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I love astronomy. I have my whole life. Part of that is the wonder and awe it generates, learning about the Universe and our place in it. But of course, there is great beauty in the skies as well. From our nearest neighbors to the most distant galaxies, the cosmos is a wonder to behold. Every year I collect my favorite pictures—chosen both for their beauty and their importance to science—and put them together in a gallery to delight your brain (you’ll find links to previous galleries at the end of this article). Picking only a few is always a...

THE recent announcement by a team of astronomers that there could be as many as 40 billion habitable planets in our galaxy has further fueled the speculation, popular even among many distinguished scientists, that the universe is teeming with life.The astronomer Geoffrey W. Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, an experienced planet hunter and co-author of the study that generated the finding, said that it “represents one great leap toward the possibility of life, including intelligent life, in the universe.” But “possibility” is not the same as likelihood. If a planet is to be inhabited rather than merely habitable,...

It's national dress but you'd be forgiven for failing to realise it. But while the majority managed to make their mermaid, the Eiffel Tower and Viking inspired outfits look glamorous, the same couldn't be said for the bizarre creation worn by the USA's Erin Brady. Eschewing traditional stars and stripes, Miss Brady instead chose a strange catsuit that appeared to have been inspired by the Michael Bay franchise, Transformers. By contrast, Britain's Amy Willerton looked to history for her gown and ended up with a mishmash of Elizabethan royal splendour and Dita von Teese on tour.

The cosmic microwave background sky, here mapped by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, has a polarization, represented by white bars. Future experiments might measure the polarization with enough sensitivity to prove the existence of gravitons, the quanta of gravity. Can a quantum of gravity ever be detected? Two physicists suggest that it can — using the entire Universe as a detector. Researchers think that the gravitational force is transmitted by an elementary particle called the graviton, just as the electromagnetic force is carried by photons. But most of them despair about ever recording individual gravitons. That is because gravity is...

Goodbye Big Bang, hello black hole? A new theory of the universe's creation Enlarge Artist’s conception of the event horizon of a black hole. Credit: Victor de Schwanberg/Science Photo Library Could the famed "Big Bang" theory need a revision? A group of theoretical physicists suppose the birth of the universe could have happened after a four-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole and ejected debris. Before getting into their findings, let's just preface this by saying nobody knows anything for sure. Humans obviously weren't around at the time the universe began. The standard theory is that the universe grew from...

ANN ARBOR—Moonless nights outside the Cerro Tololo astronomical observatory in Chile are so dark that when you look down, you can't see your feet. "You can't see your hands," said David Gerdes, physics professor at the University of Michigan. "But you can hold them up to the sky and see a hand-shaped hole with no stars in it. It's really incredible." From this site in the Andes over the next five years, an international team will map one-eighth of the sky in unprecedented detail—aiming to make a time lapse of the past 8 billion years of a slice of the...

We look back in time, and say the universe is 15 billion years old. But as every scientist knows, when we say the universe is 15 billion years old, there's another half of the sentence that we rarely bother to say. The other half of the sentence is: The universe is 15 billion years old as seen from the time-space coordinates of the earth. The key is that the Torah looks forward in time, from very different time-space coordinates, when the universe was small. Since then, the universe has expanded out. Space stretches, and that stretching of space totally changes...

Original title:Scientists to Discuss Universe's Strange Dense Spot Wednesday: Watch Live You can't watch it live anymore but you can watch the video of the event. This map shows the oldest light in our universe, as detected with the greatest precision yet by the Planck mission. The ancient light, called the cosmic microwave background, was imprinted on the sky when the universe was 370,000 years old. It shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars and galaxies of today. An odd dense spot in the universe populated...

-after winning what must be one of the most competitive national pageants on the planet! Prettiest girl in Poland- now that's something Is it just me, or does Paulina resemble Shelley Long (Dianne on Cheers) a bit in the 2nd bikini shot...? More at Reaganite Republican... _______________________________________________________________ MissPolonia.com.pl   Eska.pl   Afterparty.pl   Zebirka.pl 

The rites of spring are many and varied. As a child in rural England, I was once given the chore of finding and rearranging the bulbs of a long-unattended flowerbed. I’m not sure if spring was a wise time to do this from a horticultural point of view. It seemed to me that, having survived the rigours of winter, these hardy little tusks of plant matter probably wanted to wait undisturbed for the Sun’s warmth to penetrate the blanket of earth above them. But such was the issued command, and so I began to brush away last year’s dead leaves...

