God I love Wikipedia.

Scientists have managed to push back the date for the earliest known presence of a magnetic field on Earth by about 250 million years.

The evidence is seen in tiny iron minerals that are aligned inside ancient dacite rocks from the Barberton mountains in South Africa.

Analysis of the 3.45-billion-year-old minerals indicates the strength the field was much weaker than today.

Earth’s magnetic field protects all life on the planet.

It forms a shield that deflects harmful particles from the Sun around our world, and limits the ability of this “solar wind” to erode our atmosphere.

The new work by Professor John Tarduno, from the University of Rochester, US, and colleagues has been discussed at a major Earth sciences meeting in Vienna, Austria.

“Earth’s magnetic field is important to us,” Professor Tarduno told the European Geosciences Union meeting.

“[3.45 billion years ago] is a really critical time because it’s when we start seeing the first tentative signs of life, so perhaps these two things are linked together.”

Holy crap. And that’s using Big Bang assumptions. Essentially an admission that when it comes to astronomy, everything is up for grabs.

The astronomers carried out two sets of observations in the same region, hunting for light emitted by galaxies born 10 billion years ago.

[Translation for non-Big Bangers: They were hunting for high-redshift objects.]

The first looked for so-called Lyman-alpha light, the classic telltale used to compile cosmic maps, named after its U.S. discoverer, Theodore Lyman. Lyman-alpha is energy released by excited hydrogen atoms.

The second observation used a special camera called HAWK-1 to look for a signature emitted at a different wavelength, also by glowing hydrogen, which is known as the hydrogen-alpha (or H-alpha) line.

The second sweep yielded a whole bagful of light sources that had not been spotted using the Lyman-alpha technique.

They include some of the faintest galaxies ever found, forged at a time when the universe was just a child.

[Translation for non-Big Bangers: they found a bunch of low luminosity, high-redshift objects this way, which rogue astronomers Arp et al. would say is just what they’d heretically expect of matter newly created/ejected from active galactic nuclei (”Moreover, the closest and therefore most recent ejections have the highest relative redshifts, and the lowest intrinsic luminosities.”) , essentially the opposite of the mainstream’s interpretation of the great Rorschach Test in the sky. Based on this and Arp’s observational evidence, we would expect many of these “background” galaxies the mainstream just found to actually be objects ejected from foreground galaxies, but with higher redshifts and so assumed by the mainstream to be background. They will in general tend to be just a few arcseconds away from the foreground galaxies, which will also be criss-crossed with ejection lines of quasars. That’s the smell of pure heresy people.]

The astronomers conclude that Lyman-alpha surveys may only spot just a tiny number of the total light emitted from far galaxies. Astonishingly, as many as 90 percent of such distant galaxies may go unseen in these exercises.

“If there are 10 galaxies seen, there could be a hundred there,” said Hayes.

And we’re supposed to trust them on dark matter?

(Thanks to princelumber for sending along the link.)

In honor of Homo erectus, recently accepted as the first seafarer in the human lineage of hominids and other assorted cavemen.

National Geographic brings the science in this episode of NatGeo Explorer. 

We are published regularly on dead trees in Duluth’s own Zenith City Weekly. This issue: “Cavemen of the Sea”. I’m on a boat, bitch!

Timeline of habitation on the island of Flores just got pushed back 120,000 years, leading to contention:

Many scientists believe the creature evolved from a much larger-bodied species, Homo erectus, that became isolated and shrunk over time. Others point to features in the hobbit’s body - such as the length its feet to the shape of its shoulder girdle - that are very primitive and not what one would expect in dwarfed H. erectus.

These researchers have put forward the idea that H. floresiensis may have evolved from more archaic creatures that left Africa to colonise Asia even before erectus.

“Our discovery at Wolo Sege will certainly open the door to this contentious theory,” said Dr Brumm.

Time to put on the popcorn.

Let me add that all this was total, total heresy just a couple of years ago, and now the archaeology of human origins has basically exploded in a new direction.

Concerning a new specimen of the “giant Jurassic fish Leedsichthys” - some Gonzo Science themes in this find, which they are calling a “missing piece in the evolutionary story of fish, mammals and ocean ecosystems”:

Scientific anomaly:

Dr Jeff Liston, from Glasgow University, ran the excavation in Peterborough and found the new specimen to be an anomaly.

Excavate the Museums:

“We then started to go back to museum collections, and we began finding suspension-feeding fish fossils from all round the world, often unstudied or misidentified.” … One of the best preserved Kansas specimens had previously been interpreted as similar to a fanged predatory swordfish. When members of the team began to clean the specimen, they found a toothless gaping mouth, with an extensive network of thin elongate bony plates to extract huge quantities of microscopic plankton.

