TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES
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| Starwatch: Mercury at its best Mercury, that most elusive and smallest of planets, is about to put on its best morning show of 2010 for starwatchers at our latitudes. Our diagram plots it in the eastern pre-dawn twilight, with its swelling dot-size indicative of its growing brightness. Brightening rapidly, it doubles in luminosity from magnitude 1.5 yesterday morning to mag 0.8 tomorrow. The pace drops, though, with the planet reaching mag -0.1 on Saturday and -1.1 by the month's end. It stands farthest W of the Sun, 18°, on Sunday when the diagram shows it as a shade over 10° high and almost due E 30 minutes before sunrise. In fact, Mercury rises more than 90 minutes before the Sun from Wednesday until the 25th, so we have a decent window in which to glimpse it before it is overwhelmed by the twilight.Because of that twilight, it is easier to spot through binoculars though it should become readily visible to the naked eye as it brightens. Not far away is Leo's leading star Regulus which is a good deal fainter at mag 1.4 and climbs from 6° above-right of Mercury tomorrow to twice this distance by the 22nd.Don't be misled by the growing brightness of Mercury into thinking that it is drawing close to us. In fact, it came closest (94m km) as it slipped through inferior conjunction between the Sun and the Earth 10 days ago. Tomorrow it lies 119m km away, its 4,879km globe appearing 8 arcsec across and 24% sunlit if viewed telescopically. It is 7 arcsec wide and 50% illuminated on the 20th, shrinking to less than 6 arcsec and 86% on the 30th.Not that Mercury is an easy telescopic subject. For many years, indistinct views through the turbulent air near the horizon gave astronomers the impression that Mercury's day was the same as its year – 88 Earth-days. In fact, we now know that a day on Mercury lasts for 176 Earth-days or two Mercury-years. Flyby inspections by Nasa probes, Mariner 10 in 1974/5 and more recently by Messenger, show a heavily cratered surface beneath the flimsiest atmosphere imaginable. Temperatures vary from some 400C directly facing the Sun to a cool -190C during the long night. Hundreds of lengthy cliffs called lobate scarps cross the surface, suggesting that Mercury has contracted over time – it is only recently that a handful of similar scarps, of similar origin, have been recognised on our Moon.Mercury is far from the only planet of current interest. We can hardly miss Jupiter which dominates our E sky at nightfall and climbs well up into the S by the middle of the night. Next Monday it reaches its closest opposition since 1963 when it shines at mag -2.9 and is 50 arcsec wide. It is worth a look, too, for Uranus which binoculars show as a relatively dim star of mag 5.7 just 1° NW (two Moon-breadths above-right) of Jupiter this evening, moving to 1.4° NE of Jupiter by the 30th. Alan Pickupguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
UN climate chief resignation call Several environmentalists, UK MPs and scientists has called for the resignation of Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN's climate science body. bbc.co.uk |
Reframing the New Atheism debate | Ed Halliwell The centrality of consciousness should be acknowledged, rather than seeing the debate as purely scientific or religiousAlmost two weeks on from the After New Atheism event at the RSA and the trail seems to have gone cold. It sounded so promising – the setup from a humanist writer professing his boredom with the stagnancy of debate, a panel of distinguished thinkers charged with leading the way forward, and a full house of engaged attendees, palpably waiting for the emergence of a new agenda that could save us from more rounds of knockabout "is-there-or-isn't there" pantomime.And yet it didn't quite happen. As Mark Vernon reported, the evening itself was a bit of a damp squib, and normal service has been resumed on comment threads, with Caspar Melville – the aforementioned humanist – understandably crying foul at the pummelling he received for daring to call for more listening and less braying.It's a shame, because a way through has been hinted at, including at the event itself. Marilynne Robinson pointed to it when she said that "New Atheism doesn't acknowledge the centrality of consciousness", suggesting that when we view ourselves and the world in purely material terms, as crude scientism does, we rob ourselves of some of our humanity. Sadly, she didn't elaborate further, and a potential flicker of illumination was lost.So how might the lie of the land change if we did acknowledge the centrality of consciousness?This would mean taking an active interest in how our attempts at making objective observations are inevitably coloured by the subjective standpoint from which we view them; and becoming more alert to how our perceptions and perspectives are built from the ground of our personal histories: the parenting we received, our education, our cultural background, our genetics, the time and place we live in and so on. It would mean recognising that we don't see things clearly.When a TV picture is fuzzy, don't we then examine our receiving equipment, rather than assuming the fuzziness is meant to be part of the transmission? In meditation practice, this process is sometimes called "turning the eyeballs inwards" and it's a central element of the Buddhist non-theistic tradition, which is, it has been said, less interested in whether God exists as whether the perceiver of God exists. Or, to put it another way, how can we judge evidence accurately when we're doing the judging from the position of an ever-changing, non-solid self and not recognising that our standpoint must inevitably influence the observation?Whether it's fixation on belief in God or fixation on the absence of evidence for God, whenever we project our crystallised concepts onto the world and call them real, we are falling into a kind of theism – creating gods out of our own ideas and making ourselves "right". We all do it, of course, and it usually ends in the kind of unproductive fight that has characterised the New Atheist debate in recent years.So wouldn't it be more interesting to reframe all this as a psychological rather than scientific or religious inquiry and practise becoming familiar with how our minds work before we try to work out what, if anything, created them? There is a cost – we'd have to let go of being "right", and instead embrace a deep kind of doubt, one that accepts that the conceptual and perceptual tools we use to explore the world are limited and may be faulty. But in going beyond an investigation of objects and instead focusing a spotlight on the subject that perceives, we might expand our understanding, even while all the time accepting that we might at any point be mistaken.This position of deep doubt is creative, because it encourages us to consistently approach the world with the curiosity of what Shunru Suzuki called "beginner's mind" – by encountering the world afresh in each moment, we create space for new insights to occur. We drop any over-reliance on whatever lulls us into a stuck sense of security, and come into a new relationship with the world. We might also come to value the information (and mystery) offered by other phenomena that are more obviously not solid nor easy to interpret concretely– dreams, perhaps, myths and symbols, music or emotions.We may not resolve the question of what it all means, but it could lead us to a richer, fuller experience of life as we continue to investigate. And by encouraging humility through recognition of our fallibility, we could perhaps move beyond the theism of New Atheism in a way that allows us to be a bit kinder to those with whom we disagree. How about it?AtheismReligionPsychologyEd Halliwellguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Study reveals why the leopard got its spots Rudyard Kipling was right: leopards and other big cats have had to change their spots in order to survive. abc.net.au |
Forty-year mystery of Mars solved ASTRONOMERS said they could explain a four-decade-old enigma surrounding rugged troughs and a chasm in the northern ice cap of Mars. news.com.au |