The Sun. The Sun is now in the quietest phase of its 11-year activity cycle, the solar minimum - in fact, it has been unusually quiet this year - with over 200 days so far with no observed sunspots. The solar wind has also dropped to its lowest levels in 50 years. Scientists are unsure of the significance of this unusual calm, but are continually monitoring our closest star with an array of telescopes and satellites. Seen below are some recent images of the Sun in more active times. (21 photos total) A sweeping prominence, a huge cloud of relatively cool dense plasma is seen suspended in the Sun's hot, thin corona. At times, promineces can erupt, escaping the Sun's atmosphere. Emission in this spectral line shows the upper chromosphere at a temperature of about 60,000 degrees K (over 100,000 degrees F). Sciencefriday.com - making science user-friendly.
"There Was No Big Bang!" Say Several Leading Cosmologists (A Galaxy Classic) "What banged? " Sean Carroll, CalTech -Moore Center for Theoretical Cosmology & Physics Several of the worlds leading astrophysicists believe there was no Big Bang that brought the universe and time into existence. Before the Big Bang, the standard theory assumes, there was no space, just nothing.
Einstein merged the universe into a single entity: not space, not time, but spacetime. Proponents of branes propose that we are trapped in a thin membrane of space-time embedded in a much larger cosmos from which neither light nor energy -except gravity- can escape or enter and that that "dark matter" is just the rest of the universe that we can't see because light can't escape from or enter into our membrane from the great bulk of the universe.
And our membrane may be only one of many, all of which may warp, connect, and collide with one another in as many as 10 dimensions -a new frontier physicists call the "brane world. " Are branes the key to understanding the origin of our universe? Lehners.pdf (application/pdf Object) Index - Welcome. Climateprediction.net | The world's largest climate forecasting experiment for the 21st century. The Science Network. Beyond Belief: Candles in the Dark. BEYOND BELIEF DVDs are now available! Purchase them here. Beyond Belief: Candles in the Dark DVDs will be available soon. Beyond Belief: Candles in the Dark is the third in an annual series of conversations: an ongoing project to foster and promote the use of reason in formulating social policy. This year, we asked participants to propose a Candle -- a potential solution to a problem that they have identified in their area of expertise or informed passion.
In The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan wrote: Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. At The Science Network, we embrace scientific meliorism (last year's meeting, after all, was entitled Enlightenment 2.0). This U.S. election year, when science and reason in the nation's deliberations have been repeatedly challenged as irrelevant or elitist, and science seems to be estranged from society, Sagan's words sound prophetic -- an alarm call.
Download the program here Friday, October 3, 2008 Saturday, October 4, 2008. Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0. BEYOND BELIEF DVDs are now available! Purchase them here. The aim of Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0 is to invite participants to undertake together an ongoing reconnaissance of Enlightenment ideas in the light of advances in primarily cognitive neurosciences, evolutionary biology, physics etc. though not by any means scanting history, philosophy, law.
The word reconnaissance is used advisedly. Although reconnaissance now usually means a military information-gathering exercise, the preference is for original root - recognoscere - which roughly suggests 'to get to know again'. The hope is to explore our current sense of Reason, Truth, Belief, Human Nature, Progress, Virtue and the Good Life in this light. This is the sequel to Beyond Belief 1 - and the second in what we now are planning to be an annual series of conversations on this topic. We really do think of this as an ongoing project to foster and promote the use of reason in formulating social policy.