Samsung Universe 
Martin
Cycling Could the Quadrillions of Nomad Planets in Milky Way Sustain Life? Astrobiologists Say "Yes"
A recent study proposes the galaxy is crowded with nomad planets adrift in space. If this is the case, nomad planets may play a dynamic role in the universe. Titled "Nomads of the Galaxy," the authors proposed an upper limit...
The Daily Galaxy -...Today's Hot Tech News Video from IDG
Today's hot tech news from IDG News Service (publishers of PC World, MacWorld, and Computerworld).Click here to launch the IDG News video
"Light from the Most Ancient, Distant Galaxies will Never Reach Earth"
New research finds that the ideal time to study the cosmos was more than 13 billion years ago, just about 500 million years after the Big Bang - the era (shown in this artist's conception above) when the first stars...
Remnants of a Supersized Black Hole Eruption? Massive Bubbles Extend from Milky Way Center for 50,000 Light Years (Today's Most Popular)
In 2010 NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope unveiled a previously unseen structure centered in the Milky Way that spans 50,000 light-years that may be the remnant of an eruption from a supersized black hole at the center of our galaxy...
‘Hell Is Truth Seen Too Late’: WWII And Climate Change
Journalist Bill Blakemore has another great piece on ABC’s website: ‘The Great Big Book of Horrible Things’: WWII and Climate Change What our great failure in the 1930s may teach about facing the rapid assault of manmade global warming (Or “Hell is the truth seen too late.”) Dresden (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) It is the continuation of an essay he wrote about last week, which I blogged about here: “ ‘Hug The Monster’: Why So Many Climate Scientists Have Stopped Downplaying the...
ThinkProgress ...Lack Of Funding Forces Heartland To End Climate Denial Conference
The Heartland Institute has announced that this year’s climate denial conference will be its last for the foreseeable future. In his closing speech at this year’s event in Chicago, Heartland President Joseph Bast said that financial troubles are preventing the organization from putting on another event. “I hope to see you at a future conference, but at this point we have no plans to do another ICCC,” said Bast, addressing the remaining attendees this afternoon. The International Conference on...
A Level Playing Field Cuts Both Ways: Why We Should Encourage More Chinese Investment In U.S. Clean Energy
by Melanie Hart Chinese capital is finally flowing into the U.S. clean energy market. Chinese direct investment in the U.S. clean energy economy has grown from just $4 million annually in 2006 to over $260 million in 2011. That increase is attracting attention, and not all of it is positive. Yesterday Third Way released a report concluding that U.S. private-sector investors are losing interest in investing at home due to the fickle American policy environment, leaving Chinese companies to fill...
"Stellar Extremophiles" --Found Where Star Formation Isn't Supposed to Happen
"We’re finding stars in extreme galactic environments where star formation isn't supposed to happen," explains NASA GALEX project scientist Susan Neff of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “This is a very surprising development." The image above is Hubble’s close-up view...
Searching Earth for Clues to What Mar's Curosity Rover Might Find
Carl Sagan made a point of saying that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." If life ever existed on Mars, evidence of its presence may be signaled by a distinctive magnetic signature as a definitive test for Martian life that the...
Image of the Day: Human-Made Shadow on Mars
NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity catches its own late-afternoon shadow in this dramatically lit view eastward across Endeavour Crater on Mars. The rover used the panoramic camera (Pancam) between about 4:30 and 5:00 p.m. local Mars time to record images taken...
Today's Hot Tech News Video from IDG
Today's hot tech news from IDG News Service (publishers of PC World, MacWorld, and Computerworld).Click here to launch the IDG News video
Will Romney’s Anti-Wind Rhetoric Hurt His Chances In The Heartland?
by David Roberts, via Grist On Thursday, President Obama will visit TPI Composites, a wind manufacturer in Newton, Iowa (population, 15,254). There, he reiterated his support for the Production Tax Credit (PTC), a federal support program that has helped drive wind’s rapid expansion in the U.S. The PTC is now in peril, as Congress appears unlikely to renew it when it expires at the end of this year. The loss of the PTC would put tens of thousands of current jobs — and almost 100,000 future...
Orlando Sentinel Slams The ‘Nuclear Tax’ Ratepayers Must Pay Progress Energy
Joke is on Progress customers stuck paying nuclear tax Stop me if you’ve heard this one. You and Progress Energy walk into a bar. Progress says it’s going to order $24 billion worth of drinks, but they won’t arrive until 2024. Oh, and you have to pick up the tab — even if the server drops the tray and the drinks never arrive at all So begins a devastating Orlando Sentinel column on Progress Energy’s planned twin nuclear plants. I wrote about these nukes three years ago – see “What do you get...
