Free Republic

Once confined to the small scientific community of climate researchers and ecological economists, the idea of degrowth is now blazing into the mainstream. Not surprisingly, people are trying to figure out what to make of it. Is it an inspiring idea that points the way to a better economy? Or is it a mad notion that’s sure to plunge us all into poverty? Degrowth is a planned reduction of total energy and material use to bring the economy in line with planetary boundaries, while improving people’s lives by distributing income and resources more fairly. The scientific case for degrowth is...

At midnight on Mars, the red planet’s magnetic field sometimes starts to pulsate in ways that have never before been observed. The cause is currently unknown. That’s just one of the stunning preliminary findings from NASA’s very first robotic geophysicist there, the InSight lander. Since touching down in November 2018, this spacecraft has been gathering intel to help scientists better understand our neighboring planet’s innards and evolution, such as taking the temperature of its upper crust, recording the sounds of alien quakes, and measuring the strength and direction of the planet’s magnetic field. As revealed during a handful of presentations...

The asteroid, called "2019 OK," passed about 40,400 miles above Earth's surface — roughly 5 times closer to Earth than the moon — at 55,000 miles per hour and could have "created localized devastation to an area roughly 50 miles across" if it struck land, according to a NASA news release. "An asteroid of this size coming this close to Earth is a pretty rare event — on the order of about twice a century," according to Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at JPL.

Can the little bot still function? India claims to have spotted the country’s Vikram lunar lander on the surface of the Moon days after the spacecraft presumably crashed during a landing attempt. India still has not made contact with the lander, which went silent moments before its scheduled touchdown, but Indian officials are hopeful that the lander might still function. “We are trying to establish contact,” Kailasavadivoo Sivan, the chairperson of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) which oversees the lander, told Asian News International (ANI). “It will be communicated soon.” The Vikram lander is a key part of India’s...

**SNIP** We’ve only just begun to see how far Epstein’s influence reached into the science and technology communities, but what we know so far is disturbing. Harvard University, to which Epstein donated before his guilty plea in 2008, said it hadn’t taken any of his money afterward. He found other ways to donate indirectly, though, including by giving $110,000 to a nonprofit run by Elisa New. (New, as it happens, is married to Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard who publicly wondered in 2005 if women were just innately not equipped for STEM careers.) Harvard professor Joscha Bach was...

Sept. 19 (UPI) -- The U.S. Navy has acknowledged what appear to be unusual flying objects in footage from three separate military videos, saying they show "unidentified aerial phenomena" moving at high speeds. All three videos were recorded by F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets -- two in 2015 and one in 2004. The Navy refers to the sightings as UAP, not UFOs. "The three videos show incursions into our military training ranges by unidentified aerial phenomena," Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher said in an emailed statement. "The Navy has characterized the observed phenomena as 'unidentified.'" The 2004 footage, taken from an...

Twice in the last month, the President of the United States has claimed that the Pentagon has weapons even more powerful than nuclear weapons, with the ability to easily kill millions. He is either bluffing, confused, or is incapable of understanding the difference between conventional and nuclear weapons. President Donald Trump made the claim during remarks to commemorate the 18th anniversary of the September 11th attacks in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. According to The Washington Post, Trump told an audience, emphasis mine: “The last four days, we have hit our enemy harder than they have ever been hit before,...

Scientists have proposed a method to connect the Earth and the moon with a cable that will allow us to travel between them, but the European Space Agency isn't convinced Two astronomers from the University of Cambridge and the University of Columbia have proposed a plan for a kind of elevator between the moon and the Earth. Have you ever thought about what it would be like if we could just hop in an elevator, press a button, and head up to the moon? According to the scientists' calculations, it would be possible to construct such a structure using existing...

The team used the Osiris instrument at the 10.4m Gran Telescopio Canarias in La Palma, Spain, to obtain visible spectra - measurements of sunlight reflected by Borisov. By studying these spectra, scientists can draw conclusions about its chemical composition, including how it might differ from comets that were "born" around the Sun. "The spectrum is the red side of the comet's total spectrum, so the only thing we can see in the spectrum is the slope," said Miquel Serra Ricart, from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in Tenerife. In coming days, the team will obtain measurements of the...

Newly unearthed data from four decades ago contradicted gospel that animal fats are worse than vegetable fats — and was ignored.  All those climate alarmists who proclaim that they "believe in science" fail to understand that science is created by flawed human beings who are susceptible to ignoring findings that don't confirm their hypotheses.  Or generate future grants for more research in the field.Today, the "settled science" of nutrition as it stood decades ago is being questioned, in part because Americans have become obese after decades of following federal guidelines that turn out to be poppycock. In The Scientific American, which is all...

