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Researchers say they were able to produce 'diamond rain' using fancy plastic and high-powered lasers to recreate the intense conditions of the planets .... Consider this your daily reminder that the solar system is even more awesomely bonkers than you realized: On Uranus and Neptune, scientists forecast rain storms of solid diamonds. The gems form in the hydrocarbon-rich oceans of slush that swath the gas giants’ solid cores. Scientists have long speculated that the extreme pressures in this region might split those molecules into atoms of hydrogen and carbon, the latter of which then crystallize to form diamonds. These diamonds...

The absence of a father — due to incarceration, death, separation or divorce — has adverse physical and behavioral consequences for a growing child. But little is known about the biological processes that underlie this link between father loss and child well-being. In a study (link is external) published July 18 in the journal Pediatrics, a team of FFCWS researchers report that the loss of a father has a significant adverse effect on telomeres, the protective nucleoprotein end caps of chromosomes. At 9 years of age, children who had lost their father had significantly shorter telomeres — 14 percent...

While individuals have been playing musical instruments that require vibrating lips to produce sound since before the dawn of recorded time – we need only think of the shofar, didgeridoo, and conch shell to begin a list of lip-blown aerophones of ancient origin – there is much about playing such instruments that remains a mystery. Whether thousands of years old or made last week at a modern brass instrument factory, the fundamental changes to brasses over the millennia have been those of material, construction and ergonomics rather than actual tone production. As every school child that has ever picked up...

Electrons have been caught flowing through graphene like a liquid, reaching limits physicists thought were fundamentally impossible. This type of conductance is known as 'superballistic' flow, and this new experiment suggests it could revolutionise the way we conduct electricity. If that's not crazy enough, the super-fast flows actually occur as a result of electrons bouncing off each other, something that high school physics tells us should slow conductivity down.

Was There an Eclipse on Good Friday? Msgr. Charles Pope • August 21, 2017 • With the solar eclipse that occurred Monday, it occurred to me to consider the darkening of the sun that occurred when Jesus was on the Cross. Though some wish to explain it scientifically (as an eclipse), there may have been more at work than mere astronomy.In Luke 23:44, we read, It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour (i.e., from noon until 3:00 PM).Although this seems to describe a solar eclipse, it isn’t...

Modern science is mostly based on discoveries by white men. Therefore, it is racist and sexist and must be replaced with a new science. Enraged by the mild deviations from liberal orthodoxy that got James Damore fired from Google, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a physics researcher at the University of Washington, is ready to do her part: Prescod-Weinstein takes issue with the contention—related to her by a “well-known scientist”—that “the Google memo failed to constitute hostile behavior because it cited peer-reviewed articles that suggest women have different brains,” arguing that “peer-reviewed” is not synonymous with “correct.”

Actually: no. In the modern world, there are ever fewer reasons to maintain the distinct roles of men and women, which evolved over millions of years. But to imagine that we are not living with that inheritance is to reject not just science, but all forms of logic and reason. The message that liberates women is not: men and women are the same, and anyone who tells you different is oppressing you. The message that liberates women is: men and women are different. (And in fact, everyone who is intellectually honest knows this—see Geoffrey Miller’s excellent point regarding the central...

Scientists have responded furiously to claims about climate change made in a live BBC radio interview. Experts told BBC News that the assertions made by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson on Radio 4's Today programme were simply untrue. Lord Lawson had claimed that global temperatures had "slightly declined" over the past 10 years. However, scientists working in the field said the records showed the complete opposite to be the case. BBC Radio 4's Today programme defended its decision to interview Lord Lawson on Thursday morning in a segment on climate change. The BBC argued that it had a duty to inform...

In 1960, only 10% of children were raised without a father in the home.Today, 40% are.There are many reasons behind this sobering statistic. The clichéd case of a man knocking up a woman, and then leaving town never to return certainly still occurs.But sometimes a man’s ex-wife petitions for primary custody of their kids, and sympathetic family courts unjustly grant this request about 80% of the time.And there is an increasing number of women — who for various reasons cannot or do not want to raise their children with a boyfriend or husband — who intentionally choose to become...

When the sun came up on May 28 in the year 585 BCE, the Medes and Lydians were still at war. They had been at each other’s throats for years, and it looked like there was no end in sight for their conflict. But something extraordinary happened on the battlefield that day, which changed everything. This episode also features an interview with Dr. Fred Espenak, an astrophysicist, and scientist emeritus at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

WASHINGTON — Nearly all of the Obama administration’s science staff has departed the White House since January, and the Trump administration has moved slowly to replace them. In the meantime, however, an unofficial shadow office, stocked with Obama loyalists, is quietly at work. The network, described to STAT by officials from the previous administration who are involved, is informal yet organized, allowing for a far-reaching if largely inconspicuous effort to continue advocating for the Obama science agenda. Participants have provided counsel to Democratic lawmakers and their staffs on Capitol Hill, and they have held group-wide strategy sessions much in the...