Mission Critical: A Clean-Energy Call To Arms
by Nicole Lederer, via Clean Edge They say nothing can get done in Washington, D.C. on the issue of clean energy, which has become a political lightening rod over the last year. With Congress at a high watermark of partisanship, accusations abound on Capitol Hill that American energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies and the policies that support them are job killers and a money-wasting hoax on taxpayers. And yet, there’s reason for optimism about energy innovation in this...
Heartland Denial Conference: Special Guest Lord Monckton Goes Birther, Admits He Has ‘No Scientific Qualification’
Monckton watches the protesters outside Heartland's conference. With the Heartland Institute suffering from a public relations disaster that caused 11 donors to abandon financial support, one might think the organization would attempt to moderate messaging tactics at its climate denial conference this week. Or maybe even find an expert who doesn’t freely admit that he “has no scientific qualification” to challenge the science of climate change. Not quite. After comparing people who understand...
What Lies Ahead For International Action On Global Warming In 2012?
by Jake Schmidt, via NRDC’s Switchboard With the haze of the Durban climate negotiations finally lifting, the climate negotiations in Germany at the midway point, and one month before Rio+20 it is time to reflect on the path that lies ahead for the rest of this year. While global negotiations have slowed since the high-intensity period over the last three years (in Copenhagen, Cancun, and Durban), that doesn’t mean we can afford for action to slow down. After all, as the International...
May 23 News: Oklahoma Oil Billionaire Donates Nearly $1 Million To Romney Super PAC
A round-up of the top climate and energy news. Please post other links below. Oklahoma oil billionaire Harold Hamm didn’t wait long to make a nearly $1 million donation to a group supporting Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney after he became one of Romney’s top energy advisers in March. [Washington Post] Heartland’s seventh climate conference, which runs until Wednesday, was a much diminished event, compared to earlier lavish gatherings which spilled out over several floors...
Sensenbrenner: ‘CO2 Is A Natural Gas. Does This Mean That All Of Us Need To Put Catalytic Converters On Our Noses?’
Speaking at the Heartland Institute’s climate denial conference in Chicago this afternoon, Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) said that labeling heat-trapping carbon dioxide a pollutant is “propaganda.” Sensenbrenner is a long-time climate disinformer who says that the science of man-made global warming is an “international conspiracy.” He also happens to be Vice Chair of the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology. Blatantly ignoring the “science” part of his committee...
Manmade Pollutants May Be Driving Earth’s Tropical Belt Expansion And Subtropical Dust-Bowlification
JR: Climate science has long predicted an expansion of the tropical belt (colored band in figure below), which we’re now observing. At the same time, also as predicted, the subtropical dry zones are shifting poleward and getting drier (see for instance, this study and this one). And that means more “Dust-Bowlification,” which is a grave threat to food security. This observed expansion is happening faster than the climate models projected. A new study in Nature (subs. req’d) offers one possible...
Building Wind Energy Can Save Midwestern Consumers $200 Per Year
By Richard W. Caperton We’ve all heard that wind energy is too expensive, and that massive investments in wind will drive up electricity rates for consumers. This argument is based on the belief that wind energy is more expensive on a per kilowatt-hour basis than traditional fossil fuels. While even this premise is up for debate (for example, wind is now the least expensive option for new generation for some utilities in the upper Midwest), the bigger problem is that this argument ignores how...
Dear Heartland, Stop Using Arthur Robinson’s Trick To Hide The Temperature Incline
Mark Boslough, via Skeptical Science Climate change is debated in letters to the editor of hometown newspapers all over the world. In the Las Cruces, New Mexico, Sun-News, one reader recently cited “a 1996 paper by Kiegwin (sic) in Science which showed that, despite the present having a CO2 concentration of 388 PPM, the present temperature is cooler than the average of the last 3,000 years, and that it was considerably warmer than today during the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm...
Irony Can Be So Ironic: BP Sponsors ‘The Comedy of Errors’
What is perhaps the last play the tragically — not comically — reckless oil company BP should sponsor? Seriously, what oil company has made more flagrant errors than BP? I don’t know what PR genius came up with this idea, but here is the oil giant, oblivious to the irony, announcing on their website: Directed by Amir Nizar Zuabi, The Comedy of Errors, supported by BP as the Founding Presenting Partner of the World Shakespeare Festival, plays in the Roundhouse in Camden, as part of the What...
A Universe with Billions of Binary Planets?
The discovery that there are perhaps billions of solo rogue planets and binary planet systems in the Milky Way alone has led to a new theoretical study by astronomer Hagai Perets and his colleague at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics...
Mystery Pulsar with Unknown Wave Form Discovered
The Large Area Telescope (LAT), built by SLAC for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, collects information on high-energy gamma rays from numerous sources in the sky. Among these are small, elusive objects called pulsars, which spin up to hundreds of...
