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WASHINGTON (AP) — The president's new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth's air.

Associated Press WASHINGTON — The sun has been unusually quiet lately, with fewer sunspots and weaker magnetic fields than in nearly a century. A quiet sun is good for Earth: GPS systems are more accurate, satellites stay in orbit longer; even the effects of manmade global warming are marginally reduced, though just by three-tenths of a degree at most...

A brilliant burst of gamma rays may have caused a mass extinction event on Earth 440 million years ago—and a similar celestial catastrophe could happen again, according to a new study. Most gamma-ray bursts are thought to be streams of high-energy radiation produced when the core of a very massive star collapses. Such a disaster may have been responsible for the mass die-off of 70 percent of the marine creatures that thrived during the Ordovician period (488 to 443 million years ago), suggests study leader Brian Thomas, an astrophysicist at Washburn University in Kansas. The simulation also shows that a...

Tail-gliding Bugs Are Not Evidence for Flight Evolution by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D.* Researchers recently announced that they have unlocked some of the mystery surrounding the evolution of insect flight.1 Their observance of a certain wingless insect led them to hypothesize that its “directed aerial descent” might be an important stage in flight evolution. But is it?...

April 1, 2009: The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower. 2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days: plot. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008. Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no...

In 1912 scientists thought they'd discovered the elusive missing link between human and ape. Found in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England, a set of intriguing skull and jaw fragments were later reconstructed by the British Museum into a human-like head with an ape-like jaw. In 1953 it turned out the find wasn't proof of anything—other than the skill of the still anonymous forger. The skull was a medieval human's. The jaw was an orangutan's. And the teeth were a chimp's.

WASHINGTON — The debate on global warming and energy policy accelerated on Tuesday as two senior House Democrats unveiled a far-reaching bill to cap heat-trapping gases and move the country quickly from dependence on coal and oil. But the bill leaves crucial questions unanswered and as of now has no Republican support. For those reasons, it marks the beginning, not the end, of debate in the current Congress on how to deal with two of President Obama’s top priorities, climate change and energy. The draft measure, written by Representatives Henry A. Waxman of California and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts,...

REP. WAXMAN TO PROPOSE U.S. CARBON EMISSIONS CUTS OF 20 PCT FROM 31 Mar 2009 00:01:43 GMT Source: Reuters REP. WAXMAN TO PROPOSE U.S. CARBON EMISSIONS CUTS OF 20 PCT FROM 2005 LEVEL BY 2020, 42 PCT BY 2030, 83 PCT BY 2050 -SOURCE

Al Gore Leaves The Light On For Ya By Kleinheider Posted on March 29, 2009 at 12:00 pm Even during Earth Hour. President of the Tennessee Center For Policy Research Drew Johnson takes a Saturday drive by Al Gore’s during the time most environmentalists went dark: I pulled up to Al’s house, located in the posh Belle Meade section of Nashville, at 8:48pm – right in the middle of Earth Hour. I found that the main spotlights that usually illuminate his 9,000 square foot mansion were dark, but several of the lights inside the house were on. In fact, most...

A Web site called EarthHour.org, apparently unconcerned about the carbon footprint of majuscules, urges global warmists to "VOTE EARTH BY SWITCHING OFF YOUR LIGHTS FOR ONE HOUR" starting at 8:30 p.m. tomorrow. We were tempted to make fun of this, as many people in the site's comment section have done, but then we remembered what President Obama said about cynics who fail to understand that the ground has shifted beneath them. So instead of being consumed by the stale political argument that this protest is silly, we're going to do something positive: organize a counterprotest. Reader, if you are against...

As the climate crisis mounts and Arctic icebergs slip away, polar bears are suffering starvation, population declines, and drowning as they must swim further and further to find food. Seeking to raise awareness for the endangered species' plight, ADDI Concepts has taken wildlife preservation literally by designing a life-vest for displaced polar bears struggling to stay afloat as their homes sink into the sea. Polar bears are facing a bleak future as Arctic icebergs continue to melt and ancient shelves of ice collapse. The species inhabits only the Arctic Ocean and its surrounding areas, and they and can hunt consistently...

