A bunch of interesting science in this week's issue of the journal Science. Including a new hypothesis that the universe is actually nearly a trillion years old (lay article here) and has gone through many big bangs and crunches. The physics here is over my head as always but it seems plausible. Then again, anything that complicated seems plausible, however, it does explain a lot of the known unknowns cosmologists currently face. Here's the abstract (*thanks minimalist for catching my error*)

Within conventional big bang cosmology, it has proven to be very difficult to understand why today's cosmological constant is so small. In this paper, we show that a cyclic model of the universe can naturally incorporate a dynamical mechanism that automatically relaxes the value of the cosmological constant, taking account of contributions to the vacuum density at all energy scales. Because the relaxation time grows exponentially as the vacuum density decreases, nearly every volume of space spends an overwhelming majority of the time at the stage when the cosmological constant is small and positive, as observed today.

Their previous paper which is more descriptive of their cyclic theory can be found here.

Science also has an article about the birth of a new field, Hurricane Climatology. The field seems to have direct relation to effects of global warming forcing more extreme storms.

In the 16 September 2005 issue of Science (p. 1844), less than 3 weeks after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, Webster and colleagues reported that in fact the abundance of tropical cyclones had not increased between 1970 and 2004. But the number of the strongest storms--those in categories 4 and 5--had jumped 57% from the first half of the period to the second. That reinforced findings by meteorologist and hurricane specialist Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He had reported in the 4 August 2005 issue of Nature that the total power released during the lives of Atlantic and western North Pacific storms had risen between 40% and 50% from the first half of a 45-year record to the last half.

Both Webster and Emanuel were taken aback by their own findings. "I changed my mind in a big way" about how much the warming could be intensifying storms, says Emanuel. But it wasn't just because of the apparent upward trend of storm intensity. When Emanuel looked at how storm power and ocean temperature had varied, "what I found startled me," he told the conference. In the area just north of the equator in the Atlantic Ocean, where most hurricanes get their start, the power released during the lifetimes of storms is "spectacularly well correlated with sea surface temperature," says Emanuel. Hurricane intensity had risen along with temperature over the past half-century, even matching ups and downs along the way.

The region where Atlantic hurricanes develop has in turn warmed in step with the Northern Hemisphere for the past half-century, Emanuel noted. And that warming is widely held to be driven at least in part by rising greenhouse gases. Two studies may not be enough to prove that Trenberth is right about greenhouse warming driving storm activity, but both Emanuel and Webster now believe they see a strengthening of tropical cyclones suspiciously in synchrony with global warming.
...
Additional support for intensification also came from a new, independent analysis of wind data, mentioned in passing at the conference. Climate researchers Ryan Sriver and Matthew Huber of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, will soon report in Geophysical Research Letters on how they measured the power released by storms by using a compilation of the world's weather data developed at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting in Reading, U.K. They found a 25% increase in storm power between the first half of the 45-year record and the second, consistent with Emanuel's analyses.

Finally, you know that whole thing Bush has been talking about how we're addicted to oil and need to pursue new technologies? Well, Science reports Conservation programs are getting cut. It fits with the pattern. If Bush talks approvingly about your field, science etc., prepare for it to disappear.