid is a good way to get rid of CO2. Carbonate thus precipitates in warm shallow water. We would expect "bathtub rings" of carbonate around ocean basins. These would be less likely to be covered, but even if they were, erosional products from them would still get mixed into the soil and be visible in from space. Only a small amount of magnesite (magnesium carbonates being virtually impossible to precipitate from water, at least when calcium is around) was found, suggesting problems with the idea of oceans.
Here on Earth, the precipitation of carbonates is often done biologically. Calcium and magnesium carbonates make good cement for the "skeletons" of a large variety of sea creatures ranging from plankton to molluscs to coral (even whale bones, though they're not important quantitatively.)
Carbonates can also precipitate unassisted. A dramatic example is the somewhat speculative theory known as the snowball Earth. For periods of 10 million years and repeating perhaps up to 4 times starting 3/4 and ending 1/2 a billion years ago, the Earth froze. Large glaciers covered the land and the oceans were capped by a kilometer of ice. Without getting into a heated discussion about how this occurred, the escape sequence is the interesting part. Volacanoes poke their way through the ice and vent CO2 into the atmosphere. Since there was no biological activity, the CO2 kept building up until the greenhouse effect can melt the ice. The newly liquid oceans then absorbed CO2 from the extremely high concentrations in the atmosphere, and then rapid carbonate precipitation commenced, leaving, in some cases, crystal clusters as tall as a person.
Large oceans of liquid water under an atmosphere with CO2 tend to form large deposits of carbonate minerals. In other words, we should find wide areas of carbonate rock, especially at low elevations. No carbonate rocks were found, only carbonate signatures in soil. What's news is that the Arizona team spent 6 years using the thermal emission spectrometer to look for carbonates, and didn't find thick layers of it. Other (better) articles on the same news release can be found here or here.
Interact with the environment, on Mars?
on
NASA's Sensor Web
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· Score: 1
"Other sensor networks route information, and that's their focused goal," emphasizes Delin. "Sensor Webs collect information and interact with the environment based on what they detect.
A Sensor Web on Mars isn't going to have control over water hoses. Exactly how a Mars web will "interact with the environment" is left unstated. It is fun to speculate, however. I imagine a few assisting robots, shaped more like spiders than the present baby buggies. Perhaps they could return interesting samples to a centrally located rocket, which would return them after accumulation of sufficient rocks and the mysterious sand that turned green during the spring thaw. Just kidding. The remaining life on Mars is lithotrophs.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody made any mistakes, because nobody knows what really happened. Elsewhere there are examples of gas giants orbiting within 3-7 million miles of their stars' surfaces. Perhaps the enormous mass loss rate is bleeding the gas giant of its orbital angular momentum and essentially driving it into the star that is frying it. Or if the star is rotating slower than the planet is revolving around it (the previously mentioned evaporating gas giants have a period of 3-4 days, about a tenth of the rotational period of our own sun), then the induced tidal bulges will cause the planet to transfer its orbital angular momentum to the star's rotational angular momentum (and this could increase convection, allowing the star's energy to escape faster as light). Notice that in this case the planet is transferring energy to the star without even touching it while simultaneously falling towards it (the reverse process is happening here on Earth, where the rapidly rotating Earth is using its tidal bulges to slowly increase the orbital radius of the Moon, and we've actually been able to measure that increase). So there are a variety of ways a star could eat a planet. You seem to favor the expanding red giant model, so I'll quote from this article:
"In principle, that explanation seems OK," says John Lattanzio, director of the Centre for Stellar and Planetary Astrophysics at Monash University. But he says the star was too hot to have been a red giant. "It was probably one that was on its way there - that could fit the parameters."
And also the equation in my previous post is surprisingly robust. It should work quite well once the planet dips into the outer layers of star, no matter whether the star grew to meet it or it fell in. Also, one factor that I ignored but that works in my favor is the mass lot rate of m. The energy per unit radius lost by the planet decreases linearly with a decrease in m. Therefore the planet will be losing most of its energy when it still has most of its mass and before it gets far enough into the star that the force of gravity actually weakens (note that I've been treating M as the mass of the star interior to the radius of the planet's orbit, outside M is merely the mass of the star, but inside it decreases to 0). Once the star ate the first planet, it did increase in size, so your idea of how it eats is valid for the second and third planets.
