Chris Blake
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The Koyal Group Info Mag: Scientists Explain Why Record-High Antarctic Sea Ice - 1 views
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Scientists explain why record-high Antarctic sea ice doesn't mean global warming isn't happening
The Antarctic has been brimming with sea ice in 2014, hovering around record-high extent for most of the year. On September 20, it peaked at 7.78 million square miles, breaking the previous Antarctic sea ice extent record, which was set in 2013. But while it might seem that this record throws into question the validity of global warming, scientists say this just isn't the case.
Up north, the sea ice loss in the Arctic is exactly what you would expect in a warming world. 2012 was a record-low year for Arctic sea ice in the satellite record, and 2014 was the sixth lowest.
But in the Antarctic, sea ice has been growing year over year. This is in contrast to the ice on Antarctic land, which appears to be shrinking faster than previously estimated. The dichotomy suggests that something much more complicated than "warming equals melting" is occurring, and scientists say that more research is needed to understand the observations.
One possible explanation for the growing sea ice extent is that weather patterns around the Antarctic may be pushing more cold, continental air over the ocean, spurring the formation of more sea ice.
Another possibility actually includes the melting of the ice over Antarctica itself - as the land ice melts, it could be flushing large amounts of fresh water, which freezes faster, into the ocean.
"There hasn't been one explanation yet that I'd say has become a consensus, where people say, 'We've nailed it, this is why it's happening,'" said Claire Parkinson, a senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "Our models are improving, but they're far from perfect. One by one, scientists are figuring out that particular variables are more important than we thought years ago, and one by one those variables are getting incorporated into the models."
When it comes to comparing the Arctic and the Antarctic, it's probably best not to draw conclusions from their differences. "Some people have looked at the Antarctic increasing trend and use that to suggest that global warming isn't happening, or that the increase in the Antarctic is offsetting the decrease in the Arctic and that's simply not true," says Walt Meier, a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, in a video on the record extent. "If you look at the magnitudes of the changes we're seeing in the wintertime, the Arctic is decreasing about twice as fast as the Antarctic is increasing."
This year's record extent will likely prompt new research on the difference between the North and South poles, and for good reason, according to Meier. "They're more sensitive to climate change, and therefore they're the regions that we see the biggest effects of climate change so far," says Meier. "They're kind of the canary in a coal mine of global warming."
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The Koyal Group Info Mag News: Some Creepy and other Not-so-Believable Science Research... - 1 views
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Have you ever imagined what the future would be like? Here is a hint as to what the latest discoveries will unfold within our lifetime. Unfortunately, we also found some unlikely stories about the past that try to make the advances of scientific development a kind of joke. Read on!
1. Last year, personalized embryonic stem cells became experimentally more viable with the successes made by the Oregon Health and Science University in cloning human embryos and collecting stem cells from them. Using those derived cells, they were able to produce cells into specialized cells usable for the skin or heart. This will allow doctors in the future to use such cells to generate entire organs or parts of them for transplant procedures.
Cut off your finger with a knife or lost an eye in an accident? A replacement can be generated, perhaps, in a matter of days or weeks, perhaps, using your own body as the source of original cells to produce cloned body parts since they claim that they may be able to generate such cells without using embryos. It is like real-life imitating fiction. Exciting but a bit scary and reminiscent of Frankenstein.
2. Was there water on Mars? Well, if NASA has it right, there might have been. Or wasn't there? NASA' Curiosity rover allegedly found a lake on the red planet which "could have supported" life more than three billion years ago. But the conclusion appears to be a big leap of faith, so to speak, for researchers to claim. Just because there is water does not mean there could have been life on Mars. Comets, perhaps hundreds or thousands of them. are basically made of ice and where they got that water somewhere in outer space would lead us to suppose that there is a lot of life out there. So far, we seem to be alone.
Besides, where is all that supposed lake water now? Could that lake have been formed by some other liquid or fluid, more volatile than water, such as methane, ammonia or some kind of mineral-based acid? Or could that lake have been merely a crater formed by an asteroid like many meteor-formed lakes we have on our planet?
