Climate Changes Happening Faster Than Expected

A report released today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union provides new insights on the potential for abrupt climate change and the effects it could have on the United States, identifying key concerns that include faster-than-expected loss of sea ice, rising sea levels and a possibly permanent state of drought in the American Southwest.

The analysis is one of 21 of its type developed by a number of academic and government agency researchers for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. The work incorporates the latest scientific data more than any previous reports, experts say, including the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

While concluding that some projections of the impact of climate change have actually been too conservative – as in the case of glacier and ice sheets that are moving and decaying faster than predicted – others may not pose as immediate a threat as some scenarios had projected, such as the rapid releases of methane or dramatic shifts in the ocean current patterns that help keep Europe warm.

"We simulate the future changes with our climate models, but those models have not always incorporated some of our latest data and observations," said Peter Clark, a professor of geosciences at Oregon State University and a lead author on the report. "We now have data on glaciers moving faster, ice shelves collapsing and other climate trends emerging that allow us to improve the accuracy of some of our future projections."

Some of the changes that now appear both more immediate and more certain, the report concludes, are rapid changes at the edges of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, loss of sea ice that exceeds projections by earlier models, and hydroclimatic changes over North America and the global subtropics that will likely intensify and persist due to future greenhouse warming.

"Our report finds that drying is likely to extend poleward into the American West, increasing the likelihood of severe and persistent drought there in the future," Clark said. "If the models are accurate, it appears this has already begun. The possibility that the Southwest may be entering a permanent drought state is not yet widely appreciated."

Climate change, experts say, has happened repeatedly in Earth's history and is generally believed to be very slow and take place over hundreds or thousands of years. However, at times in the past, climate has also changed surprisingly quickly, on the order of decades.

[...]

* Recent rapid changes at the edges of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets show acceleration of flow and thinning, with the speed of some glaciers more than doubling. These "changes in ice dynamics can occur far more rapidly than previously suspected," the report said, and are not reflected in current climate models.

* Inclusion of these changes in models will cause sea level rises that "substantially exceed" levels now projected for the end of this century, which are about two feet – but data are still inadequate to specify an exact level of rise.

* Subtropical areas around the world, including the American West, are likely to become more arid in the future due to global warming, with an increasing likelihood of severe and persistent drought. These are "among the greatest natural hazards facing the United States and the globe today," the report stated, and if models are correct, this has already begun.

* The strength of "AMOC" ocean circulation patterns that help give Europe a much warmer climate than it would otherwise have may weaken by about 25-30 percent during this century due to greenhouse gas increases, but will probably not collapse altogether – although that possibility cannot be entirely excluded.

* Climate change will accelerate the emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from both hydrate sources and wetlands, and they quite likely will double within a century – but a dramatic, potentially catastrophic release is very unlikely.

Mixed news there. This is the NeoOligocene crowd, btw.

Russian News: No Crisis Here!

Russia's foreign-exchange reserves have been now been declining very rapidly since mid August, and as the money goes so does the faith that the large stock of reserves the country built up during the boom times would be sufficient to see them through any downturn in energy prices. As the money leaves, so it seems does the decade of economic growth and stability which they symbolised. Indeed so rapid has been the decline that Russia's international reserves, which are the third-biggest after those of China and Japan, have now fallen $161 billion, or 27% percent, since 8 August last, and decreased by $17.9 billion to $437 billion in the week to 5 December. Investors have now pulled $211 billion out of the country since August, according to estimates by BNP Paribas.

Read about the economic news at Global Economy Matters. It's pretty dire.

However, if you are Russian, don't write about it, because...

When a Russian sociologist wrote a newspaper column last month suggesting the global financial crisis could cause social unrest, the state media watchdog advised the paper not to spread extremist sentiments.

"This is censorship," said Yevgeny Gontmakher, the author of the column and the head of the Academy of Science's Social Policy Center. "The situation in the country is changing; you can no longer utter the word 'crisis'."

The financial crisis is presenting Russia's ruling elite with the most serious challenge to its power in a decade. The Kremlin has responded by offering a bailout package and economic stimulus measures between them worth over $200 billion.

But journalists and critics say the Kremlin has deployed another weapon too: using its grip on the media to try to prevent ordinary people from finding out how bad things really are.

It comes from the top, via the meetings the top editors have with the government and the Kremlin," said the reporter, asking not to be named because he feared he could lose his job if he spoke publicly on the issue.

"The reasoning is to prevent panic from spreading inside Russia. We can still report on the crisis but we have to be very careful of how we term things, so it is a way of reporting rather than an outright ban."

At the end of last week Russia's chief macroeconomic planner was overruled by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin after saying Russia was already in a recession. Within hours, Putin told a different story, trumpeting growth of around 6 percent for 2008 and predicting Russia would weather the financial storm.

More here.

However, one of the saddest parts of teh article is...

One senior foreign exchange trader in Moscow said he did not want to comment on the central bank's efforts to support the falling rouble because if he did, it would add to the bad news surrounding the currency.

"I am a Russian patriot and I would not like that," he said.

Speaking the truth is now unpatriotic. *sighs* Where did this meme come from? It's present here too.

To make matters worse, don't criticize the government, comrade!

A new law drafted by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's Cabinet would allow authorities to label any government critic a traitor — a move that leading rights activists condemned Wednesday as a chilling reminder of the times under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

The draft extends the definition of treason from breaching Russia's external security to damaging the nation's constitutional order, sovereignty or territorial integrity. That would essentially let authorities interpret any act against the interests of the state as treason — a crime prosecutable by up to 20 years in prison.

More here.

Better start praying that oil prices stay low. Really low. For a long, long time.

Austroraptor Cabazai, a Short Armed Dromaeosaurid

An unusual raptor dinosaur found in Argentina is the largest of its kind found so far in the Southern Hemisphere, with awkwardly short arms that made it resemble a Tyrannosaurus, researchers reported on Tuesday.

The creature would have weighed 368 kg (800 pounds) and been nearly 5 meters (15 feet) long when it hunted in what is now Patagonia 100 million to 65 million years ago, the researchers said.

The discovery sheds light on the evolution of dromaeosaurids, birdlike dinosaurs that ran on two legs and are considered by many to have been the most intelligent of the dinosaurs.

Fernando Novas of the Museo Argentino des Ciencias Naturales and colleagues named the newly discovered species Austroraptor cabazai -- from austral in reference to southern South America, and raptor meaning thief. The cabazai honors the late Alberto Cabaza, founder of the Museo Municipal de Lamarque, whose researchers also helped in the work.

Holy Parallel Evolution In Action, batman!

No renditions, sorry, folks.

Update: rendition found and put here.

