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Miss Lithuania 2012: Greta Mikalauskyte (Missology) More/swimsuit video at Reaganite Republican...

A decade ago, a British philosopher put forth the notion that the universe we live in might in fact be a computer simulation run by our descendants. While that seems far-fetched, perhaps even incomprehensible, a team of physicists at the University of Washington has come up with a potential test to see if the idea holds water. The concept that current humanity could possibly be living in a computer simulation comes from a 2003 paper published in Philosophical Quarterly by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. In the paper, he argued that at least one of...

LONDON (Reuters) - An international team of astronomers has produced the first map of the universe as it was 11 billion years ago, filling a gap between the Big Bang and the rapid expansion that followed. The study, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, shows the universe went through a phase roughly three billion years after the Big Bang when expansion actually started to slow, before the force of so-called 'dark energy' kicked in and sent galaxies accelerating away from each other. Much is known about the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang from studies of its afterglow in...

Scientists say that a perpetual motion machine is physically impossible, but a research team at the University of California Berkeley has just outlined an idea that comes pretty damn close. By proposing a 4D "space-time crystal," the engineers have designed a device that would operate at its lowest quantum energy state and exhibit a clock-like persistence that would theoretically exist even after the universe is exhausted of all its energy, the so-called heat death. Normally, crystals are comprised of atoms that are arranged in an orderly, repeating three-dimensional pattern. Earlier this year, however, MIT's Nobel-prize winning physicist Frank Wilcze outlined...

"35 years after its launch, Voyager 1 is poised to 'leave' the bubble of the solar system and sail into the mystery of interstellar space"

I have long been fascinated by the idea that the universe is not actually a singular object but made up of a multiverse of infinite universes. Each of these Universes is seemingly branch off at every possible action or inaction. This idea is staggering in it’s immensity. It seems like science fiction and it has certainly been a staple of science fiction for at least forty years. It may have remained science fiction but fortunately I am not alone in believing this might in fact be possible.

(25) Millenium simulation from Volker Springel et al., from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” -Stephen Hawking The Universe is a vast, seemingly unending marvel of existence. Over the past century, we’ve learned that the Universe stretches out beyond the billions of stars in our Milky Way, out across billions of light years, containing close to a trillion galaxies all told.Image credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team. And yet, that’s just the observable Universe! There are good reasons to believe that the...

People often say that time speeds up as we age, but if the latest scientific theory is true the opposite could well be the case. The radical theory by academics suggests that time itself could be slowing down - and may eventually grind to a halt altogether. The latest mind-bending findings - put forward by researchers working at two Spanish universities - proposes that we have all been fooled into thinking the universe is expanding. In fact, they say, time itself is slowing down until eventually, in billions of years time, it will cease altogether. Although the findings might sound...

June 10, 2012 Image of the Day: Evidence of a Past Universe? Circular Patterns in the Cosmic Microwave Background              Stephen Hawking has said: "We should look for evidence of a collision with another universe in our distant Past." Some experts believe that what we call the universe may only be one of many. Is there any conceivable way that we could ever detect and study other universes if they exist? Is it even falsifiable? This was a key question Hawking was was asked in an interview with the BBC. "Our best bet for a theory of everything...

Inside Science Minds presents an ongoing series of guest columnists and personal perspectives presented by scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and others in the science community showcasing some of the most interesting ideas in science today.(ISM) -- Our universe may exist inside a black hole. This may sound strange, but it could actually be the best explanation of how the universe began, and what we observe today. It's a theory that has been explored over the past few decades by a small group of physicists including myself. Successful as it is, there are notable unsolved questions with the standard big bang theory,...

A re-analysis of radio telescope observations from three countries has yielded a surprising result: nearby galaxies harbour one-third more hydrogen than had previously been estimated. While nothing like enough matter to solve physics’ “dark matter” problem, the work by CSIRO astronomer Dr Robert Braun (chief scientist at the agency’s Astronomy and Space Science division in Sydney) also helps explain why the rate of star formation has slowed down. While there’s more hydrogen than astronomers had thought, its distribution makes star formation more difficult. Andromeda – the galaxy headed for a catastrophic collision with our own in about four billion years...

