Clipmarks | invictus's clips

"Exploding Asteroid" Theory Strengthened By New Evidence

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:40:11 GMT

clipped by: invictus

ScienceDaily (July 3, 2008) — Geological evidence found in Ohio and Indiana in recent weeks is strengthening the case to attribute what happened 12,900 years ago in North America -- when the end of the last Ice Age unexpectedly turned into a phase of extinction for animals and humans – to a cataclysmic comet or asteroid explosion over top of Canada.

A comet/asteroid theory advanced by Arizona-based geophysicist Allen West in the past two years says that an object from space exploded just above the earth’s surface at that time over modern-day Canada, sparking a massive shock wave and heat-generating event that set large parts of the northern hemisphere ablaze, setting the stage for the extinctions.

"The kind of evidence we are finding does suggest that climate change at the end of the last Ice Age was the result of a catastrophic event," Tankersley says.

Tags: ice age, catastrophe, asteroids, comets, climate change

China Earthquake was "Rare And Unexpected"

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:25:37 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

A new analysis of the setting for last month's devastating earthquake in China by a team of geoscientists at MIT shows that the quake resulted from faults with little seismic activity, and that similar events in that area occur only once in every 2,000 to 10,000 years, on average.

However, the researchers caution that because earthquakes can sometimes occur in clusters, people should still be wary of another possible large-scale earthquake.

Tags: earthquake, geology

Martian soil supports life: "You can grow veggies"

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:44:00 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks:

Pressed on whether there was still any doubt that life existed on Mars in some form, Kounaves said the results were "very preliminary" and more analysis was needed.

Clip Source: www.reuters.com

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - "Flabbergasted" NASA scientists said on Thursday that Martian soil appeared to contain the requirements to support life, although more work would be needed to prove it.

Scientists working on the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, which has already found ice on the planet, said preliminary analysis by the lander's instruments on a sample of soil scooped up by the spacecraft's robotic arm had shown it to be much more alkaline than expected.

"We basically have found what appears to be the requirements, the nutrients, to support life whether past present or future," Sam Kounaves, the lead investigator for the wet chemistry laboratory on Phoenix, told journalists.

"It is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard, you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well. ... It is very exciting for us."

Tags: space, mars, phoenix, life, nasa, science

Solar system a bit squashed, not nicely round

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:50:46 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks:

"Imagine a balloon is being blown up by the solar wind. You might imagine that if you took a balloon, which is mainly spherical, and pushed it against the wall, it would be blunted on one side," said Edward Stone of the California Institute of Technology, one of the scientists involved in the research.

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

The solar system may not be a nice round shape, but rather a bit squashed and oblong, according to data from the Voyager 2 spacecraft exploring the solar system's outer limits, scientists said on Wednesday.

Launched in 1977, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 unmanned probes are now studying the edges of the heliosphere, the huge magnetic "bubble" around our solar system created by the solar wind as it runs up against the thin gas in interstellar space.

Voyager 2 in August 2007 crossed this boundary 7.8 billion miles from the sun.

Voyager 1 had crossed the boundary in December 2004 about 10 billion miles away from Voyager 1 and almost a billion miles farther from the sun.

Scientists think this indicates that the bubble carved into interstellar space by the heliosphere, which extends well past the distant orbit of Pluto, is not perfectly round, and the solar system is shaped a bit like an oblong.

Tags: space, solar system, heliosphere, voyager, science

Date set for Odysseus' return from Trojan War

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 23:30:56 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Although I read this story with caution and I still remain very sceptical about the astronomical references and interpretations, I'm posting it here for those who may be interested.

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

Using clues from star and sun positions mentioned by the ancient Greek poet Homer, scholars think they have determined the date when King Odysseus returned from the Trojan War and slaughtered a group of suitors who had been pressing his wife to marry one of them.

It was on April 16, 1178 B.C. that the great warrior struck with arrows, swords and spears, killing those who sought to replace him, a pair of researchers say in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Experts have long debated whether the books of Homer reflect the actual history of the Trojan War and its aftermath.

Marcelo O. Magnasco of Rockefeller University in New York and Constantino Baikouzis of the Astronomical Observatory in La Plata, Argentina, acknowledge they had to make some assumptions to determine the date Odysseus returned to his kingdom of Ithaca.

Tags: ancient history, greece, trojan war, homer, odysseus, archaeoastronomy

Ice on Mars surface

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:45:22 GMT

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Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

LOS ANGELES - Scientists believe NASA's Phoenix Mars lander exposed bits of ice while recently digging a trench in the soil of the Martian arctic, the mission's principal investigator said.

