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‘Devil’s horns’ sunrise photos went viral and it’s 100% real!!! Photography enthusiast Elias Chasiotis had spent the last days of 2019 in Qatar and they were definitely worth the trip. You see, during one of these days, a solar eclipse was underway as the Sun began rising above the horizon, making it look like a devil rising from the waters. And Chasiotis captured it all.

INDIANAPOLIS (WTHR) — Thursday night is setting up to be a rare event. There's a chance that the alpha Monocerotid meteor shower could become a meteor storm, according to Eseko Lyytinen and Peter Jenniskens, two meteor scientistss who have been studying this particular meteor shower. If the meteor storm does happen, it will be the first alpha Monocerotids meteor storm since 1995, when it produced rates of around 400 meteors per hour. According to the American Meteor Society, the storm may be here and gone quickly — usually over within an hour. AMS reports that the storm would reach its...

I’m optimistic by nature—as a scientist, you have to be. But my hopeful feeling is not wishful thinking; it is firmly grounded in the logic of SETI. Half a century sounds like a long time, but the search is truly in its early days. Given the current state of SETI efforts and abilities, I feel that we’re on the cusp of learning something truly revolutionary.

So one of my favorite times of the year is getting an extra hour of sleep due to giving back the extra hour of daylight that we got back in April. I'm a big proponent of Daylight Savings Time. Having that extra hour of daylight during warmer months is so important, especially for working people, who really benefit from the longer day. I don't think I can convey in words how much I love Daylight Savings time and changing the clocks twice a year. It would be a much sadder world if we did not have a way to bring...

Some of the most distant rocks in our solar system act in a way that suggests there’s some massive object out there we haven’t been able to see. A planet? Maybe. But why not a small black hole? That’s a scenario a pair of scientists describe in a new paper. Of course, they recognise that a planet is more likely than an ancient black hole unlike any we’ve directly observed. But they simply want astronomers to think creatively while hunting for whatever this hypothetical object, often called Planet Nine, might be. “By simply focussing on the concept of a planet,...

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,...

Earth was born as a result of repeated asteroid collisions, the moon was created by a single giant impact event. Then, Earth's size attracted huge meteorites, which slammed into it, causing super-high-temperature rock vapour to cover the entire surface and evaporate all ocean water. The earliest life-forms survived such infernal events by escaping deep into the ground, miraculously emerging again and again. The Earth has gone through innumerable catastrophic events, and life has survived by acquiring new abilities to live through each crisis. Humans are part of the grand history of life's evolution, which has been closely intertwined with repeated...

Forcing America to install literally millions of wind turbines and tens of millions of solar panels, and plant tens of millions more acres in biofuel crops, would devastate wildlife habitats and countless species, while driving up electricity prices for families, factories, farms, businesses, schools and hospitals. The wind and sunlight may be free, clean and green. But the massive technologies required to harness those forces for human benefit certainly are not. If Trump Administration advisors thought they could appease their opponents by implementing a rule focused on the useless and ultimately dangerous goal of limiting CO2 emissions, they were sorely...

Those who talk about carbon dioxide affecting temperature ignore the fact that water's potential to affect air temperature is well established in science. Water vapor is the only atmospheric gas that can hold or "trap" heat. Those who spend much time in greenhouses know that they are often very humid places because water evaporates from plants and from surfaces that get wet when the plants are watered. Meteorologists typically refer to the water vapor content of the air as relative humidity which is how close the air is to holding as much water vapor as it can hold at its...

Axiom: It is better to be alive than to be dead. Major threats to human existence and genetic death of the human race include: 1. Alien attack 2. Sun death 3. Major asteroid collision with Earth But Freepers do not worry as I have a plan to protect against the events listed above. This plan is based on two necessary human achievements: 1. We must live and reproduce on other planets/moons/spacecraft. 2. We must advance technologically so that we can defend ourselves against an alien attack. The necessary precondition to these achievements is massive technological growth. And technological growth is...

With ‘Woke’ Identity Politics Is there anything they won’t spoil? s there literally anything left that they won’t try to ruin by injecting ‘woke’ identity politics into it? The 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong becoming the first man to set foot on the Moon is this weekend. Instead of using the celebration of the Apollo Moon landing to bring Americans together in a time of intense partisan bickering, the New York Times and the Washington Post are exploiting it to divide Americans even further. “The Apollo program was designed by men, for men. If we do not acknowledge the gender...

Whether it was the Big Bang, Midas or God himself, we don’t really need to unlock the mystery of the origins of gold when we’ve already identified an asteroid worth $700 quintillion in precious heavy metals. If anything launches this metals mining space race, it will be this asteroid--Psyche 16, taking up residence between Mars and Jupiter and carrying around enough heavy metals to net every single person on the planet close to a trillion dollars. The massive quantities of gold, iron and nickel contained in this asteroid are mind-blowing. The discovery has been made. Now, it’s a question of...

Over the next several weeks, our planet will have a close encounter with the Taurid meteor swarm. It will be the closest that we have been to the center of the meteor swarm since 1975, and we won’t have an encounter this close again until 2032. So for astronomers, this is a really big deal. And hopefully there will be no danger to Earth during this pass, but some scientists are absolutely convinced that the Tunguska explosion of 1908 which flattened 80 million trees in Russia was caused by an object from the Taurid meteor swarm. As you will see...

Oh, they’re out there all right. Raj and I saw one with our own eyes at dusk one summer day over 40 years ago. And no, there were no chemicals involved. “Our sovereignty is being violated by vehicles of unknown origin.” – Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations The U.S. military has seen them.    The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast....

When I was on vacation to the Meteor Crater in Arizona, I open carried into the museum and display area, and on the tour.  The guard/ticket seller at the front entrance never blinked.  I listened to the tour guide tell us of some of the history, and I asked a question or two.  I must have caught the attention of a presumably Navajo grandmother with her family.  She might have been my age, give or take a few years. She asked me if I believed what the tour guide had told us.  I said that I believed most of...

One of the reasons why humans are handicapped in our understanding of reality is because of our reliance on the “scientific method”. It is a system based on observation. The problem with this method is that our understanding of reality is corrupted by the limits imposed by observation. Indeed, as well well know, it is the perception of the observer that changes our reality. This is a well understood rule. If you the reader, don’t “get it”, then you need to study quantum mechanics 101. For in the last two decades the entire foundation of our understanding of reality has...

Updates on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, diamonds inside a planet, the Environmental Defense Fund is up to no good (again), and cleaning up Caves...

Time travel -- it is of course a subject central to science fiction. Most of us probably believe it might one day become possible. It does not seem to be that close to becoming a reality. There are, apparently, laboratory experiments with mysterious sub-atomic particles that demonstrate the existence of time travel on a limited basis. But as to human beings getting into a time machine and ending up in their future or past, we don't have anything like that available. But we do already know some things about time travel, from what we can observe around us. (1) If...

Why do people say that they are as "happy as a clam"? Clams don't look all that happy to me.

I’m at Vandenberg Air Force Base. My wife and I came to see the launch of Icesat2, a satellite intended to measure the thickness of the polar ice caps. Our son Tony designed the laser altimeters on Icesat, which measure the height above the geoid of the ice, of forests, and other objects. The launch vehicle was a Delta rocket. The Delta was derived from the Air Force’s old Thor missile. This was the last launch of a Delta. It’s now obsolete and being retired. For me, it closed out some personal history. Back in the late ‘fifties, I was...