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Here's a problem: The universe acts like it's a lot more massive than it looks. Take galaxies, those giant, spinning masses of stars. The laws of motion and gravity tell us how fast these objects should turn given their bulk. But observations through telescopes show them spinning way faster than we'd expect, as if they were actually much more massive than the stars we can see indicate. Astrophysicists have come up with two main solutions to this problem. Either there's a lot of mass out there in the universe that we can't detect directly, mass scientists call dark matter, or there's no...

You may recall our recent discussion about a new EPA policy which will require all scientific studies used in considering new regulations to make not only their findings but their methodology and underlying data available for public scrutiny and comparative analysis. What’s not to like, right? These are investigations being done by the government and funded by the taxpayer, so the information used to reach any conclusions should be freely available. Everyone’s a big fan of transparency when it comes to those sneaks in Washington so this should roll through smoothly. Not even close. It turns out that a previous...

THE REMAINS of an out-of-control Chinese space station are expected to light up the sky with “fireballs” before crashing down to Earth within days. China’s defunct space station, named Tiangong-1 or “heavenly place”, is expected to fall to Earth between March 30 and April 2, latest estimates suggest. Most of the eight-tonne space probe, launched in 2011, should “burn up” in the atmosphere before crash landing, Chinese space officials say. China’s space agency, CNSA, have never fully explained why Tiangong-1 "ceased functioning" on March 16 after reaching its "final phase of life". According to space experts, the odds of being...

In the stew of false information and conspiracy theories that swirls online, perhaps no idea is as flummoxing as the belief in a flat Earth. Flat-Earthers believe that the Earth is a flat disc ringed by an ice wall. All those elegant models of a round Earth that perfectly explain seasons, eclipses, sunrises and sunsets? Lies and cover-ups, they say. Pictures of the round Earth from space? Government conspiracies. The fact that you can see ships disappearing hull-first over the curve of the horizon with your own eyes? Well, flat-Earthers claim to see something different. It's been a big publicity...

This is a continuation of the thread where we looked at common English says that were found in the King James Bible. https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/3638962/posts?q=1&;page=1 Now we will look at scientific facts from the Authorized version . . . Would to God that people that are not fans of the Bible for the English-speaking people be convinced that it is much more than a mere Bible version - but the Book that God has used for 400 years to the saving of countless souls for Christ.

I recall reading or hearing of research to determine the level of understanding of opponents political arguments by conservatives and leftists/liberals. The research, as I recall, showed a list of policy questions, and asked the recipient, who was self identified, as conservative or liberal/leftist, to give the opposite sides arguments on each policy question. My understanding was that conservatives consistently understood and knew the opposite sides arguments, while liberal/leftists were ignorant of the conservative arguments. I have been looking for the source of this research, but have not found any. Is this research a myth, or is there an actual...

A new scenario seeking to explain how Mars’ putative oceans came and went over the last 4 billion years implies that the oceans formed several hundred million years earlier and were not as deep as once thought. The early ocean known as Arabia (left, blue) would have looked like this when it formed 4 billion years ago on Mars, while the Deuteronilus ocean, about 3.6 billion years old, had a smaller shoreline. Both coexisted with the massive volcanic province Tharsis, located on the unseen side of the planet, which may have helped support the existence of liquid water. The water...

In such a scenario, scientists expect that about a fifth of the Moon's material would have come from Earth and the rest from the impacting body. The Moon, our planet's constant companion for some 4.5 billion years, may have been forged by a rash of smaller bodies smashing into an embryonic Earth, researchers have revealed. A bombardment birth would explain a major inconsistency in the prevailing hypothesis that the Moon splintered off in a single, giant impact between Earth and a Mars-sized celestial body. In such a scenario, scientists expect that about a fifth of the Moon's material would have...

In recent decades the scientific consensus has been that the moon formed billions of years ago from debris cast off when a Mars-sized object dealt Earth a glancing blow. But a radical new theory holds that some long-ago giant collision actually disintegrated Earth, causing it to balloon out into a vast doughnut-shaped cloud of vaporized rock, which the scientists who developed the theory dubbed a “synestia." They say the moon subsequently formed within this cosmic maelstrom. In the long-accepted explanation of lunar formation, the collision between Earth and the Mars-sized object, known as Theia, ejected part of Earth's mantle —...

By Philip Cottraux Stephen Hawking passed away at the age of 76 this week. A theoretical physicist, professor of mathematics at Cambridge University (a position once held by Isaac Newton), and author of the best-selling book A Brief History of Time, he was a legend in the scientific community. When Hawking spoke, the world listened. At one time, he seemed to be ambiguously deist (open to the possibility of God, but not as a loving Creator). But by the end, he was a devout atheist. In light of his death, the media has proudly displayed some of his most notorious...