Crumbs of bright material initially photographed in the trench later vanished, meaning they must have been frozen water that vaporized after being exposed, Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, said in a statement Thursday.

"These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it's ice," Smith said. "There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can't do that."

Phoenix Mars is studying whether the arctic region of the Red Planet could be habitable. The probe is using its robotic arm to dig up soil samples, and scientists hope it will find frozen water.

Tags: space, solar system, mars, phoenix, planets, water, life, science

The tornado nightmare

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:37:44 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: I wouldn't like to be there to take this photo.

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

A huge tornado funnel cloud touches down in Orchard, Iowa, Tuesday, June 10, 2008 at 9:04 p.m. The Globe Gazette and Mitchell County Press News reported that Lori Mehmen of Orchard, took the photo from outside her front door. Mehmen said the funnel cloud came near the ground and then went back up into the clouds. Besides tree and crop damage, no human injuries were reported.

Tags: tornado, photography, disasters, iowa

Mass extinctions? Blame it on the ocean

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:19:31 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks:

In the course of hundreds of millions of years the world's oceans have expanded and contracted in response to the shifting of the Earth's tectonic plates and to changes in climate. There were periods of the planet's history when vast areas of the continents were flooded by shallow seas such as the shark and mosasaur infested seaway that neatly split North America during the age of the dinosaurs.

As those epicontinental seas drained, animals like mosasaurs and giant sharks went extinct, and conditions on the marine shelves where life exhibited its greatest diversity in the form of things like clams and snails changed as well.

Clip Source: www.nsf.gov

Ebb and flow of the sea is the primary cause of the world's mass extinctions over the past 500 million years

If you are curious about Earth's periodic mass extinction events such as the sudden demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, you might consider crashing asteroids and sky-darkening super volcanoes as culprits.

But a new study, published June 15, 2008, in the journal Nature, suggests that it is the ocean, and in particular the epic ebbs and flows of sea level and sediment over the course of geologic time, that is the primary cause of the world's periodic mass extinctions over the past 500 million years.

View a video interview with geoscientist Shanan Peters.

Tags: mass extinctions, geology, ocean, science

Arctic sea ice melt 'even faster'

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:33:56 GMT

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clipper's remarks:

Greenland is already losing ice to the oceans, contributing to the gradual rise in sea levels. The ice cap holds enough water to lift sea levels globally by about 7m (22ft) if it all melted.

Natural climatic cycles such as the Arctic Oscillation play a role in year-to-year variations in ice cover. But Julienne Stroeve believes the sea ice is now so thin that there is little chance of the melting trend turning round.

"If the ice were as thin as it was in the 1970s, last year's conditions would have brought a dip in cover, but nothing exceptional.

"But now it's so thin that you would have to have an exceptional sequence of cold winters and cold summers in order for it to rebuild."

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Arctic sea ice is melting even faster than last year, despite a cold winter.

Data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that the year began with ice covering a larger area than at the beginning of 2007.

But now it is down to levels seen last June, at the beginning of a summer that broke records for sea ice loss.

Scientists on the project say that much of the ice is so thin that it melts easily, and the Arctic may be ice-free in summer within five to 10 years.

In March, Nasa reported that the area covered by sea ice was slightly larger than in 2007, but much of it consisted of thin floes that had formed during the previous winter. These are much less robust than thicker, less saline floes that have already survived for several years.

By the end of last year, one research group was forecasting ice-free summers by 2013.

Tags: climate change, arctic sea, melting, nsidc, science

Torley's awesome Clipmarks review

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 14:52:19 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Our new fellow clipper Torley wrote an excellent review of Clipmarks. Congrats Torley, and welcome to Clipmarks!

Clip Source: torley.com

It’s Saturday morning. Wee hours, past 2 AM PST. I’m feeling mellow and relaxed. I just started using my Clipmarks account actively. Just let me say, I’m amazed time-after-time with how easily I got into it: not only does it have rounded corners in all the right places (and certainly not gratuitously), it just about always works as I expect it to.

Me, I just feel great that it’s so social. Like I’ve said about Second Life, “I’m not alone.” Maybe I’m stretching it in 2006, but I believe Clipmarks can be a useful educational tool: when I was a kid, I grew up reading the bite-sized, punchy writing in The National Enquirer. Every now and then, they’d run an article detailing how Enquirer was useful to an ESL teacher, helping communicate English to students while informing them of topics of relevance. In a similar vein, Clipmarks, with its magnificent potpourri of “100% User Powered” content, could really get students going in classrooms, having them aware of what’s happening in a very wet and memorable way.

