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Oh, where, oh where have all the sunspots gone? The fiery orange ball overhead has quieted during the past three years. Quiet in the sense that there have been very few sunspots – those black blotches on the sun’s surface caused by intense magnetic activity. But just how quiet is quiet? Well, so far during the recent solar minimum (a period of low activity during the sun’s typical 11-year solar cycle), we’ve seen 183 sun-spotless days in 2007, 266 in 2008 and 259 in 2009 (as of Dec. 16 2009). Earth hasn’t witnessed a similar three-year stretch (1911, 192, 1913)...

SAN FRANCISCO — When the sun is relatively inactive — as it has been in recent years — the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere cools dramatically, new observations find.

EVENTS IN NEBRASKA: "At 9 p.m. Central Time on Dec. 16th, a very bright meteor lit up the completely overcast sky like lightning in southeast Nebraska," reports Trooper Jerry Chab of the Nebraska State Patrol. "It flashed for approximately 2 seconds and was followed by ground shaking, which prompted many calls by the public to law enforcement in a three county wide area." The USGS says there was a magnitude 3.5 earthquake near Auburn, Nebraska, at 8:53 pm Wednesday night, about the same time and place as the fireball. Coincidence? Readers in Nebraska with photos or eyewitness accounts are encouraged...

Astronomy experts are appealing for witnesses to an extremely rare fireball believed to have blazed across the morning sky. The spectacular sight, which star-gazers claim happened just before dawn on Monday, is being attributed to a massive meteor shower currently taking place over the northern hemisphere. "The fireball is really very special and unusual," Astronomy Ireland chairman David Moore said.

Could the Earth become a "snowball" in future? For the last million years, the Earth has been in its coldest state since the Neoproterozoic. We are now living in a relatively warm episode, some 80,000 years from the next glacial maximum, but some evidence suggests that each successive glaciation over the last several cycles has been getting stronger and stronger. During the most recent glacial event, 20,000 years ago, the deep ocean cooled to near its freezing point, and sea ice reached latitudes as low as 40 to 45 degrees north and south, still far from the critical threshold needed...

PARIS (AFP) – Sea levels were likely eight metres higher around 125,000 years ago when polar temperatures were 3-5 degrees C warmer, says a new study published Wednesday to show the effects of global warming. The research by the US universities of Harvard and Princeton was released in the journal Nature as the world's nations met in Denmark to forge a strategy to head off harmful effects of global warming blamed on greenhouse gases. To understand the potential effects of a rise in temperature, the researchers reexamined data about the last interglacial stage -- a warmer period within an ice...

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New sunspot 1035 is growing rapidly and it is now seven times wider than Earth. This makes it an easy target for backyard solar telescopes. ... The magnetic polarity of the spot identifies it as a member of Solar Cycle 24--the cycle we've been waiting for to end the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century. One spot isn't enough to end the lull, but sunspot 1035 could herald bigger things to come.

University of Utah scientists say seismic images of the plumbing feeding the Yellowstone supervolcano show a magma plume much larger than previously thought. Scientists say they've imaged a plume of hot and molten rock rising at an angle from the northwest at a depth of at least 410 miles, contradicting claims there is no deep plume, only shallow hot rock moving like slowly boiling soup. A related University of Utah study used gravity measurements to indicate the banana-shaped magma chamber of hot and molten rock a few miles beneath Yellowstone is 20 percent larger than previously believed, so a future...

Herald de Paris: Guarding the location’s coordinates carefully, the project’s leader, who wishes to remain anonymous at this time, says the city could be thousands of years old; possibly even pre-dating the ancient Egyptian pyramids, at Giza.

This could be humor, but the fraud and cost makes it very serious!JoNova is a freelance science presenter & writer: Professional speaker, author, and former TV host. The Skeptics Handbook: 164,000 copies printed.Click here or the image to view the page.Good Hunting... from Varmint Al

Here are the 100 reasons, released in a dossier issued by the European Foundation, why climate change is natural and not man-made: 1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity. 2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history. 3) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels. 4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2...

