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An artist's conception of Kepler-62f, a planet in the 'habitable zone' of a star located about 1,200 light-years from Earth. Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle ========================================================================================================================= A distant planet known as Kepler-62f could be habitable, a team of astronomers reports. The planet, which is about 1,200 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Lyra, is approximately 40 percent larger than Earth. At that size, Kepler-62f is within the range of planets that are likely to be rocky and possibly could have oceans, said Aomawa Shields, the study's lead author and a National Science Foundation astronomy and astrophysics postdoctoral fellow...

Astronomers used the Harlan J. Smith Telescope at the University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Texas, to search for a planet around star CI Tau. Credit: Ethan Tweedie Photography ================================================================================================== In contradiction to the long-standing idea that larger planets take longer to form, U.S. astronomers today announced the discovery of a giant planet in close orbit around a star so young that it still retains a disk of circumstellar gas and dust. "For decades, conventional wisdom held that large Jupiter-mass planets take a minimum of 10 million years to form," said Christopher Johns-Krull, the lead author...

SpaceEngine - a free space simulation program that lets you explore the universe in three dimensions, from planet Earth to the most distant galaxies. Areas of the known universe are represented using actual astronomical data, while regions uncharted by astronomy are generated procedurally. Millions of galaxies, trillions of stars, countless planets - all available for exploration. You can land any planet, moon or asteroid and watch alien landscapes and celestial phenomena. You can even pilot starships and atmospheric shuttles.

This is an under appreciated low budget sci-fi flick. This was a series and they made several of them but this is the best. Dr. Bernard Quartermass is prominent scientist/astrophysicist who has various adventures in the films. The film was released with the title "5 million years from Earth" in the US. Quartermas and the PitEnjoy

“I have always been amazed that anyone would pay attention to Bill Nye, a pretend scientist in a bow tie,” Coleman said Friday, according to ClimateDepot.com. “As a man who has studied the science of meteorology for over 60 years and received the AMS (American Meteorological Society’s) ‘Meteorologist of the Year’ award, I am totally offended that Nye gets the press and media attention he does. And I am rooting for the ‘Climate Hustle’ film to become a huge hit — bigger than ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ by Al Gore,” Coleman said.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's the first Monday in May and that means it's time again for the Prance For The Pork, The Democrat Derby! Not much of a field this year. In fact, it's an old nag versus an old goat. I've seen better fields on the carousel. And those horses were less wooden than Hillary and Bernie. Here's Barney Frank to blow the bugler. The horses are at the post. It's the Washington Post. Now you know where they got the saying, "Dumb as the Post". Oh, the colors are magnificent at The Democrat Derby. There's white....and there's...

The whole reason I wanted to watch Captain America: Civil War, and I was excited to see it, was because of Bucky. Bucky is one, fantastic character. But, in this clip you can watch Bucky get slapped around like a schoolgirl by African super, super, superhero: Black Panther.

Aides at Kensington Palace had to remove the word ‘negro’ from a painting at the last minute before the arrival of President Obama and his family for an informal dinner with the royals. Moments before the US president and First Lady sat down with Prince William, Duchess Kate and Prince Harry on Friday night, an assistant spotted a plaque beneath a painting reading ‘The Negro Page’. Aides reportedly hastily removed the plaque and put a pot plant in front of where the plaque would have been.

The fledgling sport of drone racing is about to fly onto more screens. The International Drone Racing Assn. has signed a multiyear international distribution deal with sports media giant ESPN, marking the first time the sport will be on major network television. In drone racing, competitors maneuver small flying drones around a course and wear goggles that show the drone's perspective of the track. At home, viewers will see a version of that perspective. The 2016 National Drone Racing Championships, held in New York City in August, and the 2016 World Drone Racing Championships, set for Kualoa Ranch, Hawaii, in...

Donald Trump was giving it his all during a final rally in New York Monday, but in the midst of his speech he made a flub. In a video obtained by CNN, the GOP candidate accidentally refers to 9/11 as the convenience store 7-Eleven, probably best known for its Slurpees. "I wrote this out, and it's very close to my heart because I was down there and I watched our police and our firemen down at 7/11, down at the World Trade Center right after it came down," he said. "And I saw the greatest people I've ever seen in...

