The other side of Mercury

The NASA spacecraft MESSENGER has managed to orbit Mercury, and take a picture of the previously unseen side of Mercury, giving us the first glimpse.

You can see the picture at NASA's MESSENGER website.

Edit: National Geographic has more

New NASA computer model predicts more severe storms

Via ScienceDaily I became aware of this NASA press release:

NASA Study Predicts More Severe Storms With Global Warming

NASA scientists have developed a new climate model that indicates that the most violent severe storms and tornadoes may become more common as Earth’s climate warms.

This is quite on par with what we already presume. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure that it's the premise of Chris Mooney's newest book.

Previous climate model studies have shown that heavy rainstorms will be more common in a warmer climate, but few global models have attempted to simulate the strength of updrafts in these storms. The model developed at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies by researchers Tony Del Genio, Mao-Sung Yao, and Jeff Jonas is the first to successfully simulate the observed difference in strength between land and ocean storms and is the first to estimate how the strength will change in a warming climate, including “severe thunderstorms” that also occur with significant wind shear and produce damaging winds at the ground. This information can be derived from the temperatures and humidities predicted by a climate computer model, according to the new study published on August 17 in the American Geophysical Union’s Geophysical Research Letters. It predicts that in a warmer climate, stronger and more severe storms can be expected, but with fewer storms overall.

Interesting. I knew that it was presumed that there would be more strong storms, and that the strength of the strongest ones would be worse, but I didn't know that tehre would be an overall decline in the number of storms.

As the NASA story tells, the models has been applied to know conditions, and was correct, so it would seem that we should take its predictions seriously. Given that those predicitions are quite uncomfortable, it again shows us the bad consequences of global warming.

Go read the rest of the story

Total destruction not imminent

It seems that Earth is not at risk for getting destroyed by any large objects from space any time soon.

'Planet Killer' Not in the Stars, Asteroid Research Indicates (Washington Post)

The key paragraph related to this:

The chairman of this week's Planetary Defense Conference, William Ailor of the Aerospace Corp., a nonprofit established by Congress to support the Air Force's space defense program, said scientists generally agree that the risk to Earth from large asteroids is small. Researchers have identified more than 700 of these potential "planet killers" -- out of an estimated 1,000 -- and found that not one is on a collision course with Earth.

"But with the smaller ones, the asteroids in the [150-yard] range, we're finding more and more," Ailor said yesterday. "They're hard to detect, and it's hard to predict where they are headed, but they can do a great deal of damage." NASA estimates that there are as many as 100,000 of the smaller asteroids in near-Earth orbit and that about 20 are "potentially hazardous."

US politicians are calling for NASA to come up with a program for protecting the Earth against these smaller objects.