WASHINGTON, DC (Herald de Paris) - EXCLUSIVE - Researchers have revealed the first images from the Caribbean sea floor of what they believe are the archaeological remains of an ancient civilization. Guarding the location’s coordinates carefully, the project’s leader, who wishes to remain anonymous at this time, says the city could be thousands of years old; possibly even pre-dating the ancient Egyptian pyramids, at Giza. The site was found using advanced satellite imagery, and is not in any way associated with the alleged site found by Russian explorers near Cuba in 2001, at a depth of 2300 feet. “To be...

SAN FRANCISCO – For most of a decade, scientists have documented unfelt and slow-moving seismic events, called episodic tremor and slip, showing up in regular cycles under the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state and Vancouver Island in British Columbia. They last three weeks on average and release as much energy as a magnitude 6.5 earthquake. Now scientists have discovered more small events, lasting one to 70 hours, which occur in somewhat regular patterns during the 15-month intervals between episodic tremor and slip events. "There appear to be tremor swarms that repeat, both in terms of their duration and in where...

In the minutes after a strong earthquake struck offshore of the Indonesian city of Padang on Sept. 30, fears of a tsunami prompted hundreds of thousands of residents to evacuate the coastal city. Or try to. The traffic jam resulting from the mass exodus kept most of them squarely in the danger zone, had a tsunami followed the magnitude 7.6 temblor. Stanford researchers who've studied the city have concluded that fleeing residents would have a better chance of surviving a tsunami if instead of all attempting an evacuation, some could run to the nearest tall building to ride out the...

An investigation by the University of Kansas' Adrian Melott and colleagues reveals a promising new method of detecting past comet strikes upon Earth and gauging their frequencyLAWRENCE, Kan. — It's the stuff of a Hollywood disaster epic: A comet plunges from outer space into the Earth's atmosphere, splitting the sky with a devastating shock wave that flattens forests and shakes the countryside. But this isn't a disaster movie plotline. "Comet impacts might be much more frequent than we expect," said Adrian Melott, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas. "There's a lot of interest in the rate...

Ice cores reveal that CO2 levels rise and fall hundreds of years after temperatures changeIn 1985, ice cores extracted from Greenland revealed temperatures and CO2 levels going back 150,000 years. Temperature and CO2 seemed locked together. It was a turning point—the “greenhouse effect” captured attention. But in 1999 it became clear carbon rose and fell after temperatures did. By 2003 we had better data showing the lag was 800 ± 200 years. CO2 was in the back seat.AGW replies: There is roughly an 800-year lag. But even if CO2 doesn’t start the warming trend, it amplifies it.Skeptics say: If CO2...

Feb. 4, 2009 -- An ancient killer is hiding in the remote forests of Siberia. Walled off from western eyes during the Soviet era and forgotten among the endless expanse of wilderness, scientists are starting to uncover the remnants of a supervolcano that rained Hell on Earth 250 million years ago and killed 90 percent of all life. Researchers have known about the volcano -- the Siberian Traps, for years. And they've speculated that the volcanic rocks, which cover an area about the size of Alaska, played a role in runaway global warming that led to the end -- Permian...

The UN panel on climate change warning that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035 is wildly inaccurate, an academic says. J Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University, says he believes the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years. He is astonished they "misread 2350 as 2035". The authors deny the claims.

There was a Medieval Warm Period (900-1100 AD), in central Greenland at any rate. But we knew that — that’s when the Vikings were naming it Greenland, after all.

PHILADELPHIA –- Environmental scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and Durham University have employed a novel combination of geological and model reconstructions of wetland environments during a 10,000-year period to address spatial variations in sea-level history and provide quantitative estimates of subsidence along the east coast of England. The findings indicate that glacial rebound — the rise or fall of land masses that were depressed by the huge weight of ice sheets during the last glacial period — explains differences in relative sea levels along the English coast. Current sea levels in Northeast England, the most northerly study area, have...

New species might arise as a result of single rare events, rather than through the gradual accumulation of many small changes over time, according to a study of thousands of species and their evolutionary family trees. This contradicts a widely accepted theory of how speciation occurs: that species are continually changing to keep pace with their environment, and that new species emerge as these changes accrue. Known as the 'Red Queen' hypothesis, it is named after the character in Lewis Carroll's book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There who tells a surprised Alice: "Here, you see, it takes...

