At http://climateaudit.org August 19th ... there is a guest post by the author of the blog, Air Vent, and he thinks he has solved a mystery concerning the Mann 2008 updated hockey stick model and the temperature data at the root of the computer generated modelling. In fact, the authors utilised already existing 'model data' which they claimed as a 'known' temperature signal and added various levels of white noise. The latter tends to flatten the hockey stick handle by obscuring its ups and down.

At http://geology.com/press-release/obsidian-artifacts/ is a story with some potential for the future (and like the previous story is also available at Science Daily). Obsidian, or volcanic glass, was prized for making tools, and an archaeologist in Idaho has plotted and catalogued obsidian pieces from his patch as he has devised a clever way of using them to shine a little window on the habits of Native Americans over the last 13,000 years.

At www.physorg.com/print201279930.html there is a report on a paper in Physcial Review Letters with some interesting discoveries, one of which is that high energy cosmic rays were thought to come from remote galaxies that contained huge black holes capable of eating stars and accelerating protons like a bullet shooting out of a gun barrel. These protons, referred to as cosmic rays, travel through space and eventually enter our galaxy - the theory assumes.

At www.physorg.com/print201191962.html we have news of a paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (August 16th, 2010) which purports to provide an explanation for the paradox of increasing Antarctic sea ice in a warming climate. It seems that as the hydrological cycle accelerates there is more precipitation in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica - and increased snow falls on the continent.