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— Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, tweeted that a "big rock" is going to hit Earth, and that we "currently have no defense." But NASA, seems to disagree. Musk's tweet was a response to another by comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan, who shared an article reporting that NASA has begun preparations for the 1,100-foot-wide asteroid Apophis, which is scheduled to pass by Earth on April 13, 2029. Apophis named after an Egyptian god of death. Musk isn't wrong when he tweeted "Wouldn't worry about this particular one," though. Apophis is going to miss us by 19,000 miles. It's...

6.4 off Oregon Coast

The structure in which shattered jugs were found during the summer 2017 Israel Antiquities Authority dig, attesting to the destruction. (Eliyahu Yanai, Courtesy of the City of David Archive) On the eve of the Hebrew commemoration of the destruction of the Temples, archaeologists discover remnants of a blaze indicating the city was grander than thought New finds in the City of David confirm the veracity of the biblical account of the Babylonian capture and conquest of First Temple period Jerusalem. The event is commemorated next Tuesday on the Hebrew date Tisha B’av (August 1) in a day of fasting and...

Researchers discovered what they believe is evidence of the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem that is detailed in the Bible. Layers of ash, arrowheads, Iron Age potsherds, lamps, and jewelry from the period were uncovered on Mount Zion by a team led by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “For archaeologists, an ashen layer can mean a number of different things,” UNC Charlotte professor of history Shimon Gibson explained in a statement. “It could be ashy deposits removed from ovens; or it could be localized burning of garbage. However, in this case, the combination of an ashy layer full of...

Radio, IR and optical observations show evolution of plumes and their impact on belts and zones Storm clouds rooted deep in Jupiter's atmosphere are affecting the planet's white zones and colorful belts, creating disturbances in their flow and even changing their color. Thanks to coordinated observations of the planet in January 2017 by six ground-based optical and radio telescopes and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, a University of California, Berkeley, astronomer and her colleagues have been able to track the effects of these storms -- visible as bright plumes above the planet's ammonia ice clouds -- on the belts in which...

Scientists have found that increasing oxygen levels are linked to the rise of North American dinosaurs around 215 M years ago. A new technique for measuring oxygen levels in ancient rocks shows that oxygen levels in North American rocks leapt by nearly a third in just a couple of million years, possibly setting the scene for a dinosaur expansion into the tropics of North America and elsewhere... The US-based scientists have developed a new technique for releasing tiny amounts of gas trapped inside ancient carbonate minerals. The gases are then channelled directly into a mass spectrometer, which measures their composition....

The fact that over 80 percent of a landmass, more than a fifth the size of the United States, is covered in ice and is still called Greenland has been a source of frequent puzzlement for many, who wonder at the misnomer. And while there is evidence that the world’s largest island (smaller than Australia, which counts as a continent) was greener in the past than it is now, a new study shows Greenland could have been completely ice-free 1.1 million years ago. In the Pleistocene epoch, which lasted from approximately 2.59 million years ago to 11,700 years ago, there...

Some people have claimed that Greenland was no warmer 1,000 years ago than it is today...In this essay, I will examine some of the historical facts concerning Greenland starting 1,000 years ago and will then attempt to demonstrate how much warmer Greenland had to be in order to accommodate the history that transpired in this region.

 You’ve seen billowy cumulus clouds and wispy cirrus clouds, but odds are you’re not too familiar with fire clouds. Even scientists know less than what they'd like to about so-called pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) clouds, which form when wildfires and agricultural fires unleash enough heat and moisture into the atmosphere to produce storms.That changed on Aug. 8, when NASA’s airliner-turned-flying laboratory took to the skies over Washington state and flew a team of scientists straight into a pyrocumulonimbus cloud that had formed high over a wildfire in the eastern part of the state.MORE AT LINK

In November of 2016, the sharp-eyed Gaia spacecraft spied a supernova that exploded some billion light-years from Earth. Astronomers followed up with more telescopes, and quickly realized that this supernova – dubbed SN2016iet – was an odd one in many ways. For one, the star that caused the supernova seemed to orbit far in the hinterlands of its tiny, previously unknown dwarf galaxy, some 54,000 light-years from its center. Most massive stars are born in denser clusters of stars, and it’s a puzzle how this one came to form so far out. And this star was extremely massive, starting life...

Scans from NASA’s Juno spacecraft have hinted that Jupiter’s core isn’t exactly what scientists once thought it was. The core isn’t as dense as researchers suspected, but determining why that is has proven to be a challenge. “This is puzzling,” Andrea Isella, co-author of a new study published in Nature, said in a statement. “It suggests that something happened that stirred up the core and that’s where the giant impact comes into play.”