I was watching a movie several minutes ago (in West Palm Beach, FL) and saw out my window (facing east)a large shining object quickly plunge from the sky. It freaked me out a bit. Did anyone out there see it? I saw one similar back around 1990-1992 and years later saw it on Discovery as it was captured on video.

The deadly tsunami could have uncovered the remains of an ancient port city off the coast in southern India. Archaeologists say they have discovered some stone remains from the coast close to India's famous beachfront Mahabalipuram temple in Tamil Nadu state following the 26 December tsunami. They believe that the "structures" could be the remains of an ancient and once-flourishing port city in the area housing the famous 1200-year-old rock-hewn temple. Three pieces of remains, which include a granite lion, were found buried in the sand after the coastline receded in the area after the tsunami struck. Undersea remains "They...

Stone Age sites found under North Sea Date released 12 September 2003 Experts have discovered the first ever evidence of Stone Age settlements in the British North Sea, dating back as far as 10,000 years. Subject to further investigation, one of them could be the earliest underwater archaeological site in the UK. The exciting find, discovered by accident by a team from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, could lead to a rewriting of the history books and revolutionise our understanding of the way our ancestors lived. The discovery of several stone artefacts, including tools and arrowheads, have pinpointed...

The Mediterranean Sea as we know it today formed about 5.3 million years ago when Atlantic Ocean waters breached the strait of Gibraltar, sending a massive flood into the basin. > But exactly how the waters cut their way through and how long it took them to do so wasn't known. >

Here is a new Naked Emperor News video that catches former Vice-President Al Gore in making a concession that in the past, rising temperatures have PRECEDED a rise in C02 levels, not the other way around. The video makes the case that since Gore concedes that has sometimes been the case, then there is "no one to blame" and no need to regulate anything with Cap and Trade legislation. He made the concession during testimony before Congress in 2007, while being questioned by Texas Rep. Joe Barton. . . (VIDEO)

Global warming 'caused by sun's radiation' Global warming is caused by radiation from the sun, according to a leading scientist speaking out at an alternative ‘sceptics conference’ in Copenhagen. By Louise Gray Published: 5:10PM GMT 08 Dec 2009 As the world gathered in the Danish capital for the UN Climate Change Conference, more than 50 scientists, businessmen and lobby groups met to discuss the arguments against man made global warming. Although the meeting was considerably smaller than the official gathering of 15,000 people meeting down the road, the organisers claimed it could change the course of negotiations. Professor Henrik Svensmark,...

WELLINGTON, New Zealand – The tsunami that killed more than 200 people in the Samoan islands and Tonga earlier this year towered up to 46 feet (14 meters) high — more then twice as tall as most of the buildings it slammed into, scientists said Friday.

Dear fellow member of the American Physical Society: This is a matter of great importance to the integrity of the Society. It is being sent to a random fraction of the membership, so we hope you will pass it on. By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen in our cumulative 223 years of APS membership. For those who have missed the news we recommend the excellent summary article by Richard Lindzen in the November 30 edition of the...

As the world gathered in the Danish capital for the UN Climate Change Conference, more than 50 scientists, businessmen and lobby groups met to discuss the arguments against man made global warming. Although the meeting was considerably smaller than the official gathering of 15,000 people meeting down the road, the organisers claimed it could change the course of negotiations. Professor Henrik Svensmark, a physicist at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen, said the recent warming period was caused by solar activity. He said the last time the world experienced such high temperatures, during the medieval warming period, the Sun...

The Copenhagen climate talks have been rocked by the leak of a draft final agreement which weakens the role of the United Nations in climate change negotiations and abandons the Kyoto Protocol. The "Danish text" draft agreement, published by the UK's Guardian newspaper, has been described as a dangerous document for developing countries. Over the past week, parts of Denmark's proposal have leaked into the public domain, but this is the first time it has been published in its entirety. According to the Guardian, the secret agreement has been worked on by a group of individuals known as the 'circle...

