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JUST PLAIN NEAT INFORMATION… The moon moves about two inches away from the Earth each year. Glass takes one million years to decompose, which means it never wears out and can be recycled an infinite amount of times! Gold is the only metal that doesn't rust, even if it's buried in the ground for thousands of years. Your tongue is the only muscle in your body that is attached at only one end. If you stop getting thirsty , you need to drink more water. When a human body is dehydrated, its thirst mechanism shuts off. Zero is the only...

Guest essay by David ArchibaldFrom a post a couple of days ago: “an F10.7 flux above 100 causes warming and below that level causes cooling.” Greg asked “Can you prove that?” I already had in this WUWT post from 2012. But it is worth revisiting the subject because it answers the big question – If all the energy that stops the Earth from looking like Pluto comes from the Sun, what is the solar activity level that corresponds to our average climate? Because solar activity is falling and climate will follow.As Nir Shaviv observed, the oceans are a big...

I look forward to all the future missions that NASA is going to be sending out in the Solar System. Here, check this out. You can use NASA’s website to show you all the future missions. Here’s everything planned for the future, here’s everything going to Mars. Now, let’s look and see what missions are planned for the outer planets of the Solar System, especially Uranus and Neptune. Oh, that’s so sad… there’s nothing. It’s been decades since humanity had an up close look at Uranus and Neptune. For Uranus, it was Voyager 2, which swept through the system in...

Did a Planetary Society citizen scientist help find one of Earth’s biggest impact craters? About 66 million years ago, a 10-kilometer-wide hunk of rock smashed into Earth near what is now Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.The impact created a global dust cloud that snuffed out the sunlight, leading to the demise of 80 percent of Earth's plants and animals—including most of the dinosaurs. A 200-kilometer-wide crater buried near the city of Chicxulub is all that's left. It's ground zero for one of the world's most notable extinction events.But throughout Earth's history, there have actually been five major extinction events. The largest of...

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ESPN the Magazine has unveiled the covers for its annual "Body Issue." The five different covers will feature Chicago Cubs second baseman Javier Baez, MMA fighter Michelle Waterson, Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott, tennis player Caroline Wozniacki, and Boston Celtics guard Isaiah Thomas. The cover for Baez is the first in which the photo was shot using an iPhone, with photographer Dylan Coulter using an iPhone 7 Plus. In all, 23 athletes will appear in this year's issue, including Julian Edelman of the New England Patriots, New Zealand All Blacks center Malakai Fekitoa, Joe Thornton of the San Jose...

The situation for human beings on Mars is dire, and not just because the red planet's atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide and the average temperature is -81 degrees. There's also the issue of the child-trafficking ring operating in secret on the planet 33.9 million miles from earth, according to a guest on the Alex Jones Show. “We actually believe that there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20-year ride,” Robert David Steele said Thursday during a winding, conspiratorial dialogue with Jones about child victims of sex crimes....

Newsflash: the universe is expanding. We've known that since the pioneering and tireless work of Edwin Hubble about a century ago, and it's kind of a big deal. But before I talk about dark energy and why that's an even bigger deal, I need to clarify what we mean by the word "expanding." The actual observation that you can do in the comfort of your own home (provided you have access to a sufficiently large telescope and a spectrograph) is that galaxies appear to be receding from our own Milky Way. On average, of course: galaxies aren't simple creatures, and...

This is the first time the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has said it aims to send an astronaut beyond the International Space Station, an agency spokeswoman told AFP on Friday. The idea is to first join a NASA-led mission in 2025 to build a space station in the moon's orbit, as part of a longer-term effort by NASA to reach Mars. Tokyo hopes that contributing to the multinational mission and sharing Japanese technology will land it a coveted spot at the station, from which it could eventually send an astronaut to the Moon, the spokeswoman said. The plan was...

An angry monster lurks in the shoulder of the Hunter. We’re talking about the red giant star Betelgeuse, also known as Alpha Orionis in the constellation Orion. Recently, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) gave us an amazing view of Betelgeuse, one of the very few stars that is large enough to be resolved as anything more than a point of light. 650 light years distant, Betelgeuse is destined to live fast, and die young. The star is only eight million years old – young as stars go. Consider, for instance, our own Sun, which has been shining as a...