The mechanical (potential + kinetic) energy E of a small mass m and velocity v a distance r from mass M is given by
E=mv^2/2-GMm/r
If we assume m is orbiting in an approximately circular orbit (the argument works even if the radius is slowly decaying), then v = (GM/r)^.5. Thus
E = mGM/(2r)- GMm/r
= -GMm/(2r)
Differentiating w/ respect to radius,
dE/dr = GMm/(2r^2)
. Suppose m is the mass of 10 Jupiters and M is 5 solar masses, and that m is at the surface of M at ~ 4 solar radii (astronomers can't agree whether the star is a red giant or a pre-red giant, so these numbers are very mushy.). To release our sun's output of energy over an entire year, m's orbit would only have to decay 15 kilometers. Notice also that once m is inside M, M becomes a variable that decreases to 0 at r=0 (the force of gravity at the center of a spherically symmetrical mass is 0). This means that at a certain point inside M, the amount of energy m is losing per unit change in radius actually starts to decrease the closer to the center of M it gets (assuming M is proportional to r^a with a>2 near the center). Also one might suspect that m wouldn't be able to descend much further then the layer of M with the same density as the core of m. All-in-all, it seems like most of the energy and the contents of the planet will be deposited in the outermost layers of the star.
Chandra detected magnesium, silicon, aluminum, and oxygen, but its already known that the lunar highlands are composed mostly of anorthosite, a rock which contains all of those elements but magnesium (I would like to know why magnesium and not calcium was detected). This is more of a proof-of-concept than anything. The most important information to come from these first observations is the discounting of the anomolous farside x-ray emissions.
What about the "far side" of the moon? Short, simple, accurate.
The text I use is The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha (aka the New Revised Standard Version). It is a direct descendent of the Revised Standard Version, the Bible with the distinction of being officially authorized by all major Christian churches: Protestant, Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox. It is the translation preferred by biblical scholars. In the commentary on Gen2:4b-25, the editors say "This is a different tradition from 1.1-2.3 as evidenced by the flowing style and the different order of events of creation." So when you argue that there are no inconsistencies, you are disagreeing with the National Council of the Churches of Christ, the body that authorized this translation. If it comes to a choice between believing either a body of scholars from the major Christian Churches and a Jewish scholar (for the Old Testament) or a /. troll, I'll side with the scholars.
A science writer who is unaware of science. Nobody ever blamed the death of the dinosaurs on iridium from the asteroid. The iridium was merely used as a marker, as the concentration in the asteroid was much higher than Earth's. Iridium compounds may be toxic, but there was not enough to poison an entire planet, just enough to label the ejecta blankets from the impact. The real problems were numerous: tsunamis, spontaneous combustion near secondary impacts, acid rain, release of CO2 and sulfuric acid from vaporized carbonates and evaporites, and light-blocking dust.
...and so Venus may have a lithosphere (outer layer of solid rock) twice as thick as Earth's. It's a tougher skin so it's less likely to crack.
Nope. Ridge push is far less important then slab pull for moving tectonic plates. See this link.
Did you even read your own link? There you'll find that geologists consider ridge push to be less important then slab pull, which often occurs near continental margins, not open oceans. And an atmosphere or ocean is going to act like a thermal blanket, actually reducing temperature extremes. After all, space is a 3 K cold sink and the sun is a 5800 K heat lamp.
The previous posters to this parent don't know what they're talking about. The addition of water to a mineral usually lowers its melting point.
YDNRC. Trudeau started penning Doonesbury in 1970 and had won a Pulitzer by 1975. The first TRS-80 came out in 1977. Bloom County started in syndication in 1980. TRS-80s were made until at least 1986. But yeah, the FFFBs! It's all a haze, man....