University of Warwick astrophysicists have pinpointed four white dwarf stars surrounded by dust from shattered planetary bodies which once bore striking similarities to the composition of the Earth. The scientists publish their results in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. White dwarfs are the final stage of life of stars like our Sun, the residual cores of material left behind after their available fuel for nuclear reactions has been exhausted. Using the Hubble Space Telescope to carry out the biggest survey to date of the chemical composition of the atmospheres of white dwarf stars,...

Cosmologists use the mathematical properties of eternity to show that although universe may last forever, it must have had a beginning kfc 04/24/2012 38 Comments The Big Bang has become part of popular culture since the phrase was coined by the maverick physicist Fred Hoyle in the 1940s. That's hardly surprising for an event that represents the ultimate birth of everything.However, Hoyle much preferred a different model of the cosmos: a steady state universe with no beginning or end, that stretches infinitely into the past and the future. That idea never really took off.In recent years, however, cosmologists have begun...

ORLANDO, Fla., March 28, 2012 /Christian Newswire/ -- The Dead Sea Scrolls have long been considered words from God recorded by men under inspiration. Since their discovery they have been a source of great wonder and revelation for the faithful, and now an author is arguing in his new book that the Hubble telescope validates a passage from the scroll of Isaiah confirming God to be the energy source behind the Universe. The book retraces the history of the telescope, and is based on Hubble's discoveries made over the past two decades. It chronicles how Hubble has photographed the greatest cinematic...

Analysis of data from the National Science Foundation-(NSF) funded 10-m South Pole Telescope (SPT) in Antarctica provides new support for the most widely accepted explanation of dark energy, the source of the mysterious force that is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. The results begin to hone in on the tiny mass of the neutrinos, the most abundant particles in the universe, which until recently were thought to be without mass. The SPT data strongly support Albert Einstein's cosmological constant—the leading model for dark energy—even though researchers base the analysis on only a fraction of the SPT data...

Einstein is still the boss, say researchers with the BOSS project for measuring key properties of the universe. BOSS, for Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, has measured the distance to faraway galaxies more precisely than ever before, mapping the universe as it existed roughly 6 billion years ago, when it was only 63 percent of its current size. The findings suggest that the mysterious “dark energy” causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate was foreseen by Einstein, the researchers reported April 1 at the American Physical Society meeting. To keep the universe in a static state, Einstein added a...

Pulsars, superdense neutron stars, are perhaps the most extraordinary physics laboratories in the universe. Research on these extreme and exotic objects already has produced two Nobel Prizes. Pulsar researchers now are poised to learn otherwise-unavailable details of nuclear physics to test general relativity in conditions of extremely strong gravity, and to directly detect gravitational waves with a “telescope” nearly the size of our galaxy. Neutron stars are the remnants of massive stars that exploded as supernovae. They pack more than the mass of the Sun into a sphere no larger than a medium-sized city, making them the densest objects in...

[BIG snip] Santorum's ad and his Op-Ed, meant to mock Gingrich, in reality can only distinctly not help Santorum's struggling campaign. Gingrich will surely make the inevitable -- and correct -- connection between Santorum's ad and a serious attack on the Reagan space legacy -- and the dreams of America itself. "We'll continue our quest in space…. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue," said President Reagan that tragic January night. Well, no they won't. Not if Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney have anything to say about it. "I promise," says Santorum. Worse, whether Santorum's staff understands it...

Are there any other fans of FABRIC OF THE COSMOS out there? I found it to be perhaps the most fascinating science show ever produced. The information in the show is nothing less than stunning and definitely changed my view of the universe. Some of the information is so stunning that it is hard to comprehend. But guess what? Even physicists have a hard time getting their minds around it. And an oatmeal cookie to the first person who can post who the major backer of this series is.

In the fifth century B.C., the philosopher Democritus proposed that all matter was made of tiny and indivisible atoms, which came in various sizes and textures—some hard and some soft, some smooth and some thorny. The atoms themselves were taken as givens. In the nineteenth century, scientists discovered that the chemical properties of atoms repeat periodically (and created the periodic table to reflect this fact), but the origins of such patterns remained mysterious. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that scientists learned that the properties of an atom are determined by the number and placement of its electrons, the subatomic...