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To find out, scientists turned to chemistry. Here on Earth, about one in every 3,000 molecules of water is made with a deuterium atom instead of a hydrogen atom. A deuterium atom is similar to a hydrogen atom except that its nucleus contains a proton and a neutron, instead of a lone proton. (Both atoms also contain a single electron.) That makes deuterium twice as heavy as hydrogen, which is why water molecules made with deuterium atoms (HDO) are known as “heavy water.” At the time that our sun was born, the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen throughout the universe...

In the fog of scandals, it has fairly well been lost that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has rolled out new regulations setting in motion coal’s destruction as an energy source in the United States. We continue to be told that no respectable scientist argues against the case of climate change. Some have even argued the scientific debate is over (as if any scientific debate can ever be over). So we set out to find a legitimate scientific expert who argues against the current mantra. We searched far and wide (not really -- it was easy) and found two climatologists....

Now here’s something I guarantee you’ve never seen before: a video of the dwarf planet Pluto and its largest moon Charon showing the two distinctly separate worlds actually in motion around each other! Captured by the steadily-approaching New Horizons spacecraft from July 19–24, the 12 images that comprise this animation were acquired with the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument from distances of 267 million to 262 million miles (429 million to 422 million km) and show nearly a full orbital rotation. ... Pluto and Charon are seen circling a central gravitational point known as the barycenter, which accounts for...

For those who do not understand the blind loyalty of people who follow Al Gore and his Global Warming crusade, you must understand that to them it is nothing short of a religious belief.That’s right; Global Warming is a religion whose god is Mother Earth. For Al Gore and other politicians, it’s just another means to control the masses, but the religious aspect of Global Warming is ultimately how they are able to convince so many people that it truly does exist and man is responsible for creating it.To really explain what it is I mean, I need to...

Approximately 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs went extinct, 75% of the planet's many species went with them. It was the world's fifth, and most recent, mass extinction event. Now, according to a July 25 review in the journal Science, the Earth seems to be at the cusp of a sixth mass extinction. Only this time, an asteroid is not to blame. We are. "Human impacts on animal biodiversity are an under-recognized form of global environmental change," the team of ecologists and biologists warn in Science. "Among terrestrial vertebrates, 322 species have become extinct since 1500, and populations of...

Two years ago we were all going about our daily business blissfully unaware that our planet almost plunged into global catastrophe. A recent revelation by NASA explains how on July 23, 2012 Earth had a near miss with a solar flare, or Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), from the most powerful solar storm on the sun in over 150 years, but nobody decided to mention it. Err, what? Well that’s a sobering bit of news. “If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” says Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado. We managed to just avoid the...

A team from Harvard University presented a study this month that remnants from an ancient Earth exists, right now, inside contemporary Earth. The group believes that their comparisons of isotopic ratios of noble gases from materials deep inside Earth with those near the surface provide testimony that the deep-down material is actually from the Earth that existed before its massive collision with another planet. That immense impact – the largest in geologic history – is what many believe led to creation of the Moon. The currently favored theory about how the Moon originated says that it was formed 4.5 billion...

Trailer Talk: Eco-Terrorism 'Night Moves' Downplays Own Subject Matter by Christian Toto 31 Mar 2014 Both The Company You Keep and The East, films which portrayed eco-terrorists in a favorable light, tanked at the box office. So is it any wonder the trailer for the new film Night Moves downplays the eco-nature of its protagonists? The thriller casts Dakota Fanning, Jesse Eisenberg and Peter Scarsgaard as three environmental radicals who decide to take action against their corporate targets. Trailers are famous for giving away too much of their stories. In the case of Night Moves, the trailer only touches on...

While all concern is focused on our planets eco system it occurred to me that we are missing what is really happening. Our earth cannot handle the stress of our movements on the planet.

The High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment aboard the International Space Station (ISS) was activated April 30, 2014. It is mounted on the External Payload Facility of the European Space Agency’s Columbus module. This experiment includes several commercial HD video cameras aimed at the earth which are enclosed in a pressurized and temperature controlled housing. Video from these cameras is transmitted back to earth and also streamed live on this channel. While the experiment is operational, views will typically sequence though the different cameras. Between camera switches, a gray and then black color slate will briefly appear. Since the ISS...