* This may be the most intact primate fossil skull ever discovered. * The fossil comes from a little-known period of primate evolutionary history. Source: Fred Spoor This is Alesi, the skull of the new extinct ape species Nyanzapithecus alesi (KNM-NP 59050). ================================================================================================================================ A group of scientists have found what may be the most intact fossilized primate skull ever discovered, and the find could shed light on the common evolutionary heritage shared by apes and humans. The lemon-sized skull was discovered in Kenya by an international team of researchers, and was dated to the middle of the Miocene era, a...

1. A breakthrough study from the Institute of Crystallography in Italy has just confirmed that the image of the man on the Shroud of Turin is composed of real blood and in fact a microscopic analysis of blood particles reveals that the blood had to come from someone undergoing torture.  This just further confirms the possible authenticity of the Shroud (see here). 2. Using a recently developed X-ray imaging technology, archaeologists were able to read the inside of a biblical scroll that was covered in ash during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD.  The results?  The current manuscripts...

Potent, climate warming gases are being emitted into the atmosphere but are not being recorded in official inventories, a BBC investigation has found. Air monitors in Switzerland have detected large quantities of one gas coming from a location in Italy. However, the Italian submission to the UN records just a tiny amount of the substance being emitted. Levels of some emissions from India and China are so uncertain that experts say their records are plus or minus 100%. These flaws posed a bigger threat to the Paris climate agreement than US President Donald Trump's intention to withdraw, researchers told BBC...

The 2001 discovery of the seven million-year-old Sahelanthropus, the first known upright ape-like creatures, was yet more proof of humanity’s place among the great apes. And yet Mike Pence, then a representative and now US vice president, argues for the opposite conclusion.For him, our ideas about our ancestors have changed, proving once more that evolution was a theory, and therefore we should be free to teach other theories alongside evolution in our classrooms. How to respond? The usual answer is that we should teach students the meaning of the word “theory” as used in science – that is, a hypothesis...

KNOXVILLE (WATE) — While East Tennesseans are keeping an eye on the sky, there’s going to be plenty of action on the ground at Zoo Knoxville as the total solar eclipse passes through on August 21. There are more than 700 animals at the zoo and staff plans to observe them during the time of totality. The phenomenon is raising questions like, how will animals react when their daily routines are driven by the cycles of night and day? “We don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Phil Colclough, with Zoo Knoxville.

Who would want to be micro chipped? Many, apparently. Some people are begging for a micro chip to be implanted in their body – one that could do everything a smartphone can do and more.“I am so ready,” says Charlene Li. She’s a long-time author and principal analyst at the Altimeter Group. This week, science fiction came to the heartland when a small Wisconsin company announced that it would begin implanting microchips into its employee’s hands. The company had more than 50 volunteers too. The company sold the implantation to their employees as a convenience for them to ditch the...

In the opening pages of the book "Foundation", written by Isaac Azimov, he describes the beginning of the fall of the Empire. The Empire was a multi-star-system civilization of trillions of people, but it was beginning to rot. One of the key characters observes that a researcher, a pompous Lord of a planet, considered it 'scientific method' to read someone else's work, saying "Why should I travel to another planet? Someone has already written about it." The protagonist thought, "Scientific method, hell. No wonder the galaxy was going to pot." Azimov was prescient. We find ourselves in a similar time....

The Reproducibility Project, meanwhile, swelled to include more than 270 researchers working to reproduce 100 psychology experiments—and in August 2015, Nosek revealed its results. Ultimately his army of volunteers could verify the findings of only about 40 percent of the studies. Media reports declared the field of psychology, if not all of science, to be in a state of crisis. It became one of the biggest science stories of the year.

Bill Nye: Older people need to 'die' out before climate science can advance Bill Nye specifically targeted the elderly this week as he spoke out against climate change deniers, saying that climate science will start to advance when old people start to "age out," according to a report.The "Science Guy" said that generationally, the majority of climate change deniers are older."Climate change deniers, by way of example, are older. It's generational," Nye told the Los Angeles Times. Nye said that he is calling them out with "due respect," acknowledging that he is "now one of them.""We're just going to have...