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Boulder, Colo., USA – A 25-year-long study published in GEOLOGY on 14 July provides the first quantitative measurement of in situ calcium-magnesium silicate mineral dissolution by ants, termites, tree roots, and bare ground. This study reveals that ants are one of the most powerful biological agents of mineral decay yet observed. It may be that an understanding of the geobiology of ant-mineral interactions might offer a line of research on how to "geoengineer" accelerated CO2 consumption by Ca-Mg silicates. Researcher Ronald Dorn of Arizona State University writes that over geological timescales, the dissolution of calcium (Ca) and magnesium (Mg) bearing...

Many young people, especially the anti-social, dislike classical music so much that it can be played to discourage them from intimidating, harassing and robbing.This experiment has been successful over many years in countless locations. The earliest occurrence was in the mid-1980s, when Canadian outlets of 7-Eleven played easy listening and classical music to disperse teenagers loitering outside. After that, companies from McDonald's to Co-op, transport authorities, housing estates and shopping malls around the world have employed this method. In the UK, the first to do so was the Tyne-and-Wear Metro system in 1997, following Montreal’s underground system in Canada. Other...

Big thanks to Martin Archer for help with this episode. And thanks to Guy Larsen for his shadow magic.

Gig Harbor, Washington. -- In the Pacific Northwest, we live among behemoths — snowcapped volcanoes, towering trees, great splashing salmon and lattes as big as a child’s head. Yet one of the region’s undeniably superlative titans has slipped beneath everyone’s radar.

The price of a stabilized green power grid is very steep, one could say it is like a “hockey stick”Story submitted by Eric Worrall  (h/t John Droz)Coal and gas electricity companies are being paid up to 400x times the wholesale price of power, in return for helping to stabilize the German electricity grid.According to Bloomberg, “Germany’s push toward renewable energy is causing so many drops and surges from wind and solar power that the government is paying more utilities than ever to help stabilize the country’s electricity grid.” “At the beginning, this market counted for only a small portion of...

I don’t think Gina McCarthy had thought this through. McCarthy to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee: “And the great thing about this proposal is it really is an investment opportunity. This is not about pollution control. It’s about increased efficiency at our plants…It’s about investments in renewables and clean energy. It’s about investments in people’s ability to lower their electricity bills by getting good, clean, efficient appliances, homes, rental units,” “This is an investment strategy that will really not just reduce carbon pollution but will position the United States to continue to grow economically in every state, based...

EDITOR’S NOTE: This past Sunday, the editorial board of the New York Times endorsed the federal legalization of marijuana. In the February 12, 1996, issue of National Review, this publication’s editors endorsed the same concept in an introduction to a symposium on the question. The editorial and WFB’s contribution to the symposium follow: National Review has attempted during its tenure as, so to speak, keeper of the conservative tablets to analyze public problems and to recommend intelligent thought. The magazine has acknowledged a variety of positions by right-minded thinkers and analysts who sometimes reach conflicting conclusions about public policy. As...

SciShow News reports some promising new findings about the worldwide fight against HIV, including insights about how we can make the most of one of our newest weapons against HIV: circumcision.

The collective noun is a terror of tyrannosaurs: a pack of the prehistoric predators, moving and hunting in numbers, for prey that faced the fight of its life. That tyrannosaurs might have hunted in groups has long been debated by dinosaur experts, but with so little to go on, the prospect has remained firmly in the realm of speculation. But researchers in Canada now claim to have the strongest evidence yet that the ancient beasts did move around in packs. At a remote site in north-east British Columbia - in the west of Canada - they uncovered the first known...

Ötzi’s human genome was decoded from a hip bone sample taken from the 5,300 year old mummy. However the tiny sample weighing no more than 0.1 g provides so much more information. A team of scientists analyzed the non-human DNA in the sample. They found evidence for the presence of Treponema denticola, an opportunistic pathogen involved in the development of periodontal disease. Ötzi's human genome was decoded from a hip bone sample taken from the 5,300 year old mummy. However the tiny sample weighing no more than 0.1 g provides so much more information. A team of scientists from EURAC...

The panel, carved in Nubian Sandstone, was found recently in a tomb at the site of Sedeinga, in modern-day Sudan. It is about 5.8 feet (1.8 meters) tall by 1.3 feet (0.4 m) wide, and was found in two pieces. Originally, it adorned the walls of a temple at Sedeinga that was dedicated to Queen Tiye (also spelled Tiyi), who died around 1340 B.C. Several centuries after Tiye's death — and after her temple had fallen into ruin — this panel was reused in a tomb as a bench that held a coffin above the floor. Scars of a revolution...

