Feb 09, 2012 ‘Plasma mythology’ may be defined as the study of plasmas, specifically near-earth plasmas, in human traditions, such as mythology and proto-scientific records. If this is a discipline, one of its most notable pioneers must be the French savant, Jean-Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan (1678-1771). De Mairan was a…
Feb 08, 2012 Jupiter puts on a periodic light show. Several years ago, Picture of the Day articles discussed the so-called “volcanic” plumes erupting from Jupiter’s moon Io. It was argued that they are plasma discharges from the moon electrically connected to the giant planet. Some astronomers acknowledged the electrical…
Feb 07, 2012 Where does the idea of constellations come from? And how do these arbitrary groups of stars relate to mythology? The argument shapes up nicely in the light of traditions that name specific constellations as mythical creatures thus conveyed to the night sky. Examples are again in…
Feb 06, 2012 Where does the idea of constellations come from? And how do these arbitrary groups of stars relate to mythology? The early 20th century saw the ascendancy of a short-lived movement in scholarship called ‘Pan-Babylonianism’, soon bemoaned for its folly. Supporters of this group held that the…
Feb 03, 2012 Fourteen years ago, Halton Arp published Seeing Red. Chapter 6, “Clusters of Galaxies,” presented his finding that the clusters were low-luminosity high-redshift—and nearby—“star piles.” There was not then and there has not been since any discussion of the difficulties for consensus theories that Arp’s observations revealed. Distribution:…
Feb 02, 2012 History repeats itself – and that includes the history of science. Back in 1879, the very notion of ‘prehistoric cave art’ was unheard of. The famous Palaeolithic art galleries inside such caves as at Altamira, Trois Frères and Lascaux still lay undiscovered in the womb of the…
Feb 1, 2012 An X-2 class solar flare recently missed a direct impact with Earth. Heliophysicists classify solar flares according to their brightness in X-ray wavelengths. C-class flares are the smallest on the scale, with X-ray measurements in the 10^-6 watts per square meter range (W/m^2), while X-class flares can…
