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Explanation: This new comet is quite photogenic. Comet Lovejoy, discovered only three months ago, was imaged through ruins of ancient Mörby Castle in Sweden last week sporting a green-glowing coma and tails trailing several degrees. The past few weeks have been an unusually active time for comet watchers as four comets were visible simultaneously with binoculars: ISON, Lovejoy, Encke, and LINEAR. C/2013 R1 (Lovejoy) comet is currently visible to the unaided eye from a dark location. As Monday's new Moon will provide little glare, the next few days provide a good time to see Comet Lovejoy as it reaches its...

A sixty-seven year old proud atheist friend of mine recently interjected the sweeping statement “all religion is irrational” into one of our conversations. I replied, not with a direct rebuttal but, instead, with the unexpected question, “who is Jesus Christ?” He replied, “I don’t know.” If I were to ask some of you why I pulled that question out of left field you might also reply with a bewildered “I don’t know.” So keep reading. Please. If you have never really pondered the question “who is Jesus Christ?” then you simply cannot consider yourself to be a committed intellectual –...

Men and women's brains are connected in different ways which may explain why the sexes excel at certain tasks, say researchers. A US team at the University of Pennsylvania scanned the brains of nearly 1,000 men, women, boys and girls and found striking differences.

Ire of the tiger! Stunning pictures capture bloodied beasts slashing each other with their claws in dramatic battle over territory • Dramatic battle caught on camera in the Londolozi private game reserve in Pretoria, South Africa • The clash erupted after one of the tigers delivered a vicious blow to the neck of its rival • After 45 minutes of bloody battle the larger tiger was deemed the winner This is the incredible moment a pair of bloodied tigers slashed each other with their claws in a dramatic fight over territory. The dramatic battle was caught on camera at the...

New dating indicates... a well-known group of early Homo (early human) fossils discovered in previous investigations at Koobi Fora in the Turkana Basin of East Africa have an age range that is older than previously estimated. Led by archaeologist Josephine C.A. Joordens of the Netherlands' Leiden University, the researchers combined magnetostratigraphy and strontium (Sr) isotope stratigraphy techniques to develop a new age constraint range for 15 selected hominin fossils found in deposits on the Karari Ridge of the Koobi Fora region in the eastern Turkana Basin (Kenya). Magnetostratigraphy measures the polarity of Earth's changing magnetic field at the time a...

Archaeologists have found a mass grave close to one of Britain's favourite cathedrals. Bones from 18 bodies have been discovered by Durham University experts during building work at the Palace Green Library, part of the World Heritage Site in the historic city centre. At first it was thought the bodies were buried in Durham Cathedral's medieval cemetery which was bigger than the current burial plot. But further examination revealed an unorthodox and intriguing layout to the bodies which archaeologists say is proof of a mass burial. Richard Annis, senior archaeologist, Archaeological Services Durham University, said: "We have found clear evidence...

Governments around the world have agreed to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). That would require an 80 percent reduction in energy sources like coal, oil and natural gas, which emit carbon dioxide into the air. Nations are far from that ambitious path. There are big political and economic challenges. But technologists do see a way — at least for the United States — to achieve that goal. Nowhere is that aspiration clearer than at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. It sits on a hill overlooking Golden, Colo., and suburbs that sprawl all the way to...

Archaeologists said fortifications of the largest neolithic Chinese city ever discovered were excavated on Wednesday and Thursday in northwest China's Shaanxi Province. The ruins of two square beacon towers, once part of the city wall of the 4,000-year-old Shimao Ruins in Shenmu County, have been uncovered, according to Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology. One of the towers is 18 meters long, 16 meters wide and four meters tall, while the other is 11.7 meters long, about 10 meters wide and three meters tall, said Su Zhouyong, deputy head of the institute. Sun said the discovery is a breakthrough and contributes...

A team of archaeologists from London’s Kingston University has mapped a prehistoric temple complex at a Neolithic site near the village of Damerham – located about 15 miles from the iconic Stonehenge – and discovered a sink hole of material that may hold information about plants that thrived there 6,000 years ago. “The site at Damerham is on chalk land, so we don’t often find materials like this that capture and preserve the plant remains – pollen or phytoliths – from a specific time period,” said Dr Helen Wickstead, head of the archaeological team. “It was evident that prehistoric people...

