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It's been several months since I've added a post to this series, since this one back on February 22. There's good reason for that. With the breakup of last year's big El Niño, global temperatures declined significantly. The latest global temperature anomaly from the UAH satellite temperature series is +0.21 deg C for June 2017 -- down a remarkable 0.65 deg C from the February 2016 global anomaly of +0.86 deg C. The Northern Hemisphere anomaly dropped even more, by 0.86 deg C, from +1.19 deg C to only +0.32 deg C. Those declines represent well more than half of...

　 Beaver's teeth 'used to carve the oldest wooden statue in the world' By The Siberian Times reporter 15 June 2017 Dating back 11,000 years - with a coded message left by ancient man from the Mesolithic Age - the Shigir Idol is almost three times as old as the Egyptian pyramids. Two years ago German scientists dated the Idol as being 11,000 years old. Picture: The Siberian Times New scientific findings suggest that images and hieroglyphics on the wooden statue were carved with the jaw of a beaver, its teeth intact. Originally dug out of a peat bog by...

“Let us do what our nation has always done since its very founding and beyond: We’ve pushed the boundaries on frontiers, not just of territory, but of knowledge. We’ve blazed new trails, and we’ve astonished the world as we’ve boldly grasped our future without fear.” “From this ‘Bridge to Space,’ our nation will return to the moon, and we will put American boots on the face of Mars.” Pence declared. Lined up behind Pence on the podium was the Orion spacecraft flown on Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1) in 2014 flanked by a flown SpaceX cargo Dragon and a mockup of...

The tunnel was found under the Pyramid of the Moon, the second-largest structure in the ancient city (the largest is the Pyramid of the Sun), according to the International Business Times. The archaeologists who discovered it believe that it mirrors the Teotihuacans’ great monuments and may represent the underworld in the belief system of the pre-Colombian, 2,000-year-old civilization that built it (a civilization thought to pre-date the Aztecs, who later occupied the site). The tunnel is long, extending from the central square known as the Plaza de la Luna to the nearby pyramid. It is about 33 feet (10 meters)...

QueSST is the preliminary design stage of NASA's Low Boom Flight Demonstration (LBFD) experimental airplane, also known as an X-plane. So far, a scale model of QueSST has been tested in an 8-by-6-foot supersonic wind tunnel at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. The next phase will be to test the technologies in flight, Coen said in the video. "So to do that, we're building an X-plane design and the eventual Low Boom Flight Demonstration aircraft that represents the boom of a larger airplane," Coen added. "The idea is to prove the technology; show how robust it is in a...

Milloy request NEJM retraction: If PM2.5 kills, then it kills everywhere, in the same way, and all the time, and every study result should either be consistent with that hypothesis or be explained away as flawed or faulty... ...the NEJM Study as it, for example, lacks information on the cause of death for any individual in the Medicare population, relies entirely on guesstimated exposure data, and fails to consider confounding factors such as smoking, socioeconomic status and any of the other myriad potential competing risk factors for death.

Scientists have discovered an ancient, giant, crocodile-like creature in Madagascar that had T-Rex-sized teeth it used for crunching bones,. The discovery helps to fill in the evolutionary gaps of a 74 million year long crocodilian “ghost lineage.” Researchers first discovered fossils of a giant predator on the island over a decade ago. At the time, scientists believed they had discovered a large predator from the Jurassic period and they named the creature Razanandrongobe sakalavae, meaning “giant lizard ancestor from Sakalava region.”

The asteroid that crashed into the planet about 66 million years might have been the end of the line for much of life on Earth, but for a few frogs it allowed a great leap forward. Genetic analysis by an international team of researchers from the US and China indicates that 88% of existing frog species are descended from just three frog families that survived and prospered following the mass extinction event known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary, which wiped out an estimated three-quarters of animals including non-avian dinosaurs and most large mammals.

Several high quality and cheap PCB antennas demoed for ham radio and survival communications by Survivalcomms You can click here to go to the video.

