American Civil War: Mystery deaths of crew of submarine H. L. Hunley finally solved after 150 years

Confederate Submarine H.L. Hunley, suspended from a crane during her recovery from Charleston Harbor, 8 August 2000 [image credit: Barbara Voulgaris, Naval Historical Center]

The Hunley was the first combat submarine to sink a warship, in 1864. It was very basic, being designed for a crew of eight, seven to turn the hand-cranked propeller and one to steer and direct the boat. Its discovery in 1995 was described by the Director of Naval History at the Naval Historical Center as “probably the most important find of the century.” ‘Tens of thousands’ attended an official funeral in Charleston, South Carolina in 2004, including all five branches of the U.S. armed forces.

A full 22 years after their bodies were discovered, scientists have come up with an explanation for the mysterious deaths of the crew of the Civil War submarine the H. L. Hunley 150 years ago, reports the IB Times.

The Confederate crew of eight were found seated in their stations on the hand crank that powered the ship. They showed no sign of struggle or trying to escape. They also displayed no sign of physical injury. The bilge pumps hadn’t been used and they hadn’t tried to escape through the air hatches.

Mathematical mystery of ancient Babylonian clay tablet solved

Some Pythagorean triples [credit: Cmglee / Wikipedia]

Could Babylonian base-60 maths be about to make a comeback? The tablet has been dated to between 1822 and 1762 BC and is based on Pythagorean triples, as Phys.org reports. It uses ‘a novel kind of trigonometry based on ratios, not angles and circles’.

UNSW Sydney scientists have discovered the purpose of a famous 3700-year old Babylonian clay tablet, revealing it is the world’s oldest and most accurate trigonometric table, possibly used by ancient mathematical scribes to calculate how to construct palaces and temples and build canals.

The new research shows the Babylonians beat the Greeks to the invention of trigonometry – the study of triangles – by more than 1000 years, and reveals an ancient mathematical sophistication that had been hidden until now.

Known as Plimpton 322, the small tablet was discovered in the early 1900s in what is now southern Iraq by archaeologist, academic, diplomat and antiquities dealer Edgar Banks, the person on whom the fictional character Indiana Jones was based.

Volcano eruptions triggered mass extinction before the age of dinosaurs 200 million years ago

Is there a contradiction in this IB Times report? First it says volcanism causes cooling, then we’re told the resulting volcanic CO2 could have caused warming.

High concentration of mercury identified in ancient sediments suggest that large-scale episodes of volcanism coincided with the end-Triassic mass extinction around 201 million years ago.

It is likely that these huge pulses of volcanic activity led to great environmental perturbations, leading to the extinction of many species living on Earth at the time and setting the scene for the dawn of the dinosaurs.

Previous studies had already shown that volcanic activity was happening around the time of the extinction and there was some evidence for an increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.

Marko, Soon et al: To Put America First Is to Put Our Planet’s Climate First

The article below was contributed by Istvan Marko, J. Scott Armstrong, William M. Briggs, Kesten Green, Hermann Harde, David R. Legates, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, and Willie Soon.

On June 2, 2017, in a Letter regarding US withdrawal from Paris climate agreement addressed to the MIT community, Professor Rafael Reif, president of MIT, criticized President Trump’s decision to exit the Paris Climate Accords. In this refutation, we propose to clarify the scientific understanding of the Earth’s climate and to dispel the expensively fostered popular delusion that man-made global warming will be dangerous and that, therefore, the Paris Agreement would be beneficial.

Professor Reif wrote, “Yesterday, the White House took the position that the Paris climate agreement – a landmark effort to combat global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions – was a bad deal for America.”

There is no science unambiguously establishing that CO₂ is the chief cause of the warming observed since the end of the Little Ice Age. The opposite has been repeatedly demonstrated. Ice cores have revealed that changes in CO₂ concentration follow, rather than precede, changes in temperature. During the last deglaciation, the latest high-resolution records show atmospheric CO₂ lagging temperature by 50 to 500 years. Our enterprises and industries return to the air some of the CO₂ that was formerly present there, and some warming may be expected. That warming will be small and beneficial.

Climategate email revisited: Ed Cook throws the tree ring circus under the bus

Just a little reminder of the science still championed by Al Gore, Barack Obama, the UN IPCC, the UK parliament’s climate change committee and all those august institutions of science such as the Royal Society, the AAAS, and the rest. Ed cook offered to put a bomb under it in 2003 by telling the truth (in bold), but none of the Hockey Jockeys at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit wanted to know.

