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In his book "2061 - Odyssey Three" (the third of his Space Odyssey series), Arthur C. Clarke put forward the intriguing proposal that the core of the planet Jupiter was, in fact, a diamond the size of Earth. Now Clarke, even though a science fiction author of some repute, had a science background and always tried to bring rigorous scientific accuracy to his stories. So, could his proposition be possible? The somewhat predictable answer is - we don't know. But we can analyse the possibility within known scientific parametres, to see if it is, at least, possible. For diamond to...

Within the unimaginable depths of the universe there is a small family of worlds circling about a star we call the Sun; it is just a single star among the billions upon billions which are shining in the cosmos. Against the awesome backdrop of the infinite blackness of space, our world is just another planet; nothing more than an insignificant speck on the cosmological scale of things, but it is our home, and as of yet we have found no other planets which are remotely like Earth. The history of our world is a story which is still largely incomplete....

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) — Uranus is a lopsided oddity, the only planet to spin on its side. Scientists now think they know how it got that way: It was pushed over by a rock at least twice as big as Earth.</p>

<p>Uranus is a lopsided oddity, the only planet to spin on its side. Scientists now think they know how it got that way: It was pushed over by a rock at least twice as big as Earth.</p> <p>Detailed computer simulations show that an enormous rock crashed into the seventh planet from the sun, said Durham University astronomy researcher Jacob Kegerreis, who presented his analysis at a large earth and space science conference this month.</p>

If human-induced climate change continues unchecked, 10 percent of the U.S. economy could evaporate by 2100, a 1,656-page federal report the White House slipped out on Black Friday (Nov. 23) warned — but a nearby world has an even hotter climate problem than ours, and scientists say we could learn some valuable lessons from it. That world is Venus, Earth's "evil twin," which was once nice enough — until something went wrong and the atmosphere began trapping a little too much heat. Scientists aren't positive precisely how events played out, but the runaway greenhouse effect that resulted is beyond debate:...

An explorer's adage says to "take only photos, leave only footprints." But it seems the footprints of NASA's Apollo astronauts had unintended consequences for the surface of the moon after they landed there nearly 50 years ago. Newly discovered temperature data from the 1970s moon landings, released in the Journal of Geophysical Research in April, reveals that NASA astronauts probably warmed up the moon's surface temperature by as much as 6 degrees Fahrenheit by walking around and poking into the lunar surface. The data comes from so-called heat-flow experiments that were installed on the moon in 1971 and 1972 during...

The...wave is thought to form as the lower atmosphere flows over mountains on Venus' surface. ... Just after entering orbit around Venus in 2015, the Akatsuki orbiter observed a bow-shaped feature in the upper atmosphere over several days. Curiously, the bright structure - which stretched for 10,000km - remained stationary at the altitude of Venus' cloud tops. This is difficult to reconcile with what we know about Venus' thick upper atmosphere, in which clouds streak by at 100 metres per second (m/s). The clouds travel much faster than the slowly rotating planet below, where a Venusian day lasts longer than...

Heavenly bodies stir up routine catastrophes March 18 2003 at 01:30PM By Graeme Addison Legend has it that when two people get together and er... bond, the Earth will move – at least in a metaphorical sense. Likewise, it takes two heavenly bodies, an impactor and a target, to come together with Earth-shattering force to form a crater. There’s nothing dreamlike about this: it happens, frequently, throughout the solar system. Impact catastrophes are routine. Just over two-billion years ago, a chunk of asteroid at least the size of Table Mountain struck the landmass that is now South Africa. It hurtled...

Measurements from NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, aka LADEE (pronounced “laddie”) have confirmed the long-suspected presence of neon in its atmosphere ... along with isotopes of argon and helium. The relative concentrations of each of these elements also appears to depend on the time of day. “The presence of neon in the exosphere of the moon has been a subject of speculation since the Apollo missions, but no credible detections were made,” said Mehdi Benna of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, lead author of a paper describing the...

Discovered by the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) spacecraft, the unusual phenomenon is thought to have been caused by the effects of the solar winds and could help to shine more light on how the Martian atmosphere escaped in to space. "We found that Mars' magnetic tail, or magnetotail, is unique in the Solar System," said NASA scientist Gina DiBraccio. "It's not like the magnetotail found at Venus, a planet with no magnetic field of its own, nor is it like Earth's, which is surrounded by its own internally generated magnetic field." "Instead, it is a hybrid between...

What is the validity of history found in the Bible? Is it fact or fiction? What does the hard evidence really have to say about the foundational story of the Old Testament: the Exodus out of Egypt? An in-depth investigation by documentary filmmaker Timothy Mahoney searches for answers to these questions amid startling new finds that may change traditional views of history and the Bible. Filmmaker Timothy Mahoney begins with the question, “Is the Bible just a myth, or did the archaeologists get it wrong?” He decides to tackle this issue with a deliberate scientific approach. After examining the details...