SpacePort America News

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The New Mexico Spaceport Authority (NMSA) received its launch license for vertical and horizontal launch from the Federal Aviation Administration’s Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation (FAA/AST). This is a critical step to moving forward with Spaceport America, the nation’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport. The FAA/AST has issued Spaceport America a license for vertical and horizontal launches, after providing the Environmental Impact Study (EIS) Record of Decision (ROD) which was needed for construction to begin.|

“These two governmental approvals are the next steps along the road to a fully operational commercial spaceport,” said NMSA Executive Director Steven Landeene. The New Mexico State Legislature set certain requirements for spaceport funding, which included the formation of a local tax district, the issuance of an FAA EIS record of decision and launch site license, and a signed lease agreement with an anchor tenant. “We are on track to begin construction in the first quarter of 2009, and have our facility completed as quickly as possible,” he said. The NMSA is expected to have a signed lease agreement with Virgin Galactic later this month.

“It’s an important day for New Mexico and the nation as Spaceport America now adds to the United States’ launch infrastructure,” said Daniela Glick, Chair of the NMSA Board. Southern New Mexico’s Spaceport America is positioned to become the nation’s leading commercial spaceport facility. There have been several commercial launches for various clients from the site since April 2007, with more launches planned. Roadwork to the spaceport is underway, and the architectural firm of URS/Foster + Partners is completing their final design for the terminal and hangar facility.

Just an update.


Watch the skies, Jason. Keep watching the skies!

Killer Zones of the Continental US

X-47B Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle Complete

Read about it here and here.

This is probably one of the single most important aircraft program that the US has at the moment. More than the F-22 (which we really ought to buy more of) or the F-25 [ed: oops] F-35 (less of). The UCAV future is nigh on here. The Predator demonstrated that.

No, Really! Hobbits are Another Homo species

University of Minnesota anthropology professor Kieran McNulty (along with colleague Karen Baab of Stony Brook University in New York) has made an important contribution toward solving one of the greatest paleoanthropological mysteries in recent history -- that fossilized skeletons resembling a mythical "hobbit" creature represent an entirely new species in humanity's evolutionary chain.

Discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, controversy has surrounded the fossilized hominid skeletons of the so-called "hobbit people," or Homo floresiensis ever since. Experts are still debating whether the 18,000-year-old remains merely belong to a diminutive population of modern-day humans (with one individual exhibiting "microcephaly," an abnormally small head) or represent a previously unrecognized branch in humanity's family tree.

Using 3D modeling methods, McNulty and his fellow researchers compared the cranial features of this real-life "hobbit" to those of a simulated fossil human (of similar stature) to determine whether or not such a species was distinct from modern humans.

"[Homo floresiensis] is the most exciting discovery in probably the last 50 years," said McNulty. "The specimens have skulls that resemble something that died a million years earlier, and other body parts reminiscent of our three-million-year-old human ancestors, yet they lived until very recently -- contemporaries with modern humans."

Comparing the simulation to the original Flores skull discovered in 2003, McNulty and Baab were able to demonstrate conclusively that the original "hobbit" skull fits the expectations for a small fossil hominin species and not a modern human. Their study was published online this month in the Journal of Human Evolution.

The cranial structure of the fossilized skull, says the study, clearly places it in humanity's genus Homo, even though it would be smaller in both body and brain size than any other member. The results of the study suggest that the theorized "hobbit" species may have undergone a process of size reduction after branching off from Homo erectus (one of modern day humanity's distant ancestors) or even something more primitive.

"We have shown with this study that the process of size reduction applied to fossil hominins accounts for many features seen in the fossil skull from Flores," McNulty said. "It becomes much more difficult, therefore, to defend the hypothesis that the preserved skull is a modern human who simply suffered from an extremely rare disorder.

Another salvo!

Meet LUCA!

An evolutionary geneticist from the Université de Montréal, together with researchers from the French cities of Lyon and Montpellier, have published a ground-breaking study that characterizes the common ancestor of all life on earth, LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor). Their findings, presented in a recent issue of Nature, show that the 3.8-billion-year-old organism was not the creature usually imagined.

The study changes ideas of early life on Earth. "It is generally believed that LUCA was a heat-loving or hyperthermophilic organism. A bit like one of those weird organisms living in the hot vents along the continental ridges deep in the oceans today (above 90 degrees Celsius)," says Nicolas Lartillot, the study's co-author and a bio-informatics professor at the Université de Montréal. "However, our data suggests that LUCA was actually sensitive to warmer temperatures and lived in a climate below 50 degrees."

The research team compared genetic information from modern organisms to characterize the ancient ancestor of all life on earth. "Our research is much like studying the etymology of modern languages so as to reveal fundamental things about their evolution," says professor Lartillot. "We identified common genetic traits between animals, plant, bacteria, and used them to create a tree of life with branches representing separate species. These all stemmed from the same trunk – LUCA, the genetic makeup that we then further characterized."

kewl.

Picture's of an amoeba, btw, not LUCA.

Amanda Seeks a Scholarship

Amanda of Self-Designed Student is seeking to go to school full time. She needs scholarships and you can help her get one by clicking vote below.

What's Your Favorite Toy? Brickfish

Vote early! Vote often!

Two Superplumes Have Fixed Positions for 200 Million Years

Two giant plumes of hot rock deep within the earth are linked to the plate motions that shape the continents, researchers have found.

The two superplumes, one beneath Hawaii and the other beneath Africa, have likely existed for at least 200 million years, explained Wendy Panero, assistant professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University.

The giant plumes -- or "superpiles" as Panero calls them -- rise from the bottom of Earth's mantle, just above our planet's core. Each is larger than the continental United States. And each is surrounded by a wall of plates from Earth's crust that have sunk into the mantle.

She and her colleagues reported their findings at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Computer models have connected the piles to the sunken former plates, but it's currently unclear which one spawned the other, Panero said. Plates sink into the mantle as part of the normal processes that shape the continents. But which came first, the piles or the plates, the researchers simply do not know.

"Do these superpiles organize plate motions, or do plate motions organize the superpiles? I don't know if it's truly a chicken-or-egg kind of question, but the locations of the two piles do seem to be related to where the continents are today, and where the last supercontinent would have been 200 million years ago," she said.

That supercontinent was Pangea, and its breakup eventually led to the seven continents we know today.

Scientists first proposed the existence of the superpiles more than a decade ago. Earthquakes offer an opportunity to study them, since they slow the seismic waves that pass through them. Scientists combine the seismic data with what they know about Earth's interior to create computer models and learn more.

But to date, the seismic images have created a mystery: they suggest that the superpiles have remained in the same locations, unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.

"That's a problem," Panero said. "We know that the rest of the mantle is always moving. So why are the piles still there?"