The outbreak of louse-born relapsing fever is just the latest re-emergence of diseases long thought exterminated in Europe, carried back to the continent by a great migratory movement of millions of people from Africa and Asia. Particularly associated with Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea, and Somalia, the extremely contagious bacteria causes severe illness and can be fatal in 30 to 70 per cent of cases, according to the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.

DENVER — The 27-year old vice president of Jet Pack International was released from the University of Colorado Hospital on Saturday afternoon after a his jet pack crash a day earlier. Nick Macomber was doing a test flight on the property of Go Fast, a Denver energy drink company in the 2600 block of West Eighth Avenue, when he lost control of the jet pack and fell Friday morning. “The guy was bleeding, he had head wounds where he had blood gushing on his face, he was spitting out blood. It looks like he had landed on his knees and...

Cleveland, we have a problem. A 'Yuuge' problem! 700 angry truckers (and growing) are watching the political developments in the US very closely and are preparing to act. The leader of the group, who asked to be unnamed, warned "If the leaders of the Republican party plan on defying the will of the voters, we feel that that's an act of treason. And I can promise you that they will see an epic traffic jam in Cleveland." He continued, "And guess what, that'll be the least of their worries!" The spox [spokesperson] was referring to the brokered convetion the GoPe's...

MOONIES FOR CRUZ April 6, 2016 Congratulations to Ted Cruz for winning his fourth primary! Usually Donald Trump wins the primaries -- where you go and vote, like in a real election. Cruz wins the caucuses -- run by the state parties, favored by political operators and cheaters. Until now, the only primaries Cruz has won are in Texas (his home state), Oklahoma (basically the same state) and Idaho (where Trump never campaigned). So now, Cruz has finally won an honest-to-goodness primary. This is great news for him, provided: (1) the general election is a caucus, and (2) the national...

And this new planet could be huge. Back in January, the astronomer who led the charge to have Pluto demoted to dwarf planet status announced that he’d just found evidence that a huge, icy planet could be lurking on the edge of the Solar System, just past Neptune. Mike Brown, a planetary astronomer at Caltech University, estimated that the hypothetical 'Planet Nine' appears to be circling the Sun on a super-elongated orbit that takes an incredible 10,000 to 20,000 years to complete. And now, thanks to a newly detected Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) that’s acting really strange, Brown says the...

Hillary Clinton says barring any national security risk, she would like to open up the government files on Area 51 to the public if she is elected president. “I would like us to go into those files and hopefully make as much of that public as possible,” she told Jimmy Kimmel Thursday night on his late night ABC talk show. “If there’s nothing there, let’s tell people there’s nothing there.” When Kimmel followed up by asking what she would do if she discovered there was actually something alarming in the files, Clinton replied: “Well, if there is something there, unless...

Spotter Charlene Yazzle told local Arizona station WDAM news ‘I was driving north and the truck was headed south to the freeway. UFO Sightings Daily’s Scott C Waring says, ‘This could be some of the alien tech being moved out of Area S4, part of Area 51. It’s a well known fact that lots of new tech the USAF gets is tested there, especially the anti gravity types like the TR3B and some disks. This looks like one of those secret projects. ‘There are black vehicles behind it, but the eyewitness says they are the Department of Safety patrol trucks....

A mysterious, mile-long landing strip in the remote Nevada desert could be the home base for testing sensors on a top-secret fleet of drones, security experts speculate. The asphalt landing strip is in Area 6 of the Yucca Flat test site, about 12 miles northeast of the infamous Area 51 that has long been the subject of conspiracy theories. In Area 6, a handful of hangars with clamshell doors are clustered at one end of the airstrip, images from Google Earth reveal.

     FNC’s Jesse Watters went to the International UFO Congress gathering in Scottsdale, Arizona a couple of weeks ago – and discovered those who’ve had alien encounters support Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. His enlightening “Watters’ World” segment aired on Monday’s O’Reilly Factor and this excerpt makes for some light-hearted viewing:

It sounds like a weapon straight out of Star Wars. Imagine the Death Star's superlaser used not to destroy worlds but to protect our own from approaching asteroids. That is the concept being developed by American researchers who believe they have found a way to use a high-power laser beam to deflect space rocks that are on course to hit Earth. The idea has been around for years but the team at the University of California say laboratory tests show their De-Star - or Directed Energy System for Targeting of Asteroids and exploRation – could actually work. They envisage putting...