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The following is based on a translation of a report in Chinese media: According to xinhuanet.com’s report on June 19, through 3 years of research, Prof. Chen Yongsheng of the College of Chemistry and Prof. Tian Jianguo of the Institute of Physics, Nankai University have obtained a special graphene material for light-driven flight. Due to the special electronic characteristic of graphene and the macrostructure and form of the material, the material is able to get driving force from light 1,000 times greater than ordinary light pressure. The website’s reporter claimed to have seen with his own eyes a graphene sponge...

NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission is still gasping along, but at least one space blogger suggests that its cancellation is all but inevitable. In the meantime, Space News just on Tuesday reported that the space agency has decided that the ARM must actually capture a boulder and take it to a retrograde lunar orbit to be considered a success. This metric was actually in doubt, with some NASA managers suggesting that as long as an unmanned probe, propelled by a solar selection propulsion engine, rendezvoused with an asteroid and then returned, even without anything resembling a rock, it would be a...

Supporters of the Obama administration and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are rightly thrilled by the 6-3 decision reaffirming the subsidies essential to the functioning of the statute. The decision likely cements the statute in place as part of the U.S. healthcare system. However, the way that Chief Justice John Roberts reached that decision may provide the seeds for judicial curbing of regulation in other areas, and could very easily come up in future court cases regarding Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations on climate change. Some background is necessary. A 1984 Supreme Court case, Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense...

Archaeologists from the University of Reading will start a three-year excavation on land between the prehistoric monuments of Stonehenge and Avenbury this summer. Exploring the Vale of Pewsey in Wiltshire is expected to reveal more about the lives of the people who worshipped at Stonehenge. The work will be done in collaboration with Historic England, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Wiltshire Museum. The site is a barely explored archaeological region of huge international importance. The project will investigate Marden Henge. Built around 2400 BC Marden is the largest henge or Neolithic earthwork in the country and one of...

Bill Nye, the liberal establishment’s cartoonish Pseudoscience Guy, packages progressive ideology in childish goofiness so as to render it less menacing as he preaches disproven global warming theory to kids young enough to take it at face value. Although his attempts to implant fear of “climate change” are laughable, his underlying message should make your hair stand on end: “Climate change is a real deal everybody…“Now back in 1750 there were about one-and-a-half billion people in the world. Well today there is 7.2 going on 7.3 billion people. Well that’s the problem. There’s billions of people breathing and burning the...

The Obama administration is denying reports the president reached out to Iran’s leadership ahead of the deadline for a nuclear deal with Tehran. “Reports that the president recently sent a letter to Iran’s leadership are not accurate,” a senior administration official said Monday. The official suggested President Obama has limited his involvement in the day-to-day talks as negotiators rush to complete a final agreement. “We have left the difficult work of the nuclear negotiations to our team on the ground in Vienna,” the official said. An Iranian newspaper reported Monday that Obama sent a private message to Iran’s senior leaders...

It is my deepest wish that none of the following should ever happen, but logic says it will. The Supreme Court has taken its place at the head of the charge to destroy the Roman Catholic Church in America. Under all the impassioned arguments about “love winning out” the leering minions of hate and lies have won a major victory. Now they can gather their forces to attack their real enemy, the one that has always been the unspoken target: The Roman Catholic Church in America. For all its faults and self-inflicted damage, the Catholic Church in America is still...

Coverage begins at 9 am for the 10:21 am launch.

Musk, Schmidt, Simons and billionaire buddies build empire based on climate and energy BS Elon Musk and his fellow barons of Climate Crisis, Inc. recently got a huge boost from Pope Francis. Musk et al. say fossil fuels are causing unprecedented warming and weather disasters. The Pope agrees and says Catholics must “ask God for a positive outcome” to negotiations over another UN climate treaty. It matters not that the predicted calamities are not happening. There has been no warming in 19 years, no category 3-5 hurricanes making US landfall for a record 9-1/2 years, indeed none of the over-hyped...

When Henri met Albert the stars didn’t quite align; nor did their clocks. Jimena Canales, historian of science, tells Joe Gelonesi about her discovery of an explosive 20th century debate that changed our view of time and destroyed a reputation.Physicists and philosophers have a curious relationship. They both need each other for the cosmic dance, but one partner sometimes refuses to join in. Star physicist Stephen Hawking even declared the end of philosophy in 2011. In some ways the pronouncement was to be expected; physics triumphalism dictates that at some point philosophy will exhaust itself and be unable to solve...