The current treatment of young-age creationists in the scientific community and society at large is unfair and unwise. Scientists and philosophers of science, including old-age creationists and naturalists, should respect youngage creationists as legitimate contributors to science. Young-age creationists offer to the current origins science establishment a competing rational viewpoint that will augment fruitful scientific investigation through increased accountability for scientists, introduction of original hypotheses and general epistemic improvement...

New research out this week has resolved a long-standing, and important, quandary about the causes of global warming. While several models point to anthropogenic CO2 and other greenhouse gases as the leading cause of global warming, the warming trends do not quite match the history of anthropogenic CO2. In fact, shrinking glaciers and other undeniable evidences of warming trace back to about the mid seventeenth century. But this predates the significant rise in anthropogenic CO2 that came later in later centuries. Now environmental researchers have solved the puzzle...

It seems there really is water on the moon, a major discovery that, like every answer to a great question, trails thousands of unanswered questions in its wake. Let us review the facts, or, at least, the facts as I understand them from my in-depth academic perusal of the headline crawl across the bottom of the screen on CNN. The lunar craft Chandrayaan-1, launched by India in October 2008, revealed a small amount of water on the moon, concentrated at the lunar poles. The craft wasn't manned , so presumably some kind of instrument relayed the news.

Description of simple experiment that shows CO2 can't cause warming by trapping Infra Red (Credit to mystery blogger) The claim that carbon dioxide (CO2) can increase air temperatures by "trapping" infrared radiation (IR) ignores the fact that in 1909 physicist R.W. Wood disproved the popular 19th Century thesis that greenhouses stayed warm by trapping IR. Unfortunately, many people who claim to be scientists are unaware of Wood's experiment which was originally published in the Philosophical magazine , 1909, vol 17, p319-320. Wood was an expert on IR. His accomplishments included inventing both IR and UV (ultraviolet) photography. Wood constructed two...

The Earth's temperature may be 30-50 percent more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than has previously been estimated, reports a new study published in Nature Geoscience this weekIn the long term, the Earth's temperature may be 30-50% more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than has previously been estimated, reports a new study published in Nature Geoscience this week. The results show that components of the Earth's climate system that vary over long timescales – such as land-ice and vegetation – have an important effect on this temperature sensitivity, but these factors are often neglected in current climate models. Dan Lunt,...

Arguing with Idiots… Part Deaux (A full-frontal assault on the Temple of Darwin) (Link to PDF). (I know I’ve done rants like this before, but you guys are worth it!) Dear worshippers of Darwin and lovers of self, My personal (condensed) declaration of faith: I believe in the God of the Bible. I believe in the Bible. I believe what it says. I believe, unashamedly that God is the Creator of the Universe and that He created it just as described in the Genesis account. I believe the only way to receive salvation is to believe and receive Jesus Christ...

Read the following mini-stories and much more by clicking the excerpt link below: 1. The Times: “Evidence of Life on Mars Lurks Beneath Surface of Meteorite, Nasa Experts Claim 2. PhysOrg: “‘Super-River’ Formed the English Channel” 3. Wired: “There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Simple’ Organism” 4. ScienceDaily: “Study Pits Man Versus Machine in Piecing Together 425-Million-Year-Old Jigsaw” 5. PhysOrg: “Bacterial Gut Symbionts Are Tightly Linked with the Evolution of Herbivory in Ants” 6. And Don’t Miss . . .

Please try to resist the childish jokes, but the fact is that the odd tilt of Uranus may be the result of a particularly large moon. Uranus spins on an axis almost parallel with the plane of the solar system, rather than perpendicular to it -- though why it does this nobody knows. One theory is that the tilt is the result of a collision with an Earth-sized object, but this "hasn't succeeded in explaining much of anything", says Ignacio Mosqueira of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Why, for example, are the orbits of Uranus's 27 known moons...

The cool climate of Antarctica was a refuge for animals fleeing climate change during the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history, suggests a new fossil study. The discovery may have implications for how modern animals will adapt to global warming. Around 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, about 90 per cent of land species were wiped out as global temperatures soared. A cat-sized distant relative of mammals, Kombuisia antarctica, seems to have survived the extinction by fleeing south to Antarctica. Jörg Fröbisch, a geologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, and colleagues rediscovered fossils of...