Hot rock constantly migrates from the base of the mantle up to the crust, she explained. Hot portions of the mantle rise, and cool portions fall. Continental plates emerge, then sink back into the earth.

But the presence of the superpiles and the location of subducted plates suggest that the two superpiles have likely remained fixed to the Earth's core while the rest of the mantle has churned around them for millions of years.

Holy Unexpected Geomechanicism, Batman!

The idea that two plumes could be fixed for that long while the plates have drifted so much is pretty amazing.

Earliest Spider Web in Amber

The tiny tangled threads of the world's oldest spider web have been found encased in a prehistoric piece of amber, a British scientist said Monday.

Oxford University paleobiologist Martin Brasier said the 140-million-year-old webbing provides evidence that arachnids had been ensnaring their prey in silky nets since the dinosaur age. He also said the strands were linked to each other in the roughly circular pattern familiar to gardeners the world over.

"You can match the details of the spider's web with the spider's web in my garden," Brasier said.

The web was found in a small piece of amber picked up by an amateur fossil-hunter scouring the beaches on England's south coast about two years ago, Brasier said. A microscope revealed the existence of tiny threads about 1 millimeter (1/20th of an inch) long amid bits of burnt sap and fossilized vegetable matter.

While not as dramatic as a fully preserved net of spider silk, the minuscule strands show that spiders had been spinning circle-shaped webs well into prehistory, according to Simon Braddy, a University of Bristol paleobiologist uninvolved with the find.

"It's not a striking, perfect web," Braddy said. "(But) this seems to confirm that spiders were building orb webs back in the early Cretaceous" — the geological term for the period of time between 145.5 and 65.5 million years ago when dinosaurs and small mammals shared the earth.

140 MYA puts it on the Valanginian-Berriasian boundary more or less.

Greenland's Glacier Melt Continues to Accelerate

Researchers watching the loss of ice flowing out from the giant island of Greenland say that the amount of ice lost this summer is nearly three times what was lost one year ago.

[...]

The research team has been monitoring satellite images of Greenland to gauge just how much ice flows from landlocked glaciers towards the ocean to form floating ice shelves. Eventually, large pieces of these ice shelves will break off into the sea, speeding up the flow of more glacial ice to add to the shelves.

Warming of the climate around Greenland is believed to have added to the increased flow of ice outward from the mainland via these huge glaciers.

Using daily images from instruments called MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) aboard two of NASA's satellites, Box and his team are able to monitor changes in 32 of the largest glaciers along Greenland's coast.

They determined that during the summer of 2006-2007, the floating ice shelves at the seaward end of those glaciers had diminished by 24.29 square miles (62.9 square kilometers. But one year later -- the summer of 2007-2008 – the ice loss had nearly tripled to nearly 71 square miles (183.8 square kilometers). Much of this additional loss is from a single large floating ice tongue called the Petermann glacier

Late this summer, the Ohio State researchers were able to watch as a massive 11-square-mile (29-square kilometer) chunk broke off from the tongue of the massive Petermann Glacier in Northern Greenland. At the time, they also noted that a massive crack further up the ice shelf suggested an even larger piece of ice would soon crack off.

Box said that some findings may have confused the public's views of what is happening around Greenland. "For example, we know that snowfall rates have increased recently in this region," he said, "but that hasn't been enough to compensate for the increased melt rate of the ice that we're seeing now."

I have a global warming post coming. It's a monster and continues to grow. IMNSHO, we're really underestimating the sea level rise from Greenland and Antarctica's melt.

Dino Sinuses Hint at Endothermy?

The Paranasal Air Sinuses of Predatory and Armored Dinosaurs (Archosauria: Theropoda and Ankylosauria) and Their Contribution to Cephalic Structure

Lawrence M. Witmer *, Ryan C. Ridgely

Department of Biomedical Sciences, College of Osteopathic Medicine, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio
email: Lawrence M. Witmer (witmerL@ohio.edu)

*Correspondence to Lawrence M. Witmer, Department of Biomedical Sciences, College of Osteopathic Medicine, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701
Fax: 740-593-2400

Funded by:
National Science Foundation; Grant Number: NSF BSR-9112070, NSF IBN-9601174, NSF IBN-0343744, NSF IOB-0517257
Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine

Abstract
The paranasal air sinuses and nasal cavities were studied along with other cephalic spaces (brain cavity, paratympanic sinuses) in certain dinosaurs via CT scanning and 3D visualization to document the anatomy and examine the contribution of the sinuses to the morphological organization of the head as a whole. Two representatives each of two dinosaur clades are compared: the theropod saurischians Majungasaurus and Tyrannosaurus and the ankylosaurian ornithischians Panoplosaurus and Euoplocephalus. Their extant archosaurian outgroups, birds and crocodilians (exemplified by ostrich and alligator), display a diversity of paranasal sinuses, yet they share only a single homologous antorbital sinus, which in birds has an important subsidiary diverticulum, the suborbital sinus. Both of the theropods had a large antorbital sinus that pneumatized many of the facial and palatal bones as well as a birdlike suborbital sinus. Given that the suborbital sinus interleaves with jaw muscles, the paranasal sinuses of at least some theropods (including birds) were actively ventilated rather than being dead-air spaces. Although many ankylosaurians have been thought to have had extensive paranasal sinuses, most of the snout is instead (and surprisingly) often occupied by a highly convoluted airway. Digital segmentation, coupled with 3D visualization and analysis, allows the positions of the sinuses to be viewed in place within both the skull and the head and then measured volumetrically. These quantitative data allow the first reliable estimates of dinosaur head mass and an assessment of the potential savings in mass afforded by the sinuses.

So far the above only occurs in endotherms...in part also for heat exchange. hmmmm...

Couldn't resist the pix. There are more with the paper!

Nat Geo has a page too. So does Paleoblog.

Gerrothorax pulcherrimus, the Wrongly Hinged

A peculiar amphibian that was clad in bony armor prowled warm lakes 210 million years ago, catching fish and other tasty snacks with one of the most unusual bites in the history of life on Earth.

The creature called Gerrothorax pulcherrimus, which lived alongside some of the early dinosaurs, opened its mouth not by dropping its lower jaw, as other vertebrate animals do.

Instead, it lifted back the top of its head in a way that looked a lot like lifting the lid of a toilet seat.

"It's weird. It's the ugliest animal in the world," Harvard University's Farish Jenkins, one of the scientists who describe the mechanics of its bite in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, said in a telephone interview on Friday.

"You almost can't imagine holding your jaws still and lifting your head back to take a bite," Jenkins said.

"There are some vertebrates that will lift their heads slightly or the upper jaws (when they bite). Some salamanders do it slightly. Some fish do it slightly. But no animal is known to have done it this extensively," Jenkins added.