The universe is looking younger every day, it seems. New calculations suggest the universe could be a couple billion years younger than scientists now estimate, and even younger than suggested by two other calculations published this year that trimmed hundreds of millions of years from the age of the cosmos. The huge swings in scientists' estimates — even this new calculation could be off by billions of years — reflect different approaches to the tricky problem of figuring the universe's real age.

One of the most radical and important ideas in the history of physics came from an unknown graduate student who wrote only one paper, got into arguments with physicists across the Atlantic as well as his own advisor, and left academia after graduating without even applying for a job as a professor. Hugh Everett’s story is one of many fascinating tales that add up to the astonishing history of quantum mechanics, the most fundamental physical theory we know of. Everett’s work happened at Princeton in the 1950s, under the mentorship of John Archibald Wheeler, who in turn had been mentored...

"Remarkably, the device is able to generate electricity at night, when solar cells don't work," "Beyond lighting, we believe this could be a broadly enabling approach to power generation suitable for remote locations, and anywhere where power generation at night is needed The device developed by Raman and Stanford University scientists Wei Li and Shanhui Fan sidesteps the limitations of solar power by taking advantage of radiative cooling, in which a sky-facing surface passes its heat to the atmosphere as thermal radiation, losing some heat to space and reaching a cooler temperature than the surrounding air. This phenomenon explains how...

A comet first spotted by a Ukrainian amateur astronomer looks to be just the second known object to visit our cosmic neighborhood from beyond the solar system. What could be an even bigger deal is that this one was discovered as it's still approaching us. The comet was found by Gennady Borisov of Crimea on Aug. 30, and went by the temporary name GB00234 until very recently. After being watched by several other observatories over the past few weeks, it was given the official name of C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) by the Minor Planet Center on Wednesday. It appeared to follow...

The enormous black hole at the center of our galaxy is having an unusually large meal of interstellar gas and dust, and researchers don't yet understand why. "We have never seen anything like this in the 24 years we have studied the supermassive black hole," said Andrea Ghez, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a co-senior author of the research. "It's usually a pretty quiet, wimpy black hole on a diet. We don't know what is driving this big feast." A paper about the study, led by the UCLA Galactic Center Group, which Ghez heads, is published today in...

If Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity holds true, then a black hole, born from the cosmically quaking collisions of two massive black holes, should itself "ring" in the aftermath, producing gravitational waves much like a struck bell reverbates sound waves. Einstein predicted that the particular pitch and decay of these gravitational waves should be a direct signature of the newly formed black hole's mass and spin. Now, physicists from MIT and elsewhere have "heard" the ringing of an infant black hole for the first time, and found that the pattern of this ringing does, in fact, predict the black...

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) said the fire broke out on the platform carrying the H-2B rocket about three and a half hours before the 5:33 p.m. Eastern scheduled launch of the HTV-8 cargo spacecraft. The statement didn’t identify the cause of the fire or what damage it caused to the platform or the rocket. Neither MHI nor the Japanese space agency JAXA set a new launch date for the mission. Industry sources said they expect the launch to be delayed by at least several days in order to make any repairs to the launch platform and inspect the rocket itself...

Exoplanet K2-18 b lies in the habitable zone of its host star some 110 light-years from Earth. In a major first, scientists have detected water vapor and possibly even liquid water clouds that rain in the atmosphere of a strange exoplanet that lies in the habitable zone of its host star about 110 light-years from Earth. A new study focuses on K2-18 b, an exoplanet discovered in 2015, orbits a red dwarf star close enough to receive about the same amount of radiation from its star as Earth does from our sun. Previously, scientists have discovered gas giants that have...

BOSTON—The number of Earth-like extrasolar planets suitable for harboring advanced life could be 10 times higher than has been assumed until now, according to a new modeling study. The finding contradicts the prevailing notion that a terrestrial planet needs a large moon to stabilize the orientation of its axis and, hence, its climate. In 1993, French mathematicians Jacques Laskar and Philippe Robutel showed that Earth’s large moon has a stabilizing effect on our planet’s climate. Without the moon, gravitational perturbations from other planets, notably nearby Venus and massive Jupiter, would greatly disturb Earth’s axial tilt, with vast consequences for the...

Uranus, which takes its name from the Greek God of the sky, is a gas giant and the seventh planet from our Sun. It is also the third largest planet in our Solar System, ranking behind Jupiter and Saturn. Like its fellow gas giants, it has many moons, a ring system, and is primarily composed of gases that are believed to surround a solid core. Though it can be seen with the naked eye, the realization that Uranus is a planet was a relatively recent one. Though there are indications that it was spotted several times over the course of...