Revised Timelines:

“These specimens indicated that there were giant filter-feeding fishes for much longer than we thought. … The fact that creatures of this kind were missing from the fossil record for over 100 million years seemed peculiar.

“What we have demonstrated here is that a long dynasty of giant bony fish filled this space in time for more than 100 million years.”

Hmm, pursuing scientific anomalies yields fruitful results? Nobody tell the astronomers…

Choice quote-

“I was flabbergasted,” said Boston University archaeologist and stone-tool expert Curtis Runnels. “The idea of finding tools from this very early time period on Crete was about as believable as finding an iPod in King Tut’s tomb.”

And another-

Moreover, the discovery could spark a host of other scientific debates.

If ancient humans were crossing the Mediterranean, Runnels said, then they certainly could have crossed other water barriers, such as the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden. “And that means that the assumptions that we have had—that the peopling of Eurasia was done by early hominins moving overland through the Near East, into India and down—will have to be revisited.” Hominins, or hominids, are members of humankind’s ancestral lineage.

Time just gets deeper and deeper…

Now things are getting interesting:

“We think the ev­i­dence is fi­nally show­ing that these [rap­tors] which are usu­ally con­sid­ered di­no­saurs were ac­tu­ally de­scended from birds, not the oth­er way around,” Ruben added.

…University of Kansas sci­en­tists ex­am­ined a fos­sil that showed feath­ers on all four limbs, some­what re­sem­bling a bi-plane. Glide tests based on its struc­ture con­clud­ed it would not have been prac­ti­cal for it to have flown from the ground up, but it could have glid­ed from the trees down, some­what like a mod­ern-day fly­ing squir­rel. Many re­search­ers have long be­lieved that glid­ers such as this were the an­ces­tors of mod­ern birds.

“This mod­el was not con­sist­ent with suc­cess­ful flight from the ground up, and that makes it pret­ty dif­fi­cult to make a case for a ground-dwelling the­ro­pod di­no­saur to have de­vel­oped wings and flown away,” Ruben said. “On the oth­er hand, it would have been quite pos­si­ble for birds to have evolved and then, at some point, have var­i­ous spe­cies lose their flight ca­pa­bil­i­ties and be­come ground-dwelling, flight­less an­i­mals – the rap­tors. This may be hugely up­set­ting to a lot of peo­ple, but it makes per­fect sense.”

I like this guy.

New blurry Hubble images of Pluto nonetheless show that its surface is wildly dynamic, moving scientists to sound like they’re using hyperbole:

“[With Pluto] you are looking at the surface in the Solar System that has the biggest changes of anything we’ve ever seen.”

That’s not even hyperbole. Whatever the nature of these extensive, rapid surface changes, they dwarf anything visible on the other solar system bodies.

Marc Buie said the exact mechanism was a mystery … “It’s close to springtime on Pluto. In the fall, it will be so much further away from the Sun, and so much colder. Things that boiled up in the spring will condense.”

“We think that these things are driven by seasonal processes on Pluto,” said Dr Buie, “But it’s a little bit of a surprise that you would see this big of a change this fast because the seasons take 248 of our years to progress.”

Space probe flyby in 2015!

The first vertebrates to walk the Earth emerged from the sea almost 20 million years earlier than previously thought, say scientists who have discovered footprints from an eight-foot-long prehistoric creature.

Is 20 million years a lot?

New research has officially “over turned” the “Primordial Soup” theory of the origin of life. It had an 80-year run where it was the dominant paradigm.

But the geochemical energy of hydrothermal vents is the new hotness:

“Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form of ATP. We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won’t work at all,” said team leader Dr Nick lane from University College London. … “It is time to cast off the shackles of fermentation in some primordial soup as ‘life without oxygen’ — an idea that dates back to a time before anybody in biology had any understanding of how ATP is made.”

Someone be sure and tell Tommy Gold, whose eye has been on deep sea vents for some time, in relation to the origin of life. Gold’s “Deep Hot Biosphere” theory (presented in a book of that title based on this paper) argues that life teems at the vents because it is upwelling from deeper inside the planet. Life’s true origin is in the geological depths, by Gold’s reckoning. And Gold is no slouch.

So, glad to see we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty, and this “primordial soup” nonsense doesn’t have to get in the way any more.

Still panspermia to contend with too, re: origin of life. Remember, even if panspermia champion Fred Hoyle was wrong about why the primordial soup idea was incorrect - it turns out it is incorrect anyway. So seems to me that Hoyle’s modern-day panspermia work should be given a second look. Because he wasn’t just criticizing the primordial soup theory, he was also advancing a positive case for panspermia, before it was cool as it were.