The scientists think Gerrothorax lurked at the bottom of a lake, then with a sudden movement of the skull created a mouth gape that entrapped any fish unfortunate enough to swim by.

Gerrothorax measured about 3 feet (1 meter) long and was stoutly protected by bony body armor reminiscent of chain mail. It had a very flat body and very flat head, short, stubby limbs and well-developed gills, Jenkins added.

Its jaws were lined with sharp teeth. And the roof of its mouth was studded with large fangs to keep any slippery fish from escaping its chomp.

With a special adaptation of the joint between its skull and first neck vertebra, Gerrothorax could raise its head relative to its lower jaw by as much as 50 degrees, giving it the wide gape necessary to swallow its prey.

Gerrothorax is one of a group of odd amphibians called plagiosaurs with no modern descendants that vanished along with numerous other species 200 million years ago in a mass extinction at the end of the Triassic Period. Its fossils were found in the Fleming Fjord Formation of east Greenland.

kewl. Someone hinged them wrong in their tetrapod improvement project.

A Brit's New Paper

Julia has a new paper. Woo!

The Modified Gap Excess Ratio (GER*) and the Stratigraphic Congruence of Dinosaur Phylogenies
Matthew A. Wills, Paul M. Barrett & Julia F. Heathcote
Systematic Biology, Volume 57, Issue 6 December 2008 , pages 891 - 904
DOI: 10.1080/10635150802570809


Swiped the cladogram from the ceratopsians...

Late Cretaceous Polar Marine Ecosystem

Life in a temperate Polar sea: a unique taphonomic window on the structure of a Late Cretaceous Arctic marine ecosystem

Karen Chin1, 2, *, John Bloch3, Arthur Sweet4, Justin Tweet1, Jaelyn Eberle1, 2, Stephen Cumbaa5, Jakub Witkowski6 & David Harwood7

1Department of Geological Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA
2Museum of Natural History, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA
3Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA
4Geological Survey of Canada, Natural Resources Canada, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2L 2A7
5Research Services, Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa, Ont., Canada K1P 6P4
6Palaeontology Section, Warsaw University, 00-927 Warszawa, Poland
7Department of Geosciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA

*Author and address for correspondence: Department of Geological Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA karen.chin@colorado.edu

Received 11 June 2008; Accepted 28 July 2008; Published online 19 August 2008

Abstract

As the earth faces a warming climate, the rock record reminds us that comparable climatic scenarios have occurred before. In the Late Cretaceous, Arctic marine organisms were not subject to frigid temperatures but still contended with seasonal extremes in photoperiod. Here, we describe an unusual fossil assemblage from Devon Island, Arctic Canada, that offers a snapshot of a ca 75Myr ago marine palaeoecosystem adapted to such conditions. Thick siliceous biogenic sediments and glaucony sands reveal remarkably persistent high primary productivity along a high-latitude Late Cretaceous coastline. Abundant fossil faeces demonstrate that this planktonic bounty supported benthic invertebrates and large, possibly seasonal, vertebrates in short food chains. These ancient organisms filled trophic roles comparable to those of extant Arctic species, but there were fundamental differences in resource dynamics. Whereas most of the modern Arctic is oligotrophic and structured by resources from melting sea ice, we suggest that forested terrestrial landscapes helped support the ancient marine community through high levels of terrigenous organic input.

ie the Polar Sea was a great big brown water ecosystem. Or at least boosted by one. I'd love to comment more, but can't.

Climate Change of 13 Million Years Ago Impacted Oceans

Researchers have discovered that the ocean's chemical makeup is less stable and more greatly affected by climate change than previously believed. The researchers report in the December 12, 2008 issue of Science* that during a time of climate change 13 million years ago the chemical makeup of the oceans changed dramatically. The researchers warn that the chemical composition of the ocean today could be similarly affected by climate changes now underway – with potentially far-reaching consequences for marine ecosystems.

"As CO2 increases and weather patterns shift, the chemical composition of our rivers will change, and this will affect the oceans," says co-author Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology. "This will change the amount of calcium and other elements in ocean salts."

The research team, which included Caldeira, Elizabeth M. Griffith and Adina Paytan of the University of California, Santa Cruz, plus two other colleagues, studied core samples of deep oceanic sediment recovered from the Pacific Ocean Basin. By analyzing the calcium isotopes in grains of the mineral barite in different layers, they determined that between 13 and 8 million years ago the ocean's calcium levels shifted dramatically. The shift corresponds to the growth of the Antarctic ice sheets during the same time interval. Because of the huge volume of water that became locked up in the ice cap, sea level also dropped.

"The climate got colder, ice sheets expanded, sea level dropped, and the intensity, type, and extent of weathering on land changed," explains Griffith.

"This caused changes in ocean circulation and in the amount and composition of what rivers delivered to the ocean," adds Paytan. "This in turn impacted the biology and chemistry of the ocean."

Calcium-bearing rocks such as limestone are the largest storehouse of carbon in the Earth's carbon cycle because they are primarily made up of calcium carbonate. "The ocean's calcium cycle is closely linked to atmospheric carbon dioxide and the processes that control seawater's acidity," says Caldeira.

No time for commentary.

Europa Has Turbulent Seas?

Locked under ice, the hidden oceans of Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, may be tumultuous rather than placid, a new study says.

Such oceanic unrest translates into a higher potential for life.

Robert Tyler, an oceanographer from the University of Washington, has used computer simulations to show that Jupiter's effects on its moon Europa may work differently than scientists once thought.

Rather than just stressing the moon's solid parts—squeezing its rocks and flexing a global shell of ice—Jupiter's relentless tugging may also generate huge planetary waves in Europa's submerged ocean.

These waves could be the primary vehicles for distributing energy, as heat, across Europa. The new theory counters a widely held impression that Europa's ocean is calm.

"Suddenly, now our whole conception has to be one of very energetic oceans sloshing around under this ice," Tyler said.

"I consider the specific case of Europa, but the general results apply equally to other moons with suspected oceans," he wrote in his paper, which appears in the journal Nature this week. Those moons include Jupiter's Callisto and Ganymede, along with Saturn's Enceladus and Titan.

Interesting!

What the...?!

Nice rendering seen through the X Planes blog.

(or should that be "Frak! The synapsid WMDs now fly!")

SCHWEEEET! Congratz, Dr Chu!

Life's been a mess here due tot he fact that Lyuda's PT has been in the fscking shop for the last week. The shop, the dealer really, has blown multiple turbochargers. I'm about to go rain down hell upon them in person, but while I have been so preoccupied with my personal problems, they slipped a fast one past me.

