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Gizmodo, as part of a series of stories about space, ran a piece on Thursday called ‘What is Stopping Us from Building Cities in Space? No, it’s not Tech.” The article attempts to examine some of the political impediments that have stymied the settlement of the high frontier. Unfortunately, the piece would have been more convincing had it not been for one rather glaring error. The piece suggested that the United States attempted to claim the moon as sovereign territory when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the American flag at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969. “So much of...

Freshman astronomy books typically include a timeline outlining the major events of the universe over the past 13.7 billion years, from the appearance of our universe to the present. Most timelines put a question mark at the very beginning to reflect the incomplete state of our knowledge about how the universe got started. We don’t know what lit the spark that launched the grand adventure of our universe, despite millennia of wondering and decades of intriguing progress. Remarkably, we know a lot about what happened a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. We have robust theories that have...

John Forbes Nash Jr. was a mathematical genius who had his life chronicled in the movie A Beautiful Mind. One of Nash’s colleagues says that just days before he died in a New York taxi cab accident, he had discussed his latest and possibly most brilliant discovery to date. Mathematician Cédric Villan says that Nash told him that he had replaced Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and that the new equation would further explain quantum gravity. The Daily Mail reports that on May 20, 2015, just three days before the tax cab accident that would take his life, Nash spoke to...

Who hasn't looked up at the star-studded night sky and wondered, "Where did everything come from?" There are many ways to address this question. It was Edwin Hubble whose telescopic observations of galaxies in 1929 led to the major discovery that the universe is expanding, and that the rate of expansion is proportional to how far the galaxies are from one another. The farther apart they are, they faster they are going. This result implies there was a time about 13.75 billion years ago when the universe began in an event we now call the Big Bang. The evidence suggests...

Just saw these cool pics of opposite views of the same thing...sort of:

Interstellar:Can You Do It?Circumnavigate the Many dimensions of Time, Space,Having Left Twenty Years Ago, Be Home For Dinner Tonight?http://endurance.interstellarmovie.net

One of the great physics experiments of our age looks ready to begin its quest.Scientists have held a dedication ceremony to inaugurate the Advanced Ligo facilities in the US. This pair of widely separated laboratories will be hunting for gravitational waves. These ripples in the fabric of space-time are predicted to result from extreme cosmic events, such as the merger of black holes and the explosive demise of giant stars. Confirmation of the waves' existence should open up a new paradigm in astronomy. It is one that would no longer depend on traditional light telescopes to observe and understand phenomena...

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The mysterious bright spots on the dwarf planet Ceres are better resolved in a new sequence of images taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft on May 3 and 4, 2015. The images were taken from a distance of 8,400 miles (13,600 kilometers). In this closest-yet view, the brightest spots within a crater in the northern hemisphere are revealed to be composed of many smaller spots. However, their exact nature remains unknown. "Dawn scientists can now conclude that the intense brightness of these spots is due to the reflection of sunlight by highly reflective material on the surface, possibly ice," said...

Every now and then, astronomers spy a runaway star, one that’s hurling itself across its galaxy at breakneck speeds. But stars aren’t the only things that occasionally go beserker in the cosmic void: Galaxies themselves will sometimes depart home, never to return. In fact, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have now spotted 11 renegade galaxies, screaming across intergalactic space at up to 6 million miles per hour. Each of these star blobs has surpassed escape velocity, meaning that it’s broken the gravitational bonds holding it in its cosmic neighborhood. The discovery of these lonely exiles appears this...

A mystic rabbi living in southern Israel is urging all Jews to pray and repent as the third Blood Moon of a tetrad cycle approaches. Rabbi Amram Vaknin, who similarly predicted the events of the Gaza flotilla and the Carmel forest fire in 2010, and Operations Pillar of Defense (2012) and Protective Edge (2014), warns that Israel is facing great judgment and potential danger at this time. One of Rabbi Vaknin’s students, Gil Nachman, spoke to Breaking Israel News and, quoting the sage, explained that the numeric value of the Hebrew word for blood, dam, which is 44, alludes to...