[The biographical side note I would offer is that Gold and Hoyle were close associates and shared a similar cognitive style - in that each found it fruitful to simply invert the common idea and see where it leads you. Don’t be too surprised if they turn out to have been right about everything.]

Scientists have discovered that 100 years of studies based on incorrect assumptions will have to be rewritten:

A new study by scientists from Oregon State University and the Environmental Protection Agency showed — much to the surprise of the researchers — that soil clings tenaciously to the first precipitation after a dry summer, and holds it so tightly that it almost never mixes with other water.

The finding is so significant, researchers said, that they aren’t even sure yet what it may mean. But it could affect our understanding of how pollutants move through soils, how nutrients get transported from soils to streams, how streams function and even how vegetation might respond to climate change.

…”We used to believe that when new precipitation entered the soil, it mixed well with other water and eventually moved to streams. We just found out that isn’t true.”"This could have enormous implications for our understanding of watershed function,” he said. “It challenges about 100 years of conventional thinking.”

One might have thought that something as close to home as soil hydrology would be well understood by now. Findings like this illustrate that many scientific surprises lie in store, even in very well-established fields.

The conventional thinking about conventional thinking should be that one might fruitfully expect it to be wrong. Scientists such as Fred Hoyle and Tommy Gold made that their bread and butter, and while it often embroiled them in controversy, their greatest contributions were arguably made by rejecting the criteria of conservatism and standing the conventional theories on their heads. It’s not a surefire method - but as in the case of soil hydrology, it sure helps to consider that the conventional assumptions might be only, you know, assumptions.

Terence McKenna on Novelty Theory part 1

Circa 1925, Percy Harrison Fawcett said he’d found evidence of ancient cities in the Amazon jungle:

…he reported finding large earth mounds filled with ancient and brittle pottery. Buried under the jungle floor, he claimed, were also traces of causeways and roadways. Based on this and other evidence, he insisted that the Amazon once contained large populations and at least one, if not more, advanced civilizations. Despite being dismissed and ridiculed as a crank, he set off in 1925 to find the place, which he christened the “City of Z.” He and his party, including his twenty-one-year-old son, Jack, then vanished forever—a fate that seemed to confirm the madness of such a quest.

Over the past several years, however, there has been mounting evidence that nearly everything that was once generally believed about the Amazon and its people was wrong, and that Fawcett was in fact prescient. When I followed Fawcett’s trail into the Xingu area of the Brazilian Amazon, in 2005, I met up with the archeologist Michael Heckenberger. In the very area where Fawcett believed he would find the City of Z, Heckenberger and his team of researchers had discovered more than twenty pre-Columbian settlements. These settlements, which were occupied roughly between 800 and 1600 A.D., included houses and moats and palisade walls. There were geometrically-aligned causeways and roads, and plazas laid out along cardinal points, from east to west. According to Heckenberger, each cluster of settlements contained anywhere from two thousand to five thousand people, which means that the larger communities were the size of many medieval European cities.

In your face!!

That coffin is getting all nailed up. The discovery of a real ”Jesus-era” burial shroud is just the tip of the iceberg in this fruitful discovery:

Assuming the new shroud typifies those used in Jerusalem during the time of Jesus, the researchers maintain that the Shroud of Turin could not have originated in the city.

…. “There have now been only two cases of textiles discovered in Jewish burials from this period,” said archaeologist Amos Kloner of Bar Ilan University. And both appear to contradict the idea that the Shroud of Turin is from Jesus-era Jerusalem.

The human remains in this new shroud have also provided the earliest known case of leprosy, and so this post gets the coveted “Revised Timelines” tag.

New study out says:

Their results showed a slow decline in megafauna that began about 15,000 years ago and appeared to last for about 1,000 years.

This discovery rules out one idea that the extinction might have been caused by an extraterrestrial object striking Earth 13,000 years ago.

Like that impact did them any favors.

As this somewhat boring article explains. Still, we exist at least in part to document these sorts of things.

“Physicians are quite divided about this,” says Joseph Stubbs, MD, an Albany, Ga., internist and president of the American College of Physicians.

David Mutch, MD, a St. Louis ob-gyn, says the recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force will not change his practice in any way. “It’s clearly economically driven and not patient care driven.”

Other doctors have taken a step back to study the science.

Something we’re in favor of.

…Now here’s a meaty essay on the matter I can sink my teeth into. Warning: partisan!

Mainstream comet theory tells us that since comets formed in the early solar system and have remained unchanged since then, they will contain early materials untouched by the processing steps of planet formation. So the goal of collecting comet dust is to get this early material and study it for clues to the early solar system.