I saw the launch from my back yard (I live in Central Florida) and it appeared to blow up after second stage ignition. Actually, it looked like the second stage stopped shortly after ignition and range safety blew it up. Does anyone have any info on this?

A scientific breakthrough could finally make a male contraceptive pill reality, researchers said last night. Previous attempts to develop a pill have tried either to alter a man’s hormones or to make his sperm ineffective. The new technique works like a temporary vasectomy, stopping sperm leaving the body during sex – which scientists say will reassure men concerned that other approaches could affect their long-term virility and libido. It is also likely to appeal to women uneasy about the female pill’s potential to raise the risk of heart attacks, strokes and blood clots.

Italian archaeologists have unearthed a 2,600-year-old intact Etruscan tomb that promises to reveal new depths of one of the ancient world’s most fascinating and mysterious cultures.

The OECD is out with new global rankings of how students in various countries do in reading, science, and math. Results of the full survey can be found and delved into here.You can see below how Asian countries are obliterating everyone else in these categories.The United States, meanwhile, ranks below the OECD average in every category. And as the WSJ notes, the US has slipped in all of the major categories in recent years:The results from the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which are being released on Tuesday, show that teenagers in the U.S. slipped from 25th to 31st...

Explanation: The many spectacular colors of the Rho Ophiuchi (oh'-fee-yu-kee) clouds highlight the many processes that occur there. The blue regions shine primarily by reflected light. Blue light from the star Rho Ophiuchi and nearby stars reflects more efficiently off this portion of the nebula than red light. The Earth's daytime sky appears blue for the same reason. The red and yellow regions shine primarily because of emission from the nebula's atomic and molecular gas. Light from nearby blue stars - more energetic than the bright star Antares - knocks electrons away from the gas, which then shines when the...

Explanation: Comet Lovejoy was captured last week passing well in front of spiral galaxy M63. Discovered only three months ago and currently near its maximum brightness, Comet Lovejoy can be seen near the Big Dipper from dark northerly locations before dawn with the unaided eye. An unexpected rival to Comet ISON, C/2013 R1 (Lovejoy), pictured above, is currently sporting a large green coma and a beautifully textured ion tail. Comet Lovejoy is now headed back to the outer Solar System but should remain a good sight in binoculars for another few weeks. Conversely, spiral galaxy M63, lies far in the...

The California Air Resources Board is reportedly considering a new plan to help transportation for low earners: buying them cars. The agency would like to give those of low income a voucher to buy energy-efficient vehicles like the Nissan Leaf, which has a sticker price of $21,000. The board currently gives drivers $1,000 to $1,500 to get rid of their older vehicles in an attempt to curb carbon emissions; there is a second program that gives up to $4,000 depending on the vehicles involved.

Full Title is "Holiday Celebration: Robot Turtles, Poop-Snooping DNA Detectives" “Robot Turtle Will Help Underwater Archeologists Inspect Shipwrecks,” for example, has some obviously worthwhile things to point out about the development of autonomous unmanned underwater vehicles to explore dangerous environments more cheaply and safely than humans can manage. The saving grace for this report from The Robot Safari in the London Science Museum, however, is the effort the announcement goes to – and trouble the designers obviously did as well – to not only build an autonomous underwater vehicle that swims like a turtle, but justify having done so (paddle-like...

J. Condensed Matter Nucl. Sci. 12 (2013) 105–142 Research Article Phonon–nuclear Coupling for Anomalies in Condensed Matter Nuclear Science Peter L. Hagelstein ∗ Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA Irfan U. Chaudhary Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology. Lahore, Pakistan Abstract Excess heat in the Fleischmann–Pons experiment is thought to have a nuclear origin, yet there are no energetic particles observed in amounts commensurate with the energy produced. This in our view is the most fundamental issue in connection with theory. In earlier work we developed a mathematical model...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGDaOJAYHfo You might not know Kevin Kelley's name, but you know who Kevin Kelley is. You've read about him in Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, the New York Times, and on ESPN. If Grantland had existed in 2005 — when Kelley first implemented his bold new strategy at Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, Arkansas — we undoubtedly would have toasted his budding cult celebrity status in our "Who's That Guy?" annals.Kelley is the coach who never punts and almost always onside kicks. And while he hasn't converted his high school success into a college gig like fellow prep sensations Gus Malzahn...

A chilly Arctic summer has left 533,000 more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year - an increase of 29 per cent. (snip) ...days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores. The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year. More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced...

