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A Saudi cleric is garnering headlines for declaring that the sun revolves around the Earth, a clear rejection of all scientific evidence. {snip} The controversial cleric, Sheikh Bandar al-Khaibari, was caught making the comments in a short video clip posted to YouTube on Monday. In response to a question posed by a student, al-Khaibari says the Earth is “stationary and does not move.” While al-Khaibari’s remarks have been mocked on social networking sites such as Twitter, regional experts say his anti-science stance is embraced and promoted by leading Saudi clerics in charge of the country’s religious authority. “It makes perfect...

Following are excerpts: Bandar Al-Khaybari: Someone is asking whether the Earth moves or whether it is fixed in place. Does it move or remain fixed? The Truth, as described by our scholars Imam Ibn Baz and Sheik Saleh Al-Fawzan, is that the Earth is fixed and does not move. This is in keeping with the Quranic text, and it makes sense as well. [...] There is ample Quranic evidence that it is the sun that revolves around the Earth. As for evidence based on reason... The [Westerners] present all kinds of theories, but we Muslims also have theories and brains....

The new Sharia tribunal in Texas is all “voluntary,” you see, so there is absolutely nothing for you Infidels to be worried about. The only catch is that we have seen how those “voluntary” tribunals worked out in Britain. “‘Voluntary’ Sharia Tribunal in Texas: This Is How It Starts,” by Pamela Geller, Breitbart, January 28, 2015: Breitbart Texas confirmed Tuesday that “an Islamic Tribunal using Sharia law” is indeed operating in Texas. But not to worry: an attorney for the tribunal assures us that participation is “voluntary,” and one of the Sharia judges, Dr. Taher El-badawi, says it’s devoted only...

He’s one of a handful of men to have orbited the moon. Today, Alfred M. Worden says NASA’s on the wrong track. He also tells DW why he likes the moon’s dark side and what he wanted most—but didn't get—upon returning. […] “We took a step backwards back in the late 70s when they decided to build the space shuttle. That was, in my opinion, a mistake. The shuttle was a very complicated machine. It did some pretty unusual, clearly spectacular things, like launch vertically and land horizontally. But from a technical standpoint, we launched a 280,000 pound machine to...

The European Space Agency’s Philae lander has made space history by successfully reaching the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The landing, which took place at 11.03 AM ET, was accompanied by rapturous scenes at the ESA’s control room in Darmstadt, Germany. Philae is the first probe to land on a comet. …

Link to live TV feed

NASA has awarded the highly-anticipated space taxi contract to Boeing and SpaceX, a move which will end the agency’s reliance on Russian technology to transport U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station. The Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contract aims to restore an American capability to launch astronauts from U.S. soil to the International Space Station by the end of 2017. Since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, American astronauts have been transported to space on Russian-built Soyuz vessels. …

NASA has worked on some inspiring interplanetary projects in the last few years, but few have been as ambitious as the simply-named Space Launch System, a new rocket that will be the largest ever built at 384 feet tall, surpassing even the mighty Saturn V (363 feet), the rocket that took humanity to the moon. It will also be more powerful, with 20 percent more thrust using liquid hydrogen and oxygen as fuel. Last week, NASA announced that the Space Launch System, SLS for short, is on track to perform its first unmanned test launch in 2018. The larger goal...

More than 150,000 people have been forced to flee Iraq's second city of Mosul after Islamist militants effectively took control of it. Troops were among those fleeing as hundreds of jihadists from the ISIS group overran it and much of the surrounding province of Nineveh. Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki responded by asking parliament to declare a state of emergency to grant him greater powers. The US said the development showed ISIS is a threat to the entire region.

NASA has been talking about sending people to Mars by 2035. That goal is still on the books, despite recent upheaval in the space program, according to two of the agency's top scientists. "In the near term, Mars remains our primary focus," Ellen Stofan, NASA's chief scientist said May 15 in a talk at the Royal Institution in London ... ....scientists [also] decided to "redirect" an asteroid into an orbit of the moon and are searching for an asteroid that's an appropriate candidate. "Once we find the right one, we'll use all the technology we've got," he said. "We'll snag...