Encore Presentation of Patterns of Evidence: Exodus by Jake Hebert, Ph.D. * The Exodus is one of the best-known narratives in the Bible. It details the Israelites' escape from Egypt after centuries of slavery, Moses' rise to leadership, the devastating plagues on Egypt, and the miraculous Red Sea crossing. Yet many, maybe even the majority, of archaeologists and historians insist there is no evidence that the biblical Exodus ever occurred. This debate is the subject of the award-winning documentary Patterns of Evidence: Exodus that has an encore presentation this Thursday.1 "Absence of evidence," however, does not necessarily indicate "evidence of...

...As for the name rings on the slab no. 21687, three names can be discerned. The first on the left reads... "Ashkelon." A similar writing (but with a vowel marker) is attested on Merenptah's Israel Stele... The name in the central ring reads... "Canaan." This form of the name is well attested during the Eighteenth Dynasty, and finds close parallels under Amenhotep II... Görg derives the name "Canaan"... translating it as "low land"... and suggests that the... ending reflects an Amorite name pattern. This too would underscore the antiquity of the name... As discussed above, evidence of early orthography is...

Jul. 3, 2006 0:15 | Updated Jul. 3, 2006 4:57Documentary sets new date for Exodus By ETGAR LEFKOVITS A new documentary by a Canadian Jewish filmmaker argues that the Exodus did happen, but that it took place a couple of hundred years before the commonly-accepted time frame. The Exodus Decoded, a two-hour documentary by award-winning Israeli-born filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, suggests that the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt as recounted in the Bible occurred around 1500 BCE, about 230 years before the date most commonly accepted by contemporary historians. The 10 plagues that smote the Egyptians, according to the Bible,...

Was Saul real king of Israel? January 4, 2003 1:06 am By RICHARD N. OSTLING Scholars debate history from Bible AP RELIGION WRITERTORONTO--Judging from a session at 2002's key gathering of Bible scholars, King Saul and King David aren't dead yet. So to speak.A lengthy session on non-biblical evidence for the first kings of ancient Israel occurred during the convention of the Society of Biblical Literature, held in November.These are often called years of "crisis" in Old Testament history. Traditionalists say the Old Testament reliably records ancient Israel's history or, more liberally, is substantially historical, though with problems and mistakes.These...

A New Chronology Synopsis of David Rohl's book "A Test of Time" by John Fulton The concept of time for us today is taken to be an absolute unchangeable system. We measure time from the fixed point of Christ's birth so that this is the one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seventh year since he was born. The ancients, however, could not look forward to Christ's birth; instead, they worked on a regnal dating system where events happened in the Nth year of the reign of a particular king. For most of the Old Testament, we can find a good...

New species might arise as a result of single rare events, rather than through the gradual accumulation of many small changes over time, according to a study of thousands of species and their evolutionary family trees. This contradicts a widely accepted theory of how speciation occurs: that species are continually changing to keep pace with their environment, and that new species emerge as these changes accrue. Known as the 'Red Queen' hypothesis, it is named after the character in Lewis Carroll's book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There who tells a surprised Alice: "Here, you see, it takes...

CHICAGO (AFP) - Hundreds of rogue black holes may be roaming around the Milky Way waiting to engulf stars and planets that cross their path, US astronomers said Wednesday. The astronomers believe these "intermediate mass" black holes are invisible except in rare circumstances and have been spawned by mergers of black holes within globular clusters -- swarms of stars held together by their mutual gravity. These black holes are unlikely to pose a threat to Earth, but may engulf nebulae, stars and planets that stray into their paths, the researchers said. "These rogue black holes are extremely unlikely to do...

It is one of the most glorious pieces of natural theatre. Assuming you spend your life on the same part of the Earth's surface, you might witness it once - if you are particularly lucky or very long-lived, perhaps twice. But a total solar eclipse is worth the wait. At the height of totality, the fit of sun and moon is so perfect that beads of sunlight can only penetrate to us through the rugged valleys on the lunar surface, creating the stunning "diamond ring" effect. It is all thanks to a striking coincidence. The sun is about 400 times...

...the planets weren't always in the order they are today. Four billion years ago, early in the solar system's evolution, Uranus and Neptune switched places. This is the result of recent work by Steve Desch, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. The work appears in this week's Astrophysical Journal. Desch based his conclusion on his calculations of the surface density of the solar nebula. The solar nebula is the disk of gas and dust out of which all of the planets formed. The surface density -- or mass per area -- of...