NASA Prepares to Snatch Samples of ‘Apocalypse Asteroid’ Bennu in 2020 as it Zooms Through Space 10:05 14.08.2019 Considered a “silent witness to titanic events in the solar system’s 4.6 billion year history” by NASA researchers, Bennu is a 1,600-foot rock that was branded an "apocalypse asteroid", located between Earth and Mars, weighing 87 million tonnes and currently orbiting the Sun. A NASA mission has spent over 8 months sizing up the massive asteroid Bennu, located between Earth and Mars, to finally select four areas on its surface as possible sampling sites for its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to grab a piece...

Moses was a prophet and a leader according to Abrahamic religions, but many scholars view him as a legendary figure rather than a real historic person. They do concede that a Moses-like figure could have existed in history, so is it possible to track this person down through historic records? It is the view of this writer that this is very possible and that in fact the Moses figure can be traced as that of the primary confidant of none other than Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut. The trail begins with Th Exodus.

An amateur astronomer in Texas captured a rare sight earlier this week when an apparent meteor slammed into Jupiter’s thick upper atmosphere. On Wednesday, amateur astronomer Ethan Chappel was on the lookout for Perseid meteors, reports ScienceAlert. But his telescope was trained on Jupiter with the camera running. Later, after feeding the data into a software program designed to detect impact flashes, Chappel was alerted to the event. Looking at the footage, Chappel saw a brief but discernible flash along the western portion of Jupiter’s Southern Equatorial Belt, or SEB. Later that day, Chappel announced his discovery in a tweet:...

..... “For archaeologists, an ashen layer can mean a number of different things,” said Shimon Gibson, a UNC Charlotte professor of history and co-director of the project. “It could be ashy deposits removed from ovens; or it could be localized burning of garbage. However, in this case, the combination of an ashy layer full of artifacts, mixed with arrowheads, and a very special ornament indicates some kind of devastation and destruction. Nobody abandons golden jewelry and nobody has arrowheads in their domestic refuse.” "The arrowheads are known as 'Scythian arrowheads' and have been found at other archaeological conflict sites from...

The tablets containing the Song of Liberation were excavated in 1983 under a Byzantine period church in the Hittite capital city of Hattusha. Writing for the July–October 2019 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Eva von Dassow of the University of Minnesota reports on an intriguing, fictitious account of subjugation and liberation from Late Bronze Age Levant. The epic poem was originally composed in the Hurrian language, around 1600 B.C.E., but the surviving text comes from a Hurrian-Hittite bilingual edition from around 1400 B.C.E. It is recorded in cuneiform writing on a series of clay tablets, which came to light only...

The researchers combined magnetic readings and radioisotope dating of samples from seven lava flow sequences to recreate the magnetic field over a span of about 70,000 years centered on the latest geomagnetic reversal. They accurately dated the lava flows by measuring the argon produced from radioactive decay of potassium in the rocks. They found that the final reversal was quick by geological standards, less than 4,000 years. But it was preceded by an extended period of instability that included two excursions — temporary, partial reversals — stretching back another 18,000 years. The lava flow data was corroborated by magnetic readings...

A gaping hole in a dying tectonic plate beneath the ocean along the West Coast of the United States may be wreaking havoc at Earth's surface, but not in a way most people might expect. The researchers in the new study aren't the first to suggest that the Michigan-size Juan de Fuca (pronounced "wahn de fyoo-kuh") plate has a tear. But thanks to a new, detailed dataset, they're the first to say so with certainty. The Juan de Fuca plate is long, stretching about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) along the Pacific Northwest coast, from Vancouver Island, Canada, to Cape Mendocino,...

Research reveals that plate tectonics started on Earth 600 million years before what was believed earlier... Where it was previously thought that plate tectonics started about 2.7 billion years ago, a team of international scientists used the microscopic leftovers of a drop of water that was transported into the Earth's deep mantle - through plate tectonics - to show that this process started 600 million years before that. An article on their research that proves plate tectonics started on Earth 3.3 billion years ago was published in the high impact academic journal, Nature, on 16 July... For their research, the...

RNA -- the short-lived transcripts of genes -- from the "Tumat puppy", a wolf of the Pleistocene era has been isolated, and its sequence analyzed in a new study by Oliver Smith of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues publishing on July 30 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology. The results establish the possibility of examining a range of RNA transcripts from ancient organisms, a possibility previously thought to be extremely unlikely because of the short lifespan of RNA. DNA, which encodes the "hard copy" of genes, is known to survive for thousands of years under favourable conditions. But RNA...