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Corals and plankton are at risk of being destroyed by the rising acidity of the world's oceans as the waters absorb carbon dioxide from the air, British scientists have warned. The only solution, they say, is drastic cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, far beyond those called for by the Kyoto treaty.

We know, we know.  They've warned us before.  As the story goes, pH levels (which measure how alkaline or acidic a substance is) are more acidic than they've been for the last 300 million or 440,000 years--depending on who you ask--because of the absorption of CO2 into the ocean.  If the burning of fossils fuels increases proportionally with the projected population growth of the next hundred years, then pH will drop from its current 8.2 to a 7.7 (pH lower than a 7 is considered acid), which will kill off corals and phytoplankton that may not be able to cope.  Since phytoplankton are the foundation of the ocean food chain, and since they are responsible for removing mass amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, the death of phytoplankton means the death of other sea life and a sudden spike in global warming.  And of course that means the glaciers will melt and New York will be flooded and so on and so on.

Yep; cut emission levels now, or we're doomed.

Didn't they read the NASA report I linked to on Tuesday?  About how phytoplankton numbers increase and decrease dramatically during El Niño and La Niña cycles?  By measuring the light reflected from the oceans via satellite, scientists were able to measure the amounts of phytoplankton in the Pacific Ocean.

During the second week of May, 1998, the ocean temperatures plummeted 10 degrees in one day, and the ocean productivity exploded with large phytoplankton blooms. After this time, many species recovered very rapidly and the land species started to reproduce immediately.

“During this period, SeaWiFS imagery showed extremely dark greenness along the equator, with chlorophyll concentrations increasing by more than 500 percent, a level not previously observed,” said Wendy Wang of the University of Maryland, who published the study with her colleagues.  Remember that phytoplankton use photosynthesis--just like like trees and plants--to convert CO2 into oxygen.  Chlorophyll levels are an indication of how much photosynthesis is taking place. 

Another way phytoplankton remove carbon from the atmosphere is by dying . . .

When marine organisms die, they carry carbon in their cells to the deep ocean. Surprisingly, this study found that this “export of carbon increased by a factor of eight due to the large phytoplankton blooms,” said Wang. This process, called the oceanic “biological pump.” is an important mechanism that enables more carbon dioxide to be transferred from the atmosphere, to be stored in the ocean floor.

What all this means is that phytoplankton life--and thus CO2 levels--are influenced far more by the weather than by pH levels or by burning fossil fuels.  If they're really worried about the plankton dying, why don't they find a way to stop El Niño from coming?  And if phytoplankton levels bounce back as "surprisingly" quick as the above report says, doesn't that show that maybe we're a bit overprotective of the little guys?

Actually, according to evolution, the earth and its plankton have successfully made it through hundreds of catastrophic events.  But now when we burn some trees evolutionists whimper that we'll never make it.  Where's their faith?

Don't they believe plankton can evolve a resistance to acid?  Where's the old "survival of the fittest" in all this?

Ha, ha, ha.

Dwarf mongooses (Helogale parvula) stare from a termite mound in South Africa's Kruger National Park.
 Courtesy Scotch Macaskill (c). 

Scotch Macaskill from South Africa has posted a whole page of mongoose photos, along with a description of them and their habits.  Once you get over to his site, you'll find gallery after gallery of African wildlife photos.  Go check it out.

WorldMagBlog reports on the state of gay marriage, and lists two countries that have now legalized it.  It appears both Canada and Spain will now recognize the homosexually hitched.  The Canadian decision, passed by a 158 to 133 vote in the House of Commons on Tuesday, was very controversial, and the Conservative Party promises to revisit the law if they are able to reform the next government.  The Canadian Senate will almost certainly pass the legislation into official law in July.
In Spain, homosexuals blew kisses at lawmakers today after the Congress of Deputies approved gay marriage in a wider 187 to 147 decision.  The Spanish law may allow gays to marry as soon as tomorrow, and will also allow them to adopt children.
Assuming Canada does indeed join the fray, there will be a total of four countries in which gay marriage is recognized by the government.  The other two are Belgium and the Netherlands.

What's more, the 1.3-million member United Church of Christ may be on its way to endorsing homosexual marriage.  The Rev. John H. Thomas, the denomination's president, gave a speech in an attempt to justify his ungodly approval of homosexual relationships.  "I believe God has led me to the convictions I have articulated," he said, "convictions I could scarcely have imagined when I was ordained thirty years ago."  Many United Church of Christ assemblies across the nation are threatening to break their ties with the denomination if the endorsement is officially adopted.

If you find a piece of this in your backyard, Louis Friedman of The Planetary Society would like to talk with you.  Please call 626-793-5100.


Cosmos 1. Illustration by Rick Sternbach,
The Planetary Society (c).

Cosmos 1 was supposed to be orbiting the earth right now, propelled solely (ha, ha) by light.  Apparently even sunshine hitting you creates a tiny amount of pressure--and given the huge size of Cosmos 1's eight 5-micron-thin aluminized reinforced Mylar sails, mission coordinators theorized that by adusting the sails towards the sun every time the craft circled the earth, the craft would slowly but steadily gain speed, reaching 100,000 mph in three years.  The purpose of this privately-funded, four million dollar mission was really just to see if the thing would work.

Unfortunately, the Volna launch rockets (converted SS-N-18 Soviet ICBMs, if anyone cares) have turned out to be somewhat of lemons.  A 2001 suborbital test flight, with only two sails, failed when a Volna computer glitch failed to release the spacecraft.  Now the Volna which launched Cosmos 1 last Tuesday (June 21st) appears to have flown the craft off into the horizon, as opposed to space.  But since U.S. law strictly governs the transfer of militarily interesting information between the U.S. and other countries (in this case the Volna missles), everyone is waiting for the Russian defense ministry to report on their debris search.

