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A random walk in science

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Welcome to ScienceBits

Read about the formation of Dendrites.
A random (and subjective) walk in science and physics in particular.

In the blog and bits sections, you'll find various interesting science related anecdotes you'll find nowhere else (e.g., an exhaled breath condensation calculator, or a snow probability calculator), and also things you will (such as a pension calculator written for my needs).

In the Research section, you'll find articles which are more directly related to my personal research in astrophysics, or on the role of cosmic rays behind climate variability. For example, you'll find articles on the Milky Way and Ice-Ages, or on the question of which mechanism is behind the 20th century global warming, is it Solar or Anthropogenic?

If there are any comments about the site you would like to post, feel free to post them here.

Enjoy your stay in \( \int c_i e^n ce \sim B i^ts \) !

Note, you're more than welcome to post comments, however due to some flooding by spam (mostly for v-pills), some precautions were placed. There are now two options to place comments:
  1. Anonymous comments, using a captcha and moderation (i.e., after I verify and approve that the content is legit.)
  2. Register/login using a captcha, and then comment without a captcha. If the comment appears legit., the next comments will not require any approval
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15 Aug 2015

Reply to Eschenbach

Willis Eschenbach had a post on wattsupwiththat.com attacking my post on this blog, which explains why the new sunspot reconstruction may be irrelevant to the solar climate link and also discusses the recent paper I have co-written. I am not writing it as comments on whatupwiththat is for several reasons, but the main one is because Eschenbach's comments were condescending and pejorative.
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10 Aug 2015

The Sunspots 2.0? Irrelevant. The Sun, still is.

Blog topic: 
After being asked by 5 independent people about the new sunspot number reconstruction and that it doesn’t show that the sun should have contributed any warming to the 20th century, I decided to write about it here. I have one word to describe it – irrelevant. It is also a good opportunity to write about new results (well, one that saw the light of day a few months ago) showing again that the sun has a large effect on climate. Yet, the world will still continue to ignore it. Am I surprised? No I’m not.
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16 Jun 2015

He who controls the past controls the future! On the vanishing global warming hiatus

Ship water intake measures the hiatus?
Two weeks ago a science magazine paper appeared claiming that once various systematic errors in the sea surface temperature are corrected for, the global warming “hiatus” is gone. Yep, vanished as if it was never there. According to the study, temperatures over the past 18 years or so have in fact continued rising as they did in the preceding decades. Here’s my two pennies worth opinion of it.
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06 Jun 2015

Bill Nye, the not-so-good-science guy

Blog topic: 
Bill "the science guy" Nye says that I am a denier.
I recently stumbled on a transcript of Bill “the science guy” Nye’s interview on CNN last week. In it, he said that climate skeptics (i.e., people like myself), are at least as bad as people who deny that smoking causes cancer. There are quite a few things he misses, in fact, he got things totally wrong, but I do like the his analogy to smoking and cancer as you’ll see.

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26 Apr 2015

Euthanizing Overholt et al.: How bad can a bad paper be?

Blog topic: 
Last month I visited the U of Washington to give a talk in which I discussed the effects of cosmic rays on climate. At the end of it, not one, but two people independently asked me about Overholt et al., which supposedly ruled out the idea that passages through the galactic spiral arms affect the appearance of glaciations on Earth. I told them that the paper had really stupid mistakes and it should be discarded in the waste bin of history, but given that Overholt et al. is still considered at all, I have no choice but to more openly euthanize it.
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27 Mar 2015

Bits of Science / Roundup #1

Blog topic: 
Aurorae on Ganymede
Since I look for interesting science bits (mostly astro bits) for the Monday coffee of our astrophysics group, I realized that I could share it with the readers including some interpretation (and hopefully some added value) by your humble servant. So, here’s my try. If it works (and won’t be too much time) I’ll continue! Although for the coffee I bring mostly astrophysics and some planetary science, here I’ll also try to bring interesting results in climate (those that aren't lame...).

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11 Mar 2015

Sights from a Field Trip in the Milky Way: From Paleoclimatology to Dark Matter

Blog topic: 
32 million year oscillation in the paleoclimate data
I was recently asked to write an article to “The Institute Letter” of Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where I am spending a wonderful sabbatical year. It briefly describes a very interesting discovery that my colleagues and I made, which is that the 32 million year oscillation of the solar system perpendicular to the galactic plane can clearly be seen in the paleoclimate data. In the article, I also discuss how the discovery came and some of its implications. I am bringing a slightly expanded version here (with more figures and elaborated caption), and references of course. Enjoy.
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01 Jul 2014

A friend has passed away

Blog topic: 
Nigel Calder's the weather machine movie about the imminent ice age
I just found out that a dear friend had passed away. Nigel Calder was the voice of rationality within a sea of extreme, something which is very much missing in the global warming debate. He didn't accept things for granted, but on the other hand didn't make extreme claims in the opposite direction either. He was simply driven by science (i.e., curiosity). One of his interests was of course that of climate.

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28 Apr 2013

Gravity waves in rain clouds over the Arava valley

Lee Waves in Rain Clouds over the Arava Valley

Spring weather here in Israel was rather strange. Although winter with most of its precipitation should have been over, we had a few very rainy days. We're now in the midst of a heat wave with temperatures as much as 20°C higher than just a week before. In between there was a nice gravity wave appear over the Arava Valley, the first one I have ever seen in a rain radar!

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15 Feb 2013

Predicting a supernova precursor (on SN2010mc)

Blog topic: 

A very interesting paper recently appeared in nature. It describes the detection of a precursor eruption of a supernova progenitor more than a month before the supernova explosion itself. It is particularly interesting because this detection was not serendipitous—it was based on my prediction.

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