Google has added Pompeii to its Street View application, allowing internet users to take a 360-degree virtual tour of the ancient Roman city. Italy's culture ministry says it hopes the move will boost tourism to the site, state news agency Ansa reports. Among the ruins visible on the search engine's free mapping service are the town's statues, temples and theatres. The city was buried in ash after Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79 and was not discovered until the 18th Century. The volcanic debris preserved many of the city's buildings, frescos, silverware, mosaics and other artefacts. "Giving people a chance to...

Italian archaeologists have discovered the remains of an ancient Roman city submerged off the coast of Libya. The remains of the city date back to the 2nd century A.D. and were found by archaeologists and experts from Sicily and the University Suor Orsola Benincasa of Naples, involved in the ArCoLibia archaeology project. The discovery took place on the Cape of Ras Eteen on the western side of Libya's Gulf of Bumbah, as archaeologists were searching the area for shipwrecks and the remains of ancient ports. Archaeologists instead found walls, streets, and the remains of buildings and ancient tombs. After a...

Massive supernova produced rainbow of elements for months. Bang! The collapse of a massive star created a previously unseen type of supernova.NASA Astronomers have watched the violent death of what was probably the most massive star ever detected. The supernova explosion, which lasted for months, is thought to have generated more than 50 Suns' worth (1032 kilograms) of different elements, which may one day go on to make new solar systems. The explosion — dubbed SN2007bi — was spotted as part of a digital survey to hunt for supernovae at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California. One supernova in...

Seismic experiment gives best evidence yet for mantle plumes. Geologists have obtained the best image yet of a plume of hot rock that rises from Earth's deep mantle and fuels the volcanoes of the Hawaiian islands. The study, led by geophysicist Cecily Wolfe at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu, reveals the structure of the plume down to at least 1,500 kilometres. Critics have questioned in recent years whether such plumes even exist. "This is a spectacular experiment that succeeded in getting data for putting the plume theory to the test," says Wolfe. The results are published this...

In May 2009, a remarkably well-preserved extinct primate, nicknamed “Ida,” was hailed as one of the most important fossil finds ever. It had features that some interpreted as a link between two primate body forms. At the time, ICR News suggested that its evolutionary significance was far overblown, predicting that the scientific consensus would offer retractions. Those retractions came three months later, confirming that the fossil―called Darwinius―was really just an extinct lemur variety...

Samples of a colony of Martians have been put on display in the Natural History Museum, in London. A scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of a series of partly filled pits on the surface of a mineral grain from the Nakhla meteorite Photo: NASA/David McKay The microscopic aliens are on a slice of a meteorite in the museum. Nasa scientists, who used a scanning electron microscope to take snaps, say the bumpy surface resembles a fossilised colony of microbacteria – a simple form of life.

In the film, "The Day After Tomorrow," the world gets gripped in ice within the span of just a few weeks. Now research now suggests an eerily similar event might indeed have occurred in the past. Looking ahead to the future, there is no reason why such a freeze shouldn't happen again - and in ironic fashion it could be precipitated if ongoing changes in climate force the Greenland ice sheet to suddenly melt, scientists say. Starting roughly 12,800 years ago, the Northern Hemisphere was gripped by a chill that lasted some 1,300 years. Known by scientists as the Younger...

Dec 2, 2009 — Field geologists have revisited a site Darwin visited on the voyage of the Beagle, and found that he incorrectly interpreted what he found.  A large field of erratic boulders in Tierra del Fuego that have become known as “Darwin’s Boulders” were deposited by a completely different process than he thought.  The modern team, publishing in the Geological Society of America’s December issue of the GSA Today,1 noted that “Darwin’s thinking was profoundly influenced by Lyell’s obsession with large-scale, slow, vertical movements of the crust, especially as manifested in his theory of submergence and ice rafting to...

An Anglo-French study has revealed that long before the English Channel there was a giant river which ran south from an area of the North Sea. Previous research found that 500,000 years ago a range of low hills connected Britain to Europe between the Weald in South-East England and Artois in northern France. But during a series of ice ages beginning 450,000 years ago huge ice sheets covered much of northern Europe, trapping a portion of the North Sea the size of East Anglia. The great rivers of Europe poured into this lake at the southern end of the North...