Global warming hysterics at the BBC warned us in 2007 that by summer 2013, the Arctic would be ice-free. As with so many other doomsday predictions by warmists, the results turn out to be quite the opposite. The UK Daily Mail reports: A chilly Arctic summer has left 533,000 more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year - an increase of 29 per cent. (snip)...days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to...

In the US we are used to abortion advocates claiming that the risk of elective abortion is relatively trivial, and major medical organizations denying any link between abortion and breast cancer. Now a powerful new study from China published last week by Yubei Huang and colleagues suggests otherwise.  The article, a meta-analysis pooling 36 studies from 14 provinces in China, showed that abortion increased the risk of breast cancer by 44% with one abortion, and 76% and 89% with two and three abortions. This new article is another example of the recent excellent scholarship on abortion in peer-reviewed journals coming...

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...

The US space agency plans to send seeds to the moon in 2015 in sealed canisters containing everything that is needed for the seedlings to thrive. As well as ten seeds each of basil and turnips, there will also be around 100 seeds of Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant related to cabbage and mustard.

Title Shortened. Full Title: Improved understanding of self-sustained, sub-micrometric multi-composition surface Constantan wires interacting with H2 at high temperatures: experimental evidence of Anomalous Heat Effects Francesco Celani, E.F. Marano, A. Nuvoli, E. Purchi, M. Nakamura, S. Pella, B. Ortenzi, E. Righi, G. Trenta, S. Bartalucci, A. Ovidi, G.L. Zangari, F. Micciulla, S. Bellucci, G. Vassallo Abstract This article is an extension of what presented by our team at 17th International Conference on Cold Fusion, ICCF-17, in Daejon, Korea, in 2012 [1]. It documents the improvements on Constantan-related experiments, started in 2011, in order to study the feasibility of new Nickel...

What Would Happen If a Lion Fought a Tiger? We've always been speculating about battles between superheroes. We know the outcome of octopus versus shark. At last we have an expert speculating on lion versus tiger. Which one would win? Since there's a good chance you've spent the weekend slowly tearing apart a ritualistically slaughtered bird, before going out and trampling your fellow citizens in arenas, you probably won't be too horrified by speculating on the outcome of animal fights. After all, the fights in question are, for the most part, in the past. Romans used to pit lions against...

Explanation: Why are these people shooting a powerful laser into the center of our Galaxy? Fortunately, this is not meant to be the first step in a Galactic war. Rather, astronomers at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) site in Chile are trying to measure the distortions of Earth's ever changing atmosphere. Constant imaging of high-altitude atoms excited by the laser -- which appear like an artificial star -- allow astronomers to instantly measure atmospheric blurring. This information is fed back to a VLT telescope mirror which is then slightly deformed to minimize this blurring. In this case, a VLT was...

Explanation: After failing to appear for Sun staring spacecraft at perihelion, its harrowing closest approach to the Sun, sungrazing Comet ISON was presumed lost. But ISON surprised observers yesterday as material still traveling along the comet's trajectory became visible and even developed an extensive fan-shaped dust tail. Edited and processed to HD format, this video (vimeo, youtube) is composed of frames from the SOHO spacecraft's coronographs. It follows the comet in view of the wide (blue tint) and narrow (red tint) field cameras in the hours both before and after perihelion passage. In both fields, overwhelming sunlight is blocked by...

Early on Sunday the spacecraft fired its main engine for more than 20 minutes, giving it the correct velocity to leave Earth's orbit. It will now cruise for 680m km (422m miles), setting up an encounter with its target on 24 September 2014. The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), also known as Mangalyaan, is designed to demonstrate the technological capability to reach Mars orbit. But the $72m (£45m) probe will also carry out experiments, including a search for methane gas in the planet's atmosphere.

Engineers at the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) Mission Operations Complex at Bangalore are now just hours away from sending the commands that will ignite MOMs’ liquid fueled main engine for TMI – the Trans Mars Insertion maneuver that will propel MOM away from Earth forever and place the craft on an elliptical trajectory to the Red Planet.

Bitcoin miners are being allegedly bundled with third party potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) that come bundled with legitimate applications, a new report indicates. According to a report by security company Malwarebytes third party applications that come bundled with legitimate applications and commonly known as potentially unwanted programs/applications (PUPs/PUAs) now come integrated with Bitcoin miners. These miners surreptitiously carry out Bitcoin mining operations on the user’s system consuming valuable CPU time without explicitly asking for user’s consent. Because of the extensive mathematical calculations involved, the mining operation consumes a lot of CPU resource and renders the user’s system almost useless for...

