Understanding Climate : #5 - Variations In Sunshine




Insolation variation

63 Years Old Solo Balloonist Reaches North Pole

Jean-Louis Etienne has made the first solo balloon voyage to the North Pole, traveling 3,130 kilometers - 1,945 miles - in five days from Norway to the tundra of eastern Siberia.

Jean-Louis Etienne has always liked rising to new challenges, especially when they combine adventure and scientific objectives. Adventures are the stuff that dreams are made of. They reveal a new way of looking at things, especially to young people, and can be a very effective means to convey scientific knowledge that in other forms sometimes falls on unreceptive ears.

My academic adventures have exposed me to a fairly large amount of mathematics.  While I seem to end up wishing I had taken even more mathematics, computer science, and statistics coursework every week or three, I've nevertheless been pretty grateful for having this sort of background as I've become involved with plant genomics research.

I have just returned from over a week working at DESY (das Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron) at Hamburg, and when I am not so tired I hope to write up some more synchrotron stuff for you all.  We were working over the Easter holiday, and while the DESY Bistro provided a magnificent brunch over that four-day period, on Sunday and Monday the only place within walking distance where we could find something to eat in the evening was Burger King (very appropriate for Hamburg, don’t you think?)
 

In two years the Higgs boson will be close to discovery, and its mass already known, or the particle will be already in the trash bin. That is the single line which best summarizes the scenarios I depicted yesterday, in the concluding slides of a seminar I gave at IFIC, in beautiful Valencia (below, placa de la Virgen on a pleasant evening, taken with my iphone).

New Missing Link - Or Maybe Not


The recent suggestion that Australopithecus Sediba is an intermediate species has aroused controversy.

The following extracts are from naturenews.

Claim over 'human ancestor' sparks furore

Researchers dispute that hominin fossil is a new species.

Michael Cherry

Arctic Ice 2010 #3 - The State Of The Ice


Arctic Ice 2010 - a short series of articles.


The first part - Arctic Ice 2010 #1 - The Nature Of Sea Ice was an introduction to the behaviour of Arctic sea ice.

The second part Arctic Ice 2010 #2 - What People Are Saying discussed current media and blog reports about the state of the Arctic.

This third part describes the state of the Arctic ice as of April 2010.