Last week, in Nice, France, I was privileged to participate along with 30 scholars, mostly scientists and mathematicians, in a conference on the question of whether the universe was designed, or at least fine-tuned, to make life, especially intelligent life. Participants — from Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia, among other American and European universities — included believers in God, agonistics, and atheists. It was clear that the scientific consensus was that, at the very least, the universe is exquisitely fine-tuned to allow for the possibility of life. It appears that we live in a “Goldilocks universe,” in which both...

New Science of Cosmography Reveals 3-D Map of the Local Universe The three-dimensional structure of the local universe may one day become as familiar as our local geography thanks to a new generation of maps that reveal our neighbourhood’s rich complexity and our place within it  The geography of our world is one of the great cultural invariants. There can hardly be the person on the planet who isn’t familiar with the shape of the continents and how they dovetail together or of the Earth is a pale blue sphere orbiting the Sun with seven other planets.Given a three-dimensional model...

More at Reaganite Republican... (should be SFW, rated PG I guess- few innocent bikini shots is all) ________________________________________________________________________ Elestandard   Miss Universe (official)   Ossiel   Perfect Miss   MyBeautyQueens

The universe is about 13.82 billion years old. Although it is well within the error range of earlier estimates, this new number means that the universe is slightly older than cosmologists previously thought. The new age comes as a result of data just released from the European Space Agency’s Planck space telescope, which for the past 15 months has been taking the most precise images of the oldest light in the universe, the “cosmic microwave background radiation.” This microwave-wavelength light is the remnant of the universe’s earliest days, and is a key piece of evidence for the event we now...

More at Reaganite Republican (should be sfw, couple bikini shots is all) ___________________________________________________ Listas   Perfect Miss   Miss Universe (official)   facebook  Ponelevos   MiraBolivia   Lanacion.cl

Before you do anything else, click on the image above and then move little slider (along the bottom of the image) from left to right. Now watch the universe fly by, going from macro to micro. Pretty cool, no? Now read on: This dynamic infographic comes to us via Number Sleuth, who describes their wonderful creation as follows: This interactive infographic accurately illustrates the scale of over 100 items within the observable universe ranging from galaxies to insects, nebulae and stars to molecules and atoms. Numerous hot points along the zoom slider allow for direct access to planets, animals, the...

After last year's naughty Miss Columbia,  hopefully this one wore some skivvies... Video/more at Reaganite Republican (SHOULD be sfw, just a couple innocent bikini shots) _______________________________________________________________ Miss Universe (official)   El Universal   Plunderguide   Terra.com   Missosology

Miss France 2012 at the Miss Universe competition was the lovely Marie Payet. Born August 17, 1992, she grew up on the small Island of La Réunion, just off the west coast of France. This one's the sporty, adventurous type -her latest thing is surfing- and has displayed some serious musical talent as well, already recording a duet single with a more established French artist.  Marie Payet seems to have made some sort of impression in Vegas last December too, as she was a Top-10 Finalist in the Miss Universe competition- not hard to see why: More at Reaganite...

Last month's Miss Universe pageant introduced the world to some truly stunning women, a prime example of which being Miss Croatia 2012 Elizabeta Burg: one of the youngest contestants at just 19, Elizabeta's what you might call a smart cookie, currently working on a veterinary degree while already fluent in English AND German in-addition to her native Serbo-Croatian... Elizabeta hails from the small Croatian town of Vrbanja, -near the Serbian and Bosnian borders- where her parents own the farm on which she learned the meaning of hard work, milking cows and cleaning stables as a young girl. Her personal ambition, discipline, and...

More pics/video @ Reaganite Republican... (SFW/PG-rated, just a couple innocent bikini shots to which some hyper-PC grievance monger may take offense...) _________________________________________________________________________________ Today.it   AceShowbiz   StarPulse   Tu Farandula   MissRhodeIslandUSA   PoponthePop   RightCelebrity   WSJ