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Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem. The survey results show geoscientists and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists. Two recent surveys of meteorologists (summarized here and here) revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming...

Explanation: Where are all of these meteors coming from? In terms of direction on the sky, the pointed answer is the constellation of Perseus. That is why the meteor shower that peaked over the past few days is known as the Perseids -- the meteors all appear to come from a radiant toward Perseus. Three dimensionally, however, sand-sized debris expelled from Comet Swift-Tuttle follows a well-defined orbit about our Sun, and the part of the orbit that approaches Earth is superposed in front of the Perseus. Therefore, when Earth crosses this orbit, the radiant point of falling debris appears in...

Religious people are less intelligent than non-believers, according to a new review of 63 scientific studies stretching back over decades. A team led by Miron Zuckerman of the University of Rochester found “a reliable negative relation between intelligence and religiosity” in 53 out of 63 studies. … Previous studies have tended to assume that intelligent people simply “know better”, the researchers write—but the reasons may be more complex. For instance, intelligent people are more likely to be married, and more likely to be successful in life—and this may mean they “need” religion less. …

For most of us, "pterodactyls" are imagined as large, vicious and ugly gargoyles with lanky limbs, leathery wings and jaws lined with savage teeth, the sort of disreputable brutes we find in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, the Jurassic Park franchise – even a recent episode of Doctor Who. Such works suggest we should think ourselves lucky that these flying reptiles – some of which measured 10 metres across the wings and stood as tall as giraffes – were confined to landscapes populated by equally terrible dinosaurs, marine reptiles and turbulent volcanoes during a time known as the Mesozoic...

Explanation: Are asteroids dangerous? Some are, but the likelihood of a dangerous asteroid striking the Earth during any given year is low. Because some past mass extinction events have been linked to asteroid impacts, however, humanity has made it a priority to find and catalog those asteroids that may one day affect life on Earth. Pictured above are the orbits of the over 1,000 known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs). These documented tumbling boulders of rock and ice are over 140 meters across and will pass within 7.5 million kilometers of Earth -- about 20 times the distance to the Moon....

Explanation: If not perfect, then this spiral galaxy is at least one of the most photogenic. An island universe of about 100 billion stars, 32 million light-years away toward the constellation Pisces, M74 presents a gorgeous face-on view. Classified as an Sc galaxy, the grand design of M74's graceful spiral arms are traced by bright blue star clusters and dark cosmic dust lanes. Constructed from image data recorded in 2003 and 2005, this sharp composite is from the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. Spanning about 30,000 light-years across the face of M74, it includes exposures recording emission from...

From ORB LAB's FB page: Shark fishing season has officially begun for the ORB LAB. Last Friday, a crew struck out to try and recapture sharks carrying tags containing valuable information about the species assemblage encountered by these coastal apex predators. We caught one large female on our first line Friday, but we were not expecting to catch her like this! This unlucky smooth dogfish couldn't resist the menhaden used as bait and unfortunately fell victim to one of the top predators in the bay. The dogfish was about 3 feet long and completely swallowed by the sand tiger shark.

Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize in 1981 for his work on what is now commonly known as right brain-left brain thinking. Sperry theorized that some very specific activities were controlled by one side of the human brain or the other — for example, the right side controlled creative tasks, while the left side was where logic, language and reasoning lived. People were fascinated by the idea, and in the three decades since, bookstores, television, the Internet and college psychology classes everywhere have been filled with endless discussions of the differences between right-brain, left-brain, and whole-brain thinkers. (Ironically, Sperry’s...

In Lebanon, at an altitude of approximately 1,170 meters in Beqaa valley stands the famous Baalbek or known in Roman times as Heliopolis. Baalbek is an ancient site that has been used since the Bronze Age with a history of at least 9,000 years, according to evidence found during the German archaeological expedition in 1898. Baalbek was an ancient Phoenician city that was named by the name of the sky God Baal. The name ‘Baal’ in the Phoenician language meant ‘lord’ or ‘god’. Legends abound around Baalbek with some of them mentioning that Baalbek was the place where Baal first...

A Polish archaeologist at the Jagiellonian University Institute of Archaeology has made a 3D reconstruction of a 5,500-year-old brewing installation which was found at Tell el-Farcha, an archaeological site in Egypt dating back to approximately 3700 BC when it functioned as a centre of local Lower Egyptian Culture. The virtual reconstruction has brought to life the ancient scene in which Egyptians practiced a traditional form of beer making. The reconstruction was created based on preserved structures of similar analogous buildings at both Tell el-Farcha and other brewing centres in Upper Egypt. The Tell el-Farcha brewery, the oldest ever brewery found...