So when the Stardust mission returned samples directly from a comet, and the material wasn’t as primitive and unprocessed as all that, there was surprise all around. Well actually I bet Tom Van Flandern wasn’t surprised since his underdog theory predicted it, but reams of successful predictions didn’t do him any good since he didn’t support the dominant theory.

“Ultra-primitive” comet dust has finally turned up for the mainstream in this study but only indirectly, from comet grains collected from the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Talk about fishing expeditions.

Some of Tom Van Flandern’s successful Exploded Planet Hypothesis (EPH) predictions:

One way the EPH has distinguished itself from competitive theories is in predicting that many comets and asteroids will have satellites. The satellites of comet Hale-Bopp, discovery of the asteroid Ida’s moon Dactyl, and the “Near Challenge Results” are all examples of the success of this genuine prediction.

The EPH was recently used to make exceptionally accurate predictions of the November 1999 Leonids meteor storm, as well as for the two subsequent years. See the complete 2000 and 2001 predictions. This same methodology also predicted another Leonids storm in 2002 as well as a Perseids storm in 2004.

Some of the successful mainstream predictions: (crickets)

New Scientist: 110,000-year-old human or half-human jawbone found in China - upsets current theory that humans didn’t leave Africa until 70,000 years ago.

The comments over there are full of speculation that it’s a hoax, and otherwise upset about the implications. Somebody get some warm milk and baby bottles.

The end is near.

Pterosaur fossil “provides the first real evidence” for the “modular evolution” theory that whole groups of traits evolve at once - this would mean things evolve at a faster clip than if their traits changed one at a time.

It may be the first “real” evidence but we’ve been tracking the developing “fast evolution” story around here for a while (links to past fast evolution posts, incl. this one).

The find of an older, smaller version of T-Rex has got paleontologists in a lather. The story also sheds light on the exciting world of international fossil smuggling.

This one small point, simply made in this video excerpt, is part of a rich tapestry of Big Bang anomalies. Astronomer Halton Arp made and lost his career cataloging these, making a strong case that an object’s redshift is not the final arbiter of its position in space. If so, it appears to falsify the Big Bang. Basically, the map of the sky could be all wrong, and the temporal corollary is that there was no “beginning”.

Video explaining Tom Van Flandern’s reconstruction of the history of Mars, as per his Exploded Planet Hypothesis.

Interview with Richard Hoagland about the secret history of NASA. Hoagland is a controversial figure to put it mildly. To the skeptics he’s a nutbar. We enjoy evaluating wild claims.

In 2007 researchers theorized that a comet set off continental fires that led to the mysterious disappearance of the Clovis people and the extermination of 35 mammal genera, including mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths and camels. The team documented a “black mat” of charcoal throughout North America that contains high levels of iridium, magnetic spheres, and nano-diamonds, which are consistent with such an airburst. The controversial theory also gibes with the 1908 Tunguska atmospheric detonation (also thought to be from a comet or meteorite) that leveled trees in Siberia, and it echoes the extraterrestrial impact widely believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Today, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the same team reports on shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds, known only from meteorite and other impact events, in a soot layer from Arlington Canyon on Santa Rosa Island in California. The canyon is famous for containing the earliest human remains in North America, dating back to 13,000 years, and the soot layer coincides with the disappearance of the pygmy mammoth from the island. In a documentary shown earlier this year on the Public Broadcasting Service’s NOVA science show, the team also claimed that they discovered similar diamonds from the Greenland Ice Sheet dating to the same period.

The skeptics are not amused.

This guy’s throwing the gauntlet down - he’s just found the oldest dinosaur burrow, pushing that timeline back 15 million years, and he’s not so much predicting as wildly speculating, but still:

“Right now burrowing dinosaurs might look like an exception to the rule,” he said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if more species [dug burrows]. Ten years from now it might be considered commonplace.”

We’ll check back. My guess: he’s right.

A sealed entrance is all that remains between archeology and a rare find - tomb of an Aztec king: 

That the seals are unbroken suggests that the potential tomb has not been looted.

Indiana Jones wouldn’t wait to open it, but…

Despite rising expectations, the archaeologist said he and his team must be patient.

Only by working slowly and methodically will the team be able to reconstruct the funerary customs and other artifacts that could shed light on the Aztec economy, political system, and religion as it existed before the arrival of the Spanish in the 1500s.

That is such bullshit!!!! What if there’s alien artifacts???!!! Kidding. Still, an unlooted tomb could contain surprises… Here’s hoping for evidence of transoceanic pre-Columbian contact.