I look forward to all the future missions that NASA is going to be sending out in the Solar System. Here, check this out. You can use NASA’s website to show you all the future missions. Here’s everything planned for the future, here’s everything going to Mars. Now, let’s look and see what missions are planned for the outer planets of the Solar System, especially Uranus and Neptune. Oh, that’s so sad… there’s nothing. It’s been decades since humanity had an up close look at Uranus and Neptune. For Uranus, it was Voyager 2, which swept through the system in...

A fifth of male fish are now transgender because of chemicals from the contraceptive pill being flushed down household drains, a study by has suggested.  Male river fish are displaying feminised traits and even producing eggs, the study found. Some have reduced sperm quality and display less aggressive and competitive behaviour, which makes them less likely to breed successfully.

Did a Planetary Society citizen scientist help find one of Earth’s biggest impact craters? About 66 million years ago, a 10-kilometer-wide hunk of rock smashed into Earth near what is now Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.The impact created a global dust cloud that snuffed out the sunlight, leading to the demise of 80 percent of Earth's plants and animals—including most of the dinosaurs. A 200-kilometer-wide crater buried near the city of Chicxulub is all that's left. It's ground zero for one of the world's most notable extinction events.But throughout Earth's history, there have actually been five major extinction events. The largest of...

Turkish high school students will no longer be taught the theory of evolution. The subject has been cut from the curriculum under changes made to eliminate “controversial” topics, the head of the national board of education, Alpaslan Durmus, announced in a video address. “If our students don’t have the background, the scientific knowledge, or information to comprehend the debate around controversial issues, we have left them out,” Durmus said. The new curriculum will go into effect for the 2017- 2018 school year. It was crafted to emphasize national values and highlight contributions made by Turkish and Muslim scholars, Durmus said....

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Newsflash: the universe is expanding. We've known that since the pioneering and tireless work of Edwin Hubble about a century ago, and it's kind of a big deal. But before I talk about dark energy and why that's an even bigger deal, I need to clarify what we mean by the word "expanding." The actual observation that you can do in the comfort of your own home (provided you have access to a sufficiently large telescope and a spectrograph) is that galaxies appear to be receding from our own Milky Way. On average, of course: galaxies aren't simple creatures, and...

Bishop Curry looks for ways to fix the world. For an 11-year-old boy, he's unusually curious about big-picture problems, his dad says — from natural disasters to civil rights. And he's always loved to tinker. That's why it wasn't a surprise when Bishop, after seeing an upsetting local news report about a 6-month-old who died when left in a hot car, resolved to make sure something like that never happened again.

Uh, sorry folks, but words mean things and science trumps feelings. Let's break this down. There are three sexual orientations: Straight, Gay, and Bi. If you have no attraction to members of the same sex, you're straight. If you have no attraction to members of the opposite sex, you're gay. If you have some attraction, some of the time, to members of both sexes, you're bi. If you have any degree of attraction to someone of the same sex as you, then you're Bi. You might be 1% Bi, you might choose to never act on your attraction (just as...

At an event in the White House, flanked by several members of Congress and industry officials as well as Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Trump signed the executive order that re-establishes the council, last active at the end of the administration of President George H.W. Bush in 1993. ... Trump had previously announced that Vice President Mike Pence would serve as the head of the space council once it is reestablished. Pence stated on several occasions, dating back to the signing of a NASA authorization bill in March, that the president would soon sign the order re-establishing the council, with...

The United States has gotten just a little bit larger. Cape Hatteras, N.C., has a new addition to the landscape. Shelly Island is the unofficial name of a mile-long sandbank that has appeared just off the coast. And here to speak with us about it is Dave Hallac, who is superintendent of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. Thanks for joining us today. [snip]

More than 800 earthquakes have now been recorded at the Yellowstone Caldera, a long-dormant supervolcano located in Yellowstone National Park, over the last two weeks - an ominous sign that a potentially catastrophic eruption could be brewing. However, despite earthquakes occurring at a frequency unseen during any period in the past five years, the US Geological Survey says the risk level remains in the “green,” unchanged from its normal levels, according to Newsweek. The biggest earthquake in this “swarm” - which registered a magnitude of 4.4 – took place on June 15, three days after the rumblings started. That quake...