President-Elect Obama has selected my boss' boss' boss, Steve Chu, to be the Secretary of Energy. Because the Director's Page is likely to be updated with a replacement in the not too distant future, here's a small grab of his bio there:

Chu’s own research has resulted in numerous awards, including the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips, for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. He did the work that led to the prize while at AT&T Bell Laboratories, from 1978-87; in 1987 he joined Stanford University as a professor in the Physics and Applied Physics Departments and was a highly decorated scientist, teacher, and administrator there until he accepted the directorship of Berkeley Lab.

Chu has published more than 220 scientific papers and is a fellow or member of the world’s leading scientific academies. He serves on numerous boards including the Hewlett Foundation, the University of Rochester, and the Executive Committee of the National Academies’ Board on Physics and Astronomy. He has been an advisor to the directors of the National Institutes of Health and the National Nuclear Security Agency.

His undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics were from the University of Rochester and his Ph.D from UC Berkeley. He has been awarded ten honorary degrees and has held numerous visiting lectureships at universities including Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, and the Collège de France.

Chu was born in Saint Louis, Missouri on February 2, 1948. He is married to Jean Chu, who was trained as a physicist at Oxford University and was formerly Stanford’s Dean of Admissions and the university president’s chief of staff. He has two grown sons, Geoffrey and Michael.

Oh, if the scuttlebutt is true, his siblings consider him a slacker, relatively speaking, since even though he has a PhD and a Nobel and run a lab and now is going to be a dept head of a nontrivial part of the government, he only has a single PhD. IDK if there's truth to that or not, but still an amusing rumor.

For the rest of you, he's huge into renewable energy, expect that for a major agenda item, and also synthetic biology, so look for that to be added more to the DOE's platform. Oh and he's not been a fan at all to what has been done to LANL and LLNL for management contracts. There's a slight ray of hope there, but only a slight one.

On a personal note, I've met him a few times. A very nice guy and very bright. PHD-itis is not something that has afflicted him.

Congratz, Dr Chu!

Orange Coalition Together Again

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko's party on Tuesday reformed a coalition with Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko's bloc and a smaller group, resolving a damaging stand-off, the parliament speaker said.

"The formation of a coalition" comprising the three groups was announced by the head of the small Litvin party, Volodymyr Litvin, immediately after he was elected parliament's new speaker.

The announcement came after Yushchenko's bloc abandoned the coalition in September citing attempts by ambitious coalition partner Tymoshenko to water down the president's powers. As negotiations faltered, the president ordered fresh parliamentary elections.

Yushchenko and Tymoshenko have had tortuous relations ever since they led a popular uprising known as the Orange Revolution in late 2004 that set the country on a firmly pro-Western path, including towards NATO membership.

Yushchenko's plans for fresh elections hit a series of administrative hurdles and were first postponed and then cancelled in the face of severe damage to Ukraine's economy from the global economic crisis.

On Tuesday morning, his bloc said it was ready to end the stand-off and get back together with Tymoshenko's deputies to avoid the prime minister's party going into coalition with pro-Moscow deputies.

Sounds like Tymoshenko got on top because of all of this.

Sapiens, Neandertals Didn't Interbreed

...he and his colleagues will make thrifty use of the rough draft to understand Neanderthal biology, evolution and their relationship to humans - and the big question: did they interbreed or not?

On that question, the answer seems to be probably not. Although the two species seemed to have lived together, if the first European humans regularly interbred with Neanderthals, researchers would expect the genome of modern Europeans to share more similarities with Neanderthals than those of modern Africans.

This is not the case, Briggs says. Europeans and Africans appear to have equal numbers of genetic differences with Neanderthals, suggesting that the first anatomically modern humans to arrive in Europe replaced their close relatives Homo neanderthalensis.

The rough draft is also expected to say some things about Neanderthal biology. "We're starting to be able to answer individual questions about concrete genes," says Briggs.

Preliminary results suggest that Neanderthals were lactose intolerant, hardly surprising since the ability to digest dairy products in adulthood only became common in humans after the domestication of cows, 10,000 years ago.

Neanderthals also seem to lack a mutation associated with increased fertility, identified in Icelanders. A 2005 paper suggested that this mutation had entered humans through inbreeding with Neanderthals.

Nor do Neanderthals boast mutations in a gene called microcephalin, linked to bulging brains in humans. This might shoot down another controversial hypothesis contending that this version of microcephalin also evolved in Neanderthals then spread to humans through inbreeding.

With a draft sequence, Briggs and his team will be able to home in on more genes known to have changed since humans split with chimpanzees, six million years ago, and determine where Neanderthals stand in relation. This will shed light on the evolution of modern humans after their ancestors split from Neanderthals, more than 600,000 years ago.

John Hawks has a don't jump too fast semi rebuttal post.

Introgression from Neandertals doesn't look too promising though.

Kyoto Follow-on to be as Useless as Kyoto Treaty

The United States and other rich nations must pledge by the end of next year specific targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 to win agreement on a U.N. climate pact, the U.N.'s top climate official said on Tuesday.

Some analysts say that President-elect Barack Obama may not be ready to set formal emissions targets for 2020 within a year, and that economic recession could delay an end-2009 deadline by 190 nations for agreement on a new U.N. global warming pact.

"We have to have numbers on the table from industrialized countries (by the end of 2009) otherwise the other dominoes won't fall," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat said during December 1-12 talks on global warming.

Poor nations such as China and India would not sign up for more action to slow their rising emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, without leadership from the rich, he told a news conference during U.N. talks of 11,000 delegates in Poznan.

And he gave a one-word answer -- "Yes" -- when asked if he would rate the negotiations a failure if they set no 2020 greenhouse cuts for rich nations to succeed 2012 goals set by the existing Kyoto Protocol.

A U.N. official said de Boer's remarks covered the United States, even though President George W. Bush kept the country out of Kyoto. Bush said Kyoto was too costly and wrongly excluded 2012 targets for developing nations.

But de Boer also cautioned against too much ambition for a new global deal due to be agreed in Copenhagen next year, saying that many details of a new pact could be worked out later.

[...]

"We should be careful not to reach too far and achieve nothing," he said.

The Kyoto Treaty was a very ineffective piece of paper. It was largely aimed at the developed countries. Everyone points to the US as the culprit for its failure. The fact of the matter is that even if the US has ratified the treaty and attempted to meet its goals, the other countries, especially the European and, yes, Canada, did not meet their obligations under that treaty.

Furthermore, China - a developing country - is putting out more CO2 than the US does. They are even less carbon-efficient than the US is! If the whole of China reaches a per capita GDP US currently has, it will produce six or more times as much carbon dioxide than the combined American economy.

The goals for any treaty must have an enforcement mechanism: it needs teeth, a carbon tariff most likely. The goals must be blanketing: developing and developed countries alike must be set. China has to be taking as much of a cut as America. There's one atmosphere here. If the Chinese, especially, but the Indians and Russians and all the other developing countries are not held accountable - and they probably won't be! - this treaty will be as much of a feel good empty promises treaty as Kyoto.

