Archive by date | January 2012

Little Ice Age was caused by volcanism

Little Ice Age was caused by volcanism

Some of the iconic winter landscapes by Pieter Breughel the Elder rank not only as fine examples of 16th century Dutch art. Paintings such as Breughel’s Hunters in the Snow (1565) also serve as vivid evidence for the so-called Little Ice Age, a period of cold climate conditions and glacier advances in Europe and elsewhere that lasted from the late Middle Ages until the 19th century.  Read more

Engine trouble scuttles plans for Arctic research expedition

Engine trouble scuttles plans for Arctic research expedition

Posted on behalf of Hannah Hoag Canada’s Arctic research vessel the CCGS Amundsen has been put out of action while it awaits engine repairs, forcing researchers to cancel the ship’s research program for 2012. A routine inspection in December 2011 revealed cracks on four of the ships six engines. “She can’t go into the Arctic this summer,” says Martin Fortier, executive director of ArcticNet, a research network based at Laval University in Quebec City, Quebec, that provides funding and logistics for Arctic research in Canada. “But if it had to happen, this was a good year for it.” Fortier says  … Read more

F1000 launches fast, open science publishing for biology and medicine

The Faculty of 1000 (F1000), in London, has announced an experiment in online science publishing, aimed at sharing research results widely and rapidly, and using open peer review to check postings afterwards.  Read more

Kepler uncovers planetary menagerie

Kepler has uncovered 26 new planets (green)

Today NASA’s Kepler mission announced the discovery of 26 new planets (above, green). The new worlds, comparable to the giant planets of our solar system (blue), nearly double the number of planets previously discovered by the probe (red), but it’s probably only a small taste of what’s to come. Kepler looks at 150,000 distant stars and searches for tiny changes in brightness as a planet passes by. So far, the probe has turned up 2,300 planet candidates. Confirming a planet is far more difficult, but Kepler has managed to verify the new worlds announced today by measuring slight changes in  … Read more

US physicists call for underground neutrino facility

US physicists call for underground neutrino facility

When the US National Science Board nixed US plans for an underground lab in 2010, multiple potential experiments were left homeless and the US physics community in a kerfuffle. Now forty leading theoretical physicists, including three Nobel Prize winners, have written to the US Department of Energy (DOE) urging it build an underground facility to study subatomic neutrinos that would compensate to some degree for the lab’s absence.  Read more