In the News

    At http://phys.org/print373795118.html ... some really nice images of the surface of the Moon taken by the Chinese rover Yutu and the Chang'e lander. At

An article in Current Biology 26 page 1-7 by Posth et al is interesting - see also http://phys.org/print373788881.html ... which provides a link via dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.01.1037

At www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/artifacts-and-the-b... ... excavations at Tell es-Safi, the site of Biblical Gath, one of the famed 5 cites of the Philistines, have reached Iron Age

At www.jewishpress.com/news/hiker-discovers-3500-year-old-egyptian-seal-in-... ....     Late Bronze age Egyptian seals are still to be picked up from the ground it would seem - a bit like

Jets, outbursts of super heated gas moving at close to the speed of light, hae long been associated with the cores of giant elliptical galaxies.

A special issue of the Journal of Human Evolution (Jan 2016) presents the results of a long term excavation of a site in Lower Saxony

At http://www.ann-geophys.net/34/1/2016/ ... abstract of a paper by multiple authors from multiple space centres across Europe and the US. These are people looking at the

Robert Farrar sent in links to two stories from Astronomy Now - see http://astronomynow.com/2016/01/30/phase-of-the-moon-affects-amount-of-r... ... and http://astronomynow.com/2016/01/30/understanding-the-magnetic-sun/ ... 1) phases of the moon affect the

At  www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/decades-long-quest-still-earth-man... ... great article - very interesting. The ingenuity of humans (or some of them). Geologists are trying to actually drill down into the

Is this significant? A comment at http://joannenova.com.au/2016/01/great-barrier-reef-an-icon-that-half-of... ... comment at 7.28am on January 30th. He said the Great Barrier Reef is 500,000 years old, we

Gary Gilligan sent in this one - at www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1302234.Jupiter-swallowed-planet... and www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727733-600-jupiter-swallowed-a-super-ea... ... where we are told Jupiter swallowed up a planet ten times the size

At http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/01/29/study-suggests-a-sea-level-climate... ... this will probably prove to be an important paper as published in the journal Science (Jan 2016) as it introduces an element

At http://blog.drwile.com/?p=10925 ... is about feathered dragons, as the consensus view is that birds are descended from the dinosaurs. Alan Feduccia is an evolutionary biologist

At http://phys.org/print373045866.html ... Guisseppe Piazzi discovered Ceres way back in January of 1801 - 200 years prior to the Dawn Mission. Piazzi was the director

This post at https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/renu-malhotra-nonlinear-reson... ... see also the whole paper at http://arxiv.org/pdf/chao-dyn/9406004.pdf ... and written by NASA scientist Renu Malhotra. It is basically an introduction

You've heard of Out of Africa - it seems there is also an Out of Taiwan theory that is proving to be difficult to uphold

This is a big issue it would seem. There are 24 articles on megafauna in January's Ecography journal and the journal of PNAS - see

William Thompson forwarded this link - http://eos.org/research-spotlights/scientists-detect-wisps-of-wind-in-space ... on a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics (January 2016). It is about the

Must Farm, the archaeological site that uncovered a Bronze Age village and boats in Cambridgeshire is also a working quarry (for the nearby brick works).

Robert Farrar sent in this link to Dr Jay L Wile at http://blog.drwile.com/?p=14280 ... which discusses the 'universal genetic code' and says it is far