My dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the remarkable stupidity of the common herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the asp…

I was chilling with the family two weeks ago at Atlantis, Bahamas, when to my surprise an additional mammoth tusk entered my life. I got a hush-hush email and photo from a friend and long-time employee telling me that our contractor’s brand new Volvo excavator was at that moment assisting in the excavation of a large mammoth tusk and skull. I was aware since 2007 that the stream channels…

I’m back — with at least five blogs loaded in my chamber. It is a terrible thing for a blogger to disappear for longish periods, only to re-appear with several posts in quick succession. But I’m not getting paid for this and (somewhat) erratic blogging is better than no blogging at all. (In my defense as well, pressing news on our subject has been scarce). First up is a wonderful…

 The excavation at Bull Creek, Oklahoma, shows the paleosol — ancient buried soil; the dark black layer in the side of the cliff — that formed during the Younger Dryas. – UCSB More recently, another group of earth scientists, including UCSB’s Alexander Simms and alumna Hanna Alexander, re-examined the distribution of nanodiamonds in Bull Creek’s sedimentological record to…

A comet collided with the Earth’s atmosphere from the Constellation of Orion on 17 Jan AD 773 with coma stretched across the whole sky and disappeared within one day with ‘dust rain’ in the daytime. — Old Tang Dynasty Book BBC…

Wrote the book Recent Developments in the Analysis of the Black Mat Layer and Cosmic Impact at 12.8 ka Bibs and Bios: William C. Mahaney, Leslie Keiser, David H. Krinsley, Allen West!, Randy Dirszowsky, Chris C.R. Allen, Pedro Costa Article first published online: 6 DEC 2013 Geografiska Annaler: Series A, Physical Geography Abstract: Recent analyses of sediment samples from “black mat”…