Collisions of understanding. Author and scientist
Ken Croswell writes about galaxy collisions in a recent blog on kencroswell.com in which he theorizes that such collisions “seem to be agents of cosmic socialism.” A new study, he says, finds that these collisions cause galactic regions rich in oxygen, iron, and even gold to mix with those that are impoverished, thereby making the rich poorer and the poor richer.”
“In astronomy, any element heavier than helium is called a metal, so while your chemist friends certainly don't consider oxygen a metal, astronomers do,” says Croswell...
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Until recently, many scientists spoke of climate change mainly as a “threat,” sometime in the future. But it is increasingly clear that we already live in the era of human-induced climate change, with a growing frequency of weather and climate extremes like heat waves, droughts, floods and fires. Today we will try to explain what’s going on with the fact that we experience very little or no rain at all; in certain places in the world such as Russia, the USA, Europe some part of Africa and in Asia.
Future precipitation trends, based on climate model projections for the coming fifth assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicate that droughts of this length and severity will be commonplace through the end of the century unless human-induced carbon emissions are significantly reduced. Read more [...] 