Genesis chapter 2 should merely retell the story from ch.1 if there's any truth to it. But Gen. 2:4-7 says that God made the first man on the same day He made the earth and the heavens, i.e. on what ch.1 calls day 1, not day 6. When you say that before man the existing plant and animal life was watered by a mist, you are basically conflating your own imagination into the story. "[W]hen no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up- for the Lord God had not yet caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground, but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground" (Gen 2:5-6) is the way it reads. There is no written evidence for any life at all during this period, and instead of a mist it reads more like a stream periodically floods the entire planet. Also, chapter 1 never mentions God making wild plants first, then making man, and then finally getting around to making the cultivatible plants. I see no evidence in chapter 2 for plant life until after man was created. I'm afraid the Genesis in your head is not the Genesis on paper.
And as for the birds vs. winged/flying creatures debate, the exact meaning is irrelevant, though there is some evidence from Leviticus 11:20-23 that the word owph, commonly translated bird, applies to flying insects as well. The first winged insect came after the first land insect, according to science. The Bible says the flying things came before "cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind." (creeping things widely regarded as including crawling insects)
The real point is that the order of creation events in the Bible is inconsistent, so there is no possible way to claim they "are absolutely in agreement with modern evolution accounts."
Your arguments on probabilties of certain protein sequences occurring are pointless. Consider a protein whose job is to catalyze a particular chemical reaction (a.k.a. an enzyme). It does so by momentarily capturing the chemical reactants at a site on its surface know as the active site, comprised of only a few of thehundreds of amino acids in the protein. The rest of the protein holds it together, and the actual order of the non-active site amino acids is not so important (i.e. any one of a large number of sequences will suffice). It doesn't end there. Even in the active site, one amino acid can be switched with another because there are several families of amino acids with similar properties (polar (itself split into charged vs. uncharged) vs. nonpolar, acidic vs. basic, etc.). The chances of forming any active site that will do the job is thus even larger. Case in point: the serine protease in Bacillus subtilis, subtilisin, has been shown to have only 3 important amino acids (His, Asp, Ser) in common with serine proteases in mammals.
Spoken like a true Jehovah's Witness. Their book "Life - How Did It Get Here? By evolution or by creation?" lists the following ten stages in chronological order:
(1) a beginning
(2) a primitive earth in darkness and enshrouded in heavy gases and water
(3) light
(4) an expanse or atmosphere
(5) large areas of dry land
(6) land plants
(7) sun, moon, and stars discernible in the expanse, and seasons beginning,
(8) sea monsters and flying creatures
(9) wild and tame beasts, mammals
(10) man
They then claim that since the chances of randomly guessing the correct order in one try is 1 in 3,628,800, the author must have had help (implying divine help).
Firstly, you'd have to be an idiot not to put "the beginning" at the beginning, nor would it be hard to imagine land appearing before land plants and land animals. A more rigorous reading of Genesis shows that the ancient writer saw the earth born as a water world. Land appears later, and the first life is plant life on land. "[F]lying creatures" is the JW way of hiding the actual word "birds" that appears in Genesis, suggesting that birds appeared before land animals, whilst science thinks that birds descended from land animals (dinosaurs). Also, plants appear before the sun is made (literal reading) or before the "sun [is] discernible in the expanse" (JW interpretation of '"and God made the two great lights'"). There is no hint of here of the scientific theory that the water came with comet bombardment (nor is it thought the entire surface was flooded) or that the moon was formed from the remnants of a collision of the earth and a Mars-sized object.
So in other words, "the order of events given in the creation account are absolutely in agreement with modern evolution accounts, and is completely accurate based on current science's view of the order of events" is a false statement.
-Max Planck
Having said that, I'm sure the actual dose does vary depending on the hydrology, geology, biology, and type and scope of contamination. The importance of the 5$/m^2 figure is to compare it with the price before they reduced the cost of making the iron nanoparticle, which was about 50$/m^2. Reducing the cost by an order of magnitude is very significant.