Russia is planning to put a manned colony on the Moon as soon as in 2030, and is racing to dispatch the first robotic rovers to explore the lunar surface two years from now, a media report says. Newspaper Izvestia said Thursday it had gained access to a draft government program, prepared by the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Roscosmos federal space agency, Moscow State University and several space research institutes, outlining a three-step plan toward manning the moon.

A Russian official angered over new sanctions that the United States imposed on Russia over the Ukraine crisis is suggesting that American astronauts get to the International Space Station by using trampolines instead of rockets. "The United States introduced sanctions against our space industry... We warned them, we will reply to statements with statements, to actions with actions," Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who heads Russia's defense industry, said on Twitter, according to Reuters. American astronauts depend on Russian rockets to get to the ISS, but after the U.S. imposed sanctions – which deny export licenses for high-tech items that...

John C. Houbolt, an engineer whose contributions to the U.S. space program were vital to NASA's successful moon landing in 1969, has died. He was 95. Houbolt died Tuesday at a nursing home in Scarborough, Maine, from complications from Parkinson's disease, his son-in-law Tucker Withington, of Plymouth, Mass., confirmed Saturday. As NASA describes on its website, while under pressure during the U.S.-Soviet space race, Houbolt was the catalyst in securing U.S. commitment to the science and engineering theory that eventually carried the Apollo crew to the moon and back safely.

The State of Indiana is reopening discussions with Midwest Fertilizer and Fatima Group about a multi-billion fertilizer plant in Posey County. Governor Mike Pence says the decision comes after the group and government of Pakistan took steps to make it more difficult for terrorists to obtain the company's products. Pence pulled state support for the project last year. Economic Development Coalition of Southwest Indiana Chief Executive Officer Greg Wathen says the company hopes to begin construction later this year.

After running the numbers on a set of four equations representing human society, a team of NASA-funded mathematicians has come to the grim conclusion that the utter collapse of human civilization will be “difficult to avoid.” The exact scenario may vary, but in the coming decades humanity is essentially doomed to some variant of “Elites” consuming too much, “resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society.” That is, unless civilization is ready for one of two “major policy changes”: inequality must be “greatly reduced” or population growth must be “strictly controlled.” The apocalyptic pronouncements, set...

Natural and social scientists develop new model of how 'perfect storm' of crises could unravel global system A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution. Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries...

ID theorists say that information is the foundation of the universe. Others say matter is. Our choice of who to believe will shape our future. First, suppose the materialists are right. If materialism (naturalism) is simply true, because everything comes down to matter in the end, what future might we expect? Stephen Hawking insists in a recent interview that "Science will win." If we take his current non-realist views seriously, science as we have known it is finished and there is nothing to win. That doesn't mean, of course, that everything shuts down. Some projects will continue as if immortal...

President wants to deliver American culture to Islamic regimeThe proposed easing of sanctions against Iran represents the most visible enticement by which the United States and five other nations intend to guide the Islamic regime toward peace. The Obama administration, however, has another tool in its diplomatic arsenal that it intends to leverage against Tehran. Hollywood. The responsibility of producing a California-centered news and entertainment program “appealing to Farsi-speaking youth in Iran” soon will be fall into the hands of a contractor working on behalf of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, or BBG, according to planning documents that WND...

China’s first lunar rover has successfully separated from the probe that carried it into space has and made its first track upon the surface of the moon, Chinese state media reported Sunday. The so-called “Jade Rabbit” rover detached itself from the much larger landing vehicle early Sunday morning, approximately seven hours after the unmanned Chang’e 3 space probe touched down on a fairly flat, Earth-facing part of the moon. The soft landing—the term for a landing in which neither the spacecraft nor its equipment is damaged—was the first on the moon by any nation in 37 years. …

Nasa has announced plans to grow plants on the moon by 2015 in a project designed to further humanity’s chances of successfully colonising space. Plant growth will be an important part of space exploration in the future as NASA plans for long-duration missions to the moon. NASA scientists anticipate that astronauts may be able to grow plants on the moon, and the plants could be used to supplement meals. If successful, the Lunar Plant Growth Habitat team will make history by seeding life from Earth on another celestial body for the first time, paving the way for humans to set...