science

Further discussion on how life on earth may have originated.

Article on active rifting in Africa

"Tracking and understanding the complex connections within the brain may finally reveal the neural secret of cognitive ability."

chemiosmosis - alternate and quite well explained possible origin of life

"Child abuse has had a known association with increased risk for virtually all types of psychological and psychiatric problems - but a new evidence review suggests that it raises the risk of physical illness just as much."

Predictions by Mojib Latif that there may be a slow down in global warming over the next decade that could bely the overall trend.

In the past 30 years, a scientific revolution has completely transformed our understanding of babies and young children. Babies both know more and learn more than we would ever have thought possible, and we have recently begun to grasp the mechanisms by which they do this. I wrote The Philosophical Baby to try to show that thinking about childhood can help us answer deep questions about truth, imagination, love, consciousness, identity and morality. Without exaggeration, I believe it can tell us how we came to be human.

A discussion of the history of the solar neutrino problem. History of the development of the solar model. Measurement of neutrinos. Discrepancy between observed and predicted neutrino flux. Proposed solution. Experimental verification.

Interesting lecture on the solar neutrion problem and how it was "solved".

A new eco-friendly coating is made by binding a water-loving molecule to a Teflon-like molecule that repels oil. This pairing makes for a surface that prevents oil from sticking to it, while also allowing it to be wet by water.

Gas planet found in a retrograde orbit - a first.

Ozone depletion may be slowing or starting to reverse, but a much longer data collection period is needed before the trend can be confirmed.

A Rutgers University, Newark and Collége de France, Paris research team has pinpointed for the first time the mechanism that takes place during sleep that causes learning and memory formation to occur.

The great oxygenation event and its role in bif formation and formation of atmospheric oxygen

The role of variations in oceanic oxygen in global warming/cooling

Entropy can decrease, according to a new proposal - but the process would destroy any evidence of its existence, and erase any memory an observer might have of it. It sounds like the plot to a weird sci-fi movie, but the idea has recently been suggested by theoretical physicist Lorenzo Maccone, currently a visiting scientist at MIT, in an attempt to solve a longstanding paradox in physics.

galactic collisions

Possibly but not probably an example of magnetic monopole