The Goldilocks zone and fairy tale earth

The primeval earth and smoggy sky with an enormous crescent moon at twilight as they may have appeared a mere billion years after formation.

Read an old astronomy text and you might see mention of a Goldilocks zone, the distance between the earth and sun, where the blessed earth is not too hot and not too cold. More recent work has shown this is a modern day fairy tale, the early earth was actually too far away. By rights the oceans should have been solid ice, the earth a lifeless, barren snowball. But it wasn’t. A new study confirms one big reason why the earth stayed so unseasonably warm early on: [Read more…]

Let’s all go to the lobby: Santorum sweeps Alabama & Mississippi!

Big upset and the GOP clown car is back on nationwide tour: Rick Santorum soundly beat Mitt Romney in the Alabama and Mississippi GOP primaries, worse, Romney may come in third in both states hitting the presumed front-runner where it hurts. He’s still the odds on favorite and this is why, the aproximate delegate totals before tonight via Daily Kos: [Read more…]

The science of anti-science

On almost every post where conservative denial of science rears its unwelcome head, a fascinating question breaks out in comments: do they really believe it or are they just being cynical assholes? The traditional response is “I can’t read people’s minds …but”. Now, thanks to the rapidly growing field of neurophysiology, we’re starting to get insight into the cerebral activities that rise and fall when someone is confronted by strong counter arguments to their beliefs. Defacto mind reading?  It’s a complicated subject, way out of my league as a writer. But luckily, I happen to have in my hot little hands a review copy for a new book due out in April by noted science writer Chris Mooney called The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Don’t Believe in Science. [Read more…]

Limbaugh may be in trouble and you can help make it worse

Rush Limbaugh may be in some legal and commercial trouble for calling a college student a slut and hooker, simply because she wanted her insurance company to cover birth control and HRT prescriptions, and you can help … pile on the shameless gas bag hitting him where it hurts the most. The advertisers that pay his salary.

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This week in science: Make Pluto a stamp

      
Sign the petition for Pluto’s encounter with New Horizons to be honored with a new stamp

From the scientific vantage of medicine to the politics of abortion, low cost accessible contraception makes sense all the way around. Healthier women with more money to spend, fewer abortions and unwed mothers. But conservatives and a tiny handful of democratic enablers, who can’t seem to read polls or just don’t give a goddamn, continue to dream of the Republic of Gilead:

Any women who votes for these bozos is probably too far gone. For men, the last time birth control was illegal, there was no such thing as genetic testing and court mandated child support. Then again it wouldn’t take a theocracy long to strip those laws and ban genetic testing. After all, it’s the always women’s fault, and babies are always a blessing … just ask any Handmaid.

Most of my male conservative buddies pretend not to care about the issue while whining that we’re not going along and playing solely on their rhetorical terms. But I got a call from another reliable GOP voter this week — after Rush’s tirade — and herfirst three words were, “You were right.”

  • It’s been a good week for giant insects, extinct monster fleas with a hankering for Jurassic dino blood and extant “tree lobsters,” gentle six-legged giants so striking in appearance that they might make interesting pets …for the right kind of animal enthusiast anyway.
  • Mixing chemistry with climate change has unexpected consequences: An ongoing reaction with dissolved GHGs and seawater has made the ocean more acidic than anytime over the last 300 million years. Another, even more obscure consequence of polar warming might kick off a toxic reaction producing elemental mercury.
  • The asteroid reported to be on course for a possible 2040 rendezvous is no dino killer and highly unlikely to hit earth. If it beats the long odds, depending on the closing velocity, strike angle, and the composition of impactor and target, simulations predict it would be similar to a standard hydrogen bomb in blast, without the deadly gamma ray flash, radioactive fallout, or blinding white fireball. It could annihilate entire city blocks, kick off house or forest fires in the vicinity, but the damage would be mostly localized.
  • Pluto is the most exciting first-time encounter in the near future. But New Horizons doesn’t need to settle for one stamp, there are dozens of Kuiper Belt Objects it could also reach after it sails by distant Pluto and Charon. Beyond even the last KBO is the mysterious Oort Cloud, reaching so deep into interstellar space that newly inferred rogue planets may float silently by. Could life exist on such a wandering world untethered to a star?