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Explanation: A mere 280 light-years from Earth, tidally locked, Jupiter-sized exoplanet WASP-43b orbits its parent star once every 0.8 Earth days. That puts it about 2 million kilometers (less than 1/25th the orbital distance of Mercury) from a small, cool sun. Still, on a dayside always facing its parent star, temperatures approach a torrid 2,500 degrees F as measured at infrared wavelengths by the MIRI instrument on board the James Webb Space Telescope. In this illustration of the hot exoplanet's orbit, Webb measurements also show nightside temperatures remain above 1,000 degrees F. That suggests that strong equatorial winds circulate the...

There is a famous story about Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman walking down the street with a friend. The friend stopped and said, “Hey, there is a $20 bill on the sidewalk.” The economist turned to him and replied, “There can’t be. If there were a $20 bill on the sidewalk, somebody would have picked it up.” Friedman often taught that if something were in people’s best interest, they would discover and put it to use without having to be told or forced to do so. A Forbes economic writer named Tilak Doshi, a long-time energy economics analyst, wrote a...

With tent cities springing up across American campuses, filled with antisemitic activists who are openly supporting U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations, you could be forgiven for suspecting that this activism was not wholly organic. And you would be right. Fingerprints Of Further Funding Take the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Columbia University, where “students sleep in tents apparently ordered from Amazon and enjoy delivery pizza, coffee from Dunkin’, free sandwiches worth $12.50 from Pret a Manger, organic tortilla chips, and $10 rotisserie chickens,” according to the New York Post. That is not the sort of event a campus student association organizes on...

Progressive pundits have a habit of sticking to the same words and phrases when discussing major issues of the day. No matter who is talking on MSNBC, CNN or a podcast, they speak in unison. That happens thanks to coordination by a small group of subversives. Politico last week documented the machinations of leftist commentators and former government officials who have been holding weekly Zoom sessions to hammer out messaging since 2022, when it became clear that former President Donald Trump intended to run again in 2024. Participants explore the most effective talking points to ensure that voters won’t send...

Three and a half years into the Biden Administration, and to an ordinary citizen on the ground it might seem like not that much has changed as to energy. Despite hundreds of government actions and initiative in an all-of-government regulatory onslaught to transform the energy economy, the important things have been remarkable stable. Production of oil and gas are actually up, and prices increases have been relatively modest — far less than one might have anticipated from the extreme regulatory hostility to production. The percentage of what is called “primary energy” (that is, energy for everything, not just electricity) coming...

Joe Biden's civil rights chief at the Department of Justice, Kristen Clarke, has always been a problem. She's been hauled into Congress for her draconian, flimsy and politicized prosecutions of pro-life activists, effectively acting as Joe Biden's knifewoman to punish his political pro-life enemies as if on a political mission closely connected to Joe Biden's bid to stick it to his political opponents. I wrote about her record of it here. Now we learn she's quite the knifewoman in a more literal sense, and a leading congressmember says she lied about it under oath. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke admitted...

The 19th-century Prussian general Karl Von Clausewitz famously said: “War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.” Or as we more often hear it, “War is but politics by different means.” Some predict that America is on the verge of a hot war. But while it’s true that our country is more divided than ever, it may not be as divided as the pro-Hamas, anti-American protesters hope. War is what generally happens when two (or more) sides get to a point where they can no longer peacefully coexist with the current circumstances. America seems...

Explanation: Majestic on a truly cosmic scale, M100 is appropriately known as a grand design spiral galaxy. The large galaxy of over 100 billion stars has well-defined spiral arms, similar to our own Milky Way. One of the brightest members of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, M100, also known as NGC 4321 is 56 million light-years distant toward the well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices. In this telescopic image, the face-on grand design spiral shares a nearly 1 degree wide field-of-view with slightly less conspicuous edge-on spiral NGC 4312 (at upper right). The 21 hour long equivalent exposure from a dark sky...

Stanford University, its campus lined with redwoods and eucalyptus trees, has long been known as a hub for innovation and entrepreneurship. But in recent years, another ideological force has taken root: “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” a euphemism for left-wing racialism. DEI, in fact, has conquered Stanford. I have obtained exclusive analysis from inside Stanford outlining the incredible size and scope of the university’s DEI bureaucracy. According to this analysis, Stanford employs at least 177 full-time DEI bureaucrats, spread throughout the university’s various divisions and departments. Stanford’s DEI mandate is the same as those of other universities: advance the principles of...

Top Biden administration officials worked with the National Archives to develop Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump involving the former president’s alleged mishandling of classified material, according to recently unsealed court documents in the case pending in southern Florida. More than 300 pages of newly unredacted exhibits, containing emails and other correspondence related to the early stages of the hunt for presidential papers, challenge public statements by Joe Biden about what he knew and when he knew it regarding the case against his political rival. The new disclosures indicate the Department of Justice was in touch with the...