We have one atmosphere, folks, and the climate doesn't care if the carbon dioxide comes from a developed or developing country. Or methane for that matter.

Because of the above, that's why I say that Global Warming Is Inevitable.

It's baaaaaaaaaack!

Military planners responsible for finding space resources to support troops on the ground think the time may be ripe to advance the 40-year-old space solar power concept to help reduce the logistics train behind forward-deployed forces.

The concept of collecting solar energy above the atmosphere and beaming it to the ground as microwaves or lasers has long been seen among military freethinkers as a way to get electricity to remote airfields, fire bases or other distant outposts without having to haul fuel for diesel generators.

But that out-of-the-box concept may be gaining new life as the incoming administration looks for "green-energy" technologies to reduce reliance on foreign oil, and technologists home in on the hardware that would be needed to orbit deployable sunlight collectors measuring kilometers across and get power down from them to troops on the ground. Engineers studying space solar power (SSP) believe a pilot plant could be orbited fairly soon.

"The end game needs to have a pilot plant in operation within 10 to 12 years," said John Mankins, chief operating officer of Managed Energy Technologies and a longtime SSP advocate. "By pilot plant I mean a small but full-scale operational system delivering megawatts of power to the Earth."

The price tag would be relatively small by Pentagon standards, at least initially. Mankins estimates an end-to-end systems study, with some early lab work and low-cost flight-tests, would cost about $100 million and take about three years.

The Pentagon's National Security Space Office proposed just such a study in a report on SSP as "an opportunity for strategic security" released in October 2007. "It's being talked about," said a defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity in the absence of policy guidance. "Part of the problem has to do with perception... It's [about] roles and responsibilities, and having people get over the giggle factor, that this is actually something that's real."

Mankins said a pilot plant delivering 5-10 megawatts "does mesh nicely" with a notional military requirement for a system to deliver power from space to forward-deployed forces. To meet the 10-year timeline for a pilot plant, he said, it would take another three years after the systems study to put together a flight demonstration in low-Earth orbit, and another four to six years after that to get a pilot plant in geostationary orbit.

The National Security Space Office concluded that "while significant technical challenges remain, space-based solar power is more technically executable than ever before and current technological vectors promise to further improve its viability," according to the 2007 report. "A government-led demonstration of proof-of-concept could serve to catalyze commercial sector development."

First off, I would LOVE to say that this was viable. Truly. The idea that we can collect power from space and deliver it to earth without the impacts that coal has is slobber worthy. OTOH...until such time as the manufacture of solar panels, their deployment, and utilization in space is cheaper than producing them and deploying them out in the desert here ground side, it's a ridiculous prospect to even suggest that space solar power transmission is even two orders of magnitude near practical. It's almost, but not quite Helium3 ridiculous.

That said, two things about the above article. All I see here is a proposal and some PR hand-waving by a company wanting dinero. Second, there's potential for the military to use something like this...if it doesn't require an ubersized, very vulnerable mesh be laid out on the ground.

Oh. Wait.

(OTOH, the prospect of relatively secure bases having autonomous power from the host country has some appeal).

Super Earths Found

I like it when remarkable exoplanet results are disguised within more-or-less innocuously titled papers. A nice example occurred this summer, with “The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets. XIII. A planetary system with 3 Super-Earths (4.2, 6.9, & 9.2 Earth masses)”. While it’s true that the three planets orbiting HD 40307 are indeed cool, the Geneva team announced much bigger news in the discussion section of the article. They reported, almost offhandedly, that 1/3 of solar-type stars have sub-Neptune mass planets with periods of 50 days or less. That’s the most important planet news since the discovery of hot Jupiters.

Blatantly stolen from systematic.

Carbon Dioxide Detected on an Exoplanet

The recent discovery of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-like planet 63 light-years away has some researchers excited that we may soon find habitable exoplanets—worlds circling other stars.

According to lead author Mark Swain of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, carbon dioxide is a biomarker, a molecule associated with life as we know it.

This first discovery of the molecule on a far-flung planet, he said, is a step toward eventually finding biomarkers on smaller, more Earthlike worlds.

Last March, Swain and colleagues had announced the first detection of another biologically important chemical, methane, on the same exoplanet, as well as confirmation of water vapor.

"Methane is a potential marker [of life], as is water, as is carbon dioxide," Swain said. "So, three of the biggies we've already detected."

But not all planetary scientists are embracing the idea that finding chemicals such as carbon dioxide and methane on a distant planet is enough to say it is habitable.

On Earth, for example, carbon dioxide traps a certain amount of sunlight, keeping temperatures warm enough to support life. But on Venus, too much carbon dioxide creates a killing heat—average temperatures there reach 864 degrees Fahrenheit (462 degrees Celsius).

"To me, a CO2-dominated atmosphere says the planet would certainly be more like Venus than Earth," said Ellen Stofan, a planetary geologist for Proxemy Research in Maryland and a member of NASA's Cassini science team.

"To say it precludes life or guarantees life are both going out on a limb—we just don't know. But it is intriguing!"

No commentary. Really kewl though.

Sino-Russian Martian Probes

China will team up with Russia to launch two satellite probes to take pictures of Mars and one of its small moons in October next year as it seeks to cement its place in the select ranks of global space powers.

A Chinese-built probe will piggy-back on a Russian-built rocket which would also be carrying a Russian satellite, the Beijing News said, quoting a Chinese lead designer on the project.

The Chinese probe, called "Yinghuo 1," would "carry two cameras to take photos of Mars and Phobos (Mars 1)," the paper quoted Chen Changya, the mission's deputy design chief, as saying.

The two countries' satellites would travel together for 11 months, with the Chinese probe powered by Russia's, before separating on entering Mars' orbit, the paper said.

The mission planned for the Chinese probe to spend a year in orbit taking pictures, Chen said, but designers were still puzzling over how to keep the solar-powered probe functioning during seven "long shadow periods."

The probe would have to pass through seven periods of 8.8 hours in darkness when the sun would be obscured by the red planet, with temperatures plunging to 200 degrees below Celsius, the paper said.

While it could turn itself off to conserve energy, the concern was that it might "freeze to death" and not be able to turn itself back on.

hrm. No bent metal and its supposed to launch next year. hmmm.

Romano-Byzantine Empire Declines Due to Climate Change?!

The decline of the Roman and Byzantine Empires in the Eastern Mediterranean more than 1,400 years ago may have been driven by unfavorable climate changes.