“One of the odd burials is in Grave 1003, which had been excavated by our Italian colleagues,” Sajjadi said. The skeleton of 45-year-old man is located in the center of the circle-shaped grave and skulls of two dogs are placed above his head. In addition, 12 human skulls were placed on the north side of the grave, he stated, adding that to date, no other example of such a burial has been discovered in the Burnt City. Due to the structure of the grave, Sajjadi stated, “The grave undoubtedly belongs one of the peoples who had migrated from the Central...

For the first time in three decades, paleontologists are about to revisit one of North America's most remarkable troves of ancient fossils: The bones of tens of thousands of animals piled at the bottom of a sinkhole-type cave. Natural Trap Cave in Wyoming is 85 feet (25 meters) deep and almost impossible to see until you're standing right next to it. Over tens of thousands of years, many, many animals—including now-extinct mammoths, short-faced bears, American lions and American cheetahs—shared the misfortune of not noticing the 15-foot-wide (4 meters) opening until they were plunging to their deaths. Now, the U.S. Bureau...

...an ancient naval ram used by the army of Mithradates VI of the Bosporan Kingdom to quell a popular uprising against him in Phanagoria in 63 B.C. One-meter long ram and presumably made of bronze, it has an engraving of Mithradates VI, the king of Pontus from 119 to 63 B.C. who was the most powerful king in Anatolia during the 1st century B.C... The ram was found in the submerged part of Phanagoria, the largest Greek colony on the Taman peninsula, not far from the 15-meter-long ship that was previously unearthed in 2012... and proves that the ship was...

Explanation: The clouds surrounding the star system Rho Ophiuchi compose one of the closest star forming regions. Rho Ophiuchi itself is a binary star system visible in the light-colored region on the image right. The star system, located only 400 light years away, is distinguished by its colorful surroundings, which include a red emission nebula and numerous light and dark brown dust lanes. Near the upper right of the Rho Ophiuchi molecular cloud system is the yellow star Antares, while a distant but coincidently-superposed globular cluster of stars, M4, is visible between Antares and the red emission nebula. Near the...

Explanation: Shiny NGC 253 is one of the brightest spiral galaxies visible, and also one of the dustiest. Some call it the Silver Dollar Galaxy for its appearance in small telescopes, or just the Sculptor Galaxy for its location within the boundaries of the southern constellation Sculptor. First swept up in 1783 by mathematician and astronomer Caroline Herschel, the dusty island universe lies a mere 10 million light-years away. About 70 thousand light-years across, NGC 253 is the largest member of the Sculptor Group of Galaxies, the nearest to our own Local Group of Galaxies. In addition to its spiral...

An ancient inscription discovered on a 14th century church in Spain's Galicia region has been identified as Gaelic; the first written evidence of the northern region’s Irish and Scottish heritage. For centuries it has gone unnoticed, weathered by Galicia’s incessant drizzle but still visible to those with an eagle-eye. On one of the granite walls of Santiago church in the small town of Betanzos, a small previously unintelligible inscription five metres above ground kept historians and epigraphists, or people who study ancient inscriptions, baffled for decades. Researchers working for a private association called the Gaelaico Project now believe they've finally...

Academic publishing was rocked by the news on July 8 that a company called Sage Publications is retracting 60 papers from its Journal of Vibration and Control, about the science of acoustics. The company said a researcher in Taiwan and others had exploited peer review so that certain papers were sure to get a positive review for placement in the journal. In one case, a paper's author gave glowing reviews to his own work using phony names. Acoustics is an important field. But in biomedicine faulty research and a dubious peer-review process can have life-or-death consequences. In June, Dr. Francis...

Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system has been highly visible protecting its airspace during Operation Protective Edge. But exactly how the military is locating Hamas’ labyrinth of underground tunnels between Israel and Gaza – and whether it is using new technologies to uncover them – remains a closely held secret. “Due to security concerns, we cannot specify the tools or methods used to uncover these tunnels. Exposing our capabilities would hamper our ability to address this lethal threat,” an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokeswoman said in an email to FoxNews.com. “However, using precise intelligence combined with specialized units which use...

