Brown Algae: Clues To How Life Hasn't Evolved in 200 Million Years

Brown algae fossils have been dated to between 150 million and 200 million B.C. No evolution since then.

Science Daily: Brown Algal Genome Opens New Door to Understanding Multicellularity and Photosynthesis.

Brown algae were assumed to have arisen from the fusion of photosynthetically inactive colourless cells with a unicellular red alga. However, as discovered in a previous research project on single-celled diatoms, AWI researchers showed that brown algae also arose from the fusion of a green alga with a red alga and thus refuted a widespread theory among experts.

Quantifying Hydrocarbons

In 1998, John Dreher, staff astronomer at the SETI Institute, estimated that there are 1.192 octadecillion (1.192^57) hydrogen atoms in our solar system. Good luck running out.

Mainstream Scientists Whine About Peer Review Process

"The tradition of 'peer review' of articles published in professional journals has degenerated into almost total censorship." -- Halton C. Arp, astronomer, 2000

"Of course that market today needs the Internet to loosen the shackles of scientific censorship and control through anonymous peer review." -- Wallace Thornhill, physicst, October 2006

The Leftists are whining because peer-review censorship is unable to suppress every thought.

New Scientist: We need to fix peer review now.

Yesterday the UK parliament heard that studies at the University of Texas have shown that homeopathic remedies kill cancer cells while leaving normal cells intact.

The revelation came from David Tredinnick, who continues to use his position as a public representative to argue for more NHS spending on complementary and alternative medicines.

To my mind, the fact that this study was mentioned in parliament, and the statement that homeopathy can kill cancer cells is now a matter of public record, is a spectacular failure. But it is not a failure of politics or politicians: it is a failure of science.

Islands Prove Earth Expansion and Declining Sea Levels

New Scientist: Shape-shifting islands defy sea-level rise.

For years, people have warned that the smallest nations on the planet - island states that barely rise out of the ocean - face being wiped off the map by rising sea levels. Now the first analysis of the data broadly suggests the opposite: most have remained stable over the last 60 years, while some have even grown.

Guy, R., The Mysterious Receding Seas and Isostatic Rebound, Ewire, Apr 12 2008

How Stars Are Born

Steve Smith: How Are Stars Born?

It is commonly assumed that stars are gravitationally compressed hot gas.

“Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?”
--- Nathaniel Hawthorne

What are the stars? The question might seem self-evident, since we are taught from an early age that they are intensely bright, burning balls of hydrogen gas. A star's great size, therefore its great gravitational attraction, is what holds the planets in their orbits. Its core of fusion fire sends energy on a million-year journey before the radiation is emitted from its surface, so dense is its interior.

How are stars formed and by what agency are they ignited? The answer, according to accepted astrophysical theories, is gravity. At some time, billions of years before any particular shining star was born, it started out as a wispy cloud a thousand times less dense than the most rarified mist. One of the questions that astronomers have been asking for many years about the process is what caused such insubstantial clouds to condense?

Star formation is initiated according to two main theories. First, the gaseous cloud might cool down from whatever high temperature it once possessed (although what event heated the cloud is not elucidated), thermal energy falls off, allowing gravity to assert itself on the individual particles and the cloud falls in on itself.

Second, the explosion of a supernova (or intense bursts of radiation from a nearby star) might generate shock waves that pass through the proto-stellar cloud, forcing the particles to collide and clump together. Gravity then takes up its familiar position, eventually pulling the cloud into a structure dense enough for fusion to take place.

According to a recent press release from the Marshall Space Flight Center and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, there is reason to believe that radiation from neighboring massive stars could be the most common method for pushing the nebular clouds into collapse.

The Cepheus B nebula is approximately 2400 light-years from Earth, and is composed primarily of hydrogen gas. As astronomers reckon age, there is supposed to be a large population of young stars bordering a region where a massive star's radiation impinges on the cloud. Infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope appears to show "protoplanetary disks" around many of the stars, indicating (according to theory) that they are young, since older stars would have already absorbed the dust and gas. Older stars would not exhibit the specific infrared frequencies that are supposed to indicate disks.

