Recent content by CapnGranite

https://www.materialsproject.org/ The Materials Project You type in the crystal structure and it generates data

http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/3030/3030Tres.pdf Bruce Railsback is one of my favorite geologists and very highly regarded for his insights and syntheses. In the above link, he calculates the residence time of Na at 72 million years and that of Cl as 130 million years. I am a bit uneasy...

The abundance of sodium and chlorine in the present biosphere is ultimately due to their behavior in the differentiation of the igneous melts, presumably all the way back to the initial formation of the earth. In basaltic magmas, both elements end up as residual ions in late stage minerals, or...

There are a few geodes in eastern Oregon, Idaho and Utah that rattle. It's possible that there are stones inside yours, but some rattlers that have been cut open also have poorly formed quartz crystals that possibly broke off. Smaller geodes tend to be spheroidal and are more typically picked...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/96JD03436/epdf Radiative forcing and climate response This was one of the first papers that helped shape the current climate change model. Other papers can be found in http://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/jgr/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)2169-8996/...

Amber is one of the better preservatives of DNA, so dinosaur extracting DNA in amber might be possible, but there has been no success so far in extracting DNA from any animal. Some studies looking into DNA from flies in copal, a pre-amber material, failed. While amber preserves DNA longer than...

I see 4-ft tall raptor roadrunners in my yard soon, to say nothing about a corner on cock fights.

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(16)31193-9.pdf A Feathered Dinosaur Tail with Primitive Plumage Trapped in Mid-Cretaceous Amber

With regard to the use of "belief" in language with the public, its worse case scenario popped up at Thanksgiving Day dinner. I have been avoiding contact with a couple who are both rabid believers that climate change is a hoax. The dinner was uneventful, but we retired to the den and the...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2003GL016899/epdf POAM III observations of the anomalous 2002 Antarctic ozone hole http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2003GL017117/epdf Unusual stratospheric transport and mixing during the 2002 Antarctic winter...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2004JD005322/epdf NOy from Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding on Environmental Satellite during the Southern Hemisphere polar vortex split in September//October 2002 This is the only paper I have on this computer. It is open-access

Swansong Biospheres II: The final signs of life on terrestrial planets near the end of their habitable lifetimes...

Unless "geologic timescales" is defined, relevance of our actions is moot. While it doesn't seem to have happened by the 2016 target, the Anthropocene Epoch will probably be accepted as a unit of the geologic timescale. The time frame of human evolution is even longer than that. In either...

http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.252501 Structure and Rotations of the Hoyle State "The excited state of the C12 nucleus known as the “Hoyle state” constitutes one of the most interesting, difficult, and timely challenges in nuclear physics, as it plays a key role in...

I had intended to stay away from this thread, but there are a couple things that I think should be addressed. One is that scientists "believe" in global warming. I've been involved in the larger aspect of that--global environmental change, of which global warming is an aspect-- for pretty much...