In fact, the photo has all the evidences of a crater formed from a ballistic impact of a meteor rather than a lake that once held water. Notice the exact center where the tell-tale rebound of rock materials formed a small peak. Remember the popular slow-mo drop of water rebounding out? That is what happens with a meteor impact on solid ground. It forms a small peak on the center from the debris that are is thrown upward. A more exacting scientific inquiry and not speculations should be made before coming out with such "desperate" conclusions.
This piece of news is far from being a vindication of NASA. We need more proof of life - intelligent, if possible - to make us applaud. Even a college student will see through this unfounded claim.
3. A skull discovered in the Republic of Georgia apparently showed more ancient and more recent human characteristics. Evolutionists would feel confounded by this news as it would disrupt there belief that there was progression in the development of the Homo Sapiens species that we are. The conclusion the scientists reached, rather conveniently, was that more archaic humans apparently mated with the more advanced Homo Erectus or the first primitive erect humans before our "species" emerged.
Now this might be a rather surprising admission; but it is again a desperate and illogical hypothesis that throws cold water on the whole Theory of Evolution. It is basically saying that because some fossils show mixtures of pre-evolved and post-evolved characteristics then it could have only been the result of the reproduction of the two. But that is exactly like saying that a "zebronkey" - a mutant zebra that had features of a zebra and a donkey documented in Manila back in the 1970's - was the product of the mating of a zebra and a donkey.
Again, it seems evolutionary scientific research has a lot of credibility check it has to undergo before we can accept its farfetched conclusions. Besides, a single toe bone does not a whole human being or so-called whole humanoid. With such sparse evidence, we wonder how scientists could confidently brag about their "latest discoveries".
There are, to be sure, legitimate and amazing scientific discoveries out there; but these few we found online seem to be more like press release materials for fund-raising purposes rather than acceptable results of serious scientific inquiry.
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Koyal InfoMag: Ebola - Faith Trumps Science - 1 views
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When the Black Death was raging in Elizabethan London, some terrified citizens sought to assuage the Plague. The Queen herself ordered that anyone leaving London would be hanged. As in times past, some offered penitence to God in the form of self-flagellation, but to no avail. The Plague continued to rage even as the flagellants beat themselves to a bloody pulp.
Some frightened but resolute groups resorted to boarding up houses inhabited by anyone who exhibited symptoms of the disease. Armed watchmen saw to it that no one could go in or out, regardless of how much those trapped inside begged for mercy. The victims were given bare sustenance by means of baskets filled with provisions, which were lowered through upper windows. If any unfortunates in the plague houses survived the quarantine, which was rare, they were eventually let out.
History repeats itself.
Apparently, a family exposed to Ebola is being quarantined in their home under armed guard. No one can enter and no one can exit until health officials are assured there is no danger of contagion. Despite the family's strong objections to the loss of their liberty to freely roam about, the action is perhaps one of the first sensible precautions yet taken to quarantine the Ebola virus.
It's about time scientific sensibilities rather than ideological purity takes the measure of a pestilence with the capacity to wipe out entire populations. Let's hope the politically-correct response aimed at protecting the sensitivities of gays that characterized the first reactions to appearance of AIDS in the 1980s does not once again prevail. Let's hope Ebola does not become the vanguard of a campaign conferring civil rights on a disease because any rigorous response to a deadly virus is considered racist by the likes of Louis Farrakhan. Let's hope sane medical practices for limiting exposure and stopping the spread throughout the entire population are actually followed.
In brief, let's hope ideological faith does not trump science.
How ironic incidents of faith trumping sound scientific and medical are repeating themselves.
The Left has long pointed to the idiocies of the past as reasons that faith means nothing and that religion gets everything wrong because it does not bow to science. The examples abound, be they Galileo's discoveries disputed by the Church or ignorant pastors resisting the administration of chloroform ( "a decoy of Satan") to women in labor because God had supposedly decreed women had to suffer in giving birth.
Even among the scientists themselves, horrendous disputes over orthodox practices resulted in deaths of innocent people. Louis Pasteur's discoveries (1862) about the transmission of disease via invisible microbes were ignored by many doctors who continued to deliver babies with unwashed hands only to see women continue to die of childbed fever. Joseph Lister's prescription for sanitizing the hospital and surgical environment was scorned because Leeuwenhoeck's "wee little beasties" were still not regarded as a particularly potent threat centuries after he peered into his microscope, as Thomas Eakins' "The Gross Clinic" illustrates. Today's viewers of the painting are less inclined to admire the composition of the piece than they are to not the horribly unsanitary practices still in place as late as 1875.