Life on Earth exists becuase of the sun and our distance from it. Without that star and the energy it gives off, we’d be what NASA once described as a “lifeless ball of ice-coated rock.” Luckily, we are far enough from it, and as of right now, it’s not radiating so much light as to make our planet uninhabitable. In some ways, we’re in the sweet spot, and researchers may have discovered many more such connections. Stars in the Milky Way may have 100 billion planets — two, on average, per star — in their habitable zone, the area far...

A Two Thousand Year Old Project Two thousand years ago the Epicureans believed that the world arose spontaneously. Their idea was that randomly veering atoms attained a great variety of configurations by chance, and would eventually find themselves forming stable, functional structures. And while this may seem unlikely, the immense universe provided a great many opportunities for those configurations to come about. In Cicero’s dialog, the Epicurean explains this to his stoic opponent: You [stoics] would surely have no need of the activity of such a figure [a skilled craftsman] if you would only observe how unlimited, unbounded tracts...

The Maunder Minimum (also known as the prolonged sunspot minimum) is the name used for the period roughly spanning 1645 to 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time. Like the Dalton Minimum and Spörer Minimum, the Maunder Minimum coincided with a period of lower-than-average global temperatures. During one 30-year period within the Maunder Minimum, astronomers observed only about 50 sunspots, as opposed to a more typical 40,000-50,000 spots. (Source) Climatologist John Casey, a former space shuttle engineer and NASA consultant, thinks that last year’s winter, described by USA Today as “one of...

Some scientists believe this is a seed sent to earth by aliens The never-before seen image shows a microscopic metal globe spewing out biological material feared to be an infectious agent. Though the origin or purpose of the mysterious sphere is uncertain, experts say it could contain genetic material - the precursor to life. They sensationally claim it could have been designed by an intelligent species to “seed” and propagate alien life on Earth. It is the first time anything like this has been seen and points not only to the existence of extra-terrestrial life, but to complex and...

As we watch horrific images of beheadings from the country formerly called Iraq - a country that is disintegrating into various tribal fiefdoms before our eyes - it is easy to forget that it was once the cradle of civilization. In point of fact, Arabs are latecomers to the area. They are first mentioned in the mid 9th century BCE as a tribal people subjugated by the Assyrians. Way before that, the area was home to the Babylonians. First records indicate that Babylon was established as a city around the 23rd century BCE. It stood about 50 miles south of...

On June 18, 2006, we celebrated Paul McCartney's 64th birthday by highlighting sixty-four of our most dazzling images, a kaleidoscope of splendor and spectacle, in an 8-minute-long cinematic production accompanied by the music of the Beatles. These same sixty-four scenes from Saturn have been composited into the poster shown here. Credit: Diamond Sky Productions, LLC Released: April 25, 2007 Image/Caption Information

Presently, our solar system is known to contain 4 fully-fledged rocky worlds: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars; 2 ice-giants: Neptune and Uranus; 2 gas-giants, Saturn and Neptune; 5 dwarf-planets, Ceres. Pluto, Eris, MakeMake, Haumea; around 100 moons; and an unknowable number of comets, asteroids and minor planets. Indeed, we’ve only begun to understand the full scope of our local corner of our galaxy, and new information emerges on a monthly-basis, yet there a number of seemingly obvious things that remain unknown. For instance, long before Pluto’s existence was deduced, astronomers scoured the outer solar system in search of another large...

Full Title:New Evidence For Anthropic Theory That Fundamental Physics Constants Underlie Life-Enabling Universe For nearly half a century, theoretical physicists have made a series of discoveries that certain constants in fundamental physics seem extraordinarily fine-tuned to allow for the emergence of a life-enabling universe. Constants that crisscross the Standard Model of Particle Physics guided the formation of hydrogen nuclei during the Big Bang, along with the carbon and oxygen atoms initially fused at the center of massive first-generation stars that exploded as supernovae; these processes in turn set the stage for solar systems and planets capable of supporting carbon-based life...

Well, this is more than a little depressing: The politician who tried reducing NASA funding (and successfully shut it down for over two weeks) is now in charge of the senate subcommittee that effectively controls NASA. More than that, one of the most vocal climate-change detractors is now in charge of the United States Senate's Environmental committee. Let's let that sink in for a minute, shall we? Despite all the progress we've made so far with things like unmanned, deep-space space-flight and our efforts toward limiting the negative effects that humans have had on the environment, any future plans are...