Established in 1247, the notorious Bethlem (“Bedlam”) Royal Hospital was the first dedicated psychiatric institution in Europe and possibly the most famous specialist facility for care and control of the insane, so much so that the word ‘bedlam’ has long been synonymous with madness and chaos. Now, in a spectacular discovery, archaeologists have uncovered the asylum’s ancient graveyard right in the heart of London, revealing as many as 20,000 skeletons. The 500-year-old graveyard was found during excavations to create a 13-mile high speed tunnel under Central London. Modern-day residents and visitors going about their busy daily lives have been oblivious...

More than 100,000 people around the world have applied to be the first to make a one-way trip to Mars, according to organisers of a prospective mission. The private Dutch-based Mars One project is proposing to select a group of 40 would-be civilian astronauts this year, aiming to send four of them on a no-return journey to to the red planet in 2022. Experts have questioned both the financial and practical viability of the mission, but that hasn't stopped people signing up in droves, including 30,000 Americans, CNN reported. The estimated cost for the initial mission is $6 billion (£3.87...

Scientists have long tried to figure out what causes the ebb and flow of ice ages. New data suggests a novel explanation for why the mile-thick blankets of ice retreat so quickly: They become too heavy. For the last 900,000 years, mile-thick ice sheets have waxed and waned in the Northern Hemisphere with remarkable regularity – building over periods of about 100,000 years and retreating in the space of only a few thousand years, only to repeat the cycle. Now, a team of scientists from Japan, the US, and Switzerland suggests that the North American continent is the breeding ground...

Working on some area and latitude calculations for sea ice. many hundreds of on-line references report that the Antarctic continent is 14,000,000 square kilometers: A nice, convenient even round number. That's obviously always been rounded off as one source copies from everybody, or just never measured accurately. Neither seems correct. the NSIRDC tracks sea ice, and they have explicitly written me that their "Antarctic Sea Ice"totals do NOT include the permanent ice shelves around many areas of that continent. Fine, no problem: and it even makes sense: Why should a federal agency track "permanent sea shelves" when they can get...

It is called “The Hyperloop” and, according to the designer, it will be a revolutionary “fifth mode” of transport, eclipsing trains, planes, boats and automobiles. (snip) Billionaire Elon Musk’s CV is impressive, to say the least. He made his initial fortune from PayPal ... his SpaceX venture ... founded Tesla (snip) he would be publishing plans for the Hyperloop on Monday, August 12 (snip) Mr Musk will not be patenting the design and it will be “open source”, meaning anyone can modify it, or try to build it.

Explanation: The two bright meteors flashing through this night skyscape from August 7 are part of the ongoing Perseid meteor shower. In the direction indicated by both colorful streaks, the shower's radiant in the eponymous constellation Perseus is at the upper right. North star Polaris, near the center of all the short, arcing star trails is at the upper left. But also named for its pose against the sky, the monastery built on the daunting sandstone cliffs in the foreground is part of Meteora. A World Heritage site, Meteora is a historic complex of lofty monasteries located near Kalabaka in...

Explanation: Medieval Albrechtsberg castle is nestled in trees near the northern bank of the river Pielach and the town of Melk, Austria. In clearing night skies on August 12, 2012 it stood under constellations of the northern summer, including Aquarius, Aquila, and faint, compact Delphinus (above and right of center) in this west-looking skyview. The scene also captures a bright meteor above the castle walls. Part of the annual perseid meteor shower, its trail points back toward the heroic constellation Perseus high above the horizon in the early morning hours. Entering the atmosphere at about 60 kilometers per second, perseid...

One particular dynamic should garner attention on the West Coast: conjoined lunar and solar gravitational tides. Gravitational tides are one of the overarching forces of the cosmos. Some of the solar system's most iconic features are shaped by them: the towering and ferocious volcanoes of Jupiter's moon Io and the hyper-geysers of Saturn's moon Enceladus. These are powers sufficient to nudge fault lines into action, especially those already under stress. The currently accepted scientific view is that while tidal influence is an ancillary force in seismic activity, it is a minimal stimulus for producing earthquakes powerful enough to cause damage,...

The Blackbody force is a newly discovered force that attracts atoms and molecules to hot, opaque objects emitting blackbody radiation. Under certain circumstances, the new force is stronger than gravity.