AUSTIN — The State Board of Education gave a nearly-final nod to new science curriculum standards Thursday that would change a long-standing Texas tradition over how schoolchildren learn about evolution. The tentative vote — a final one is expected today — will mean teachers and students no longer will be expected to discuss the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution and the theory about the origin of life developed by Charles Darwin 150 years ago. The move is a setback for critics of evolution, who argued that teachers and students should have to analyze the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution —...

Earlier this month, an expedition fertilized 300 square kilometers of the Atlantic Ocean with six metric tons of dissolved iron. This triggered a bloom of phytoplankton, which doubled their biomass within two weeks by taking in carbon dioxide from the seawater. The dead phytoplankton were then expected to sink to the ocean bed, dragging carbon along with them. Instead they experiment turned into an example of how the food chain works as the bloom was eaten by a swarm of hungry copepods. The huge swarm of copepods were in turn eaten by larger crustaceans called amphipods, which are often eaten...

Paleontologists can still hear the echo of the death knell that drove the dinosaurs and many other organisms to extinction following an asteroid collision at the end of the Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago... This conclusion followed a detailed global analysis of marine bivalves, one of the few groups plentiful enough in the fossil record to allow such a study, which was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Andrew Krug of the University of Chicago, Jablonski and James Valentine of the University of California, Berkeley, examined the geologic ages of every major lineage of living bivalves the...

Walking on two legs, or bipedalism, immediately sets us apart form other apes. It frees our arms for using tools and weapons and is a key part of our evolutionary success. Scientists have put forward a few theories to explain how our upright gait evolved, but the 'savannah theory' is by far the most prolific... But this theory fails in the light of new fossils which push back the first appearance of bipedalism to a time before the forests thinned, and even before our ancestors split from those of chimpanzees. Very early hominins, including Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) and Millennium Man...

The biggest ever investigation into "ocean fertilisation" as a climate change fix has brought modest results. The idea is that putting iron filings in the ocean will stimulate growth of algae, which will absorb CO2 from air. But scientists on the Lohafex project, which put six tonnes of iron into the Southern Ocean, said little extra carbon dioxide was taken up. Germany's environment ministry had tried to stop the project, which green campaign groups said was "dangerous". Leaders of the German-Indian expedition said they had gained valuable scientific information, but that their results suggested iron fertilisation could not have a...

A 25-year-old transsexual Spaniard claims to be pregnant with twins after artificial insemination in the first such case in Spain, local media reported on Sunday. "I am six-and-a-half weeks pregnant," Ruben Noe Coronado Jimenez, initially named Estefania, told the popular magazine Pronto, saying he took treatment to restart his menstrual cycle.

The Permian Extinction: Good Science, Bad Assumptions by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Ninety percent of marine and 70 percent of terrestrial creatures perished suddenly in an event variously called the Permian extinction, the Permian–Triassic (P-Tr) extinction, or the Great Dying. The calamity’s cause, referred to as the K-T event, remains unknown, even though asteroid impact has been in vogue. At least, this is the account that has been repeated for several decades. Now, a recently-published study is showing that evidence of the Permian extinction is not limited to a single rock stratum.1 The whole story must be rewritten...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Day after day, reports of the dangers of climate and climate change circulate in the news, often filled with confusing data and debate. In an effort to improve understanding of climate science, a group of government agencies has combined efforts to produce "Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Science."

Sometimes it's just really hard to kill a bug. According to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, a mosquito managed to live 18 months clinging to the outside of the International Space Station, without any food, being bombarded by radiation and enduring fluctuating temperatures ranging from minus 230 degrees to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. "We brought him back to Earth. He is alive, and his feet are moving," Anatoly Grigoryev of the Russian Academy of Sciences told RIA Novosti. The buzzing bug was part of a larger experiment in which bacteria, barley seeds, small crustaceans and larval insects were placed in...