Trump orders all climate scientists to bend over and jam their heads under the sand

Well close enough.

Trump has ordered the US Environmental Protection Agency to remove all climate change information from its websites.

My mind boggles at how this is all going in the USA.

What next? NASA told to de-orbit all climate research satellites? Or perhaps they'll just have to recalibrate them to "alternative facts"?

Can't afford a boat trip to the Antarctic? Try this instead!

This is the view today from the bow webcam on the Aurora Australis, the resupply vessel that services Australia's Antarctic bases.

Not your average cruise ship view! Not your average webcam view either…

The ship left Australia on 15 October, and was slated to return on 16 November. The latest sitrep has them here (and it is so worth your time to zoom in and look around the shoreline on this map!):

What I've been reading lately

Just an archival catch-up of recent The Beach House Weekly—my Paper.li auto summaries—of an interesting few weeks in science, space and Australian politics.

From rockets to meteorites, Roxon to Rudd, novas to Nobels, planet hunters to metric hunters.

25 March 2013
18 March 2013
11 March 2013
4 March 2013
25 February 2013
18 February 2013
11 February 2013
4 February 2013
28 January 2013
21 January 2013
14 January 2013
7 January 2013
31 December 2012
24 December 2012
17 December 2012
10 December 2012

Intriguing to look back through actually. Something in there for everyone.

Night-time satellite images are pretty—like light reflecting off oil scum in wetlands is pretty!

I get a bit cranky every time I see one of these night-time from space photos—especially when they are posted by NASA. Everyone is always going "wow awesome pretty".

Yes—pretty like the refraction off the oil scum polluting the wetlands is pretty.

As a space-interested community, shouldn't we should be saying "it's pretty, but you know what is WAY prettier? The unpolluted night sky."

I know which sky I'd prefer to see!   http://stellarium.org/img/screenshots/0.10-bortle.jpg

Listen to our frogs celebrating the rains

Have a listen to the wonderful sounds of the frogs in the pond outside our kitchen. Glad we put this away from the bedrooms!


And they got a lot more into the swing of things shortly after I recorded this. It was during the rain Christmas Eve.


Apart from the three or four of one (loudest) species playing ping pong, you can hear two other quieter species chirping and squeaking in the background. Then around 70% through, another deep sounding species chimes in, and then the whole lot get really wound up...

As you can see from the photo, in winter the pond gets pretty cold! Yet the fish and tadpoles survive...

Cyberbully pot-kettle, Greens launches, telescopes, more. The week that was.

Alan Jones learns what it's like on the receiving end; the ACT Greens campaign powers towards 20 October; the first stage of the Square Kilometre Array is turned on; a Nobel laureate yanks the rug out from under Newspoll; iPad Mini confirmed; and much more.

The week that was - my readings and posts.

Crying over spilt light - a lament about light pollution

A beautiful view of the Milky Way at Wilsons Promontory
Alex Cherney  www.terrastro.com

A reader of my complaints about Canberra's chronic light pollution wrote to me with a poem she wrote about exactly that.

Penelope Cottier points out that about one-fifth of the world's population can no longer detect the Milky Way with the naked eye due to light pollution. (Reported in Cosmos magazine, August/September 2009.)

Light pollution simulation http://stellarium.org/features_in_0.10.0.php

And as she wrote to me, the poem raises the irony that we can find great images of stars on-line, yet we are losing the ability to see them for ourselves due to our reliance on technology.

Crying over spilt light 

Obesity of light blankets black,
clogs the arteries of recognition.
Blindness comes from the stroke
of too easy ignition; the fatty candle
of conjoined cities chokes imagination.
No matter; search the lost skies
by screen's unblinking gaze,
and rediscover what Neanderthals
once mind-wandered quite for free.
Erasure of night by carrion globe,
pecking out eyes of speculation.


- P.S. Cottier
   First published in The Specusphere


You can read more of Penelope's writings on her blog.

Need more galactical timelapses? Sorted.

This is an ad for a whole movie-length version of this sort of gorgeous timelapse stuff. Holy cow - a whole movie of this might just be overload...

The scenes of the Milky Way are quite simply beautiful. And there are two scenes with huge cloud formations that are incredible.

Make sure you switch the resolution to 1080 first. Look for the geostationary satellite in the scene from 25 to 35 seconds - it isn't moving while the rest of the star field is. And what is that in the top left corner at 1:53?



The film is by Tom Lowe, and is available through Timescapes.

Via DVice

Holy cow - there were stegosauruses in Australia?

One of the sad things about Australia has always been the lack of really cool dinosaurs. Yo know - the iconic beasts like T-Rex, Triceratops, Diplodocus, Raptors

But recent days have seen that 'shortfall' being addressed a bit. First there was the report that palaeontologists have found fossils of a nine metre long killer reminiscent of the notorious Tyrannosaurus Rex in the Otway and Stzelecki Ranges.

Stegosaurus footprint

And now there are reports of Stegosaurus footprints fossilised in rocks along the shores of the Dampier Peninsula in West Australia. And they are right where oil and gas miner Woodside wants to build a $30 billion (yes that's with a B) gas plant at James Price Point!

Now there is no doubting - the Stegosaurus is definitely one of the cool dinosaurs!

How big is everything? How small? This nifty scaling demonstration will amaze you.

That Pluto really isn't that big is it?

This seems like a simple little tool. Slide left and check out how small some things are. Except they just keep getting smaller and smaller. And smaller. And...

