Greenland’s glaciers speed up

Ice floats. That’s fortunate, because if frozen water was denser than liquid, earth would be a very different world. Ice would build up at the bottom of the sea until only a thin surface ocean would be left, perhaps only seasonal at that, affecting climate in dramatic ways. But floating ice combined with warmer temperatures can also cause glaciers to speed up. Moulins form more often and earlier, lubricating the interface between ice and land below and buoying up the ice sheet. That now seems to be happening in Greenland: [Read more…]

The Republican brain … on science


The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality by Chris Mooney
Publisher Wiley; available on Kindle

During the darkest days of the Bush era, science writer Chris Mooney made a big splash in the publishing world with his first book detailing the Republican war on science. This month his newest effort, what could be nicknamed the Republican brain on science, hit the shelves. In it you will find Mooney is a stickler for detail, always important in any book on science, especially one with a bold title. But this is no clinical read, the book is a blast right off the bat, framing the main subject marvelously in the juiciest claims and tastier bits of conservative pseudoscientific lore readers here have come to lovingly know and ridicule. [Read more…]

NASA seeking lower cost ideas for planetary science and exploration

The Martian countryside in the Utopian Plain as seen by Viking. New analysis of the Viking data suggests microbes may be living just beneath the surface. Image 1976 NASA/JPL

Because of recently announced budget targets and a potentially exciting new look at old data, NASA is looking for low cost ways to continue exploring Mars and other parts of the solar system. It’s a shame for our nation and species they have to think this way, but that’s the real world in all its raw glory: [Read more…]