"The heavens reek, the waters below are foul ... we are in a crisis of survival." That's how Walter Cronkite and CBS hyped the first Earth Day, back in 1970. Somehow we've survived since then, and most of life got better, although I never hear that from the worrywarts. Of course, some things got better because of government: We passed environmental rules that got most of the filth out of the air and sewage out of lakes and rivers. Great -- but now we're told that we're in big trouble because greenhouse gases cause global warming. I mean, climate change....

For scientists who spend time thinking about how planets form, life would be simpler if gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn didn’t exist. According to the standard model of planet formation, called "core accretion," planets form over millions of years as enormous blocks of rock and ice smash together to form planetary embryos, called "protoplanets," and eventually full-fledged planets. Most scientists agree that core accretion is how terrestrial planets such as Earth and Mars were created, but the model can’t convincingly explain how gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn came to be. One major problem is that developing gas...

Line up Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars according to their distance from the sun and you'll see their size distribution is close to symmetrical, with the two largest planets between the two smallest. That would be no coincidence -- if the pattern emerged from a debris ring around the sun. Brad Hansen of the University of California, Los Angeles, built a numerical simulation to explore how a ring of rocky material in the early solar system could have evolved into the planets. He found that two larger planets typically form near the inner and outer edges of the ring, corresponding...

http://goo.gl/maps/Dc4mV A year or so ago I looked at the google earth image to see what I could see. The only thing that irritated me from the start is the picture was taken with the trees at full foliage. That is odd for goggle in it’s self because they generally try to take the pictures from fall or spring where there is less tree cover so you can see more ground detail. Didn’t think much more of it at the time… so I forgot about it. A few days ago I had another reason to hit google earth and I...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 15 (UPI) -- Twenty-six percent of U.S. respondents do not realize Earth revolves around the sun, a survey by the National Science Foundation indicated. The NSF conducts the poll on some basic science facts every two years, The Atlantic reported. The foundation said there has been little change in the percentages of correct answers since 1992.

The video below is a very creative representation of what the day and night sky on Earth would look like if the earth had rings like Saturn. It is well worth a view.But it puts me in the mind of pondering the delicate balance of life on this earth and, though the artwork in the video is beautiful, I suspect that the presence of rings would dramatically alter life on this earth, perhaps even annihilate it.By way of disclaimer, let me say I am not a geologist or astronomer. But a number of things concern me about the presence of...

Decades after industrial waste dumping turned part of Southern California's seafloor into a toxic hot spot, scientists have dredged up a mystery. Chemicals fouling the ocean off the Palos Verdes Peninsula seem to be going away without being cleaned up. Samples taken from the sediment suggest more than 100 metric tons of the banned pesticide DDT and industrial compounds known as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, have vanished from one of the country's most hazardous sites, almost a 90% drop in just five years.

Secular scientists used to regard the planetary collision theory as a triumph in explaining several of the moon's specific arrangements. But newfound facts severely debilitate this lunar impact origins theory. According to this new theory, an early Earth collided at a glancing angle with a planet that was one or two times the mass of Mars. Some of the debris launched into orbit around Earth and somehow collected to form the moon. This could explain the moon's peculiar orbit and some of its other properties.1 But, as Bob Jones University astronomy professor Ron Samec noted, recent studies refute even this...

NEW YORK — Members of the United Nations met with distinguished astronauts and cosmonauts this week in New York to begin implementing the first-ever international contingency plan for defending Earth against catastrophic asteroid strikes. Six of the space travelers involved in these U.N. discussions discussed the asteroid defense effort Friday (Oct. 25) in a news conference hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson at the American Museum of Natural History. Their goal: to drive home the very-real threats posed by near-Earth objects (NEOs), or asteroids traveling within the radius of Earth's orbit with the sun. You can see a video of...

Earth will be able to host life for just another 1.75 billion years or so, according to a study published on 18 September in Astrobiology1. The method used to make the calculation can also identify planets outside the Solar System with long ‘habitable periods’, which might be the best places to look for life. The habitable zone around a star is the area in which an orbiting planet can support liquid water, the perfect solvent for the chemical reactions at the heart of life. Too far from a star and a planet’s water turns to permanent ice and its carbon...