Year: 2022

STRANGER THAN STRANGE. “Kangaroos have three vaginas and two uteruses. “Koalas, wombats and Tasmanian devils all share the three-vagina structure. The side ones carry sperm to the two uteruses (and males marsupials often have two-pronged penises), while the middle vagina sends the joey down to the outside world. The programme also suggested that this might explain why marsupial embryos are born at such a premature stage of development.” https://lnkd.in/dNKiT4Z6 View in LinkedIn

Perhaps one of the stranger children’s toys at the Figueres Toy Museum in Catalinia. This is on a parr with Grimm’s fairy tales. View in LinkedIn

The Veil Nebula seen by Hubble. https://lnkd.in/dAAK_yED View in LinkedIn

TECTONICS + MAGNETIC SHIELD. “The approximate coincidence of the Ediacarian biological leap forward with the onset of plate tectonics makes a connection between them possible. The link may be that Earth's asthenosphere and its internally generated strong dipolar magnetic field both originated then as a result of Sun/Earth/Moon orbital mechanics.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012825219302636?via=ihub View in LinkedIn

ORBITAL CONSEQUENCES. “This may have generated torques and frictional heating that caused not only development of an asthenosphere, enabling plate tectonics, but also influenced convection in the outer core. This in turn enabled differential core motions and development of an inner core and internal strong dipolar magnetic field for the first time, shielding Earth's surface from solar-particle bombardment and enabling evolution.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012825219302636?via=ihub View in LinkedIn

TESTABLE HYPOTHESIS. “Recent advances in orbital understanding and paleomagnetic evidence suggests such speculative ideas but much more information of course is needed to test it.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012825219302636?via%3Dihub View in LinkedIn

SALUTE TO WARREN HAMILTON. “The Plate Tectonic Pump: How the Transition from Single Lid to Plate Tectonics Stimulates Biological Evolution" presented by Dr. Robert Stern and Dr. Taras Gerya. Originally presented at GSA 2019 in Phoenix in the session "Unconventional Ideas and Outrageous Hypotheses: In Honor of Warren B. Hamilton”. https://lnkd.in/ev5Grjwz View in LinkedIn

PRECISE MAGNETIC HISTORY DATING. “Magnetic reversals and the record they leave in the oceanic crust in the form of negatively and positively magnetized stripes paralleling the oceanic spreading centres, among other data, enable us to track the motion path of continents back to 150 Ma with great precision, and back to 230 Ma with some precision.” https://lnkd.in/eJYccnpE View in LinkedIn

ENTRENCHED OPPOSITION. “Professor Hamilton believes in plate tectonics, but has come to realize that a generally accepted component of the theory, mantle plumes, is wrong. The opposition he witnessed to any challenge to plumes exposed an ugly side of the academic geology world that many are unaware of.” https://lnkd.in/d8kyQ4xj View in LinkedIn

STIFLING DEBATE. “I know of many recent examples wherein prominent members of the dominant pro-plume community have stifled anti-plume reports and research. Although such perpetrators might tell themselves that they are maintaining professional standards, bad science is to them anything contrary to their own conjectures. (I have been guilty of this myself in other contexts).” https://lnkd.in/d8kyQ4xj View in LinkedIn