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Here is a video report showing the underwater eruption of the West Mata Volcano south of Samoa, near Fiji and Tonga. This was reportedly filmed from 4,000 feet down, and is the deepest filming ever of an underwater eruption of a volcano. . . . (VIDEOS)

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)...

On one of the last of days of digging in Harvard Yard this fall, archaeologists believe they finally found evidence linked to one of the University's earliest buildings, the Indian College that stood on the site from 1655 to 1698. Archaeologists working in a chest-deep hole near Matthews Hall uncovered a narrow strip of dark earth in a lighter, orange-brown layer that marks natural soil. They believe that the dark earth is the bottom of an architectural trench most likely dug for the Indian College, built to house Native American students as part of the University's original mandate to educate...

...The plateau, with an average altitude above 4,000 meters and known as "the Roof of the World" in southwestern China, is one of the most challenging areas in the world for human settlement due to its environmental extremes, such as extreme cold and low oxygen levels. ...with the drastic drop of temperature on the Earth in the Last Glacial Maximum of the Late Paleolithic Age, about 23,000 years ago, many species could not adapt to the changes and died out... From the perspective of genetic continuity studies, geneticists had also attempted to find out when modern humans settled on the...

Evidence of what could be Australia's earliest human occupation has been found on the fringe of desert in the country's remote northwest, according to archaeologists. Peter Veth, of the Australian National University, said an artefact dated at between 45,000 and 50,000 years old found near the shores of Lake Gregory could be the start of a 25-year study into Australia's first humans. "This is the first evidence of human activity ... in the arid northwest of the continent which can be dated to a time before the last great Ice Age," he said in a statement. It was likely to...

Proof that pre-historic people placed bunches of flowers in the grave when they buried their dead has been found for the first time, experts have said. Archaeologists have discovered a bunch of meadowsweet blossoms in a Bronze Age grave at Forteviot, south of Perth... Pollen found in earlier digs had been thought to have come from honey, or the alcoholic drink mead but this find may finally rule that theory out. Dr Kenneth Brophy, from the University of Glasgow, said the flowers "don't look very much. Just about three or four millimetres across. But these are the first proof that...

Egypt on Thursday lifted a nine-ton gate of the goddess Isis which carved out of red granite and discovered in the port area on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The gate is one of the rare artifacts discovered in 1998 by an archaeological survey carried out by the Greek archaeological mission in cooperation with the diving team of the Department of the Sunken Antiquities in Alexandria, said the Egyptian Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni during the ceremony. Hosni noted that a committee of the UNESCO would meet with Egyptian archaeologists to study the establishment of the museum under...

PARIS — European Space Agency (ESA) governments on Dec. 17 gave final approval to a two-part Mars exploration program to be conducted with NASA, confirming their commitment to spend 850 million euros ($1.23 billion) on missions in 2016 and 2018, ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain said.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – U.S. researchers have discovered antiviral proteins in cells that naturally fight off influenza infections, a finding that may lead to better ways to make vaccines and protect people against the flu. They said a family of genes act as cell sentries that guard cells from an invading influenza virus, the team reported on Thursday in the journal Cell. "This prevents the virus from even getting into the cell," said Stephen Elledge of Harvard Medical School and a Howard Hughes Investigator at Brigham & Women's Hospital. "It is out there fighting the flu all of the time," Elledge...

It is crucial that scientists are factually accurate when they do speak out, that they ignore media hype and maintain a clinical detachment from social or other agendas. There are facts and data that are ignored in the maelstrom of social and economic agendas swirling about Copenhagen. Greenhouse gases and their effects are well-known. Here are some of things we know: • The most effective greenhouse gas is water vapor, comprising approximately 95 percent of the total greenhouse effect. • Carbon dioxide concentration has been continually rising for nearly 100 years. It continues to rise, but carbon dioxide concentrations at...

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...

Montreal, December 17, 2009 – Canadian teenagers are among the largest consumers of cannabis worldwide. The damaging effects of this illicit drug on young brains are worse than originally thought, according to new research by Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, a psychiatric researcher from the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre. The new study, published in Neurobiology of Disease, suggests that daily consumption of cannabis in teens can cause depression and anxiety, and have an irreversible long-term effect on the brain. "We wanted to know what happens in the brains of teenagers when they use cannabis and whether they are...

If you've seen an Internet ad for capacitor-type power factor correction devices, you might be led to believe that using one can save you money on your residential electricity bill. However, a team including specialists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have recently explained* why the devices actually provide no savings by discussing the underlying physics. The devices—sometimes referred to as Amp Reduction Units or KVARs**—are touted as good investments because they reduce the amount of current drawn from power lines while simultaneously providing the necessary amount of current to appliances inside the house. Though engineers elsewhere...