Based on chemical signatures in a piece of calcite from a cave near Jerusalem, a team of American and Israeli geologists pieced together a detailed record of the area's climate from roughly 200 B.C. to 1100 A.D. Their analysis, to be reported in an upcoming issue of the journal Quaternary Research, reveals increasingly dry weather from 100 A.D. to 700 A.D. that coincided with the fall of both Roman and Byzantine rule in the region.

The researchers, led by University of Wisconsin-Madison geology graduate student Ian Orland and professor John Valley, reconstructed the high-resolution climate record based on geochemical analysis of a stalagmite from Soreq Cave, located in the Stalactite Cave Nature Reserve near Jerusalem.

"It looks sort of like tree rings in cross-section. You have many concentric rings and you can analyze across these rings, but instead of looking at the ring widths, we're looking at the geochemical composition of each ring," says Orland.

Using oxygen isotope signatures and impurities — such as organic matter flushed into the cave by surface rain — trapped in the layered mineral deposits, Orland determined annual rainfall levels for the years the stalagmite was growing, from approximately 200 B.C. to 1100 A.D.

While cave formations have previously been used as climate indicators, past analyses have relied on relatively crude sampling tools, typically small dental drills, which required averaging across 10 or even 100 years at a time. The current analysis used an advanced ion microprobe in the Wisconsin Secondary-Ion Mass-Spectrometer (Wisc-SIMS) laboratory to sample spots just one-hundredth of a millimeter across. That represents about 100 times sharper detail than previous methods. With such fine resolution, the scientists were able to discriminate weather patterns from individual years and seasons.

Their detailed climate record shows that the Eastern Mediterranean became drier between 100 A.D. and 700 A.D., a time when Roman and Byzantine power in the region waned, including steep drops in precipitation around 100 A.D. and 400 A.D. "Whether this is what weakened the Byzantines or not isn't known, but it is an interesting correlation," Valley says. "These things were certainly going on at the time that those historic changes occurred."

hmmmm...

Slime Molds

Wow.

Just...wow.

There's more. Go look.

Thanx, Julia.

Google Reader

Something of an very strong suggestion: if you are reading this and you are not using an RSS aggregator, you really should. I use Google Reader. It saves a lot of time keeping track of everyone's blogs.

Mark's New Genus of Pterosaur The Press Finally Noticed

(image credit: Mark)

A fossil of a toothless flying pterosaur, with a body bigger than some family cars, represents the largest of these extinct reptiles ever to be found and has forced the creation of a new genus, scientists announced today.

Pterosaurs ruled the skies 115 million years ago during the dinosaur age. They are often mistaken for dinosaurs.

Mark Witton of the University of Portsmouth identified the creature from a partial skull fossil. Witton estimates the beast would have had a 5.5-yard (5-meter) wingspan. It stood more than a yard (about 1 meter) tall at the shoulder.

"Some of the previous examples we have from this family in China are just 60 centimeters [about two feet] long - as big as the skull of the new species. Put simply, it dwarfs any chaoyangopterid we've seen before by miles," Witton said.

The finding also is significant because it originated in Brazil and is the only example of the Chaoyangopteridae, a group of toothless pterosaurs, to be found outside China.

Witton has christened the new species Lacusovagus, meaning "lake wanderer," after the large body of water in which the remains were buried. The findings are detailed in the November issue of the journal Palaeontology.

Here's Mark's post on the subject. A very kewl Aptian pterosaur there.

Mars Science Lab Delayed to 2011?

A NASA insider says the space agency is delaying launch of a giant Mars robotic mission.

The Mars Science Laboratory was scheduled to fly next year. But the project has been dogged by cost increases and technical challenges. The launch has been postponed until 2011.

(ARGH!)

Today is jsut full of suckage.

Homo sapiens 80k Years Older?

Modern humans may have evolved more than 80,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to a new study of sophisticated stone tools found in Ethiopia.

The tools were uncovered in the 1970s at the archaeological site of Gademotta, in the Ethiopian Rift Valley. But it was not until this year that new dating techniques revealed the tools to be far older than the oldest known Homo sapien bones, which are around 195,000 years old.

Using argon-argon dating—a technique that compares different isotopes of the element argon—researchers determined that the volcanic ash layers entombing the tools at Gademotta date back at least 276,000 years.

Many of the tools found are small blades, made using a technique that is thought to require complex cognitive abilities and nimble fingers, according to study co-author and Berkeley Geochronology Center director Paul Renne.

Some archaeologists believe that these tools and similar ones found elsewhere are associated with the emergence of the modern human species, Homo sapien.

"It seems that we were technologically more advanced at an earlier time that we had previously thought," said study co-author Leah Morgan, from the University of California, Berkeley.

The findings are published in the December issue of the journal Geology.

Interesting...

Squids With...Elbows?!

What the...

Link above has more and a video of the weird-o.

Ripsaw Armed UGV: Future Tank Killer?

Zero to Sixty in 3.5 seconds. (!!!)

Now we need to put a full blown tank killer turret on that sucker and integrate it with the combatants. Geez. Imagine a pack of these airdropped in to support of the airborne and infantry divisions, much the way that the M8 AGS Buford was to be and M551 Sheridan did.

Well, and figure out what its range is. Damned kewl all the same.

Brown Dwarves Are Failed Stars

Astronomers have uncovered strong evidence that brown dwarfs form like stars. Using the Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA), they detected molecules of carbon monoxide shooting outward from the object known as ISO-Oph 102. Such molecular outflows typically are seen coming from young stars or protostars. However, this object has an estimated mass of 60 Jupiters, meaning it is too small to be a star. Astronomers have classified it as a brown dwarf.

Brown dwarfs are on the dividing line between planets and stars, and generally have masses between 15 and 75 Jupiters. (The theoretical minimum mass for a star to sustain nuclear fusion is 75 times Jupiter.) As a result, brown dwarfs are sometimes called failed stars. However, it is not clear whether they form like stars, from the gravitational collapse of gas clouds, or if they form like planets, agglomerating rocky material until they grow massive enough to draw in nearby gas.

A star forms when a cloud of interstellar gas draws itself together through gravity, growing denser and hotter until fusion ignites. If the initial gas cloud is rotating, that rotation will speed up as it collapses inward, much like an ice skater drawing her arms in. In order to gather mass, the young protostar must somehow shed that angular momentum. It does so by spewing material in opposite directions as a bipolar outflow.

A brown dwarf is less massive than a star, so there is less gravity available to pull it together. As a result, astronomers debated whether a brown dwarf could form the same way as a star. Previous observations provided hints that they could. The serendipitous discovery of a bipolar molecular outflow at ISO-Oph 102 offers the first strong evidence in favor of brown dwarf formation through gravitational collapse.