New Initiative Addresses Triple Threat To Climate And Human Health By Replacing Charcoal Cookstoves
In the fight against climate change, we often think about the big problems like coal-based electricity, car-centric transportation, and energy-sucking buildings. But there’s equally important problem we need to address for environmental and human-health reasons: biomass cookstoves. In fact, the use of biomass-based cookstoves in developing countries represents a triple threat: They contribute to severe deforestation, they help accelerate short-term global warming by emitting “black carbon,” and...
Image of the Day: Space X Falcon 9 'Dragon' Launch to the ISS
The Space X company made history as its Falcon 9 rocket rose from its seaside launch pad and pierced the pre-dawn sky, aiming for a rendezvous in a few days with the space station and launching the commercial space era....
May 22 News: Coal Country Jobs At Two-Decade High, But Industry Campaigns Against ‘Job Killing’ Regulations
The coal industry and their Republican allies are looking to bury Obama under coal issues, Politico reports. American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity unveiled video attacks on his coal record the past week, as coal donors flock to Romney, who’s taken $187,750 in campaign cash through March 31. We’ve already debunked the myth that EPA regulations threaten jobs, and the facts do not back the industry’s case for a “war on coal”: While the Obama administration and the EPA may be taking a...
Cold Cash, Cool Climate: Using Entrepreneurial Innovation To Solve The Climate Crisis
by Rick Piltz, via Climate Science Watch Jonathan Koomey’s new book, Cold Cash, Cool Climate: Science-Based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs, offers a concise, compelling analysis of why innovative entrepreneurial approaches are needed in order to limit global climate change, and to improve the quality of life while doing so. Koomey’s analysis has more integrity than those who promote energy alternatives while evading the daunting constraints that follow from climate science, and opens...
G-8 Leaders Endorse New Plan To Combat Short-Term Climate Pollutants
by Jeffrey Cavanagh During this weekend’s G-8 summit hosted by President Obama at Camp David, leaders from the Group of Eight nations endorsed a new plan to combat “short-lived climate polluters,” with a focus on methane, black carbon, and hydroflurocarbons (HFCs). According to the Camp David Declaration — the official communiqué endorsed by all G-8 leaders at the end of the summit — short-lived pollutants significantly contribute to global warming, and limiting their release will help prevent...
Heartland Institute Hemorrhages Donors And Cash For Extremist Agenda, As Coal And Oil Step In
Peter Gleick cleared of forging documents in Heartland expose Heartland Institute hosts its annual denial-a-palooza conference in Chicago this week, during an uncertain time for the libertarian think tank. Exposed for its secret agenda to teach climate denialism in classrooms and its outlandish billboard campaign, Heartland has shed sponsors and more than $800,000 exactly because of its extremist position on the climate. Meanwhile, the UK Guardian breaks the news today that an external...
Oil And Gas Link To Texas Earthquakes Studied
By Tom Kenworthy Scientists from two Texas universities are looking into a pair of recent earthquakes near the Texas-Louisiana border for clues to whether they were related to underground injection of oil and gas drilling waste produced in the course of hydraulic fracturing or fracking. One of the scientists studying the two recent Texas quakes was on a team that concluded a swarm of earthquakes near Dallas in 2008 and 2009 were related to the disposal of drilling wastes, according to E&E’s...
"Why Super-Massive Black Holes Formed Less than 1 Billion Years After Big Bang" --A Mystery
In the early days of the universe, a mere 700 to 800 million years after the Big Bang, most things were small. The first stars and galaxies were just beginning to form and grow in isolated parts of the universe....
EcoAlert: NASA Updates Hazardous Asteroid Count --Only 20-30% of 4700 Objects Found
New results from NASA's NEOWISE survey find that more potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHAs, are closely aligned with the plane of our solar system than previous models suggested, coming within 5 million miles (about 8 million kilometers) of Earth. "We...
Image of the Day: Super-Massive Galaxies of the Early Universe
Sensitive infrared cameras staring over large fields of view are the best way to find large numbers of very distant objects for analyses SAO astronomers Jia-Sheng Huang, Giovanni Fazio, and Matt Ashby, together with a team of colleagues, used the...
Today's 'Hot Tech News' Video from IDG
Today's hot tech news from IDG News Service (publishers of PC World, MacWorld, and Computerworld). Click here to launch the IDG News video
Must-See CBS News: We Are ‘Living On A Planet With A Fever…. This Is Our Society’s Sink Or Swim Moment’
The CBS Evening News had one of the best segments ever on manmade global warming. The piece is headlined on their website, “Assessing the risk of climate change” with this description: The past 12 months were the hottest on record, and forecasters are predicting high temperatures across the U.S. this summer. Science and environment contributor M. Sanjayan explains the risk of climate change. Watch it: Kudos to CBS News for running this segment with Sanjayan, who is “the lead scientist for...