Methane was discovered on Mars in 2004, meaning volcanic activity continues to generate heat below the martian surface or, if you are exceptionally kooky, that life there is generating it.

When Mars Express arrived in orbit around the red planet, Vittorio Formisano, Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario CNR, Rome, and the rest of the instrument team using planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) began taking data and saw a puzzling signal; along with atmospheric gases such as carbon monoxide and water vapor, they saw methane.  
 

When did executions go from being functional example-setting to being more humane in method?

Annulla Linders, a University of Cincinnati sociologist, examined newspaper accounts of 19th and 20th century Ohio executions to put more 'scientific' executions in context.  

Linders used two late 19th century executions to illustrate the transition from hanging to electrocution and determined that central to the switch was the audience of executions - including journalists and physicians. 

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US, have performed sophisticated laser measurements to detect the subtle effects of one of nature's most elusive forces - the "weak interaction", and in the process also found the largest effect of the weak interaction ever observed in an atom.

Our offices are in a building in sunny Folsom, California, a town made most famous when Johnny Cash had a concert at the nearby prison (*).   It's one of those full service places where they have the phones and the furniture and a kitchen in the middle.   It's obviously more expensive than a regular office lease but the riverboat gambler in me doesn't like long-term leases and I am convinced I could work from my house if my wife didn't say things like, "You can't work from the house."

On Thursday I was walking toward the kitchen to get my 11th coffee of the day when I passed two fellows talking in the hallway.   "No, the cost to run it is $3 million a day," says one.   "That's ..."

I kept walking.

"That's ..."

The Voynich Manuscript Part 7 : Further Dating Studies

I present here more evidence in support of my suggestion that the Voynich manuscript may date from a period between 1350 to 1450, perhaps even earlier.  This is part 7 of an occasional series which commenced in part 1 with information about Wilfrid and Ethel Voynich.

Merlons and Bartizans.

Amateur astronomers fond of visual observation of faint galaxies and other fuzzy treasures of the night sky are always in search of the best observative site, where to drag their large Dobsonian telescopes.

Unfortunately, their road is always uphill - also in a metaphorical sense: light pollution is growing everywhere at a disturbing rate, and it has already erased all but the brightest stars from our urban and suburban skies.

Many of our kids grow without having seen the Milky Way, and the few who are drawn to astronomy are surprised to realize, from the tales of older dogs like me, that it did not use to be that way.

Higher education has helped women narrow the wage gap but there is one college-related factor that has becoming increasingly important in perpetuating that gap, according to new research.

And that factor is their college major.   Women dominate the social sciences, for example, so by not moving more into hard sciences, the numbers are not normalizing across all fields.   Women at the higher levels of research and in disciplines like engineering show no modern wage gap.

Americans go to church less but the rate of departure previously reported may have been incorrect, according to sociologists Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer of the University of California, Berkeley.

According to the new data, 93 percent of Americans believe in God, a figure unchanged since 1988. The group that increased was the group Hout and Fischer call "unchurched believers," those people who believe in God but report no religion. 

A new paper outlines what it calls a simple-to-use technique which enables companies to optimize the performance of industrial boilers and reduce their main emissions.

It's about time.   

Obviously there aren't going to be any new super-efficient combustion techniques any time soon -   combustion is what it is - but using a new oxidation method with an improved catalyst is a different story.   

A catalyst is a substance which increases the speed of chemical reactions, without taking any apparent part in the reaction, or which modifies the parameters of the reaction (temperature, pressure, concentration, etc.).  In the case of catalytic combustion, the main parameter is its speed of reaction given by the equation for the speed of the flame front UL:

When it comes to how they raise their children, mothers do things the way their mothers did, according to a new study that looked at parenting practices across two generations.

Fathers don't seem to use their moms as parenting role models despite the fact that the fathers studied were raised more by their mothers, even in a changing workplace environment.

Obviously, fathers may have been more influenced by their dads rather than their moms, but the surveys used by the study didn't examine their fathers' behavior,  said Jonathan Vespa, co-author of the study and doctoral student in sociology at Ohio State.