Explanation: The Crab Pulsar, a city-sized, magnetized neutron star spinning 30 times a second, lies at the center of this tantalizing wide-field image of the Crab Nebula. A spectacular picture of one of our Milky Way's supernova remnants, it combines optical survey data with X-ray data from the orbiting Chandra Observatory. The composite was created as part of a celebration of Chandra's 15 year long exploration of the high energy cosmos. Like a cosmic dynamo the pulsar powers the X-ray and optical emission from the nebula, accelerating charged particles to extreme energies to produce the jets and rings glowing in...

Production of beef is nearly ten times more damaging to the environment than any other form of meat production, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. American scientists measured the environment inputs required for beef production and concluded that beef cattle need 28 times more land and 11 times more irrigation water than pork, poultry, eggs or dairy. […] The scientists calculated that the amount of resources required for all the feed consumed by edible livestock and worked out the amount of hay, silage and concentrates such as soybeans required by the...

A dinosaur graveyard in Kulinda, on the banks of the the Olov River in Transbaikal region, has given up some remarkable secrets. For the first time, plant-eating dinosaur remains with feathers and scales have been discovered. Until now, only flesh-eating dinosaurs were known to have been feathered. The latest find in Siberia indicates that - on the contrary - all dinosaurs could have been feathered, says a paper in Science magazine. 'It is a big discovery. It has completely changed our vision of dinosaurs', lead researcher Dr Pascal Godefroit, of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, who worked alongside...

They were intended to be among the first animals to join the 350-mile-high club, but now a group of geckos sent into space to reproduce may be at risk. The five lizards - four male and one female - launched on a research satellite on 19 July to study the effects of weightlessness on their sex lives.

The sun is the most important energy source on Earth. Solar energy powers the growth of all trees, grasses, herbs, crops and algae; it creates the clouds and powers the storms; it is the source of all hydro, photo-voltaic (PV), solar-thermal, bio-mass, and wind energy. Over geological time, it also creates coal. PV solar panels are useful in remote locations and for some portable applications. With enough panels and batteries, standalone solar can even power homes. But solar energy has five fatal flaws for supplying 24/7 grid power.

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...

Mount Rainier, one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the U.S. and in the world, is widely expected to erupt again. The only unknown facing scientists is when the massive stratovolcano, 4,392 meters tall and located 87 kilometers southeast of Seattle in Washington state, will finally explode. Scientists from the United States and Norway recently mapped the electric and magnetic signatures of magma flows beneath Mount Rainier (pronounced “ray-near”). They’ve also discovered a mammoth magma reservoir below the mountain that will fuel any eruption with massive magma flows. The research found out that magma or fluid molten rock is trapped...

Explanation: This alluring all-skyscape was taken 5,100 meters above sea level, from the Chajnantor Plateau in the Chilean Andes. Viewed through the site's rarefied atmosphere at about 50% sea level pressure, the gorgeous Milky Way stretches through the scene. Its cosmic rifts of dust, stars, and nebulae are joined by Venus, a brilliant morning star immersed in a strong band of predawn Zodiacal light. Still not completely dark even at this high altitude, the night sky's greenish cast is due to airglow emission from oxygen atoms. Around the horizon the dish antenna units of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, ALMA,...

Explanation: Why does this starfield photograph resemble an impressionistic painting? The effect is created not by digital trickery but by large amounts of interstellar dust. Dust, minute globs rich in carbon and similar in size to cigarette smoke, frequently starts in the outer atmospheres of large, cool, evolved stars. The dust is dispersed as the star dies and grows as things stick to it in the interstellar medium. Dense dust clouds are opaque to visible light and can completely hide background stars. For less dense clouds, the capacity of dust to preferentially reflect blue starlight becomes important, effectively blooming the...

Essay by Dr. Tim Ball (Elaboration of my Heartland Climate Conference Presentation) We’re drowning in information and starving for knowledge. Rutherford RogersSo-called climate skeptics, practicing proper science by disproving the hypothesis that human CO2 is causing global warming, achieved a great deal. This, despite harassment by formal science agencies, like the Royal Society, and deliberate neglect by the mainstream media. It combined with an active and deliberate Public Relations campaign, designed to mislead and confuse. Most people and politicians understand little of what is going on so the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) strategy of using created science for...

Governments can’t change the weather. One day people will marvel that turn of the century governments thought they could control the climate, and needed to issue decrees about how much “change” in the weather they would allow.From different continents come two articles with a similar theme. It’s time to dump the EPA and pointless “Climate” policies.The US should get rid of the federal EPA Alan Caruba and Jay Lehr tell us how it is. The EPA is a rogue tool of liberal activitists. For years now I have been saying that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must be eliminated and...