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...

Seems Jesse is furthering the carbon credit scam exposure.

Scientists from University of Strathclyde have devised a novel way to harness natural vitamin E extract that would kill tumours within 10 days.Using a new delivery system, the research team could mobilise an extract from Vitamin E, known ton have anti-cancer properties, to attack cancerous cells. In the study conducted over skin cancer, the researchers found that tumours started to shrink within 24 hours and almost vanished in ten days. They believe the tumours might have been completely destroyed if the tests had continued for longer. When the tumours regrew, they did so at a far slower rate than previously....

There is no evidence supporting auditory and visual learning, psychologists sayAre you a verbal learner or a visual learner? Chances are, you've pegged yourself or your children as either one or the other and rely on study techniques that suit your individual learning needs. And you're not alone— for more than 30 years, the notion that teaching methods should match a student's particular learning style has exerted a powerful influence on education. The long-standing popularity of the learning styles movement has in turn created a thriving commercial market amongst researchers, educators, and the general public. The wide appeal of the...

China today announced it had begun construction of the world's longest sea bridge – barely 18 months after opening the current record-holder. The Y-shaped link between Hong Kong, Macau and China will be around 50km (31 miles) long in total, 35km of which will span the sea, said the state news agency Xinhua. Due to be completed by 2015, the 73bn yuan (£6.75bn) cost of the bridge will be shared by the authorities in the three territories.

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.

TAU draws on bacterial decision-making success to guide human choices> "Unlike our health authorities, bacteria would never panic," he says. "Bacteria don't follow the media or watch cable news. Instead, they send chemical messages to each other — in a colony 100 times larger than the earth's human population — to make their decisions. And based on what we've seen in bacterial colonies, I know they would be suspicious committing to swine flu shots. They wouldn't opt for a colony wide vaccination," Prof. Ben Jacob concludes. >

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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 black depths of the frigid Arctic Ocean, scientists on a 2005 expedition found a splash of color: The brilliant, blood-red Crossota norvegica jellyfish (pictured). The creature was spotted by a remotely operated vehicle 8,530 feet (2,600 meters) underwater during a two-month National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) expedition to the Canada Basin, the deepest and least explored part of the Arctic waters. Though C. norvegica is not a new species, several new deep-sea animals were discovered during the expedition--some of which were announced in recent research papers in 2009.

An international team of Canadian and Spanish scientists have found the first potential immunological clue of why some people develop severe pneumonia when infected by the pandemic H1N1 virus. The study analyzed different levels of regulating molecules for 20 hospitalized patients, 15 outpatients and 15 control subjects in 10 Spanish hospitals during the first pandemic wave in July and August 2009. Researchers from the Hospital Clinico Universitario de Valladolid in Spain and the University Health Network found high levels of a molecule called interleukin 17 in the blood of severe H1N1 patients, and low levels in patients with the mild...

Astronomers announced today the discovery of at least four — and as many as six — planets orbiting two nearby stars. These planets are relatively low mass, ranging from 5 to 25 times the mass of the Earth. For comparison, Jupiter is over 300 times more massive than the Earth, and Uranus 15 times our mass. Three of these extrasolar planets orbit the nearby star 61 Virginis, which is only about 28 light years away (that’s a stone’s throw in galactic terms). 61 Vir has been a target for planet hunters for some time because it’s very much like our...

SYDNEY (AFP) – Australian scientists on Tuesday revealed the eight-tentacled species can carry coconut shells to use as armour -- the first case of an invertebrate using tools. Research biologist Julian Finn said he was "blown away" the first time he saw the fist-sized veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, pick up and scoot away with its portable protection along the sea bed. "We don't normally associate complex behaviours with invertebrates -- with lower life forms I guess you could say," Finn, from Museum Victoria, told AFP. "And things like tool-use and complex behaviour we generally associate with the higher vertebrates: humans,...

Since we're already on the topic of fairy dust, how about a new all-wheel drive supercar that can purportedly thrust you from nought to sixty in 2.5 seconds? New startup Kepler Motors is about to unveil its first vehicle and its ambition is nothing short of staggering. Employing a 550bhp Ford Ecoboost petrol engine to drive the rear wheels and a 250bhp electric motor for the front pair, this machine also comes with a carbon fiber chassis and carbon ceramic brakes to really make the theoretical numbers look ridiculous. Of course, it's still only a concept for the Dubai International...

