Recent global warming isn’t a result of solar radiation, scientists said, disputing a theory advanced by some researchers as an alternative to the United Nations’ view that temperatures are rising as a result of human activities. The scientists examined historical records of solar activity over the past century, studying measures such as the number of sunspots and the amount of light emitted. They found that the total radiation from the sun peaked in 1985, according to Mike Lockwood, co-author of the paper published today in the U.K. journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A. ‘The sun did a U-turn around 1985, but the temperatures kept on rising,” Lockwood, a solar physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Chilton, central England, said late yesterday in a telephone interview. “Everything on the sun that could have affected climate has been going in the wrong direction to cause warming, and we’ve seen continued warming.” The findings contradict scientists who posit that the sun is the main cause of recent warming, rather than human emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. The discovery also goes against the central arguments of “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” a documentary aired earlier this […]
The sound of unbridled joy seldom breaks the quiet of the British Museum’s great Arched Room, which holds its collection of 130,000 Assyrian cuneiform tablets, dating back 5,000 years. A fragment of cuneiform – Tiny tablet provides proof for Old Testament This fragment is a receipt for payment made by a figure in the Old Testament But Michael Jursa, a visiting professor from Vienna, let out such a cry last Thursday. He had made what has been called the most important find in Biblical archaeology for 100 years, a discovery that supports the view that the historical books of the Old Testament are based on fact. Searching for Babylonian financial accounts among the tablets, Prof Jursa suddenly came across a name he half remembered – Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, described there in a hand 2,500 years old, as ‘the chief eunuch’ of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon. Prof Jursa, an Assyriologist, checked the Old Testament and there in chapter 39 of the Book of Jeremiah, he found, spelled differently, the same name – Nebo-Sarsekim. Nebo-Sarsekim, according to Jeremiah, was Nebuchadnezzar II’s ‘chief officer’ and was with him at the siege of Jerusalem in 587 BC, when the […]
· A rare baby woolly mammoth has been found frozen in the ice of northern Siberia, a vast region in Russia. Although the 6-month-old female mammoth died thousands of years ago, her body is remarkably well-preserved. The animal’s eyes and trunk are intact, and the body still has some fur. The young mammoth, named Lyuba after the wife of the reindeer herder who found her in May, is about the size of a large dog. She weighs 110 pounds. ‘To find a juvenile mammoth in any condition is extremely rare,’ said Larry Agenbroad, director of the Mammoth Site in South Dakota. To find one like this, with its organs preserved and protected from modern germs, is unheard of, said Alexei Tikhonov of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Tikhonov said the animal could have been lying frozen for up to 40,000 years. The discovery could help scientists map the genetic makeup of a species that has been extinct for thousands of years. Mammoths, members of the elephant family, first appeared about 5 million years ago. What caused their disappearance is unclear; climate change, disease and overhunting by humans are possible reasons.
LONDON — Astronomers said on Wednesday they had discovered the best evidence yet of water outside our own solar system — in the atmosphere of a giant planet 60 light years from Earth. Writing in the scientific journal Nature, researchers said the planet itself, HD 189733b, was unlikely to harbor life but evidence supported the search for life in other solar systems. ‘We’re thrilled to have identified clear signs of water on a planet that is trillions of miles away,’ Giovanna Tinetti, a European Space Agency fellow at the Institute d’Astrophysique de Paris in France who led the study, was quoted as saying in an accompanying news release. A light year is the distance a beam of light travels in one year at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 km per second), or close to 6 trillion miles. The Earth’s moon is only 1.3 light seconds from our planet. ‘Although HD 189733b is far from being habitable, and actually provides a rather hostile environment, our discovery shows that water might be more common out there than previously thought, and our method can be used in the future to study more ‘life-friendly’ environments,’ Tinetti said. Investigations […]
Norway has more millionaires, measured in US dollars, than any other country in the world in terms of its size. No other country has more dollar-millionaires per capita than Norway, Roger Gullqvist of Paris-based consulting firm CapGemini told newspaper Finansavisen. A new study compiled by CapGemini and Merrill Lynch showed that one out of every 86 Norwegians has more than USD 1 million (about NOK 5.8 million at current exchange rates) in net worth even when the net value of their primary residences is excluded. ‘When viewed in relation to the size of the population (around 4.6 million in Norway), there’s no other country that matches that level,’ Gullqvist said. Norway also has the largest number of dollar-millionaires of all the Nordic countries, which includes the three Scandinavian countries of Norway, Denmark and Sweden plus Finland and Iceland. The report counted a total of 54,810 dollar-millionaires in Norway, nearly 6,500 more than in Sweden even though Sweden’s total population is nearly double that of Norway’s. The number of dollar-millionaires in Norway rose 9.7 percent last year. That’s also a faster rate of growth than the world average of 8.3 percent and the European average […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
