Getting a handle on how cold it has been this March means looking back down through the Central England Temperature record, the oldest in the world but still only a couple of hundred years in extent. See http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/cet-march-2013/ ... lovely name for a blog and it's a cracker too. It seems March was not particularly unusual in the grand scheme of things as 1962, from a UK perspective, was just as bad - and the cold and the snow lay on the ground much longer. As for central England a couple of years in the 1880s were as cold and colder.
Discovering Dark Matter
We had the Higgs bosun discovery and now it looks like we might have the vaunted dark matter nailed down - see http://phys.org/print284206733.html The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer has picked up something peculiar - which might be dark matter. It could be picking up something quite different it is admitted, such as a pulsar. As we are thought to live in a sea of dark matter the hard money is on the discovery and this is how it has been presented to mainstream media. If they can pin down dark matter astro-physicists will put some flesh to their theory, but watch this space.
Babylon
A note for all revisionists, from Emmet to Eric and anyone else researching chronology, and the role of Babylon - just 2 per cent of the city has been excavated. Is that enough for deep revisionists to claim there is no evidence of a Persian presence? Two per cent is a very small section of the city and that is probably the palace of Nebuchadnezzar and not a lot else - go to www.cnn.com/2013/04/04/world/meast/iraq-babylon-tourism/index.html
Mercury and Venus
Was Mercury once a moon of Venus. It seems Tom Van Flandern posed this question quite some years ago - but is there anything to it? See what you think at http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/04/04/tom-van-flandern-was-the-plane...
Engineering Fallacy
How a new hockey stick was created to coincide with the next IPCC Report - and still on cue to be an icon. Another piece of doomsaying full of environmentalist gibberish. It all started with a PhD on paleoclimate but for some reason grew legs - and a very sharp uptick in temperature that led to lots of swooning by the CAGW types and general over excitement..
Salt glaciers
In the Zagros mountains of Iran salt domes, a quite common geological oddity, break the surface - see http://geology.com/stories/13/salt-glacier/
A greenish Arctic fantastical ... and mental contortions way down in the south
At http://phys.org/print283951814.html ... computer simulation models are predicting trees are going to start growing on what is now tundra in the next 40 years. The article has two maps - one as it is now, tundra with some shrubs, and another one with lots of trees in place of the graminoids.
Riposte
Laurence Dixon responded to the In the News piece on barycentric orbits on March 29th by making the point that under Newton's laws of gravity two bodies will orbit around their common centre of mass = their barycentre. In that way the blog site in that piece was somewhat misleading as orthodox astronomers use this fact all the time when interpreting binary stars. In the solar system the barycentre of any one planet with the Sun is withing the Sun's radius, but not at its centre. Similarly, the Earth - Moon barycentre is within the radius of the Earth.
Jet Streams and solar Lunar Cycles
Three cracking videos from Piers Corbyn discussing the role of the Sun, and the Moon, on the climate, and how they cause changes in the jet stream - which is what is happening nowadays.
See www.youtube.com/watch?v=O76GO02LtlU
Notes on Sekhmet
Gary Gilligan sent in some further information about the goddess Sekhmet - who embodied the 'flaming' sky and 'flame of heaven' (see also his web site and the various images of Sekhmet at www.gks.uk.com).