Sarah Palin is such a cold-eyed skeptic about the Copenhagen summit on climate change that it's no surprise she would call on President Obama not to attend. After all, Obama might join other leaders in acknowledging that warming is a "global challenge." He might entertain "opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions." He might even explore ways to "participate in carbon-trading markets." Oh, wait. Those quotes aren't from some smug Euro-socialist manifesto. They're from an administrative order Palin signed in September 2007, as governor of Alaska, establishing a "sub-Cabinet" of top state officials to develop a strategy for dealing with climate...

Russian commercial aircraft manufacturer Irkut has selected an American engine (the Pratt & Whitney PW1000G) for its new twin engine MC-21 airliner. While Russia is competitive in building airframes, it still cannot yet match Western jet engine quality. This is critical, because Western engines use less fuel and are cheaper to maintain. These are decisive factors in the airline business. Russia continues to work at catching up in the high-end jet engine business. For military engines, you can sacrifice some fuel efficiency and reliability, to achieve equal performance. But this still makes your air force inferior (aircraft are unavailable more...

Distance Vision Is All A Blur To More of Us A study finds that 17% more Americans have myopia than 30 years ago. Close-up computer work could be a reason. By Shari Roan December 15, 2009 For an increasing number of Americans, life's a blur. That's according to a population-based study published Monday showing that rates of myopia -- difficulty seeing distant objects -- are soaring. The trend is matched in many other countries, causing eye doctors to wonder what could be causing the decline in human vision. Some suspect both an increase in our close-up work time (think computer...

15,000 Will Die From CT Scans Done In 1 Year Scans have higher levels of radiation than thought, researchers say Dec. 14: According to new reports in the Archives of Internal Medicine, radiation exposure from commonly performed CT scans may contribute to thousands of future cancer cases. NBC's Robert Bazell reports. Dec . 14, 2009 CHICAGO - Radiation from CT scans done in 2007 will cause 29,000 cancers and kill nearly 15,000 Americans, researchers said Monday. The findings, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, add to mounting evidence that Americans are overexposed to radiation from diagnostic tests, especially from...

WASHINGTON — The commercial spaceflight company Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) said this month that it expects to launch its cargo-carrying Dragon spacecraft on a maiden flight to the International Space Station (ISS) sometime between May and November 2010.

The report of the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee (the Augustine Committee) formed by the Office of Science and Technology Policy is truly exciting and inspiring. But that is hard to tell from its title, its text, or listening to the folks presenting it. It is dry, technical, and full of caveats. Nor would you know it from the media coverage — which is mostly about the negatives of NASA not having enough money.

An international team of planet hunters has discovered as many as six low-mass planets around two nearby Sun-like stars, including two "super-Earths" with masses 5 and 7.5 times the mass of Earth. The researchers, led by Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said the two "super-Earths" are the first ones found around Sun-like stars.

If there’s one thing that the Virgin Group, the umbrella of companies that includes Virgin Galactic, is known for, it’s putting on a spectacle. The company has, over the years, refined the art of doing events designed to maximize public interest and media attention. It’s something that had its roots in the company’s need to compete against rival companies with bigger advertising budgets, but has since become a hallmark of Virgin itself.

A crypt in the Tuscan town of Porto Ercole, Italy, could contain the 400-year-old bones of artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, anthropologists said. A team from Bologna University and Ravenna University planned to use infrared scanners, CAT scans, DNA analysis and carbon dating to solve the mystery of where Caravaggio, a master of chiaroscuro lighting, was buried, the Italian news agency ANSA reported Friday. The crypt in Porto Ercole was the mostly likely of eight possible burial sites, said Caravaggio expert Maurizio Marini. Local church records said Caravaggio died in the town in 1610. On Wednesday, the anthropologists began sorting...

Infectious diseases can be transmitted by sneezing, touching, or – for Tasmanian devils – biting each other on the face, a habit that may have driven the dinosaurs to extinction through the transmission of a protozoan parasite. Jacqueline Upcroft, a member of f1000 Biology, highlights the 'paleobiological detective work' of David Varricchio and colleagues published in PLoS One. This led them to deduce that a protozoan parasite was to blame for the diseased jaw bones seen in many tyrannosaurid fossils. The parasite's modern-day equivalent, which infects birds, eats away at the jawbone and can cause ulcers so severe that the...