RTFA. The shuttle-induced noctilucent clouds form in the mesosphere, and so are well above the ozone and the stratospheric ice clouds that help destroy the ozone layer. The Anchorage Daily News was careful to call the phenomenon "benign."
our earth viewed from Mars, would appear clearly blue, due to the 70% water coverage in connection with refraction of light in the atmosphere. With a reverse relation of the water land distribution however, rather a brown-green planet would be to be seen from space. The color of the atmosphere, caused by Rayleigh Scattering[4] at gas molecules, determines thus only in very small amount the color of a planet as seen from space and also directly on the surface! Bullshit. I live hundreds of km's from the nearest ocean and the scale height of the atmosphere above my head is only 8 km. It appears blue, not from refraction of light from an ocean hundreds of miles away, but from Rayleigh scattering. Oddly enough, when the nearby forest fires start adding particulates to the air, the sky appears on the pink side of gray.
the white ground frost (water ice!) supplies a natural color calibration to the white alignment. Shine a flashlight with a red filter on a snowbank. Does it appear to be white? No.
Astronomers at the Hubble Spacetelescope and amateur-astronomers[8] are observing, since long time now, white water-clouds and blueish atmosphere. How it appears from above the atmosphere does tell you how it would appear from the ground.
Am I claiming the Martian sky is never blue? No. But it woud have been silly and pointless for NASA to mess with the data in a misleading manner.
This did not fit with NASA thinking and so they were color corected to present the red sky we all know. Backwards, my friend. They thought it was going to be a blue sky, so the color in the first pictures was tweaked to make the sky look look blue. It really is pink, looking from the surface. This is due to scattering from dust, which we may assume is limited to the lower atmosphere. The air molecules in the upper atmosphere can still scatter light, and short wavelength light (blue) gets scattered best (by gases). If you look well above the limb of Mars itself you'll be seeing the light scattered by the upper atmosphere imposed on the blackness of space.
Wrong. The long distances do matter a lot. The main reason far away objects seem to be speeding away from us is that the space between has been expanding in size. A photon traveling through this expanding space also stretches, and the further it has to go the more it stretches. Doppler has nothing to do with it.
CO2 + H2O + CaCO3 => Ca2+ + 2*HCO3-
The reaction will be driven to the left by the removal of CO2. from the water. As your flat Mountain Dew can attest, depressurizing and warming a liquid is a good way to get rid of CO2. Carbonate thus precipitates in warm shallow water. We would expect "bathtub rings" of carbonate around ocean basins. These would be less likely to be covered, but even if they were, erosional products from them would still get mixed into the soil and be visible in from space. Only a small amount of magnesite (magnesium carbonates being virtually impossible to precipitate from water, at least when calcium is around) was found, suggesting problems with the idea of oceans.
Carbonates can also precipitate unassisted. A dramatic example is the somewhat speculative theory known as the snowball Earth. For periods of 10 million years and repeating perhaps up to 4 times starting 3/4 and ending 1/2 a billion years ago, the Earth froze. Large glaciers covered the land and the oceans were capped by a kilometer of ice. Without getting into a heated discussion about how this occurred, the escape sequence is the interesting part. Volacanoes poke their way through the ice and vent CO2 into the atmosphere. Since there was no biological activity, the CO2 kept building up until the greenhouse effect can melt the ice. The newly liquid oceans then absorbed CO2 from the extremely high concentrations in the atmosphere, and then rapid carbonate precipitation commenced, leaving, in some cases, crystal clusters as tall as a person.
Large oceans of liquid water under an atmosphere with CO2 tend to form large deposits of carbonate minerals. In other words, we should find wide areas of carbonate rock, especially at low elevations. No carbonate rocks were found, only carbonate signatures in soil. What's news is that the Arizona team spent 6 years using the thermal emission spectrometer to look for carbonates, and didn't find thick layers of it. Other (better) articles on the same news release can be found here or here.
A Sensor Web on Mars isn't going to have control over water hoses. Exactly how a Mars web will "interact with the environment" is left unstated. It is fun to speculate, however. I imagine a few assisting robots, shaped more like spiders than the present baby buggies. Perhaps they could return interesting samples to a centrally located rocket, which would return them after accumulation of sufficient rocks and the mysterious sand that turned green during the spring thaw. Just kidding. The remaining life on Mars is lithotrophs.