The good news about all this is that with all the Russian agencies involved, from the Volna rockets to the spacecraft contractor (NPO Lavochkin) to the Russian nuclear submarine that launched Cosmos 1 from the Barents Sea, we may not need to worry about any serious ballastic threat from the former Soviet Union.

See a video of the launch at this blog.  Read down far enough and you'll find that Bill Nye is The Planetary Society's vice pres.

[In other news:  Scientists kill dogs and bring them back to life;  Global warming actually creates more ice; and the NASA people think they can see a hydrocarbon lake on Titan.]

If you haven't read about Bisonalveus browni, a small extinct mammal that had grooved fangs, you may want to skim over this short report.  It explains how paleontologist Richard Fox of the University of Alberta found the specimen of this animal in 1991, but only recently noticed that the canines contained distinct grooves.  He and his team believe the mammal had poisonous fangs.


Courtesy the University of Alberta, Edmonton.

Bisonalveus browni was a shrew-like creature the size of a mouse, and allegedly survived 60 million years ago by pouncing on and injecting venom into its prey--insects.  Evolutionists are excited about the find because venom in mammals is very rare.  In fact, only four other species of mammals are know to be venomous: the North American short-tailed shrew, the Eurasian water shrew, the Australian duck-billed platypus, and the solenodon, another shrew-like animal from the Caribbean.  Fox believes B. browni's teeth most closely resemble the solenodon's, but are still "unlike any venom-delivery system sported by living mammals."

Perhaps B. browni really did sport venom, but my suggestion is, that we're jumping to a conclusion awful quickly.  Why assume the grooves conducted saliva?  And why assume the saliva was poisonous?  Sure, it's possible, but to find a few fossilized teeth with grooves and conclude decisively that the mammal bit "like a snake," is throwing your own opinion in.  Nothing wrong with opinions, though.

Venom is, in my opinion, a product of the Curse which God pronounced on His creation in Genesis chapter three, following man's rebellion.  It likely became more and more common as genetic mutations multiplied, and animals lost resistance to certain types of poison.

More evolutionary thinking about Bisonalveus browni at National Geographic.

Astronomy & Origins reports on Amalthea, one of Jupiter's many moons, which breaks evolutionary assumptions about how moons formed.  The evolution model predicts that moons which formed closer to a young, hot Jupiter will be more dense, while further moons are less dense and more icy.  Amalthea, however, is very close (112,468 miles) to Jupiter, yet is not dense.

A new study of the black-capped chickadee finds that when the chickadee warns his brothers that predators are about, he conveys information about the size and species of the threat by altering his "chick-a-dee-dee-dee" call.  A common alteration is to add a number of "dees" to the end of the call--as many as 20 when a pygmy-owl is nearby.  Chickadees also subtly change their call if the predator is moving.  They'll signal a sort of retreat if, say, a hawk is swooping among the leaves, but if the hawk is stationary, they begin "mobbing calls" which invite chickadees and even other birds to harass and hopefully drive out the predator.

Jon Pelletier, assistant professor of geosciences at The University of Arizona in Tucson, has offered an explanation for those mysterious look-alike lakes that keep forming in Alaska; and maybe loud music really is turning your brain to jelly:  Scientists have found a way to turn certain oily liquids into jelly using a burst of sound--then they can turn it back to liquid again the same way.

And just because it's so cool, here's a satellite view of Istanbul, Turkey, city of 10 million.  Urban areas are whitish.


Courtesy ESA.

It's a little-known fact that tiny ocean plants called phytoplankton absorb as much CO2 from the atmosphere as all other plant life combined. This makes a huge impact on the "greenhouse effect", which is said to be caused by high levels of CO2 (carbon dioxide), a gas constantly on the move as it is exhaled by humans and animals (and mega-producers such as volcanoes) and converted back into oxygen by plants through photosynthesis.

A new study using NASA satellite technology shows how phytoplankton numbers dramatically increase and decrease during El Niño and La Niña years.  The information is important not only because of how gas levels affect the climate but also because phytoplankton are the foundation of the ocean food chain.

A new species of bacteria has been discovered that uses photosynthesis, even though it lives at ocean depths (a mile and a half down) where no sunlight is present.  It grows near 700+ degree (F) hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor, which actually emit miniscule amounts of light--enough to keep the bacteria alive.  This species is "the only photosynthetic organism in nature known to use a light source other than sunlight."

Left image comet Tempel 1.  Right image shows jet of dust.
Courtesy NASA, ESA, P. Feldman (Johns Hopkins University),
and H. Weaver (Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Lab)

Tempel 1 has released a 'jet' of dust 1,300 miles wide into space, while traveling at over 20,000 miles per hour.  The plume was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, and although we've seen these jets before, we're not sure what causes them.  When NASA's Deep Impact probe crashes into Tempel 1 on July 4, it will hopefully supply us with information about jets and the general composition of comets--including how and where they originate.  Since comets disintegrate so quickly they cannot be millions of years old, so many evolutionists have postulated that an unobserved "Oort cloud" outside of Pluto's orbit has been supplying us with comets over the eons.  Deep Impact's findings may test that idea.  Another option, for creatonists, is that many or all comets were created in motion only a few thousand years ago.  This model would predict that Tempel 1 was formed recently.

The "smart impacter," which will be launched from Deep Impact, is expected to leave a crater the size of a football field on Tempel 1, a comet which is about half the size of Manhattan.  The impacter uses no explosives--only kinetic energy--and NASA promises the comet's path will not be altered.