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Stop me if you've heard this one before: The Biden administration misled the American people about a major foreign policy issue. According to a new report, the claim that the infamous Chinese spy balloon was blocked from transmitting data as it flew across the mainland United States was false. Astonishingly, the balloon was allowed to connect to a domestic telecommunications service. That connection was then used to send "burst transmissions" back to China, and it's unlikely it was transmitting take-out orders.The balloon connected to a U.S.-based company, according to the assessment, to send and receive communications from China, primarily related...

"U.S. intelligence officials have determined that the Chinese spy balloon that flew across the U.S. this year used an American internet service provider to communicate, according to two current and one former U.S. official familiar with the assessment." "The balloon connected to a U.S.-based company, according to the assessment, to send and receive communications from China, primarily related to its navigation. Officials familiar with assessment said it found that the connection allowed the balloon to send burst transmissions, or high-bandwidth collections of data over short periods of time." More at link

Astronomers think some of these explosions occur when a massive star — five or 10 times the mass of our sun — detonates, abruptly becoming a black hole. Gamma-ray bursts may also occur when two superdense stellar corpses called neutron stars collide, often forming a black hole. And conveniently, a gamma-ray burst that scientists watched during a few nights in 2019 likely occurred only about 1 billion light-years away from Earth, relatively close by for these dramatic events. Two NASA space-based observatories, Fermi and Swift, first detected the event, which is known as GRB 190829A because it was detected on...

Earth's gravitational wave observatories -- which hunt for ripples in the fabric of space-time -- just picked up something weird. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo detectors recorded an unknown or unanticipated "burst" of gravitational waves on Jan. 14. The gravitational waves we've detected so far usually relate to extreme cosmic events, like two black holes colliding or neutron stars finally merging after being caught in a death spiral. Burst gravitational waves have not been detected before and scientists hypothesize they may be linked to phenomena such as supernova or gamma ray bursts, producing a tiny "pop" when...

BERKELEY — The Bay Area’s brutal spikes in home prices have spurred more than half of its residents to dream of escaping from the expensive region, and the urge to flee is strongest among millennials, according to new poll results. In July, the median price of a single-family home in the nine-county Bay Area was $804,000, up 10.1 percent from a year earlier. The new Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies Poll determined that 65 percent of the Bay Area’s registered voters and 48 percent of voters in California describe the issue of housing affordability as an “extremely serious” problem. The...

The Sun has unleashed its most powerful eruption of 2013 so far. The solar flare - a sudden release of radiation - peaked at 1705 BST on Monday, and was associated with a huge eruption of matter. When these eruptions reach Earth, they can interfere with electronic systems in satellites and those on the ground. Nasa said this solar explosion - known as a coronal mass ejection (CME) - was not directed at Earth, but it could pass several US spacecraft. The event on Monday was classified as an "X-class" flare - the most intense type - with a designation...

Today, college is pretty much accessible to anyone with a pulse, despite claims to the contrary. But the laws of mathematics explain this should not be so. Besides, most college kids devote much of their waking hours to Comedy Central, MTV, and half-naked drinking games. How could it be possible for the typical student of moderate means to account for upwards of one-hundred thousand dollars (or more) of post-education debt? Are art history and gender studies majors really necessary? The numbers don’t add up. College costs too much, but who is to blame? Fantasy Finance Consider the situation, writ large....

In the mood for takeout? Try this tasty Mexican dinner.

WASHINGTON – The economy got what it needed in April: A burst of hiring that added a net 290,000 jobs, the biggest monthly total in four years. The improving picture caused so many more people to pour into the labor force in search of employment that the jobless rate rose from 9.7 percent to 9.9 percent. The hiring last month of 66,000 temporary government workers to conduct the census added to overall job creation. But private employers — the backbone of the economy — contributed the most: A surprisingly strong 231,000 jobs, the most since March 2006, the Labor Department...

A stellar explosion has smashed the record for most distant object in the known universe. The gamma-ray burst came from about 13 billion light-years away, and represents a relic from when the universe was just 630 million years old. "It easily surpassed the most distant galaxies and quasars," said Edo Berger, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and a leading member of the team that first demonstrated the burst's origin. "In fact, it showed that we can use these spectacular events to pinpoint the first generation of stars and galaxies." "The burst most likely arose from the explosion of a massive...