"We thought that any such outflow would be too weak to detect with current facilities and would have to wait until a next-generation instrument like ALMA [the Atacama Large Millimeter Array]," said Ngoc Phan-Bao of the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA), lead author on the paper announcing the find. "This was a big surprise. Finding the molecular outflow with the SMA shows the extraordinary capabilities of the array."

As might be expected, the outflow contains much less mass than the outflow from a typical star: about 1000 times less, in fact. The outflow rate is also smaller by a factor of 100. In all respects, the molecular outflow of ISO-Oph 102 is a scaled-down version of the outflow process seen in young stars.

"These findings suggest that brown dwarfs and stars aren't different because they formed in different ways," said Paul Ho, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and director of ASIAA. "They share the same formation mechanism. Whether an object ends up as a brown dwarf or star apparently depends only on the amount of available material."

Interesting. Again, no time. Prepping presentations and working on an fs.

Reading Update

While Avrora and Lyuda were off visiting with her family just prior to TDay, I got a lot of things done. In fact, so much so that I have to wonder - if we can really afford it (HA!) - that we shouldn't plan on something like this biannually so I can get caught up on all the extraneous things that get tossed by the family roadside. One of the nice things is that when the world wound down after 10ish pm, I got to read and read I did. I tackled a couple paleo books and a history book already mentioned in one of my few, few alt-history posts. I also tackled a book on global warming by a popsci writer (can't discuss a book w/o reading it first) and a couple sf books.

The first book was that of The Evolution of Vertebrate Design. This book and the one I have partially completed - Dinosaurs, Spitfires, and Sea Dragons - I strongly recommend for someone that's a nonspecialist wanting to underrstand more on how vertebrates evolved into what they are and how they function. They are both a little dated, but they give a good run down on a lot of how the body works and how it came to be in a mostly nontechnical way. However, if you have basical knowledge in the area, I am warning you off except to read about the icthyosaurs in the latter book, really. The latter book I am almost finished with now.

The history book that I munched through was The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. It was pretty good and it was fascinating to see the divergence in views about the Crusades. In the West people either see it as a valiant attempt to retake the Holy Land or as a massive embarrassment. We still use the expression of someone out to save the world or change the course of history as a 'crusader', so despite the more recent viewing of the crusades as something to be ashamed of, it still resonates in a positive way on some level. The interesting thing by reading this book was that the Crusades are viewed as a great rape of the Arab world by the Occidentals (West). There were bits that diverged quite a bit: the West plays up an almost amicable relationship between Richard Lionheart and Saladin whereas tCTAE ignores, discounts or recasts their relations completely. Part of the reason that I wanted to read this book was that I adhere to an opinion that when recounting events, especially personal, but also at times historical, there's your story, my story, and somewhere in the middle the truth. I'm weighing how true it is here.

I also read Six Degrees. Hmmm. This is not a bad book. It glosses over a lot. It sides with the Neo-Oligocene scenario (hotter, drier). I tend to subscribe to the NeoEocene scenario. I have a massive, bloated blog post coming from this. The damned thing is almost cancerous in its growth. No, I won't let it be a blogpost Singularity. Do read it: be skeptical of the scenario.

In SF reading, I read Scalzi's Old Man's War and Ghost Brigades. Light, yummy mind candy. Not sure I buy the premise, but definitely interesting.

The Alien Invasion Has Begun?!

The bizarre chemical make-up of a comet suggests the blob of ice is an interloper, possibly flung into our solar system from beyond, astronomers now say, adding that the wacky comet is forcing them to create a new category for such objects.

The comet, called Machholz 1, was discovered in 1986 by Donald Machholz of Loma Prieta, Calif. Since then, the icy denizen has made a few appearances, including one in 2007.

"A large fraction of comets in our own solar system have escaped into interstellar space, so we expect that many comets formed around other stars would also have escaped," said David Schleicher, a planetary astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. "Some of these will have crossed paths with the sun, and Machholz 1 could be an interstellar interloper."

This really ought to be interesting to see how it plays out. If it is confirmed to be an interloper from another system, I bet we get a mission scramble as soon as the economic heart burn passes.

Newest Russian VTOL Was Approved For Production 30 Years Ago

Well, our Comanche got canned, so we can't brag much here.

Then again, our route to a new attack helo is probably going to head down something like this since we're very concerned about the pilot survivability these days (apaches were mauled at times roaming ahead of the columns in Iraq).

Lentiviruses Up To 85 Million Years Old? Or Only 14 MYO?

The genome of a squirrel-sized, saucer-eyed lemur from Madagascar may help scientists understand how HIV-like viruses coevolved with primates, according to new research from the Stanford University School of Medicine. The discovery, to be published online on Dec. 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could provide insight into why non-human primates don't get AIDS and lead to treatments for humans.

Scientists have long believed that lentiviruses — the family of viruses that includes HIV — started infecting primates within the past million years. In fact, said Rob Gifford, PhD, former postdoctoral researcher in infectious diseases and geographical medicine and lead author of the new study, lentiviruses may have been present in ancestral primates as long as 85 million years ago.

A type of retrovirus, lentiviruses replicate by inserting their RNA into a cell's DNA. Some retroviruses have been known to infect cells that mature into sperm or eggs, incorporating viral DNA into the genome of the host. Until last year, when Gifford discovered Rabbit Endogenous Lentivirus type K among the DNA of the European rabbit, no one knew lentiviruses could be inherited in this way.

"It allows us to put a timeline on the evolution of primate lentiviruses," said Robert Shafer, MD, associate professor (research) of infectious diseases and geographical medicine and senior author of the paper.

Gifford began computer-based screening of the DNA of 21 primates for which at least partial genome sequencing was available. He searched each species for strings of nucleotides that matched the modern lentivirus genome and found one lurking in the DNA of the tiny gray mouse lemur.

Ancestors of the modern lemur colonized Madagascar about 75 million years ago, and since then, lemurs and their lentivirus-carrying African cousins have been evolving separately. Four hundred kilometers of ocean divide the two branches, giving mainland primates limited opportunities to swap germs with lemurs. And the last of the occasional land bridges between the two disappeared beneath the sea 14 million years ago, suggesting that lentiviruses are likely at least that old, say the researchers.

High-end estimates of the age of this lentivirus, called pSIVgml, could range back 85 million years, when the primate family that includes lemurs split from the evolutionary branch that would eventually give rise to monkeys, apes and humans. "Lentiviruses could be very ancient indeed," Gifford said.

Gifford remains cautious about overestimating the virus's age, warning that the virus could have been spread within the last 14 million years by something that could cross the ocean, such as a bat. But Shafer says that sort of cross-species transmission is unlikely, because bats and primates are very distant relatives. The leap from primate to bat and back would be difficult for a lentivirus to make.

whoa.

No time to comment further again.

Got Wood? (mars style - not)

Universe Today and Bad Astronomy have details