Super Science & Technology

A new analysis has challenged the accuracy of a climate timeline showing that recent global warming is unmatched for a thousand years. That timeline, generated by stitching together hints of past temperatures embedded in tree rings, corals, ice layers and other sources, is one strut supporting the widely accepted view that the current warm spell is being caused mainly by accumulating heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe emissions. The authors of the study, published in the current issue of the online journal ScienceExpress, said they did not dispute that a sharp warming was under way and that its pace could signal a human influence. But they saidtheir test of the methods used to mesh recent temperature records with centuries-old evidence showed that past natural climate shifts were most likely sharply underestimated.

Many climate scientists credited the new study with pointing out how much uncertainty still surrounds efforts to turn nature's spotty, unwritten temperature records into a climate chronology. An accompanying commentary in ScienceExpress, by Dr. Timothy J. Osborn and Dr. Keith R. Briffa, scientists at the University of East Anglia in Britain, said it implied that "the extent to which recent warming can be viewed as 'unusual' would need to be reassessed."But many experts stressed that the new analysis did not undercut confidence that humans were themain cause of warming now - a conclusion based on a host of evidence trails, including ocean warming and accelerating melting of glaciers.Indeed, Dr. Briffa and Dr. Osborn wrote that if past climate swings were bigger than they appeared, this could mean the earth's climate system might be more sensitive to external influences like shifts in the sun's output or the concentration of greenhouse gases than scientists had estimated. They said that might mean that future warming from human activities could be greater than had so far been projected.The lead author of the new study, Dr. Hans von Storch of Germany's GKSS research center, disagreed, saying his conclusion was simply that the old method of integrating climate clues from beyonda. ...

Scientists believe they have pinpointed the origin of a low frequency "hum" that emanates from the Earth. The noise - which can be picked up in the two and seven mHz (millihertz) range - occurs far below the threshold of human hearing, US researchers said. A University of California team propose the hum is a product of storm energy being converted into other forms in the Pacific and Southern Oceans. Details of the study appear this week in the academic journal Nature. The daily release of energy required to generate the hum is equivalent to a magnitude 5.75 to six earthquake, say Junkee Rhie and Barbara Romanowicz ofthe University of California, Berkeley.

They show that the hum is not distributed over the entire surface of the globe as previously thought. Instead, they have pinpointed the source of the "noise" to the seas not the land. But the seismologists say that this noise cannot be explained by summing the contributions of small earthquakes. So they analysed seismic waves emitted from the Earth. These so-called Rayleigh waves were measured on two networks of seismic instruments in Japan and California. The Rayleigh waves are usually generated from medium to large magnitude earthquakes. But not in this case. Ocean source They filtered their data to detect and locate non-earthquake sources for these waves. Both setsof measurements agree that the "hum" originates from the northern Pacific Ocean during the northern hemisphere winter and the Southern ocean during southern hemisphere winter. These locations also correspond to the regions of maximum storm activity in the northern and southern winters. Rhie and Romanowicz think some of the energy contained in powerful waves generated by ocean storms at mid-latitudes is transferred via infragravity waves to the seafloor. Infragravity waves are probably generated in shallow water from more common types of ocean wave and are indirectly driven by winds over ocean basins. On the seafloor, these are converted to seismic waves and it is these that generated the hum. "TheEarth's. ...

In 35 years as a carpenter, Wally Wallington had solved just about every construction problem that ever came his way. But when he retired in 1999, the Lapeer County father of nine and grandfather of 27 had one more building mystery that he was determined to solve. Today, he admits, his pursuit of the issue sounds more than a little obsessive. Yet after five years of experimentation, he's convinced he has solved it. And it's all chronicled for us on a Web site that has made him the object of a Discovery Channel TV special and a worldwide celebrity of sorts. The mystery concerns megaliths. Mega whats, you ask? Megaliths are whatarcheologists call the ancient formations and edifices, like the pyramids and Stonehenge, made from huge stones and rocks by long-extinct civilizations.

Wallington, 58, is so enthralled by them that he's building a replica of the 4,000-year-old Stonehenge in the backyard of his home out in the country near the Genesee County line. And he's doing it like he's convinced the ancients did it, manipulating huge weights without hoisting them. Instead, he's using crude wooden tools and leverage to single-handedly move 10,000-pound cement blocks without wheels, rollers, ropes or pulleys.You can see it on the Web site his son-in-law made for him called the Forgotten Technology (www.theforgottentechnology.com).The Web sitedocuments it all, in still pictures and streaming video. He's even selling a DVD of his work."At first, nobody believed them when I told them what I could do," he said. "So I got a camcorder, set it up on a tripod and took video of everything."What Wallington learned was that the ancients were a lot smarter than we thought. "This really is forgotten technology," he says. "It's based on common sense, gravity and leverage."Wallington doesn't lift the massive blocks. Instead, he uses the mass of the object to create inertia and move the weight. He wedges a stone or a stick under the stone and rocks it back and forth, "spinning it," as he says. Think of a big teeter-totter;it's. ...

Albert Einstein once said the most important question a human being can ask is "Is the universe friendly?" Think of that for a moment. How would you answer? If you think the universe is truly friendly and supportive of you, this obviously has a huge effect on your perceptions and behaviour. The same applies if you think cosmos is hostile - or just indifferent to your fate. On a first reading, Einstein's question is trivially true. If you've decided, consciously or unconsciously, that the universe is friendly, your positive outlook is likely to be mirrored by positive responses from others, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy about yourworld being fundamentally good.

You are likely to have more friends, job offers, etc. Conversely, if you are suspicious by nature, or walk around with a cloud over your head, you're not likely to be much fun at parties, although you may win nodding approval from fellow grumps. At the very least your life is likely to seem a series of disappointments. This is pretty self-evident stuff. From Ralph Waldo Emerson to Dale Carnegie to Wayne Dyer, most of us have heard the drill: life is what you make it. But if it's Einstein talking, there's a good chance there's more to it than this. Spend a bit of time on it, and you realize the question's depth. This goes far beyond the soothing homilies about high self-esteem, or the pieties ofreligious dogmatism. This is about whether universe is friendly (unifiable, consoling) or unfriendly (neutral, fragmented, hostile, "other"). From the choice you make, you can extrapolate the direction of subsequent life decisions. Your state of being could evolve from the answer to that one all-important question. But bear with me; because it's a big topic and this essay is all over the map, from childhood psychology to the pest problems of a Hollywood star author, to the paradoxes of cosmology and quantum physics, to the "angel" in the library. The choice to believe in a friendly or unfriendly universe undoubtedly begins in our early years. It may well be that people who are preternaturally content, seemingly at peace with....