News updates about the September 15, 2007, Carancas, Peru, meteorite impact; alarming disappearance of four bumblebee species in North America; and breakthrough quantum physics math that shows the Cosmos is branching like a bush and each limb is a parallel universe.
Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
More and more people are depending on podcasts and the internet for their daily news updates. But there is no overall Web Editor to do a reality check on content. So, finding out what is factual is an ever-increasing challenge. In this Earthfiles August 2007 podcast, a headline circulating on the web for weeks is called false by astronomers. Also, Texas media keep calling the strange, grey animal seen and photographed over the past four years as a “chupacabras,” but it’s not the goat-sucker of Puerto Rico, Mexico and South America.
For the first time in astronomical history, a huge, bizarre rock beyond Neptune has been linked to other orbiting bodies out there. Some how the big rock called 2003 EL61, which is almost the size of Pluto, got into orbit out in the Kuiper Belt where most every other object is made of ice. Not only is this huge rocky object there, it is the only object in our solar system shaped like an American football and tumbling long end-over-end every four hours.
Speculations about the function of junk DNA now range from “punctuation” among the genes, to damage residue by ancient viruses, to even questions about DNA manipulation in already-evolving primates by non-human intelligences.
Coming up is Solar Maximum 24, reaching its peak between 2010 to 2012. Will there be a lot of X-flares that can hurt astronauts, fry satellites and damage electrical power stations? The sun is sending contradictory signals. But NASA has weighed in on the space weather debate with the prediction this maximum could be the strongest in 400 years since record keeping began.