At www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Ice-Age-iLion-Mani-is-worlds-earliest-f... ... straying back on to yesterday's Ice Age art theme we learn here that a piece of mammoth ivory carved into the shape of a human body with the head of a lion goes back somewhat earlier than thought - as way back as 40,000 years ago. We may assume lions were part of the European fauna at that time.
Clovis Comet is bunkum
Scientists from Royal Holloway College (part of London University) in association with Sandia National Laboratory in the US, and 13 other universities in N America and Europe are down as contributing to the conclusions, are all unanimous in saying a large impact or airbursting comet or asteroid is out of context in explaining the sudden dip in climate at the Younger Dryas boundary and even less in respect of explaining the disappearance of Clovis points and their replacement by the similar Folsom points (which appear derivative).
Ice Age Art in the British Museum
This is an intersting exhibition running between February 7th and the 26th May 2013 - see www.britishmuseum.org ... If you wondered where Henry Moore might have got inspiration for some of his strange sculpture we may note one of them, at least, appears to bear some striking parallels with a female figurine reputedly made over 20,000 years ago.
Robert Schoch
Fresh from his stint at last year's Electic Universe conference Robert Schoch has a fascinating article in the current issue of Current World Archaeology 57 (see www.world-archaeology.com) and signing off the article we learn he is also the author of a book, Forgotten Civilisations: the Role of Solar Outbursts in Our Past and Future ... which sounds a spot on the speculative side - but no doubt is interesting in spite of that.
The lunar dynamo model?
At www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/01/the-moon-was-once-powered-by-a-dyn... ... it seems scientists have found evidence that rocks on the moon were magnetised millions of years ago. This discovery has led to the idea the moon formerly had a metallic core that produced the magnetic field - a lunar dynamo. It is thought a dynomo exists at the heart of the Earth.
Funny Thing Happened in India
Here is a bit of humour from the pen of a journalist in India - go to www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/1/28/its-cold-in-india.html ... and comes from Jug Suraiya writing for The Times of India. If you like your humour in cartoons and pictures and having a laugh at the Met is up your street - go to www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/1/28/we-told-you-so-josh-197.html
The Earth in an electric solar system
The Earth in an electric solar system is a paper by Louis Hissink in the New Concepts in Global Tectonics Newsletter, a link forwarded by the contacts tab by member Robert Farrer, and you can find it by going to www.ncgt.org and scrolling down to issue 51, clicking on and downloading the full pdf of that issue. Once downloaded you pick which pages you might want to print out. This paper is fairly short in comparison to some of them.
An asteroid mystery
At http://phys.org/print277964429.html ... we learn that the recently visited asteroid Vesta might have had a very active inner life (but early in the history of the solar system). This is derived from a meteorite found in the Sahara desert and linked to the asteroid by their comparable chemical and isotopic signatures. The space rock had similarities in structure to igneous rocks found on Earth - and does that mean it was igneous on Vesta?
Lengths of Day, Orbit of Venus, Planetary Rotation
Tall Bloke's Talk Shop has an interesting series by Tim Cullen (retired and living in Malaga) - go to http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/tim-cullen-planetary-rotation-... and http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/01/23/tim-cullen-planetary-rotation-... ... in which the piece concerning Venus might tempt the taste buds of SIS members. Venus appears to rotate very slowly - in the opposite direction to the general rotation of the solar system.
The mysterious nature of dark matter is in the news again
At www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/01/gravitinos-will-they-unlock-the-my... .... is a post on the ongoing search to discover what exactly dark matter is (if it is anything) and why it is invisible. Ari Raklev of the University of Oslo thinks it is made of gravitinos, a rather out of favour particle, the hypothetical supersymmetric partner of the hypothetical particle, graviton.