Science News, the 'Golden Corral' Buffet

A Bunch of interesting science blog posts at this link -- The finalists for the Three Quarks Daily science contest. Lots of fun, and the winner will be selected by Sean Carroll (who, though he has blocked me from posting on his facebook wall, still lets me comment on his posts, and who in fact, is a heck of a nice guy.)

A few posts I ,at least, noticed the title of, include---

Eruptions: The Mysterious Missing Eruption of 1258 A.D.

Double X Science: Real science vs. fake science: How can you tell them apart?

[ I didn't read the above post--- I was miffed my essay"God will smite the climate change deniers" didn't even make the first round, of candidates]

Cosmology Science Blog: Observation of two early yet mature galaxies: Rare objects or is Big Bang model inaccurate?

Galileo's Pendulum: Is Cosmology in Shambles?

[nice]

The Beast, the Bard, and the Bot: Are Humans Still Evolving?

[don't get too excited here; the evolution of human intelligence seems not to have occurred to the writer.]

So how did the climate change in the Miocene Era?

Scientists are puzzled today by the discovery that millions of years ago levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were lower [than they are today] - and yet,[the water] temperatures [then] were higher than today's [are].

So begins a writeup about a paper in Nature just published. If you don't have access to the magazine the writeup I reference still contains information about how they determined what the temperature in the miocene era WAS, and how surprised they were to find that apparently the levers of climatic change were different in the miocene than the mechanisms of global change today.

Mind body connection progress perhaps

Quoting a blurb about an article in Nature, an article which may represent a step toward understanding the mind body connection---

Though i don't have a subscription to Nature, nor could I understand the article probably, my guess is its a very tiny step, because the headlines for any part, typically, of a scientific solution, will grandify the results, which is only apparent when you look at the actual article. That is just how the mind operates. Guess they won't be identifying the part of the brain, where a guess, a step towards progress, ie, any verbal formulation, is taken by the brain to be more significant than it actually is, ---- too soon. What brought my comment up, is the observation that even the title of the article here, is modest. "Involved" rather than "discovered", "explained," .... the usual hyper conclusions typically found in headlines, book titles, etc. This is not a scientific jargon matter, this is the way words work in general. (kind of) -- that is, unavoidably overstating their own, significance. My favorite example, which I am not quoting exactly, is books titles, Like "The Evolution of Consciousness" which you find quickly, is held out by the author or authors, as nothing so definitive. The interesting thing is this blurb is atypically modest---

Rhythmic Firing of Nerves Involved in Body’s Movements

A new model for understanding how nerve cells in the brain control movement may help unlock the secrets of the motor cortex, a critical region that has long resisted scientists’ efforts to understand it, researchers report June 3 in Nature. (Embargo expired on 03-Jun-2012 at 14:00 ET)
Nature, June 3
—Washington University in St. Louis

My source for the above quotation is --Newswise SciWire for 04-Jun-2012

No traffic lights in the early solar system

A Professor Minton has some new ideas to explain the puzzle that, when, two billion years ago, the sun was only 70% as bright as it is now, the earth did not become a frozen ball of ice. The answer is clever and involves the mechanics of solar system formation. It does involve another collision of two bodies as creating a night sky feature. Since recently it was theorized the moon was made of two different bodies that collided, it certainly makes for a busy scenario in the early solar system.

Dark Matter Getting Cloudy

New study finds mysterious lack of dark matter in Sun's neighborhood. FROM phys.org

"(Phys.org) -- The most accurate study so far of the motions of stars in the Milky Way has found no evidence for dark matter in a large volume around the Sun. According to widely accepted theories, the solar neighbourhood was expected to be filled with dark matter, a mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by the gravitational force it exerts. But a new study by a team of astronomers in Chile has found that these theories just do not fit the observational facts. This may mean that attempts to directly detect dark matter particles on Earth are unlikely to be successful."

The stellar source of the elements that compose us

From Scientific American blogs: a fair use excerpt:

One of the most widely known and repeated astrophysical facts is that stars produce all the heavy elements that eventually make planets, shrubberies, and the likes of us. It’s absolutely true, but how exactly do they get those elements out into the universe to do all that?....

The problem is that we haven’t fully understood how stars perform this trick [of dispersing the elements]. The only tool they have at their disposal is the pressure of stellar photons – light flooding from the star can push and accelerate material away from it. However, getting this light to push against the gas of the stellar atmosphere efficiently enough to set it in motion has seemed difficult. One option is that the tiny grains of dust act like miniature solar sails, that in turn snowplough through the gas to accelerate it along in front of them. However this theory has had some gaps in it; figuring out the necessary combination of dust grain composition, size, and location of formation has been tricky....

We link to an illuminating answer above.

In the 1960s the US creates an successful artificial ionosphere

1960s -- US creates successful artificial ionosphere