On July 23, 2012, the sun unleashed two massive clouds of plasma that barely missed a catastrophic encounter with the Earth’s atmosphere. These plasma clouds, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), comprised a solar storm thought to be the most powerful in at least 150 years. “If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” physicist Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado tells NASA. ... Analysts believe that a direct hit … could cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn’t even be able to flush their toilet because...

Once overlooked because of its relative inactivity compared to other subduction zones around the world, the Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) — and the potentially devastating megathrust earthquakes and tsunamis it could unleash — are today well known to both geoscientists and the public. Beginning with the efforts of John Adams of the Geological Survey of Canada and Brian Atwater of the U.S. Geological Survey in the late 1980s, a series of oceanic research cruises and datasets has steadily advanced our understanding of Cascadia. It seems like there is “a paradigm change every few years,” says Chris Goldfinger, a geologist at...

Watchmaking is a noble tradition stretching back hundreds of years when they would make all the parts by hand. While technology today has lightened some of their workload, it's still a fascinating sight when a watchmaker creates another mechanical beauty.

A few weeks ago it was teeming with sunspots, as you would expect since we are supposed to be in the middle of solar maximum -- the time in the sun's 11-year cycle when it is the most active. But now, there is hardly a sunspot in sight. If you look closely at the image above, taken on July 18 by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, you will see a tiny smidge of brown just right of center where a small sunspot appears to be developing. But just one day before, there truly was nothing. It was a totally spotless day....

Things are heating up on planet Earth. Average global temperatures shattered records this June ... for the second month in a row, according to a new report from the National Climactic Data Center. The NCDC, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, analyzed data from 2,000 weather stations scattered across the globe measuring both ocean and land temperatures and found that global average temperatures surpassed the previous record by 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit. That makes June 2014 the warmest June since record keeping began in 1880. If this trend continues, 2014 could top 2010 as the warmest year recorded.

Explanation: Yes, but have you ever seen aurora from a cave? To capture this fascinating juxtaposition between below and above, astrophotographer Bjargmundsson spent much of a night alone in the kilometer-long Raufarhólshellir lava cave in Iceland during late March. There, he took separate images of three parts of the cave using a strobe for illumination. He also took a deep image of the sky to capture faint aurora, and digitally combined the four images later. The 4600-year old lava tube has several skylights under which stone rubble and snow have accumulated. Oh -- the person standing on each mound --...

The highlight of the excavation was the discovery of a Judea Capta coin, which was minted by Roman Emporor Domitian during his reign of 81 – 96 CE in honor of the conquest of Judea and the destruction of Jersusalem in 70 CE by his father, Vespasian, and brother, Titus. Christie Cobb, a doctoral student at Drew University in New Jersey, discovered the coin. There are only 48 other versions of this coin that have been found, and fewer still at Biblical sites such as Bethsaida. “The coin confirms other ceramic data about the date of the large Roman period...

Apple Inc. is preparing for its largest initial production run of iPhones, betting that larger-screen models will lure consumers now attracted to similar phones from Samsung Electronics Co. and others. The Cupertino, Calif., company is asking suppliers to manufacture between 70 million and 80 million units combined of two large-screen iPhones with 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch displays by Dec. 30, according to people familiar with the matter. Its forecast for what is commonly called the iPhone 6 is significantly larger than the initial order last year of between 50 million and 60 million versions of the iPhone 5S and 5C--which had...

Climate change skeptics have suggested a recent slowdown in the warming of the Earth is evidence that global warming is a farce and that climate models can't be trusted, but new research suggests the slowdown, or "pause," was not a significant disruption of larger trends. The planet has been slowly warming over the last century or more. But in the last 15 years, that rate of warming has slowed. Temperatures are still high by historical standards; but between 1998 and 2013 they were slightly below what climate models had predicted. A small number of scientists and policy makers have pointed...

Climate alarmists sometimes like to claim skeptical scientists don’t exist, but they do, and one meteorologist had a lot to say on the subject. In an interview with the MRC’s Business and Media Institute, well-known meteorologist Joe Bastardi dissected and criticized major aspects of the climate change alarmism movement. Drawing on his knowledge of weather and climate history, Bastardi said that “extreme weather” events the media talk about so much are commonplace and the result of normal variability. He also attacked basic arguments about CO2, scientific consensus and alarmist media bias. Bastardi contended that climate alarmism is “ludicrous” and “not...