“Echoes of Apollo” by George Thompson is the sort of space faring technothriller that Tom Clancy would have been proud to have placed his name on if he was still alive. The novel is a near future story of what amounts to the first space war between China and the United States. “Echoes of Apollo” not only involve the sort of cutting edge technological toys inherent in the genre, but also makes clever use of the technology of the past. The story also casts a new light on the ongoing debate as to whether or not to return to the...

n an op-ed published in Florida Today on Wednesday, Jeff Kottkamp, a former lieutenant governor of Florida, and Rich Ramos, a Florida businessman, proposed a new justification for sending humans to Mars. A Mars program would serve, in their view, as a means to foster national unity of the sort that is rarely achieved outside times of war. Some recent polling data suggests that they may be on to something.

According to a Tuesday piece in Motherboard, Noam Chomsky, a philosopher and political commentator, and Lawrence Krauss, a physicist and cosmologist, had a public dialogue about space exploration. Being both men of the far left, they concluded that space travel should be best left to robots and conducted by governments. The conclusions are the exact opposite of what the prevailing trends are in space policy.

A Monday piece in IO9 contained some revelations about the upcoming sequel to 1996’s “Independence Day,” which is entitled “Independence Day: Resurgence.” 20 years after the great alien invasion flattened many of Earth’s largest cities and killed untold millions of people, the world is still united in building up its defenses against a return engagement. These defenses apparently include a moon base.

Would take away a state's rights once and for all to require labeling of GMO foods. 70 bills have been introduced in over 30 states to require some sort of labeling of genetically engineered (GE) or genetically modified organisms (GMO).1)http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/issues/976/ge-food-labeling/state-labeling-initiatives#  Although very few of these bills or initiatives have passed into actual law, and many have been challenged in court, a new congressional bill would take away the state’s rights once and for all to require labeling of GMO foods.H.R.1599 2)https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/1599/text, ironically labeled the  Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015 has been renamed the DARK (Deny Americans the Right...

PharmedOut is a Georgetown University Medical Center project that advances evidence-based prescribing, and educates healthcare professionals about pharmaceutical marketing practices. Founded in January, 2007, it is an Internet-based alternative for doctors seeking Continuing Medical Education (CME) courses, not sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry. Inasmuch as the industry derives its greatest profits from new proprietary drugs, it has a built-in tendency to tout them, even though newer is not always better. One example, cited at the time of PharmedOut’s founding, came from Georgetown Ob-Gyn doctor Anthony Scialli: “Take oral contraceptives. Over the years they have increased in number, but there haven’t...

Is this the ultimate evidence that ancient civilizations inhabited the red planet in the distant past? NASA’s curiosity rover has photographed on of the most interesting images of the surface of Mars ever since it touched down on the red planet in 2012. Curiosity was launched from Cape Canaveral on November 26, 2011, at 10:02 EST aboard the MSL spacecraft and landed on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater on Mars on August 6, 2012 You can check out the RAW image of the pyramid here. Ufologists and researchers have already started speculating what this artifact is and according to many...

Imagine this: you're gushing blood. Nothing seems to make it stop. Then you apply a gel to your wound, and within seconds, the bleeding stops. In minutes, you're healed. This is the premise of VetiGel, an algae-based polymer created by Joe Landolina — a 22 year-old who invented the product when he was just 17. Landolina is now the co-founder and CEO of Suneris, a biotech company that manufactures the gel. Last week, Suneris announced that it will begin shipping VetiGel to veterinarians later this summer. Humans won't be far behind. When injected into a wound site, the gel can...

New scientific models supported by the British governmentÂ’s Foreign Office show that if we donÂ’t change course, in less than three decades industrial civilisation will essentially collapse due to catastrophic food shortages, triggered by a combination of climate change, water scarcity, energy crisis, and political instability. Before you panic, the good news is that the scientists behind the model donÂ’t believe itÂ’s predictive. The model does not account for the reality that people will react to escalating crises by changing behavior and policies. But even so, itÂ’s a sobering wake-up call, which shows that business-as-usual guarantees the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it: our current...

Researchers found four teeth in the Qesem Cave near Rosh Ha'ayin (not far from Tel Aviv), and they were astonished at test results that conclude the fossils to be some 400,000-years-old. The significance of this is that it's possible that the origin of prehistoric man is in Israel, and not in East Africa. And an additional surprise is that prehistoric man was mainly vegetarian and not carnivorous. The cave is 10 meters deep and its surface area is approximately 300 square meters. Researchers have been sifting through it for some 15 years to discover remains from prehistoric times. The ancient...