From: Edward Cook <drdendro@xxxx.columbia.edu>
To: Keith Briffa <k.briffa@xxx.ac.uk>
Subject: An idea to pass by you
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2003 08:32:11 -0400
Hi Keith,

After the meeting in Norway, where I presented the Esper stuff as
described in the extended abstract I sent you, and hearing Bradley’s
follow-up talk on how everybody but him has fucked up in
reconstructing past NH temperatures over the past 1000 years (this is
a bit of an overstatement on my part I must admit, but his air of
papal infallibility is really quite nauseating at times), I have come
up with an idea that I want you to be involved in. Consider the
tentative title:

“Northern Hemisphere Temperatures Over The Past Millennium: Where Are
The Greatest Uncertainties?”

Authors: Cook, Briffa, Esper, Osborn, D’Arrigo, Bradley(?), Jones
(??), Mann (infinite?) – I am afraid the Mike and Phil are too
personally invested in things now (i.e. the 2003 GRL paper that is
probably the worst paper Phil has ever been involved in – Bradley
hates it as well), but I am willing to offer to include them if they
can contribute without just defending their past work – this is the
key to having anyone involved. Be honest. Lay it all out on the table
and don’t start by assuming that ANY reconstruction is better than
any other.

Here are my ideas for the paper in a nutshell (please bear with me):

Dinosaur asteroid hit ‘worst possible place’

Credit: quora.com

The energy that went into making the impact crater is thought to be equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima A-bombs, as BBC News explains. Nowhere to run/hide/escape.

Scientists who drilled into the impact crater associated with the demise of the dinosaurs summarised their findings so far in a BBC Two documentary on Monday.

The researchers recovered rocks from under the Gulf of Mexico that were hit by an asteroid 66 million years ago. The nature of this material records the details of the event.

It is becoming clear that the 15km-wide asteroid could not have hit a worse place on Earth.

Massive asteroid impact crater in Falklands linked with Great Dying mass extinction

Credit: worldatlas.com

Something new for geologists to get their teeth into.

The Falkland Islands may be home to one of the world’s largest craters, reports the IB Times. A new analysis has revealed it has many characteristics of an asteroid impact and may date back to the ‘Great Dying’ extinction event.

About 200 similar large craters have been discovered so far on Earth but there are many other examples of them on other planets including on Venus, Mercury and Mars.

The Falkland Islands structure, which is described in detail in the journal Terra Nova, has a diameter measuring approximately 250 kilometres (150 miles). If it turns out to be an impact crater, this size would make it one of Earth’s largest – comparable to the famous Chicxulub crater discovered in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico nearly four decades ago.

Glacial Advance During The Little Ice Age

.
.
Interesting historical round-up from Paul Homewood, which concludes:
‘There is no written law of nature that says glaciers should be the size they were in Victorian times.’

Indeed.
—
Update – see also the follow-up post: Rapid Retreat Of Glaciers In Early 20thC

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

From HH Lamb’s “Climate, History and the Modern World”

We know that sea levels have risen since the late 19thC, and that much of this is due to melting of glaciers and ice sheets. However, we also know that the same glaciers were growing rapidly during the Little Ice Age, so can we say that 20thC sea level rise is anything other than a natural process?

Let’s remind ourselves of just how great and widespread this glacial advance was.

The history of glacial advance in the European Alps is well documented. Historian, Brian Fagan, offers us this horrifying account:

View original post 1,484 more words

Ancient stone carvings confirm comet struck Earth in 10,950BC

Carving at Göbekli Tepe

The alleged event appears to pre-date the Göbekli Tepe site itself by at least 1,500 years, which seems at odds with the idea that the carvings were intended as observations of it.

Ancient stone carvings confirm that a comet struck the Earth around 11,000BC, a devastating event which wiped out woolly mammoths and sparked the rise of civilisations, says the Daily Telegraph.

Experts at the University of Edinburgh analysed mysterious symbols carved onto stone pillars at Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, to find out if they could be linked to constellations. The markings suggest that a swarm of comet fragments hit Earth at the exact same time that a mini-ice age struck, changing the entire course of human history. 

