Our universe is thought to be around 14 billion years old and astronomers recently determined that big galaxies formed much earlier in the universe's history than previously thought, within the first 1 billion years, and for more than two decades the prevailing wisdom among astronomers has been that galaxies evolved hierarchically - gravity drew small bits of matter together first and then those small bits gradually came together to form larger structures.

A new model seeks to turn that idea on its head.  And the researchers say the very large umbrella of 'dark matter' may be the explanation.

In reading one of the other posts a casual point was made regarding the relative safety of flying versus driving.  It is generally assumed that flying is, by far, the safest of the two modes of travel, but is this really true?  In looking at the data, it appears that the data is being skewed because of some strange assumptions that tend to favor flying.

Eusociality is the social structure where individuals cooperate to raise offspring.   How does it happen?   Some proponents have found the answer in kin selection theory, a 'gene's-eye' view of evolution made explicit by William Hamilton (1) in a pair of seminal papers and which sees organic evolution as a result of competition among genes for representation in the gene-pool -  organisms are simply vehicles that genes constructed to aid in propagation.

Petermann Ice Island Revisited

Petermann Ice Island (2010) Calved on August 05 2010.  The calving had been anticipated for some time and had been predicted to occur in summer 2010 by a number of people, including myself.  The actual calving event was observed in near real-time images by a number of people - credits at the foot of this article.


I give here some more background to my observations and my predictions of the Petermann calving event in a wider context of mechanical forces which may act on glaciers.


Greenland under observation

If the freezing point of fish blood is -0.9 ° Celsius, how are Antarctic fish able to keep moving at a temperature like -1.8 ° C?

You're not the only one to ask, researchers have wondered for 50 years, and it known that fish in the Arctic have a special sort of antifreeze, similar to what we put in cars, but just how these special frost protection proteins work has been unclear.

Some 80-90 years ago, an unknown Californian guy named George A. Linhart, unlike A. Einstein, P. Debye, M. Planck and W. Nernst, has managed to derive a very simple, but ultimately general mathematical formula for heat capacity vs. temperature from the fundamental thermodynamical principles, using what we would nowadays dub a “Bayesian approach to probability”. Moreover, he has successfully applied his result to fit the experimental data for diverse substances in their solid state in a rather broad temperature range. Nevertheless, Linhart’s work was undeservedly forgotten, although it does represent a valid and fresh standpoint on thermodynamics and statistical physics, which may have a significant implication for academic and applied science.

Junk food will make your waistline bigger, which is bad for you, and candy is no exception.   But candy that makes your intelligence bigger?   Garth Sundem's Brain Candy is here to satisfy your intellectual sweet tooth.

"We're building a rocket.  We're building it bigger" -  Copenhagen Suborbital.
"We've got the biggest balls of them all" - AC/DC

I'll steal UniverseToday's summary, then tell you to skip reading everyone else's coverage of it (even mine):

Is cosmic inflation faster than the speed of light?

An introduction: in the online autism community, there are a lot of heated debates. One of them is related to the nature of autism research. Some are insistent that more research focus on vaccines. Others push for more research on treatments. Still others insist that autism research is skewed because studies, especially brain imaging studies, have narrow parameters and exclude intellectual disability. The following post is a response to this last argument and an explanation as to why studies are conducted as they are.