A dog may be man’s best friend, but dolphins can imitate human actions, and even how they solve problems. When a dolphin has one of its senses blocked, it can use other senses to mimic a human’s movements, according to a recent study. … The study, conducted at the Dolphin Research Center in the Florida Keys, expands on previous studies looking at how dolphins are able to imitate other dolphins while blindfolded. To see if a change in sound would affect their imitation, researchers used humans instead of dolphins to make the movements in the water. Dr. Kelly Jaakkola, research...

"From previous studies, it is estimated that 40% to 70% of a person's BMI is inherited," Batterham says, but it's complex and not as simple as just giving a percent. Overall, the role of any single gene [in obesity] is not big, Qi says. However, if all the obesity-related genes are considered, “the effect would be sizable."

"It does have the right ingredients," said Robert Pappalardo, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and lead author of a new study outlining what might be learned from a spacecraft that landed on the mysterious moon. Sending a lander to Europa is not officially part of NASA's plans, but the agency asked Pappalardo and a far-flung team of planetary scientists to lay out what they would hope to learn if and when a spacecraft landed on the tantalizing moon. In a study published in the journal Astrobiology, the team said it was mostly interested in Europa's chemical composition -...

U.S. researchers reported a breakthrough Thursday in the search for a vaccine for malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that sickens millions worldwide. More than three dozen volunteers received multiple, intravenous doses of a vaccine produced with a weakened form of the disease, scientists from the National Institutes of Health, the Navy, Army and other organizations reported Thursday. Though the results were promising, more extensive field testing will be required, the researchers wrote. Nevertheless, the it marks the first time any vaccine trial has shown 100% success in protecting subjects from the mosquito-borne tropical disease, which sickens more than 200 million a...

Thursday's Poll Do you believe climate change is an immediate threat? Yes No

<p>NEAR GOODLAND, Kan. — A mysterious, massive hole in the earth is attracting visitors to western Kansas.</p> <p>Geologists and engineers are still trying to determine how and why the ground gave way in this particular spot south of Goodland in the middle of someone’s pasture.</p>

Evolution vs God: 36 HOURS = 61,000 VIEWS!! 5k COMMENTS When posting about "Evolution vs God" on Facebook or Twitter please include the tag (# -- the pound sign / hashtag) at the beginning of your post: ‪#‎evolutionvsgod‬. If you do this others will be able to immediately search using #evolutionvsgod on FB or Twitter and see all the posts that are being made about the movie. WATCH IT FREE ->

Two fossils have got palaeontologists scratching their heads about where to place an enigmatic group of animals in the mammalian family tree. A team analysing one fossil suggests that the group belongs in mammals, but researchers looking at the other propose that its evolutionary clan actually predates true mammals. The situation begs for more analysis, more fossils, or both, experts say. The fossils represent previously unknown species, described today in Nature1, 2. Both are members of the haramiyids, a group of animals that first appeared around 212 million years ago and that researchers first recognized in the late 1840s. Until...

Black holes can be described by just two fundamental characteristics: mass and spin. Astronomers have been able to measure the objects’ mass for decades, by looking for gravitational effects on the orbits of nearby stars. But measuring spin, which records the angular momentum of the matter that falls into the holes, has proved troublesome, particularly for the supermassive black holes that lie at the centres of galaxies. No light emanates from the black holes’ spinning event horizons, so astronomers instead look for proxies that emit X-rays, such as the swirling disks of matter that feed into some holes. Such indirect...

Explanation: Similar in size and grand design to our own Milky Way, spiral galaxy NGC 3370 lies about 100 million light-years away toward the constellation Leo. Recorded here in exquisite detail by the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys, the big, beautiful face-on spiral does steal the show, but the sharp image also reveals an impressive array of background galaxies in the field, strewn across the more distant Universe. Looking within NGC 3370, the image data has proved sharp enough to study individual pulsating stars known as Cepheids that can be used to accurately determine this galaxy's distance. NGC...

Explanation: What's going on behind that mountain? Quite a bit. First of all, the mountain itself, named Kirkjufell, is quite old and located in western Iceland near the town of Grundarfj%C3%B6r%C3%B0ur. In front of the steeply-sloped structure lies a fjord that had just begun to freeze when the above image was taken -- in mid-December of 2012. Although quite faint to the unaided eye, the beautiful colors of background aurorae became quite apparent on the 25-second exposure. What makes Geminids meteor shower -- meteors that might not have been evident were the aurora much brighter. Far in the distance, on...

A 15-ton blob of congealed fat so large it's been dubbed a "fatberg" has been removed from a sewer tunnel beneath London. And just in case you're not completely grossed out yet, the fatberg — as large as a double-decker bus — was mixed with thousands of used baby wipes. (click image to enlarge)

Tests performed on three mummies found in the Argentinian mountains have shed new light on the Inca practice of child sacrifice. An analysis of the mummies, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that alcohol and drugs played a large role in the weeks and months leading up to the sacrifice of these children. Before Incan high priests embarked on the pilgrimage to take the victims to the top of mountains, the children were given diets high in animal protein and maize–a diet made for the elite. Along the demanding journey, coca leaves, the plant from...

The world's largest bid to harness the power of fusion has entered a "critical" phase in southern France. The Iter project at Cadarache in Provence is receiving the first of about one million components for its experimental reactor. Dogged by massive cost rises and long delays, building work is currently nearly two years behind schedule. The construction of the key building has even been altered to allow for the late delivery of key components. "We're not hiding anything - it's incredibly frustrating," David Campbell, a deputy director, told BBC News. "Now we're doing everything we can to recover as much...

China's Heat Wave Brings 'Dead' Man Back to Life BEIJING — Having the dead guy jump up for a drink probably wasn't part of the script. A staged protest claiming that city officials had beaten a sidewalk vendor to death in central China went awry when the man playing dead under a white sheet was overcome by the region's heat wave and sprang up to quaff a bottle of water, state media reported Monday. "It's too hot. I can't bear it anymore," the man was quoted as saying by state-run Xinhua News Agency. More than 10 men had gathered Saturday...

Sliven. Archaeologists discovered a rich Thracian grave from the 1st century AD in a mound in the municipality Sliven in south-eastern Bulgaria. The findings provide evidence for the preservation of burial rites and a strong Thracian aristocracy in the Roman era. The main finding is a 15 cm long bronze amphora, with two uniquely decorated handles. Another valuable discovery is a bronze skillet-shaped patera. One of its side handles ends with a lion's head, while the other ends with an animal combining features of the lion and the goat. Both items served ritual purposes. The archeologists also unearthed a bronze...

During excavations carried out by the Bodrum Underwater Archaeology Museum in the Aegean town of Bodrum’s Ortakent district, graves from the Mycenaean era have been unearthed. According to a written statement issued by the Culture and Tourism Ministry, pieces unearthed in the graves are very important for the scientific world. Among the pieces are baked earth, water bottles, cups with three handles, a carafe, a razor, animal bones and lots of glass and beads of various sizes. Examinations on nearly 3,500-year-old artifacts show that the graves date back to the Mycenaean III era around 600 B.C. to 1,000 B.C years...

Explanation: Strange shapes and textures can be found in neighborhood of the Cone Nebula. The unusual shapes originate from fine interstellar dust reacting in complex ways with the energetic light and hot gas being expelled by the young stars. The brightest star on the right of the above picture is S Mon, while the region just below it has been nicknamed the Fox Fur Nebula for its color and structure. The blue glow directly surrounding S Mon results from reflection, where neighboring dust reflects light from the bright star. The red glow that encompasses the whole region results not only...

The flip-flopping of the Sun’s magnetic field takes place at the peak of each solar activity cycle when the Sun’s internal magnetic dynamo reorients itself. When the field reversal happens, the magnetic field weakens, then dies down to zero before emerging again with a reversed polarity. While this is not a catastrophic event, the reversal will have effects, said solar physicist Todd Hoeksema, the director of Stanford University’s Wilcox Solar Observatory, who monitors the Sun’s polar magnetic fields. “This change will have ripple effects throughout the Solar System,” he said.

Women taking drugs known as calcium channel blockers (CCBs) for high blood pressure and other health conditions may be at higher risk for breast cancer if the drug is used long-term, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The finding is particularly important because so many people take drugs to lower blood pressure. It’s also important because studies about risk of breast cancer from the drugs that are the most commonly prescribed medication in the U.S. have yielded inconsistent results. Christopher I. Li, M.D., Ph.D., of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle...

About to go to space? Better postpone your trip The solar magnetic field will completely "flip" within the next three or four months, according to NASA.The dramatic-sounding event happens every 11 years. The Sun's magnetic activity follows a cycle, and as it reaches a maximum the poles weaken, reversing polarity. In June last year, the Sun's northern polar field became more positively charged than the southern polar field - what's called a "reversal" of polarity. What's called a "flip" is considered to have taken place when the both fields change polarity. The Sun's magnetic field is weak but extends far...

August 5, 2013 – SIBERIA - Having an official task to draw up a geological map of the region, a young geologist ended up running into something so unique, outstanding and mysterious that it would still puzzle scientists more than six decades later – the Patomskiy Crater. A host of theories have been put forward in the intervening years: that the crater was created by an ancient civilization, or by prisoners at a top secret Stalin labor camp, or by volcanic activity, or by a meteorite, or by an underground hydrogen explosion, or by a UFO. And even more...

August 5, 2013: Something big is about to happen on the sun. According to measurements from NASA-supported observatories, the sun's vast magnetic field is about to flip. "It looks like we're no more than 3 to 4 months away from a complete field reversal," says solar physicist Todd Hoeksema of Stanford University. "This change will have ripple effects throughout the solar system."

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center report the identification of a new cellular source for an important disease-fighting protein used in the body's earliest response to infection. The protein interferon-gamma (IFN-γ) keeps viruses from replicating and stimulates the immune system to produce other disease-fighting agents. Neutrophils, the newly identified cellular source of the protein, are the major component of the pus that forms around injured tissue. The researchers also report that the neutrophils appear to produce IFN-γ through a new cellular pathway independent of Toll-like receptors (TLRs): the body's early warning system for invasion by pathogens. This finding indicates that...

A new drug candidate has shown promising signs in treating tuberculosis. The synthetic molecule is effective in mice and bears no similarity to existing TB drugs, many of which have become inadequate as drug-resistant bacterial strains have developed. If it is shown to be safe and effective in humans, it could help to combat a disease that killed 1.4 million people in 2011. A team led by Kevin Pethe, a microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute Korea near Seoul, investigated more than 120,000 compounds over 5 years, infecting mouse immune cells called macrophages with Mycobacterium tuberculosis — the bacterium that causes...

Researchers manipulate mouse neurons to create a false memory; the work could lead to a better understanding of how memories form. Remember this: The red neurons are the brain cells in the hippocampus of a mouse carrying a new memory of a particular place. Scientists have created a false memory in mice by manipulating neurons that bear the memory of a place. The work further demonstrates just how unreliable memory can be. It also lays new ground for understanding the cell behavior and circuitry that controls memory, and could one day help researchers discover new ways to treat mental illnesses...

Plants Use Underground 'Fungal Internet' to Communicate by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * Researchers have just documented how plants use underground fungal networks to warn neighboring plants of impending insect attack, uniquely illustrating the complex and highly designed interconnected cooperation found in nature. The research study—just published in the July, 2013 issue of Ecology Letters—is the first such report that confirms and reveals how plants have uniquely co-designed physiologies that internetwork with other plants using an underground fungus as an information conduit.1 This amazing and intricate system allows the plants to readily and effectively communicate as a community, like a natural...

It's well known that the dinosaurs were wiped out 66 million years ago when a meteor hit what is now southern Mexico but evidence is accumulating that the biggest extinction of all, 252.3m years ago, at the end of the Permian period, was also triggered by an impact that changed the climate. While the idea that an impact caused the Permian extinction has been around for a while, what's been missing is a suitable crater to confirm it. Associate Professor Eric Tohver of the University of Western Australia's School of Earth and Environment believes he has found the impact crater...

Explanation: What it would look like to leave planet Earth? Such an event was recorded visually in great detail by the MESSENGER spacecraft as it swung back past the Earth, eight years ago, on its way in toward the planet Mercury. Earth can be seen rotating in this time-lapse video, as it recedes into the distance. The sunlit half of Earth is so bright that background stars are not visible. The robotic MESSENGER spacecraft is now in orbit around Mercury and has recently concluded the first complete map of the surface. On occasion, MESSENGER has continued to peer back at...

The first interesting form is the scorpion, which might first be thought to represent is known as Scorpius, but this does not appear to be the case.  This is due to the presence of the three birds to the middle right (A, B, C), these three most clearly correspond to the “Summer Triangle� stars, the three birds, one represented by each star: Cygnus, Aquila (aka Vultur volans), and Vultur cadens (Lyra).  The shape of the Aquila constellations holds the same general appearance as bird A, the angle of the Cygnus stars matches the shape of the body of bird B,...

Scientists have discovered a marine microbe-derived antibiotic that has the ability to kill the deadly Anthrax bacterium Bacillus anthracis and other pathogens such as the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.Bacillus anthracis spores as viewed in scanning electron microscopy (© National Academy of Engineering) Prof William Fenical with colleagues from the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography first collected Streptomyces sp. - a marine microorganism that produces the compound – in 2012 from sediments close to shore off Santa Barbara, California.Using an analytical technique known as spectroscopy, they then deciphered the unusual structure of a molecule isolated from Streptomyces sp....