Each poo is a time capsule to the dawn of the dinosaurs. A gigantic "communal latrine" created at the dawn of the dinosaurs has been unearthed in Argentina. Thousands of fossilised poos left by rhino-like megaherbivores were found clustered together, scientists say. The 240-million-year-old site is the "world's oldest public toilet" and the first evidence that ancient reptiles shared collective dumping grounds. The dung contains clues to prehistoric diet, disease and vegetation says a study in Scientific Reports. Continue reading the main story [snip]

A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive. His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may eventually result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein's law of relativity. We contacted White at NASA and asked him to explain how this real life warp drive could actually work.

COMET ISON LIVES (UPDATED): Cancel the funeral. Comet ISON is back from the dead. Yesterday, Nov. 28th, Comet ISON flew through the sun's atmosphere and appeared to disintegrate before the cameras of several NASA and ESA spacecraft. This prompted reports of the comet's demise. Today, the comet has revived and is rapidly brightening. Click to view a SOHO coronagraph movie of the solar flyby

Did you make it to work on time this morning? Go ahead and thank the traffic gods, but also take a moment to thank your brain. The brain’s impressively accurate internal clock allows us to detect the passage of time, a skill essential for many critical daily functions. Without the ability to track elapsed time, our morning shower could continue indefinitely. Without that nagging feeling to remind us we’ve been driving too long, we might easily miss our exit.

Explanation: Sungrazing Comet ISON reached perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun, yesterday, November 28, at 18:45 UT. The comet passed just over 1 million kilometers above the solar surface, a distance less than the diameter of the Sun. These two panels follow ISON before (right) and after its close approach, imaged by the LASCO instrument onboard the Sun staring SOHO spacecraft. Overwhelming sunlight is blocked by LASCO's central occulting disk with a white circle indicating the Sun's positon and scale. The bright comet is seen along its path at the bottom of the before panel, but something much fainter...

Recent English information on the mission is scarce, but it’s been widely reported that the mission will include a lander in a six-wheeled rover. This Chinese news agency notes that planners expect to put up an astronomical telescope, test remote control between the moon and the Earth, and explore areas around the landing location. You can also read (dated) background information on the mission on the Chinese National Space Administration’s website.

A team of Iranian and Italian archaeologists has unearthed ruins of an ancient temple in an Elymais site in the Kaleh Chendar region in southwestern Iran, the Iranian director of the team announced on Saturday. Most parts of the structure have been built with large stones without mortar in form of a broad platform like those built at Persepolis, Jafar Mehrkian told the Persian service of CHN. The structure also includes platforms made of brick, which were usually built in the ancient temples, he added. Vito Messina of the University of Turin and a number of his colleagues accompanied the...

Italian technology will allow the restoration and preservation of thousands of very delicate papyri at the Egyptian museum in Cairo...part of the 'commodity aid' programme of Italian cooperation. High tech instruments in particular provided by Italtrend Spa and produced by Bresciani Srl, which will play a role in saving the museum's secular papyri, were shown during the ceremony. They are a laser and a portable instrument. The laser, an Italian-made groundbreaking tool in the preservation of artwork, uses non-invasive technology to clean very delicate and sensitive surfaces and allows not to use chemical products. The spectrometer is used for chemical-physical...

Västra Vång in Blekinge is now a sleepy rural community on Sweden’s southern Baltic coast. It has never been mentioned in ancient or medieval writings. So why are gold figurines and bronze busts turning up there? ... No less than 29 guldgubbar have been found beneath the turf. The term means “little old man of gold”, and is also found in Norway and Denmark. These are thin pieces of hammered gold, fashioned as clothed men or women. The figurines date back to the 6th century AD and were made for a few centuries. They are made of very thinly beaten...

Hold the obituary. Experts now think Comet ISON -- or at least part of it -- survived its close encounter with the sun. Karl Battams, a comet scientist for the Naval Research Laboratory, said it is believed some parts of ISON's nucleus survived perihelion. "It now looks like some chunk of ISON's nucleus has indeed made it through the solar corona, and re-emerged," he said. "It's throwing off dust and (probably) gas, but we don't know how long it can sustain that." However, he said, it's fate is uncertain.

