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POPSCould Jupiter wreck the solar system?
"So what's the likelihood Mercury could crash into the Earth? If it did, the asteroid that most likely wiped out the dinosaurs will seem like a drop in the ocean compared with a planet 4880 km in diameter slamming into us. There will be very little left after this wrecking ball impact. But here's the kicker: There is only a 1% chance that these gravitational instabilities of the inner Solar System are likely to cause any kind of chaos before the Sun turns into a Red Giant and swallows Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars in 7 billion years time. So, no need to look out for death-wish Mercury quite yet… there's a very low chance that any of this will happen. But some good news for Mars; the researchers have also found that if the chaos does ensue, the Red Planet may be flung out of the Solar System, possibly escaping our expanding Sun. So, let's get those Mars colonies started! Well, within the next few billions of years anyhow…" Good stuff for the next science-fiction movie :-)
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POPSNew clues on "The Great Dying" The lessons of the Permian-Triassic massacre are "directly applicable to the present," said John Isbell, a geoscientist at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. He said the world today is in danger of exceeding a CO2 "threshold" that could set off an environmental upheaval as great as the one 251 million years ago.
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POPSMass extinctions? Blame it on the ocean In the course of hundreds of millions of years the world's oceans have expanded and contracted in response to the shifting of the Earth's tectonic plates and to changes in climate. There were periods of the planet's history when vast areas of the continents were flooded by shallow seas such as the shark and mosasaur infested seaway that neatly split North America during the age of the dinosaurs. As those epicontinental seas drained, animals like mosasaurs and giant sharks went extinct, and conditions on the marine shelves where life exhibited its greatest diversity in the form of things like clams and snails changed as well.
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POPSThe Creation Museum in Kentucky A Guardian reporter gets a tour of Kentucky's Creation Museum, currently under construction. His comments are mildly amusing. See also http://AnswersInGenesis.com.
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POPSDinosaur evolutionary tree unveiled It remained at that low level throughout the following Cretaceous period, a time of plenty in Earth's terrestrial history in which flowering plants, lizards, snakes, birds and mammals all became much more numerous. Dinosaurs apparently did not take advantage of the abundant food supply that emerged during the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution. "Our supertree allows us to look for unusual patterns across the whole of dinosaurs for the first time," says Lloyd. "It is the most comprehensive picture ever produced of how dinosaurs evolved."
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POPSStupid Christians Navigate to the website and watch the video if you've got the stomach for it. I found it to be revolting. If this isn't child abuse, I don't know what is. How could rational people be so ignorant? Religion is how!
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POPSDon't Know Much Biology This attitude has enormous political—and educational—implications. What happens if scientific truth conflicts with a politician's "spiritual truth"? This is not a theoretical problem, but a real one, as we see in debates about stem-cell research, abortion, genetic engineering, and global warming. Ignorance about evolution may be widespread, but it's not nearly as dangerous as dogmatic certainty about the real world based on faith alone.
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POPSEarth could seed Titan with life Dr Gladman's team calculated that up to 20 terrestrial rocks from a large impact on Earth would reach Titan. These would strike Titan's upper atmosphere at 10-15 km/s. At this velocity, the cruise down to the surface might be comfortable enough for microbes to survive the journey.But the news was more bleak for Europa. By contrast with the handful that hit Titan, about 100 terrestrial meteoroids hit the icy moon. "It's frustrating if you're a microbe that's been wandering the Universe for a million years to then die striking the surface of Europa," Dr Gladman mused.Asked after his presentation by one scientist whether he thought microbes would be able to survive Titan's freezing temperatures, Dr Gladman answered: "That's for you people to decide, I'm just the pizza delivery boy."
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POPSWhat Dinosaurs Really Looked Like - sort of... Most dinosaurs are known only from their bones, which are seldom found joined together as they would be in real life. Growing up I often lamented the problem of knowing how dinosaurs looked. After all, we find their bones fossilized and fragmented. Although it is easy enough to accurately reconstruct the individual bones, but since they are often found in jumbled dumps, it is virtually impossible to accurately reconstruct how they all fit together without a lot of subjective guesswork. A lot of times they can't even tell which bones come from which dinosaurs. Now, I know that lately the National Geographic Society has been pulling Discovery-Chanel-league stunts of leaping ahead of the facts to promote splashy and unverified history, but this is still a major leap forward. We may not know what color they were, but we are one step closer!
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POPST.Rex Soft Tissue Found. "Before this discovery, most scientists believed that soft tissue could not survive for 70 million years" Same source as Skwirlinator's clip, but a different focus: http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/F26319CD-6FB6-4343-9EFC-905630EFED78/
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