Slide right, and you get big, bigger, and so on in scales you will have trouble comprehending.

And that's fine, because the sorts of scales that exist in our universe are quite simply beyond our ability to comprehend. So we need to just acknowledge it, marvel at it, and then leave it to the scientists!

Unfortunately, the tool is in Flash, so iThing users will need to find a desktop PC.

Hat tip to my sister Michelle who passed on the link.

Despicable. Only way to describe this desperate ploy from the Heartlands "Institute".

Well the latest turn from the global warming denialist front really does take the prize for the most cretinist, pathetic ploy one could possibly imagine.

This fossil fuel funded PR mouthpiece commissioned a bunch of billboards in Chicago featuring some of society's lowest of the low who apparently believe in global warming - the Unabomber, Charles Manson, and even Osama Bin Laden!

This is a shallow attempt to paint everyone who believes that the world's climate experts are not trying to snowjob us as somehow as bad as these insane madmen.

And perhaps it is a sign that the denialists are getting truly desperate. Australia's emissions trading scheme comes into effect in two months. South Korea has just resolved to implement an emissions trading scheme. And so has China.

This ocean current video from NASA is a great big ball of beautiful art!

This new video from NASA has gone around the world like wildfire - for good reason - it is truly beautiful.

And everywhere it's gone, it is compared to a Van Gogh painting. Looking at these screen grabs, you can see why.

Here's what NASA says about the video:

Ooh - a new toy from NASA: Earth Now app for iPhones

It's a 3D model of climatic conditions around the entire planet.

As NASA describe it:

NASA's Earth Now is an application that visualizes recent global climate data from Earth Science satellites, including surface air temperature, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, and water vapor as well as gravity and sea level variations.

Data sets are visually described using "false color" maps. Color-coded legends are provided to indicate relative strength or weakness of an environmental condition. The resulting 3D model of the Earth may be rotated by a single finger stroke, and may also be zoomed in or out by pinching 2 fingers.

It was developed by the Earth Science Communications and Visualization Technology Applications and Development Teams at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with support from NASA Headquarters.

Available on iTunes. And it's free.

UPDATE 22/03/2012: One of the people I follow on Twitter is Doug Ellison of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Doug is a visualisation producer and has confirmed for me that he was part of the team that designed Earth Now.

Stunning cave full of crystals up to 11m long, but is it at risk?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/
photogalleries/giant-crystals-cave/index.html 

It's a rare time I'd ever bother watching 60 Minutes, let alone rave over an item on it.

But the crystal cave featured this week is simply stunning. Picture crystals up to 11 metres long and a metre or more square across. Picture a cave completely chokko with them, like a gigantic version of those crustal gardens you buy for your children.

That's what was on show. It is in a massive cave that was broken into at the back of a Mexican mine in the Chihuahua area in 2000. And the crystals are all gypsum, bred in a soup of thermally heated water with temperatures above 50 degrees.

Stupid dolphins. Lucky there were a bunch of tourists around...

Who knows what happened here with 30 dolphins just barging straight up onto a beach? Just distracted chasing fish perhaps.

But beached they were, just like that. They couldn't have picked a better beach to do it on though...

Alive...Beautiful...Finite...Hurting...and she needs our protection!

This is a beautifully produced video of our stunning planet. It takes a twist though - it's actually a memoriam for some of the world's leading conservationists who were all murdered for their efforts. For trying to protect the planet for you, for me, and for our children.

It's like Sigorney Weaver's Alien - and it's right in your frog pond!

http://true-wildlife.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/dragonfly.html

I love dragonflies - even better than butterflies. And I loved dragonflies way before they suddenly became cool home decor. Ever since an Animal Systematics assignment for Uni requirement me to catch and classify several, actually.

And it was then that I learnt about their amazing double-hinged jaw and that they spend the first part of their life underwater.

But I never learnt what a vicious hunter a dragonfly larva is! Or that they are jet-propelled. This BBC video is a real eye-opener...




Via Myrmecos - making bugs gorgeous - even the scary ones.

Hope you haven't just eaten. You may have some trouble keeping it down when you see this view...

The highest waterfall on the planet - a full kilometre high - in 360 degree panorama. You will love this - or it will freak you out a bit.

Go to the website, select the high resolution version, have your sound up, and enjoy. It takes a little to get the hang of the controls - that's the bit that will make you woosey and put your meal at risk. But once you have it sorted, you'll be exploring up and down the cliff-face.

Don't forget to zoom in and study the amazing colouring of the rock itself. And if the South American pipe music charm wears off, you can switch to the roar of the waterfall itself.

When you've had your fill, check out the story behind the shoot, the other amazing photos (think: the Pixar movie Up), and then some of the other stunning pano shots on the website.

Via io9.com

Google Streetview goes under the ocean on the Great Barrier Reef

http://dvice.com/archives/2012/02/google-street-v-5.php

How cool is this? The University of Queensland is partnering with Google to take the Streeview technology under water to chart the Great Barrier Reef.

Of course, the Barrier Reef being really kind of huge, means that there'll some 50,000 360 degree panorama shots at 20 sites along the 2300 kilometre length to be taken to make up Google Seaview. That's a lot of diving!

Once finished, it will be available through Google Maps and Earth, just like Streetview. The project starts in September and it will be logged on YouTube as it progresses.

Australia's Cosmos Magazine gives a good explanation of the purpose behind the project.

One year since the Christchurch earthquake - and they haven't stopped since

Thoughts with the people in Christchurch who have lost everything...

Via @CatherineQ