In this paper we will not take up stellar ages and the conventional viewpoints that determine them. Suffice to say here is that stellar diagrams that attempt to establish age according to color and temperature are missing important points. If other electrical factors are added, temperature and brightness become a matter of externally applied electric currents and not internally generated fusion energy. The differences in the two concepts are not trivial, especially when they are used to explain other observations. It is an entirely new paradigm.

Regardless of whether it is shock waves or "radiation pressure," the energy that drives the effects in conventional theories is kinetic and mechanically induced. In fact, lowering the thermal activity is how the first theory suggests stellar formation begins. The second theory requires a star 20 times more massive than the Sun to irradiate the cloud from close up for millions of years.

In the Electric Universe, gravity, density, compression, and mechanical phenomena give way to the effects of plasma. The stars are not hot, dense balls of hydrogen being crushed into helium and electromagnetic radiation by gravitational pressure. Rather, they are isodense balls of plasma—a form of slow-motion lightning—with all the fusion taking place on the surface. Since they are the same density throughout, with no superdense fusion cores, their mass estimates are most likely being seriously overstated by papers written from the consensus.

The Electric Universe definition of "plasma" is not the conventional one of "ionized gas." It is that confused apprehension of plasma that falls back on ideas about gas behavior and thermal ionization.

"Plasma," as theorist Mel Acheson wrote, "is an emergent (i.e., higher-level or statistical-level) orderliness of complex electrical forces: such properties as filamentation, long-range attraction and short-range repulsion, braiding, characteristic velocities, formation and decay of plasmoids, and identity of properties at different scales."

Electric stars aren't begotten in nebular clouds, their progenitor is charge separation. Everything we see in the Universe—99.99% to be more precise—is ionized to some degree, therefore it is plasma. Positive ions and negative electrons move within plasma in ways not governed by gravity, although gravity might cause some heavy positive ions to create a charge surplus in one volume of space over another. When that happens, a weak electric field develops.

An electric field, no matter how weak, will initiate an electric current that generates a magnetic field. Those fields interact with the magnetic fields generated by other currents. In images from space, as well as in high-speed photographs of plasma activity in the laboratory, those currents are seen to form twisted pairs of filaments, called Birkeland currents. Birkeland currents follow magnetic field lines and draw charged material from their surroundings with a force 39 orders of magnitude greater than gravity. Magnetic fields pinch the ultra-fine dust and plasma into heated blobs of matter called plasmoids.

As the effect, called a "z-pinch," increases, the electric field intensifies, further increasing the z-pinch. The compressed blobs form spinning electrical discharges. At first they glow as dim red dwarfs, then blazing yellow stars, and finally they might become brilliant ultraviolet arcs, driven by the electric currents that generated them.

Asteroid Strike Froze Atlantis

"For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia." -- Plato, philosopher, Timaeus, 360 B.C.

New Scientist: Asteroid strike may have frozen Antarctica.

According to ABC News, Glikson says the asteroid that created the dome was probably 5 to 10km wide.

Of course the problem with claiming that this happened 35 million years ago is that a temperate forest existed in Atlantis only 3 million years ago.

Neanderthals Lived In Britain 100,000 Years Ago

Science Daily: Neanderthals Walked Into Frozen Britain 40,000 Years Earlier Than First Thought, Evidence Shows.

ScienceDaily (June 1, 2010) — A University of Southampton archaeologist and Oxford Archaeology have found evidence that Neanderthals were living in Britain at the start of the last ice age, 40,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Commissioned by Oxford Archaeology, the University of Southampton's Dr Francis Wenban-Smith discovered two ancient flint hand tools at the M25 / A2 road junction at Dartford in Kent, during an excavation funded by the Highways Agency. The flints are waste flakes from the manufacture of unknown tools, which would almost certainly have mostly been used for cutting up dead animals. Tests on sediment burying the flints show they date from around 100,000 years ago, proving Neanderthals were living in Britain at this time. The country was previously assumed to have been uninhabited during this period.

"I couldn't believe my eyes when I received the test results.