In the scientific community, there is still a great deal of energy devoted to “listening” for evidence or hints of intelligent, extraterrestrial civilizations out among the stars. Most of you are probably familiar with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and their decades of work in this field. They’re still at it and, in fact, are upping their game with a new generation of laser sensors. These projects drew fresh attention after the discovery of Tabby’s Star and the frantic speculation over whether or not some ancient civilization had built a Dyson Sphere around their own sun. This has led...

Bennu has a shape that looks a bit like a spinning top. It is roughly 500 meters (1,640 feet) in diameter and orbits the sun once every 1.2 years, or 436.604 days. Every six years or so, it comes very close to Earth — about 0.002 AU, according to the University of Arizona. (... well within the orbit of Earth's moon.) Bennu is part of a small class of carbonaceous (dark) asteroids that likely have primitive materials in them. Called a B-type class, Bennu and other asteroids like it have materials such as volatiles (compounds with a low boiling point),...

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk told an audience at South by Southwest that his timeline for sending a space vehicle to Mars could mark its first milestone early next year. The privately-funded venture, announced in September 2017, aims to send a cargo mission to the Red Planet by 2022. SpaceX's ultimate objective is to plant the seeds to put a human colony on Mars. Musk held a surprise question and answer session at the annual technology and culture festival in Austin, Texas on Sunday. The billionaire told attendees that "we are building the first Mars, or interplanetary ship, and...

Although planets surround stars in the galaxy, how they form remains a subject of debate. Despite the wealth of worlds in our own solar system, scientists still aren't certain how planets are built. Currently, two theories are duking it out for the role of champion. The first and most widely accepted, core accretion, works well with the formation of the terrestrial planets but has problems with giant planets such as Uranus. The second, the disk instability method, may account for the creation of giant planets. "What separates the ice giants from the gas giants is their formation history: during...

Up for Grabs In Science, When 'Anything Goes,' Everything Goesby Denyse O'Leary Family values activist Austin Ruse's new book, Fake Science: Exposing the Left's Skewed Statistics, Fuzzy Facts, and Dodgy Data (Regnery, 2017), offers a look at a world growing increasingly hostile to evidence-based reasoning. We have not discovered better reasoning methods; rather, many people seem to have decided that reasoning is not relevant to our life together, and perhaps not relevant to the life of the mind generally. Ruse begins his book with a note about polls. Opinion pollsters claim that their work is a scientific enterprise. But in...

Astronomers have detected a signal from the first stars as they appeared and illuminated the universe, in observations that have been hailed as “revolutionary”.

In a clean room inside a clean room at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, a petite telescope is perched on a stand for a final series of checkouts prior to launch. The extra fastidiousness is because the observatory’s four cameras will fly without protective covers—one of several simplifying design decisions made to help ensure the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, will meet its goal of measuring the masses of at least 50 small, rocky and potentially Earth-like worlds as part of the first all-sky, exoplanet survey. TESS was proposed even before NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, launched in 2009, demonstrated...

Physicists have insisted for a long time that black holes are impenetrable ciphers. Whatever goes in is lost, impossible to study or meaningfully understand. Some small amount of matter and energy might escape a black hole in the form of "Hawking radiation," but anything still inside the black hole is functionally disappeared from the physical universe. The idea is a basic premise of modern physics: If something falls into a black hole, it can't be contacted, it's future can't be predicted. No observer could possibly survive traveling into the dark space, not even long enough to glance around and notice...

(The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of ancient and brilliant quasar 3C 273, which resides in a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo. Its light has taken some 2.5 billion years to reach us. Despite this great distance, it is still one of the closest quasars to our home. It was the first quasar ever to be identified, and was discovered in the early 1960s by astronomer Allan Sandage.) Shining so brightly that they eclipse the ancient galaxies that contain them, quasars are distant objects powered by black holes a billion times as massive as our...

It's time to gaze into our crystal ball and see what the coming year has in store for science. From powerful new rockets and asteroid-sampling spacecraft to groundbreaking particle physics, there's plenty to look forward to in 2018. Aeronautics and space exploration A new tool to find exoplanets In March 2018, NASA will launch its Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) - a mission to find previously undiscovered exoplanets from the vantage point of low Earth orbit. The space-based telescope is expected to discover thousands of exoplanets over the next several years as it measures the luminosity of more than 200,000...