Just being in the Goldilocks zone doesn't mean there'll be anyone to eat the porridge ... “We know that many planets are completely uninhabitable because they are either too close or too far from their sun. A planet’s habitable zone is based on its distance from the sun and temperatures at which it is possible for the planet to have liquid water,” said David Stevens, from the university's school of mathematics. “But until now, most habitability models have neglected the impact of oceans on climate. Oceans have an immense capacity to control climate. They are beneficial because they cause the...

� A flip-flop on Arctic permafrost thaws – actually a net cooling rather than a warming A conversation with Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. on the Kaya Identity → Hard times for Aussie Alarmists – Flannery begs in new video Posted on July 18, 2014 by Anthony Watts Story submitted by Eric WorrallTim Flannery, one time head of the government Climate Commission in Australia, until it was disbanded by the current government, has released a video begging for donations to “keep science in the news”. A year after raising a million dollars, he now needs more money. Flannery has an impressive track record...

Among the most exciting of the new acquisitions are the materials from the site of Jebel Sahaba, now in northern Sudan, which were donated to the Museum by Dr Fred Wendorf in 2002. Excavating here in 1965–66, as part of the UNESCO-funded campaign to salvage sites destined to be flooded by the construction of the Aswan High Dam, Dr Wendorf found a cemetery (site 117) containing at least 61 individuals dating back to about 13,000 years ago. This discovery was of great significance for two reasons. First, as a designated graveyard, evidently used over several generations, it is one of...

As of today, Australia no longer has the most expensive “carbon” price in the world. The voters didn’t ask for a tax in 2010,  but it was forced on them in 2011. They rejected it wholeheartedly in 2013 but it still has taken months to start unwinding this completely pointless piece of symbolism which aimed to change the weather. The machinery of democracy may be slow, but this is a win for voters.11:15am EST today: The Australian Senate passes the carbon tax repeal bill.“Australia has become the first country in the world to abolish a price on carbon, with the Senate...

South Korea announces delay the day after Australia’s carbon tax repealStory submitted by Eric WorrallIn a sign that rejection of climate alarm is gathering momentum, South Korea has thrown doubt on its carbon plans. Significantly, the announcement was made the day after Australia abolished the carbon tax. According to the report; “July 18 (Reuters) – South Korea’s finance minister has called its impending emissions trading market “flawed in many ways”, hinting that he would pressure other ministries to delay the planned 2015 launch, a local newspaper reported. Choi Kyung-hwan, who is also deputy prime minister, said problems had been found...

...the burials of the deceased of the estimated 30,000 commoners and laborers remained elusive – until 2001, when archaeologist Barry Kemp of the University of Cambridge began to see the first signs. Kemp has directed excavations and surveys at Amarna for the Egypt Exploration Society since 1977. “The puzzle seems now to have been solved,” says Kemp. “ It has come about through the desert GPS survey begun in 2001 and continued in subsequent years. First came the discovery of two cemeteries (clearly robbed) of what must be relatively poor graves on the flat desert not far from tomb no....

About 400 footprints were first discovered in the cave in 1965. Scientists initially attributed the impressions to a man, woman and child who lived 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. But radiocarbon measurements of two cave bear bones excavated just below the footprints now indicate that Homo sapiens made these tracks around 36,500 years ago, say anthropologist David Webb of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania and his colleagues. Analyses of 51 footprints that remain — cave explorers and tourists have destroyed the rest — indicate that six or seven individuals, including at least one child, entered the cave after a flood had...

Explanation: Why does this comet's nucleus have two components? The surprising discovery that Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko has a double nucleus came late last week as ESA's robotic interplanetary spacecraft Rosetta continued its approach toward the ancient comet's core. Speculative ideas on how the double core was created include, currently, that Comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko is actually the result of the merger of two comets, that the comet is a loose pile of rubble pulled apart by tidal forces, that ice evaporation on the comet has been asymmetric, or that the comet has undergone some sort of explosive event. Pictured above, the comet's unusual...

Explanation: What's happened to our Sun? Nothing very unusual -- it just threw a filament. Toward the middle of 2012, a long standing solar filament suddenly erupted into space producing an energetic Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). The filament had been held up for days by the Sun's ever changing magnetic field and the timing of the eruption was unexpected. Watched closely by the Sun-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory, the resulting explosion shot electrons and ions into the Solar System, some of which arrived at Earth three days later and impacted Earth's magnetosphere, causing visible aurorae. Loops of plasma surrounding an active...

Forty-five years ago, on July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 Lunar Module (LM) touched down on the surface of the Moon. On the eve of this anniversary, NASA has released a new look at the Apollo 11 landing site created using data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter