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Explanation: What's happening at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy? To help find out, the orbiting Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have combined their efforts to survey the region in unprecedented detail in infrared light. Milky Way's center because visible light is more greatly obscured by dust. The above image encompasses over 2,000 images from the Hubble Space Telescope's NICMOS taken in 2008. The image spans 300 by 115 light years with such high resolution that structures only 20 times the size of our own Solar System are discernable. Clouds of glowing gas and dark dust as well as...

Oldowan stone-knapping dates back to the Lower Paleolithic period in eastern Africa, and remained largely unchanged for 700,000 years until more sophisticated Acheulean hand-axes and cleavers, which marked the next generation of stone tool technology, came on the scene. It was practiced by some of our earliest ancestors, such as Homo habilis and the even older Australopithecus garhi, who walked on two legs, but whose facial features and brain size were closer to those of apes. In testing five different ways to convey Oldowan stone-knapping skills to more than 180 college students, the researchers found that the demonstration that used...

A multi-purpose bone tool dating from the Neanderthal era has been discovered by University of Montreal researchers, throwing into question our current understanding of the evolution of human behaviour. It was found at an archaeological site in France... Neanderthals lived in Europe and western Asia in the Middle Paleolithic between around 250,000 to 28,000 years ago. Homo sapiens is the scientific term for modern man. The production of bone tools by Neanderthals is open to debate. For much of the twentieth century, prehistoric experts were reluctant to recognize the ability of this species to incorporate materials like bone into their...

Guest Post by Bob TisdaleI hadn’t read the NOAA State of the Climate (SOTC) Report for 2014 when I prepared the post Does the Uptick in Global Surface Temperatures in 2014 Help the Growing Difference between Climate Models and Reality?  (WattsUpWithThat cross post is here.) I simply presented data and climate model outputs in that post.The following are a few observations about the annual NOAA report. NOAA biased their report by omitting key discussions.  First an introduction.THE 2014 GLOBAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE NOAA SOTC REPORTWith respect to surface temperatures, the Global Highlights of the NOAA State of the Climate report...

Apple's iBooks platform is seeing an average of a million new users per week after the company's decision to ship iOS 8 with the app pre-installed, according to Apple Director of iBooks Keith Moerer, who spoke today at the Digital Book World Conference. efore iOS 8, the iBooks app had to be searched for and downloaded from the App Store, putting it on par with several other App Store-based e-books apps like Amazon's Kindle app for iOS. Pre-installing iBooks made it "so easy" for new users to try iBooks for the first time, said Moerer. Family Sharing, also new in...

The Art of Lying by Omission Back in the old days, when scientists had standards, they would never get excited over one hot year and certainly not over one meaningless hundredth of a degree.The NOAA and NASA spinmeisters are parsing their press releases carefully, using vagueness to speak in half-truth-tongues. They utter no outright lie, yet misinform the crowd with lies by omission.NOAA and NASA don’t say their models still don’t work, that the world was supposed to be a lot warmer and the “pause” continues. Nor do they admit that it has been warmer before many times in...

Explanation: Sweeping north in planet Earth's sky, Comet Lovejoy's greenish coma and blue tinted ion tail stretched across this field of stars in the constellation Taurus on January 13. The inset at the upper left shows the 1/2 degree angular size of the full moon for scale. So Lovejoy's coma appears only a little smaller (but much fainter) than a full moon on the sky, and its tail is visible for over 4 degrees across the frame. That corresponds to over 5 million kilometers at the comet's estimated distance of 75 million kilometers from Earth. Blown by the solar wind,...

Mittens, shoes, weapons, walking sticks -- lost in the high mountains of Norway thousands of years ago -- are now emerging from melting ice. Around 7,000 years ago the Earth was enjoying a warm climate. Now glaciers and patches of perennial ice in the high mountains of Southern Norway have started to melt again, revealing ancient layers... The summer of 2014 was hectic in this respect. In Oppland County alone, Pilø and his colleagues found 400 objects, now emerged from the deepfreeze. Among these were a horse skull and hiking staffs from the Viking Age. An arrow shaft found by...

A new archaeological find on the Danish island of Falster can be traced back to the first Roman Emperor, Augustus. A bronze figure representing the Greek figure Silenus, from the time of Rome's first emperor, Augustus, has been found on the south-eastern Danish island of Falster. This find suggests that there was close contact between the Roman empire and Scandinavia, before and after the emperor's reign... At first sight the figure seemed so finely detailed that the finder took it home in the belief that it was a modern object. Later she handed it over to the National Museum of...