A massive gamma-ray burst detected last March, believed to be the brightest ever seen, turns out to have been aimed directly at the Earth. A narrow jet that drove material toward us at 99.99995 of the speed of light is revealed in the data, itself wrapped within a somewhat slower and wider jet. The best estimates are that an alignment like this occurs only once every ten years. Says Paul O’Brien (University of Leicester, and a member of the team working on the Swift satellite): “We normally detect only the wide jet of a GRB as the inner jet is...

Chris Wallace (FOX TV) just stated on the Monday morning news segment of Fox TV (aired in the 7:00 a.m. EST hour) that, not only did Bill Clinton retain his anger at Wallace after the interview was over and the cameras were off (despite Wallace trying to part on friendly terms), Clinton absolutely fumed at his own personal staff, right then and there while still on the Fox TV premises, for getting him into the interview with Wallace where he had earlier lost his head.Wallace said Clinton's blow up at his staff for this mistake was very visible and...

LONDON (Reuters) - Teams of international scientists have used observations from NASA's Swift satellite and other telescopes to witness the evolution of a cosmic blast into a stellar explosion or supernova. The blast is thought to be a milder type of gamma-ray burst (GRB) -- the most powerful type of explosion known to astronomers -- called an X-ray flash. It is known as GRB060218 after the February 18 date it began in the constellation of Aries about 440 million light years away. A light year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year. "This extends the...

Burst.com has filed a countersuit against Apple Computer claiming that the iTunes software, the iPod and the Quicktime streaming software all infringe on patents held by Burst.com, Burst announced Monday. [more]

Real estate bubble. Clues: Speculators driving prices. Lenders offer cheap money, short-term loans. Home-equity loans fund short-term spending. Fed chairman sees minimal froth. Energy and oil bubble. Clues: Crude hits another record. Political turmoil in oil-producing nations. Consumers buy gas-guzzlers at record pace. GM, Ford in trouble. Foreign-trade deficit. Clues: Monthly deficits top $50 billion. This year's deficit will beat 2004's $617 billion. Foreigners now own $2.5 trillion of America. Federal-budget deficit. Clues: Federal debt now $7.8 trillion; add another $400 federal deficit this year. Corporate pensions underfunded. Clues: Airlines, auto, other manufacturers heavily burdened, default to taxpayers. Local government...

Hundreds of toads have met an unexplained, explosive demise in Germany in recent days, it was reported on Saturday. According to reports from animal welfare workers and veterinarians as many as a thousand of the amphibians have perished after their bodies swelled to bursting point and their entrails were propelled for up to a metre. It is like "a science fiction film", according to Werner Smolnik of a nature protection society in the northern city of Hamburg, where the phenomenon of the exploding toad has been observed. "You see the animals crawling on the ground, swelling and then exploding," he...

A huge blast of radiation from an exploding star might have been behind one of the Earth's worst mass extinctions, some 450m years ago. In the latest issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists argue that a gamma ray burst, the most powerful explosion that occurs in the universe, was responsible for the Ordovican mass extinction in which 60% of all marine invertebrates died. Gamma ray bursts are thought to be caused either when two neutron stars collide or when giant stars collapse into black holes at the end of their lives. For around 10 seconds, intense pulses of energy...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A strange and powerful burst of radio waves from near the center of our galaxy may have come from a previously unknown type of space object, U.S. astronomers reported on Wednesday. Other experts nicknamed the mysterious source a "burper" and said there would be a race to scan for similar radio bursts. "We hit the jackpot," said Scott Hyman, a professor of physics at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, who led the study. "An image of the Galactic center, made by collecting radio waves of about 1 meter (3 feet) in wavelength, revealed multiple bursts from the...

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Bob Dole Slams Kerry By Andrew L. Jaffee, August 23, 2004 Home   Search   Forum   Terms Nothing has really changed for Democratic hopeful John Kerry, except that real war veterans, like Bob Dole, are questioning the “superficial wounds” and resulting “medals” he received during four (4) months service in Vietnam. Kerry is still flailing, trying to cover up a career punctuated by extreme left-wing politics and flip-flopping by talking to voters about his military service. He squandered his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention by trying to convince Americans that his tour of duty in Vietnam will make him a great commander...