Scientists have speculated for decades that a comet could be behind the sudden fall in temperature during a period known as the Younger Dryas.

Tony Heller: Extreme weather of 1936 and Hiding the warmth of early C20th

Tony Heller, AKA Steve Goddard, has published two short videos on youtube covering the topics of the extreme weather of 1936 compared to today, and the way temperature data has been manipulated to hide the 1940s-1970s cooling trend. Well worth 15 minutes of your time.

Advanced geometry used by prehistoric architects in US Southwest, say scientists

[click on image to enlarge]

Another one to add to the ‘how and why did they do that?’ list of ancient sites. Years of research lie ahead.

Imagine you are about to plan and construct a building that involves several complicated geometrical shapes, but you aren’t allowed to write down any numbers or notes as you do it. For most of us, this would be impossible.

Yet, new research from Arizona State University has revealed that the ancient Southwestern Pueblo people, who had no written language or written number system, were able to do just that – and used these skills to build sophisticated architectural complexes, reports Phys.org.

Dr. Sherry Towers, a professor with the ASU Simon A. Levin Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center, uncovered these findings while spending several years studying the Sun Temple archaeological site in Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, constructed around A.D. 1200.

“The site is known to have been an important focus of ceremony in the region for the ancestral Pueblo peoples, including solstice observations,” Towers says. “My original interest in the site involved looking at whether it was used for observing stars as well.”

However, as Towers delved deeper into the site’s layout and architecture, interesting patterns began to emerge.

Ancient tree rings suggest sunspot cycles have been ongoing for 290 million years

Petrified log at Petrified Forest National Park, AZ
[image credit: Jon Sullivan / Wikipedia]

They seem to base their estimates of the past solar cycle length on a study of only 79 years’ worth of data which is almost certainly too short for high accuracy, but the results are interesting nevertheless.

A pair of German researchers has found evidence in ancient tree rings of a solar sunspot cycle millions of years ago similar to the one observed in more modern times, reports Phys.org.

In their paper published in the journal Geology, Ludwig Luthardt and Ronny Rößler describe how they gathered an assortment of petrified tree samples from a region in Germany and used them to count sunspot cycles.

Scientists know that the sun undergoes a sunspot cycle of approximately 11 years—some spots appear, grow cooler and then slowly move toward the equator and eventually disappear—the changes to the sun spots cause changes to the brightness level of the sun—as the level waxes and wanes, plants here on Earth respond, growing more or less in a given year—this can be seen in the width of tree rings.

In this new effort, the researchers gathered petrified tree samples from a region of Germany that was covered by lava during a volcanic eruption approximately 290 million years ago (during the Permian period), offering a historical record of sun activity.

Exoplanet anniversary: 1st alien worlds confirmed 25 years ago today

Still from pulsar animation. [Image credit: NASA]

The exoplanet revolution began 25 years ago today. On Jan. 9, 1992, astronomers Alex Wolszczan and Dale Frail published a paper in the journal Nature announcing the discovery of two planets circling an incredibly dense, rapidly rotating stellar corpse known as a pulsar.

It was a landmark find: while several alien-world “candidates” had recently been spotted, Wolszczan and Frail provided the first confirmation that planets exist beyond our own solar system, reports Mike Wall.

“From the very start, the existence of such a system carried with it a prediction that planets around other stars must be common, and that they may exist in a wide variety of architectures, which would be impossible to anticipate on the basis of our knowledge of the solar system alone,” Wolszczan, who’s based at Pennsylvania State University, wrote in a note about the pulsar planets for the “Name Exoworlds” contest sponsored by the International Astronomical Union.

5,000-year-old calendar rock found in Sicily excites archaeologists

Winter solstice sunrise at the historic site in Sicily [image credit: Giuseppe La Spina]

A team of researchers exploring the southern coast of Sicily have found an intriguing prehistoric calendar rock, reports Ancient Origins.

After conducting some empirical observations, they discovered the rising sun of the winter solstice aligns perfectly with a large hole in a rock formation on a hill near a prehistoric necropolis.

They also discovered a fallen megalith that would have stood directly in front of the hole. Stonehenge-like comparisons abound in the media.

Boiler room fire led to the sinking of the Titanic, says new research

Titanic: was this dark mark due to excessive heat from the boiler room? – asks TV prog.