Elforsk Takes Lead in Preparing for LENR November 26, 2013 • 24 Comments The extensive report just published about LENR by the Swedish energy research organization Elforsk raises an important question. Why should Elforsk, when there is still so much doubt and skepticism about LENR in the mainstream of academia and the media, spend so much time and effort chronicling the history and current developments in the LENR field? To my mind the answer seems to be that Elforsk must be at least reasonably convinced that there is something behind the LENR phenomenon to write a report like this. Certainly...

Scientists excavating within the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Maya Devi Temple in Lumbini, Nepal, have unearthed a timber structure that they date to the sixth century BCE. It is situated within and underlies a temple that is considered sacred to many as the birthplace of Siddh�rtha Gautama, or Buddha. Until now, there has been no archaeological evidence supporting a date any earlier than the third century BCE for Buddha's life. Some historians have suggested the death of Buddha took place sometime in the late 4th century or early 3rd century BCE, although there are a number of traditions...

One of the mysteries of Stonehenge is how some of its stones were brought from Pembrokeshire in Wales to Wiltshire. Photograph: I Capture Photography/Alamy For almost a century archaeologists have been braving the wind and rain on an exposed Welsh hillside in an attempt to solve one of the key mysteries of Stonehenge. But new research about to be published suggests that over the decades they may have been chipping away at the wrong rocky outcrop on the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire. The work in the hills is a crucial element in the understanding of Stonehenge because it is generally...

beautiful and expertly-flaked obsidian tool which formed part of a cache, rescued from a development site, offers a greater insight into the lives of ancient people that inhabited the island of New Britain, Papua New Guinea (PNG). In October 2010 Dr Robin Torrence a Senior Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Museum Reseach Institute was contacted by the General Manager at Barema oil palm plantation on New Britain Island. The company was in the process of bulldozing the side of a hill to make a house terrace. In the process they had uncovered a group of finely worked obsidian (volcanic...

Explanation: South of the large star-forming region known as the Orion Nebula, lies bright blue reflection nebula NGC 1999. At the edge of the Orion molecular cloud complex some 1,500 light-years distant, NGC 1999's illumination is provided by the embedded variable star V380 Orionis. That nebula is marked with a dark sideways T-shape near center in this cosmic vista that spans about 10 light-years. The dark shape was once assumed to be an obscuring dust cloud seen in silhouette against the bright reflection nebula. But recent infrared images indicate the shape is likely a hole blown through the nebula itself...

Using a compact but powerful laser, a research team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has developed a new way to generate synchrotron X-rays. Although the high quality of synchrotron X-rays make them ideal for research ranging from the structure of matter to advanced medical images, access to the technology has been limited until now. Most traditional synchrotron X-ray devices are gigantic and costly, available only at a few sites around the world. As reported in this week's issue of the top-ranked optics journal Nature Photonics, researchers at UNL's Extreme Light Laboratory developed a novel method to generate research-quality X-rays using...

(snip) Comet ISON (C/2012 S1) is nearing the climax...(snip) What will emerge after perihelion into the December dawn? A naked-eye marvel, a binocular-only target for amateur astronomers with good charts, or nothing at all? Maybe the latter, a new report this morning suggests. Michal Drahus posts: (snip)We observe consistent, rapid fading of the molecular emission lines between Nov. 21 and Nov. 25 by at least a factor of 20 (likely more). This may indicate that the nucleus is now at best marginally active or that... it no longer exists. (snip) I am afraid that there is rather "little hope" for...

KOI-351 is “the first system with a significant number of planets (not just two or three, where random fluctuations can play a role) that shows a clear hierarchy like the solar system — with small, probably rocky, planets in the interior and gas giants in the (exterior),” Dr. Juan Cabrera, of the Institute of Planetary Research at the German Aerospace Center, told Universe Today.

Explanation: Will Comet ISON survive tomorrow's close encounter with the Sun? Approaching to within a solar diameter of the Sun's surface, the fate of one of the most unusual comets of modern times will finally be determined. The comet could shed a great amount of ice and dust into a developing tail -- or break apart completely. Unfortunately, the closer Comet ISON gets to the Sun, the harder it has been for conventional telescopes to see the brightening comet in the glare of the morning Sun. Pictured in the above short time lapse video, Comet ISON was captured rising over...