In the News

The image of Jupiter's north pole has been released by NASA - www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/pia21032/jupiter-down-under ... and it seems to show hot spots at the poles ....

At http://phys.org/print358186778.html ... sun spot numbers have come up again recently with scientists realising activity on the Sun may affect earth's climate and should be

At http://phys.org/print391425744.html ... the Great Barrrier Reef has grown in size due to findings by the Australian Navy. They have discovered a massive extension of

At www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-37194266 ... evidence of an assault on a Scottish hill fort by the Romans has been found - at Burnswark. The fort, or ditched

It seems like Mesolithic foragers were consuming domesticated cereals  such as wheat and barley long before the early farming package reached the Balkans or eastern

Gary Gilligan forwarded the link www.newscientist.com/article/2101518-giant-ancient-supervolcanoes-threw-... ... and www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3564649/the-oldest-crystal-Earth... ... two different stories, one about volcanoes and the other concerning impact phenomena but quite similar

At www.spaceweather.com August 29th 2016 ... the 'Earth to Sky Calculus' experiment (using helium filled balloons) has been monitoring cosmic rays in the stratosphere above

Fossil whales in the Ica Desert of Peru - in sedimentary rocks dating 9 million years ago .... .... go to http://phys.org/print391254364.html ....       

Mars and water channels as highlighted in a post this week prompted William Thompson to point out that Donald Patten predicted something like this decades

A fantastic picture by Yuri Beletsky of the conjunction of Venus with Jupiter this holiday weekend (28th to 30th August 2016). Enjoy. Clark Whelton posted

OJ Haugen suggested reading Lewis Mumford's 'Technics and Human Development: the myth of the machine' written way back in 1966. It is still relevant today

The BBC pundits were full of it today (Thursday the 25th) and the science correspondent had on his 'very serious' face mask as he read

Stitching a hole in their shirts may have been a problem ovecome by the Denisova contemporaries of Neanderthals. These people lived in central Asia before

At www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160809095145.htm .... the discovery of a circular earthwork enclosure in southern Spain, dating to the Bell Beaker period (2600-2200BC) is interesting as we don't

Yes, plate tectonics on Mars - you heard that right (go to http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-scientist-discovers-plate-237303.... ... (alternatively, www.space.com/17087-mars-surface-marsquakes-plate-tectonics.html) ...  An Yin, a UCLA scientist, claims rudimentary Plate

Speaking of rings (yesterdays post) the same subject is uncannily the feature of an article today at Universe Today (see http://phys.org/print391077112.html ). It is an

At http://phys.org/print391077030.html ... the signature of a supernovae has been found in deep ocean cores from the Pacific Ocean. German scientists have had their findings

Surprisingly, SIS has not published a great deal on stone circles as far as major articles are concerned. It tends to have been small pieces

Somebody else that does not buy the idea Easter Islanders soiled their own nest as proposed by environmentalists a few years ago. It's getting pretty

Jovan Kesic forwarded the link www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/fifth-force-permeate-universe0818... ... it seems theoretical physicists are saying they have found a fifth force. The comments are not exactly confident