Was the Titanic going faster than usual because its coal supplies were in danger of running out due to a fire? This is one theory put forward in a new TV documentary as Sott.net reports. The TV report also shows how the ship’s internal flooding could have been accelerated by metal buckling due to intense heat from the fire.

Fire had been raging in the Titanic’s boiler room even before it left Southampton for New York, weakening the liner’s hull and turning a collision with an iceberg into the infamous disaster, a new British documentary claims.

The mystery of the ‘Amazon Stonehenge’ near the city of Calçoene

Some stones of Rego Grande, known as the ‘Amazon Stonehenge’

As soon as the Mail Online report of this historic site said there were 127 stones, an idea occurred. In the lunar Metonic cycle of ~19 years there are 254 lunar orbits (= sidereal months) of the Earth, which is 127 x 2. If this has already been suggested somewhere, I’m not aware of it!

Wikipedia says: ‘the Metonic cycle…is a period of very close to 19 years that is remarkable for being nearly a common multiple of the solar year and the synodic (lunar) month.’
—
A megalithic stone circle in Brazil hints that the indigenous people of the Amazon may have been more sophisticated than archaeologists first thought.

Rego Grande, known as the ‘Amazon Stonehenge’ after the famous prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, is located in Amapá state, near the city of Calçoene. Experts say the unusual stone arrangement may have been used as a place of worship as well as for astronomical observations related to crop cycles.

Trumped!

Nice one Josh. 🙂

Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723)

. . . my work, which I’ve done for a long time, was not pursued in order to gain the praise I now enjoy, but chiefly from a craving after knowledge, which I notice resides in me more than in most other men. And therewithal, whenever I found out anything remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof.Antony van Leeuwenhoek. Letter of June 12, 1716

---

Antony van Leeuwenhoek was an unlikely scientist. A tradesman of Delft, Holland, he came from a family of tradesmen, had no fortune, received no higher education or university degrees, and knew no languages other than his native Dutch. This would have been enough to exclude him from the scientific community of his time completely. Yet with skill, diligence, an endless curiosity, and an open mind free of the scientific dogma of his day, Leeuwenhoek succeeded in making some of the most important discoveries in the history of biology. It was he who discovered bacteria, free-living and parasitic microscopic protists, sperm cells, blood cells, microscopic nematodes and rotifers, and much more. His researches, which were widely circulated, opened up an entire world of microscopic life to the awareness of scientists.

Astronomy shown to be set in standing stone

Brodgar standing stones, Orkney [image credit: BBC]

University of Adelaide research has for the first time statistically proven that the earliest standing stone monuments of Britain, the great circles, were constructed specifically in line with the movements of the Sun and Moon, 5000 years ago. H/T ScienceDaily

The research, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, details the use of innovative 2D and 3D technology to construct quantitative tests of the patterns of alignment of the standing stones.

Hubris: The Troubling Science, Economics, and Politics of Climate Change

Interview at Lifesitenews with Michael Hart.

Michael Hart is a former official in Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and now emeritus professor of international affairs at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where he has taught courses on the laws and institutions of international trade, Canadian foreign policy, and the politics of climate change. He held the Fulbright-Woodrow Wilson Center Visiting Research Chair in Canada-U.S. Relations and was Scholar-in-Residence in the School of International Service, Senior Fellow at American University in Washington, and is the founder and director emeritus of Carleton University’s Centre for Trade Policy and Law. In addition, he has taught courses in several other countries. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of more than a dozen books and several hundred articles.

LifeSiteNews interviewed him during a conference on Catholic Perspectives on the Environment, sponsored by the Wojtyla Institute for Teachers, held at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom in Barry’s Bay, Ontario, August  4-6, 2016.

1)  Professor Hart, your book Hubris: The Troubling Science, Economics, and Politics of Climate Change, has recently been published. In it, you challenge a worldwide project that has become something of a sacred cow. Can you tell our readers what motivated you to begin your research into the subject?

I was initially motivated by questions from my students – and my wife – about the policy implications of climate change. The more I looked into it, however, the more I learned the extent to which it fit with one of my research interests: the extent to which modern health, safety, and environmental regulatory activity relies on poor science advanced by activists to push an agenda. I learned that both domestic and international actors had succeeded in using the poorly understood science of climate change to advance an ambitious environmental agenda focused on increasing centralized control over people’s daily lives.