No surviving species today is the same as a fossil or hypothetical form claimed to be an intermediate form, but living creatures preserve historical information that is otherwise lost to us in their unique adaptations and the adaptations they share with fossil/hypothetical forms. So whenever the press says a living creature is somehow “ancestral” or

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New York Times article discussing the latest evidence on the Hadean Aeon (4.5-3.8 Gya) being relatively less nasty than previously believed… A New Picture of the Early Earth …with the possibility of oceans, plate tectonics, even Life dating back to c.4.4 Gya. The colder, even chilly Earth that has emerged is potentially just what the

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Back in the 1950s a lot of work was done on the practical aspects of triggering fusion in various bomb designs and fuels. A relevant fuel is deuterium. Friedwardt Winterberg was a nuclear physicist involved in the very secret work on triggering fusion reactions without using fission bombs to create the solar-interior conditions needed for

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The Carnival is up at Starts With a Bang with a Thanksgiving theme… a concept meaningless to an Aussie like me.

Hopefully in your fave news-source, but here’s a few more… NASA – HST news New Scientist news-bite Scientific American BBC News From the ExtraSolar Planet Encyclopedia… Fomalhaut and planet …only 25 lightyears away. Hr 8799 and retinue …some 128.5 ly away. A bit far, but at least we know it has planets. …enjoy!

We were not Alone. Less than 12,000 years ago we shared the planet with Homo floresiensis – the Hobbits. Aunty (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) screened an updated documentary on the Hobbits, with some seriously teasing ideas… The Hobbit Enigma …which is fully downloadable. Well worth a look. It gives a voice to the sceptics as

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All quiet here in “Crowlspace” but elsewhere in the Blogoverse is the latest Carnival of Space. And the BlogHost IS normally in Swedish, in case you’re bleary eyed and feeling a touch out-of-it.

Carnival of Space #73 is up at Alice’s Astro Info and it has some real fascinating ones. First up – The Martian Chronicles ponders a crashed moonlet. Second – Starts With A Bang ponders whether galaxies have more stars than bodies have cells. Has the interesting fact that human somatic cells only number about 4

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Recent years have seen a lot of optimistic reappraisals of the requirements for space elevators – instead of multi-billion ton structures anchored to asteroids the current designs mass less than 1,000 tons and can support 20-ton elevator cars. However there are a few problems, one of which I’ll discuss here: How to power it? If

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Sky survey yields new cosmic haul …including a new Inner Oort Cloud member – making two, the first being Sedna. Solar plane makes record flight …stays aloft 3 days by recharging lithium-sulfur batteries via very light-weight solar cells. It cruised at 18 km up (temp -70 C, pressure 0.075) and is hoped to be a

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