"Terrible, terrible," is what just about any liberal would say; adding that those poor deluded people should have listened to science.
But here we are again facing resistance to science because of prevailing ideology, but this time the onus is on the Left, whose paradigm of thought is now so tightly structured nothing considered alien to it, including proven science, can intrude. Contagion of thought is evidently considered worse than actual contagion.
Ironically, the Ebola scare in the U.S. is following the pattern outlined by Albert Camus in his novel The Plague. The first stage is denial:
Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise. In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. […]Pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken their precautions.
In other words, since pestilences were impossible, everyone went on with business as usual. After all, a pestilence would interfere with their freedom to live life as they saw fit.
Camus writes the second stage was the disseminating of "information" in order to keep the public calm: Read More here
Info Mag Koyal Group Spirit and Opportunity Top 10 Decade 1 Discoveries Top Rover Scien... - 0 views
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Info Mag Koyal Group Spirit and Opportunity Top 10 Decade 1 Discoveries Top Rover Scientist Tells Universe Today A Top 10 Decade 1 Discovery by NASA's Twin Mars Exploration Rovers Carbonate-Containing Martian Rocks discovered by Spirit Mars Rover Spirit collected data in late 2005 which confirmed that the Comanche outcrop contains magnesium iron carbonate, a mineral indicating the past environment was wet and non-acidic, possibly favorable to life. This view was captured during Sol 689 on Mars (Dec. 11, 2005). The find at Comanche is the first unambiguous evidence from either Spirit or Opportunity for a past Martian environment that may have been more favorable to life than the wet but acidic conditions indicated by the rovers' earlier finds. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University January 2014 marks the 10th anniversary since the nail biting and history making safe landings of NASA's renowned Mars Explorations Rovers - Spirit and Opportunity - on the Red Planet barely three weeks apart during January 2004. Due to their completely unforeseen longevity, a decade of spectacular and groundbreaking scientific discoveries continuously flowed from the robot sisters that have graced many articles, magazine covers, books, documentaries and refereed scientific papers. What are the Top 10 Decade 1 discoveries from Spirit and Opportunity? Find out below what a top Mars rover team scientist told Universe Today! Ray Arvidson, the rovers Deputy Principal Investigator and professor at Washington University in St. Louis, has kindly shared with me his personal list of the Top 10 discoveries from Spirit and Opportunity for the benefit of readers of Universe Today. The Top 10 list below are Ray's personal choices and does not necessarily reflect the consensus of the Mars Explorations Rover (MER) team. First some background. The dynamic duo were launched on their interplanetary voyages from Cape Canaveral Florida atop Delta II rockets during the summer of 2003. The now
Koyal Info Group Mag: Scientific findings on Climate - 1 views
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LETTER: Scientific findings on climate are real, not optional The letter by James Policelli ("America is heading down dangerous path," Jan. 22) is proof that the far right lunatic fringe disavows science. On the next page of that day's paper was a statement by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that 2013 was the fourth warmest year on record. Policelli would likely claim that NOAA is a puppet of the Obama administration and has broadcast false information to further a socialist agenda. (What!) Let's look at some indisputable facts. A comparison of NASA space shots of polar ice caps clearly indicates they are shrinking. Ocean levels have been measured to be rising. (Where do you think the melting polar ice caps go?) As a scientist, I have never been amused by junk science or those who espouse it. As one who helped develop some of the spectroscopic fingerprints used to monitor ozone-destroying man-made molecules in the upper atmosphere, I find the climate change denials of the far right lunatic fringe to be extremely offensive and exceptionally dangerous. This Content: http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/01/letter_scientific_findings_on.html Koyal Info Group Mag: http://koyalgroupinfomag.com/science.html http://koyalgroupinfomag.com/blog/ Koyal Info Group Mag - Twitter: https://twitter.com/koyalgroup
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At Futurism.co, Alex Klokus created an infographic that highlights 48 of the most transformative scientific advancements and discoveries of last year. We've republished the graphic here with permission, but you can check out Futurism's interactive version to click through to a source for each story.