University of Alberta researchers are part of an international team that has used DNA samples from frozen dirt, not fossilized bones, to revise the history of North America's woolly mammoths and ancient horses. The work of U of A Earth and Atmospheric Sciences professor Duane Froese and his colleagues counters an important extinction theory, based on radiocarbon dating of bones and teeth. That analysis concluded that more than half of the large mammals in North America (the 'megafauna') disappeared about 13,000 years ago. In the new research, DNA samples recovered from Alaskan permafrost showed that woolly mammoths and ancient horses...

People blessed with youthful faces are more likely to live to a ripe old age than those who look more than their years, work shows. Danish scientists say appearance alone can predict survival, after they studied 387 pairs of twins. The researchers asked nurses, trainee teachers and peers to guess the age of the twins from mug shots. Those rated younger-looking tended to outlive their older-looking sibling, the British Medical Journal reports. Survival advantageThe researchers also found a plausible biological explanation for their results. Key pieces of DNA called telomeres, which indicate the ability of cells to replicate, are also...

Research confirms mothers were right all along - removing a Band-Aid is less painful when it is ripped off quickly. A study at Queensland's James Cook University used 65 medical students who removed Band-Aids either quickly or slowly, and ranked their pain reaction from zero to 10. Quick removal returned a pain score of 0.92 in comparison with 1.58 for those who chose the slow approach. Researcher Dr Carl O'Kane says the research found the cause of pain to be more of a psychological issue. "It's fascinating that if you had a preconception that slow was going to be more...

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...

For years we’ve tried to ‘sell’ climate change, but a lot of people aren’t buying.

It's a spine-chilling discovery - hundreds of expertly-butchered human bones that suggest cannibalism was rife among early man.What's even more shocking is that the victims may have been HAPPY to be eaten ...The birds are singing and the forest floor is dappled with sunlight. You can hear the sound of a babbling stream, running into the great river not far off to the east. Sharp ears might hear the drumming of a woodpecker or, high above, the cry of a sparrowhawk.

"We were very scared, because it was the first time we had seen this," Castellano said. Keepers in Ecuador put that bear, which had previously been fed human food—including Coca-Cola—on its natural diet of fruits and bamboo, and added enrichment items, such as toys and exotic foods, into the bear's enclosure. Four months later the fur grew back.

Radical environmentalists are forging a new socialist post-democracy that is slowly undermining representative government. The myth of global warming along with the Environmental Protection Agency have become the hammer and sickle of eco-Marxism - the new green-red alliance that seeks to destroy capitalism and the sovereign nation-state. The United Nations climate-change summit in Copenhagen represents a major victory for international socialism. It also marks the triumph of ideological fanaticism over reality. National governments will announce at Copenhagen major cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. President Obama vows to commit the United States to reducing carbon-dioxide levels by 83 percent from 2005 levels...

IPCC and ACORN

The Big Dipper -- part of Ursa Major in astronomy -- may be one of the most recognized features of the night sky, but that doesn't mean it can't stand an occasional improvement. A team from New York's American Museum of Natural History, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, Caltech, and the University of Cambridge in England reports that Alcor, the bright star that forms the bend in the dipper's "handle," has a dim red dwarf star orbiting it. They've put out this very pretty image, in which Alcor is renamed Alcor A, and its newly-found satellite star is called Alcor B....

COLLEGE STATION – A gene commonly studied by cancer researchers has been linked to the metabolic inflammation that leads to diabetes. Understanding how the gene works means scientists may be closer to finding ways to prevent or cure diabetes, according to a study by Texas AgriLife Research appearing in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. "Because we understand the mechanism, or how the gene works, we believe a focus on nutrition will find the way to both prevent and reverse diabetes," said Dr. Chaodong Wu, AgriLife Research nutrition and food scientist who authored the paper with the University of Minnesota's Dr....

Long, long ago, some of the first dinosaurs walked the Earth. But scientists have not known with any confidence where those initial dino prints were made. Much more recently, hikers stumbled across a few bits of bone at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, leading to the discovery of a game-changing dinosaur that reveals where it all began. The dinosaur, now called Tawa hallae, had a body that was only the size of a medium to large dog, but its remains have helped scientists shore up where dinosaurs came from. The research team used the extremely well-preserved and complete skeletal remains...

Monkey Alarm Calls Provide Clues To Origins Of Human Language Monkeys form very primitive sentences, scientists have discovered, in research that brings us closer to understanding the origins of language. Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent 11 Dec 2009 A team found the Campbell's monkey can add a simple sound to its alarm calls to create new ones and then combine them to convey even more information. Human language is incredibly complex, but one defining feature is the process of adding a prefix or suffix to a word to change its meaning. For example, adding "hood" to the word "brother" to form...