Earth Compared To The Rest Of The Universe - Amazing Graphic Presentation This is the best video of this type of thing I have seen.- will blow your mind!! Best to enlarge full screen and play at slower speed from the right bottom. https://www.youtube.com/embed/1Eh5BpSnBBw

The sun is heading into a period known as solar minimum, during which activity at the surface will ‘change form.’In this time, certain types of activity, such as sunspots and solar flares will drop – but, it’s also expected to bring the development of long-lived phenomena including coronal holes. According to NASA, solar minimum could also enhance the effects of space weather, potentially disrupting communications and navigation systems, and even causing space junk to ‘hang around.’

Nasa's Curiosity rover has snapped a photo of a mysterious object on the surface of Mars, which conspiracy theorists believe could be evidence of aliens. The high-definition image appears to show the object glinting against Mars' rocky landscape. While many people believe that the object is made by aliens, others have suggested that it is merely the rover's own entry debris.

Just. Wow. An angry monster lurks in the shoulder of the Hunter. We’re talking about the red giant star Betelgeuse, also known as Alpha Orionis in the constellation Orion. Recently, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) gave us an amazing view of Betelgeuse, one of the very few stars that is large enough to be resolved as anything more than a point of light.

On 25th February 2014 Sun produced X4.9 flare which on 27th February caused G2 (KP 6) geomagnetic storm on Earth. It was the brightest aurora display so far during this solar maximum which I could witness with auroral displays overhead in the far north of Scotland. This short movie illustrates what has been seen from latitude 58.3 degrees north. Here is a link to the music used, as many of you asked about it http://www.pond5.com/stock-music/1070...

Neural networks come to astronomy as a self-adapting algorithm digs through star maps to find rogue fast-moving stars, writes Andrew Masterson. An artificial neural network capable of learning from its own observations is helping astronomers identify a rare type of star that might offer clues to both the formation of the Milky Way and the role of dark matter in governing its motion. In research published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team led by Elena Maria Rossi from Leiden University in the Netherlands detail how the self-adapting algorithm is spotting rogue stars among millions mapped...

Zeeya Merali is a freelance science writer and author of A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes. Her work has appeared in Nature, Scientific American, Discover, Science, New Scientist, and on the BBC. She has also published two textbooks with National Geographic and has worked on NOVA's television series The Fabric of the Cosmos. She has a PhD in theoretical cosmology and lives in London. Artwork illustrating the concept of an alternate ‘bubble’ universe in which our universe (left) is not the only one. Some scientists think that bubble universes may pop into existence...

June 30th is “Asteroid Day.” This international event is an effort to increase global awareness of the threat posed by the possibility of an asteroid impact. Established by a United Nations resolution in 2016, the June 30th date is in recognition of the anniversary of the “Tunguska Event.” In 1908, a meteoroid exploded over a remote wooded area near the Stony Tunguska River in Russia, flattening 830 square miles of forest. The object, approximately 400 feet in diameter, that exploded in the atmosphere perhaps three to six miles above the ground, generated a destructive force 1,000 times greater than the...

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) continues to make waves within the physics community. On June 1, they published their third gravitational wave detection from an observation in early January 2017. This new detection may help vet previously established theories of how these massive mergers behave, and has already provided a new round of observational data to push forward this new kind of astronomy. The confirmed results, published in Physical Review Letters, tell a story of two black holes that coalesced 3 billion light-years from Earth. So far, this is the farthest source from which gravitational waves have been detected...

Beam-Riding and Sail Stability by Paul Gilster on June 23, 2017 Breakthrough Starshot, the ambitious 30-year plan for launching small interstellar craft to a nearby star, depends critically on the sails that will ride a laser beam to 20 percent of lightspeed. In the essay below, James Benford takes a hard look at where we are now in the matter of sail stability, a subject he and brother Gregory have analyzed in their laboratory work. But as Jim points out, there is a great deal we still don’t know, emphasizing the need for a dedicated test facility in which deep...