The milestone hot fire test conducted on Jan. 9, involved igniting a shuttle-era RS-25 space shuttle main engine for 500 seconds on the A-1 test stand at Stennis. A quartet of RS-25s, formerly used to power the space shuttle orbiters, will now power the core stage of the SLS which will be the most powerful rocket the world has ever seen. “The RS-25 is the most efficient engine of its type in the world,” said Steve Wofford, manager of the SLS Liquid Engines Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Alabama, where the SLS Program is managed. “It’s...

Explanation: Delivered by Saturn-bound Cassini, ESA's Huygens probe touched down on the ringed planet's largest moon Titan, ten years ago on January 14, 2005. These panels show fisheye images made during its slow descent by parachute through Titan's dense atmosphere. Taken by the probe's descent imager/spectral radiometer instrument they range in altitude from 6 kilometers (upper left) to 0.2 kilometers (lower right) above the moon's surprisingly Earth-like surface of dark channels, floodplains, and bright ridges. But at temperatures near -290 degrees C, the liquids flowing across Titan's surface are methane and ethane, hydrocarbons rather than water. After making the most...

[I really think it is important to highlight all the great advances in technology and medicine, to show what is good in society and what we can accomplish if we put our minds to it! Even if you don’t have diabetes you should appreciate the advances that can be made—if government regulators and Obama don’t destroy the medical industry first.] This Temporary Tattoo Can Monitor Diabetics' Glucose Levels as Accurately as a Finger Prick “A flexible and easy-to-wear temporary tattoo could help diabetics manage their condition without daily finger pricks.” By FIONA MACDONALD January 15, 2015 Engineers from the University...

Official Trailer: Patterns Of Evidence: The Exodus

Free Will Is Real and Materialism Is Wrong Michael Egnor January 15, 2015 11:09 AM | Permalink I've written before in reply to materialist Jerry Coyne's assertion that free will is an illusion. The gist of Coyne's denial, shared by others of course, is that nature is deterministic and that the mind is a wholly material process, yoked to the laws of physics and to an organism's evolutionary history. Thus, our choices are completely determined and free will is an illusion.I've already pointed out his error on the question of determinism. Today I'll focus on his error regarding the materiality/immateriality...

In November, the Society for American Archaeology sent a letter to the St. Louis organization that said, in part, "This action by the St. Louis Society constitutes a stark violation of the ethics of the science of archaeology." A basic problem is selling such items at auction, where they may be bought by private collectors and removed from public view and study. "The objects in question, collectively known as the Harageh Collection, were entrusted to the St. Louis Society in 1914 in return for that organization's support of the Egyptian excavations directed by Sir Flinders Petrie," the letter reads. "They...

Kurt H. Becker, a professor in the Department of Applied Physics and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and WeiDong Zhu, a research associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, are helping develop a new colloidal gold test strip for cardiac troponin I (cTn-I) detection. The new strip uses microplasma-generated gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) and shows much higher detection sensitivity than conventional test strips. The new cTn-I test is based on the specific immune-chemical reactions between antigen and antibody on immunochromatographic test strips using AuNPs. Compared to AuNPs produced by traditional chemical methods, the surfaces of the...

ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Human activity has pushed the planet across four of nine environmental boundaries, sending the world towards a "danger zone", according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Science. Climate change, biodiversity loss, changes in land use, and altered biogeochemical cycles due in part to fertilizer use have fundamentally changed how the planet functions, the study said. These changes destabilize complex interactions between people, oceans, land and the atmosphere, said the paper "Planetary Boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet" by 18 leading international researchers.

A young man with incredible math skills and brain power

Doctors at the University Clinic in Ulm have discovered a new disease causing obesity while studying an extremely overweight three-year-old. The child weighed more than 40 kilos, almost three times as much as a normal three-year-old, and could not stop eating and gaining weight. Researchers found that the “satiety hormone” that tells the body to stop eating was inactive, meaning the child was always hungry. But in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, they described how they were able to bring their patient’s eating and weight under control within days by giving the child an artificial form...

Explanation: Inner planets Venus and Mercury can never wander far from the Sun in Earth's sky. This week you've probably seen them both gathered near the western horizon just after sunset, a close conjunction of bright celestial beacons in the fading twilight. The pair are framed in this early evening skyview captured on January 13 from the ruins of Szarvasko Castle in northwestern Hungary. Above the silhouette of the landscape's prominent volcanic hill Venus is much the brighter, separated from Mercury by little more than the width of two Full Moons. On Friday, planet Earth's early morning risers will also...