Even more than that, in today’s world, we need information management skills. There’s no shortage to dataglut! I haven’t stepped inside a school in years, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the impression these skills aren’t being taught enough. By far. It goes beyond basic computer usage and adding bookmarks, to being able to make sense and retrieve the info, and share it with your fellow human beings for extended discourse, learning, and fun — creating feedback loops and reactions, and increased knowledge for all involved. This is what I’m seeing in Clipmarks as a form of participatory media (hey, what would Howard Rheingold think?). And I’ve added it to my existing pantheon of how I manage daily info.

Tags: clipmarks, review, reviews, torley

Rare Book Room

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 14:19:20 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: An awesome reference site with a good collection of scanned rare books.

Clip Source: rarebookroom.org

Introduction

The "Rare Book Room" site has been constructed as an educational site intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world.

Over the last ten years, a company called "Octavo" embarked on digitally photographing some of the world ’s great books from some of the greatest libraries. These books were photographed at very high resolution (in some cases at over 200 megabytes per page).

This site contains all of the books (about 400) that have been digitized to date. These range over a wide variety of topics and rarity. The books are presented so that the viewer can examine all the pages in medium to medium-high resolution.

Tags: books, rare books, reference

Hubble telescope captures crashing galaxies

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:20:16 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

Images of colliding galaxies show them spinning, sliding and slipping into one another, wreaking stellar destruction that will give birth to new and larger galaxies.

The Maryland-based Space Telescope Science Institute released 59 new images from the Hubble Space Telescope on Thursday to celebrate the 18th anniversary of its launch.

"This new Hubble atlas dramatically illustrates how galaxy collisions produce a remarkable variety of intricate structures in never-before-seen detail," the Institute said in a statement.

"Astronomers observe only one out of a million galaxies in the nearby universe in the act of colliding. However, galaxy mergers were much more common long ago when they were closer together, because the expanding universe was smaller."

The color images, available online at http://hubblesite.org/news/2008/16, are a look back in time.

Tags: hubble, space, galaxies, images, science

Little arrow that rewrites history books

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:25:15 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: www.pretorianews.co.za

Two researchers from Wits University believe that what they have discovered is a 60 000-year-old arrow that was fired from the earliest known bow. Their discovery has pushed back the origins of bow-and-arrow technology by 20 000 years.

The bow, probably made of wood and long since decayed, was used at a time when Neanderthals in Europe were using large spears in duels with woolly mammoths and other large prehistoric game.

The bone arrow, just 5cm long, was excavated by Wadley at the Sibudu cave, near the coastal town of Ballito in KwaZulu Natal, two years ago.

It's mystery who the people were who fashioned the arrow.

Also at this time, humankind was leaving an ever-increasing archaeological record of the first inklings of modern human behaviour. They were burying the dead, using coloured pigments and wearing jewellery.

"This at a time a few thousand years before they walked out of Africa, to become the ancestors of all humans," said Backwell.

Tags: archaeology, anthropology, south africa, prehistory, arrow, science

Atheist quotes

Fri, 30 May 2008 16:11:09 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: From a Norwegian site in English. I recommend browsing the source itself. A rich content with some interesting articles and documents.

Clip Source: www.bandoli.no

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. Lucius Annaeus Seneca,
Roman philosopher and statesman 4 BC – AD 65

There are two classes of men:
intelligent men without religion,
and religious men without intelligence.
Abu Ala Al-Ma'arri,
Arab philosopher 973 - 1057 AD

"As people become more intelligent
they care less for preachers and more for teachers."
Robert Green Ingersoll,
American politician and lecturer (1833-1899)

"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."
Mark Twain

The first requisite of the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.
Karl Marx

Religion is against women's right and freedom. In all societies women are oppressed by all religions. Taslima Nasrin

Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity.
Now that humanity had come of age,
it should be left behind.
Sigmund Freud

Tags: religion, atheism, agnosticism, quotes, wisdom

5000-year-old site discovered in Iran

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:33:25 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: www.tehrantimes.com

TEHRAN -- A broad site dating back to the third millennium BC was discovered during the latest excavations in Bampur region in Sistan-Baluchestan Province, southeastern Iran.

“In the Bampur valley, there is an ancient site covered with sand mounds, which is as large as the Burnt City and may belong to a civilization as great as the civilization of that the city,” Mehdi Mortazavi, an archaeologist of the University of Sistan-Baluchestan, told the Persian service of CHN on Saturday.

According to Mortazavi, the site measures 1x1.5 kilometer.

“I feel sure that there are a large number of sites like this here. Such sites may even exist in nearby regions like Saravan,” he stated.

Twenty sites -- mostly prehistoric -- have been discovered by the archaeologists of the University of Sistan-Baluchestan over the past few years.

Tags: archaeology, iran, prehistory, burnt city