Sneak Peeks

The June 15 issue of the MRB is just finished with reviews and content editing. There might be some problems rendering it because of the upgrades to Vista and Office 2007 since the March issue. (Many software programs must be upgraded to be Vista-compatible.) But I expect it will all happen within a few days.

The main theme of this issue is "Life on Mars" -- evidence for liquid water and living microbes.

To preview the issue, watch for the link to appear first at the "Publications" tab, "Bulletin" sub-tab. Please report any problems with the posting so we can fix them before the general announcement goes out. Thx. -|Tom|-

I've just added a PDF version of the current Bulletin, which presumably is suitable for printing and would reproduce the layout of the print edition. I'd be very interested in reports about how well this works and how well the images turn out, especially if anyone has a color printer for the task. -|Tom|-

The close swing-by of Iapetus yesterday has yielded an amazing admission. From saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/im...ils.cfm?imageID=1270 :

One of the important new results is that no clear evidence can be found that erupted fluids have resurfaced Cassini Regio. The high density of impact craters argues that the terrain underlying the dark coating is relatively ancient and has not been eradicated by its emplacement. Thus, Cassini Regio may have had its origin in plume-style eruptions in which dark particulate materials accumulated on the surface as fallout, perhaps in conjunction with the creation of the equatorial ridge. On the other hand, <i>the dark deposits in Cassini Regio may be a surface coating consistent with, and perhaps more simply explained by, the fall of dark materials from outside.</i> [emphasis added]

And so we draw incrementally closer to the inevitable. -|Tom|-

The September issue is now complete and in process. It announces a major international cosmology meeting in Port Angeles WA from 2008 Sept. 7-11, organized by Meta Research and two other groups who think the Big Bang should be replaced. My article deals with lunar eclipses and "blue moons". And Neil DeRosa has an article about the origin of "black gold" (petroleum), which has been long-debated and has some implications for both science in general and astronomy in particular. Finally, we have five notes in "Meta Science in the News", including some about the note in the previous message.