This morning I received a text from someone I have never met. It read: Hello Dr Gorka, I’m a reporter at the Washington Post and we are working on an article about how Donald Trump‘s messages on TruthSocial are communicated outside that particular platform by a key group of his like-minded supporters. You are one of the people whom our data team identified as a key individual (in addition to Mark Levin, Laura Loomer, and Gen Michael Flynn, among others) who helps DJT spread his messages to the wider world. We wanted to ask for your comment about that role...

The White House visitor logs show other Nat'l Archives officials visited Biden Administration officials throughout the earliest stages of the probe into President Trump. White House officials met with Nat'l Archives on at least 19 other occasions. On June 8, 2023, Gary Stern, the General Counsel of the National Archives arrived at the White House for a meeting with Special Counsel to President Biden Richard Sauber. The meeting reportedly took place in the Navy Mess, a “nautical” themed dining room run by the seafaring military branch, according to White House records. It is not known what Stern and Sauber discussed,...

Back on April 15, I received an extremely courteous message from Matthew Weinberg, the chairman of the UCLA chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), inviting me to speak on campus in mid-May. While I was grateful for the invitation and immediately accepted, being invited to UCLA was the equivalent of getting a message from the dentist saying it’s time for a root canal: it’s painful and unpleasant, but necessary. The pro-Hamas mob in the campus encampment, however, might not allow someone as dangerous as me to speak there. Yes, they’re the ones in charge. YAF explained what is happening...

Politicized faculty, infantilized students, and mediocre classes have combined to erode the prestige of college degrees, even at once elite colleges. Elite higher education in America—long unquestioned as globally preeminent—is facing a perfect storm. Fewer applicants, higher costs, impoverished students, collapsing standards, and increasingly politicized and mediocre faculty reflect a collapse of the university system. The country is waking up to the reality that a bachelor’s degree no longer equates with graduates being broadly educated and analytical. Just as often, they are stereotyped as pampered, largely ignorant, and gratuitously opinionated. No wonder polls show a drastic loss of public respect...

No one can accurately predict where the stock market will go, but it is a fact that the Biden administration’s spending imperils every American. After a strong run in 2023 and early 2024, stock markets have been selling off lately. I cannot predict whether this market sell-off will continue, but I can state what has happened so far and speculate as to why it has happened and whether it will continue. In my opinion, anyone who says he can do more than speculate is deceived or lying. After closing at an all-time high of 5,254 on March 28, the S&P...

Hating America is among the 'values' of these Palestinians whom no Arab state wants in their country. Why is Biden doing this? Joe Biden is running for re-election and behind in the polls. He's desperate to satisfy his 'death to America' base in places like Dearborn and at campus protests. So now he's come up with a new sweetender to bring those voters back. Importing Gaza "refugees," despite the war, from the Gaza side at least, being about staying in place at home and taking over Israel, too. According to CBS News: The Biden administration is considering bringing certain Palestinians...

Explanation: To some, this nebula looks like the head of a fish. However, this colorful cosmic portrait really features glowing gas and obscuring dust clouds in IC 1795, a star forming region in the northern constellation Cassiopeia. The nebula's colors were created by adopting the Hubble color palette for mapping narrowband emissions from oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur atoms to blue, green and red colors, and further blending the data with images of the region recorded through broadband filters. Not far on the sky from the famous Double Star Cluster in Perseus, IC 1795 is itself located next to IC 1805,...

No wonder it’s a hallowed day for the progressive Democrats. It’s May Day, a day when the workers of the world are set to unite and (ostensibly) fight against injustice—but because it’s a cause rooted in the soil of far-left political philosophies like fascism and communism, everything is backwards, and predictably, the anti-Israel and anti-Jew “Free Palestine” movement is entwined with the May Day “festivities.” And just as predictably, it’s a hallowed day for the progressive Democrats. There was a time when you dared not mention the logical fact that collectivist Volk were leftist comrades, despite the overwhelming evidence. Any...

Around 1 a.m. on Tuesday, Columbia University students calling for their school’s divestment from Israel escalated their protest by taking it indoors. After nearly two weeks in an encampment on the Ivy’s main lawn, demonstrators forced their way into a nearby academic building, Hamilton Hall, and set up barricades to block the police from the entrance. After evicting two university facility workers, students hung a banner reading “Student Intifada” from the second floor of the hall. In response, Columbia threatened to expel students occupying the building, while the White House condemned the practice of “forcibly taking over buildings.” As students...

Americans are worried about crime on their streets, but President Biden and the mainstream press corps don’t think that they should be. ABC News claims that “violent crime is dramatically falling.” NBC News asserts that “the drop in crime does not appear to be well understood by large majorities of Americans.” And in his State of the Union address, Biden bragged about a purported drop in crime that was allegedly a result of his efforts. While the administration and its allies are trying to convince Americans that the crime spike that they think they’ve seen in recent years has been...