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At a campaign event in Springfield, Illinois Wednesday afternoon presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton warned Donald Trump would use the military and IRS "to go after his critics and opponents."

Another year passes. Another 365 planetary spins completed (14.6 million kilometers of combined distance traveled if you live at the Earth's equator), and another journey of 940 million kilometers around the Sun. Time is marked off for us by a largely predictable, if not tedious, set of cycles. Except, this is by no means all the cosmic traveling we've done in the last 31.5 million seconds. For one thing, the solar system is not at rest with respect to its host galaxy. The Sun and its planetary entourage are moving in an orbital path within the Milky Way. The generally...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The melting of glaciers caused by the world's rising temperatures appears to be causing a slight slowing of the Earth's rotation in another illustration of the far-reaching impact of global climate change, scientists said on Friday. The driving force behind the modest but discernible changes in the Earth's rotation measured by satellites and astronomical methods is a global sea level rise fueled by an influx of meltwater into the oceans from glaciers, the researchers said. "Because glaciers are at high latitudes, when they melt they redistribute water from these high latitudes towards lower latitudes, and like a...

TOKYO — Japanese high-tech firm Hitachi Wednesday unveiled an electric motor that does not use "rare earths", aiming to cut costs and reduce dependence on imports of the scarce minerals from China. The prototype 11 kilowatt motor does not use magnets containing rare earths and is expected to go into commercial production in 2014, the company said. Hitachi started work on the project on 2008. Other Japanese firms, including automaker Toyota, have been working towards the same goal, spurred on by high prices of the minerals. Permanent magnet motors usually contain rare earth such as neodymium and dysprosium and are...

Roughly one out of every 37 to one out of every 70 sunlike stars in the sky might harbor an alien Earth, a new study reveals. These findings hint that billions of Earthlike planets might exist in our galaxy, researchers added. These new calculations are based in data from the Kepler space telescope, which in February wowed the globe by revealing more than 1,200 possible alien worlds, including 68 potentially Earth-size planets. The spacecraft does so by looking for the dimming that occurs when a world transits or moves in front of a star. Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory...

"Where will we get them? Look at a chart of rare earths production and consumption over the past 50 years, and two trends are immediately clear. The more rare earths the world has consumed, the fewer have been mined here in the United States. In 1985 - before the emergence of the public Internet and in the infancy of the laptop revolution - the U.S. produced half of the world's rare earths supply. By 2000, world production had more than doubled, while the U.S. share dropped below 10 percent. In 2002, U.S. rare earth production dropped to zero, with the...

« A symposium called Crossroads: The Future of Human Life in the Universe seems timely about now (the site has been down all morning but should be up soon). With the Kepler mission undergoing calibration and CoRoT actively searching for small extrasolar worlds, we’re probably within a few dozen months of the detection of an Earth-like world around another star (and maybe, by other methods, much closer). This is sometimes referred to as the ‘Holy Grail’ of planetary sciences, but as soon as we accomplish it, a new ‘Grail’ emerges: The discovery of life on these worlds. And then...

<p>Ship logs and pottery show how the geomagnetic field has changed.</p> <p>Old ship records of magnetic north have helped to unravel a record of our planet's field.</p> <p>While sailors plied the Seven Seas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, little did they know that their ships' logs would one day help scientists to reconstruct the history of the Earth's magnetic field.</p>

The Universe could host billions of EarthsBritish researchers are more confident than ever that there are "Earths" out there waiting to be discovered.The scientists say perhaps a half of all the known planetary systems today could be harbouring habitable worlds. It must be said most of these systems are strange places where supergiant planets orbit close in to their stars. But Barrie Jones and colleagues say their modelling work suggests that even with this oddness, there should be room for small rocky planets. The Open University team presented its ideas here at the UK National Astronomy Meeting on Tuesday. They...

Asteroid shaves past Earth's atmosphere 13:59 23 August 04 NewScientist.com news service The closest observed asteroid yet to skim past the Earth without hitting the atmosphere, was reported by astronomers on Sunday. The previously unknown object, spanning five to 10 metres across, has been named 2004 FU162. It streaked across the sky just 6500 kilometres - roughly the radius of the Earth - above the ground on 31 March, although details have only now emerged. The MIT Lincoln Laboratory's asteroid-hunting LINEAR telescope in Socorro, New Mexico,US, observed the new object four times over a 44-minute period, several hours before its...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The solar wind pries open immense cracks in the Earth's magnetic field, holding them apart while it gushes through to cause geomagnetic storms, scientists reported on Wednesday. The findings could help scientists better predict the storms, which can disrupt power, satellites and communications and endanger astronauts, the U.S. space agency NASA (news - web sites) said. "We think we have solved an old and long-standing controversial discussion of how this process of crack formation really works," Harald Frey of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the study, told a news conference. "Now that we know these...

Professor says Mayan calendar does not portend Earth’s doom By Steve Reeves January 01, 2003 TUSCALOOSA | Does our planet have only a scant 10 more years of existence left? Some people believe the ancient Mayan calendar suggests the end of the world will come on Dec. 21, 2012. But University of Alabama professor Enrique Gomez is not among them. “The world won’t end in 2012," laughed Gomez, who teaches in UA’s astronomy and physics department. “I can assure you of that." Gomez, a native of Mexico City, said he is much more interested in Mayan culture and how the...

Earth's volcanism linked to meteorite impacts 14:31 13 December 02 Exclusive from New Scientist Print EditionSpace rocks are blamed for violent eruptions (Image: GETTY) Large meteorite impacts may not just throw up huge dust clouds but also punch right through the Earth's crust, triggering gigantic volcanic eruptions. The idea is controversial, but evidence is mounting that the Earth's geology has largely been driven by such events. This would also explain why our planet has so few impact crater remnants. Counting the number of asteroids we see in the sky suggests that over the past 250 million years, Earth should have...

Monday, 21 October, 2002, 16:27 GMT 17:27 UKEarth's little brother found The asteroid was found almost by accident By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor Astronomers have discovered the first object ever that is in a companion orbit to the Earth. Asteroid 2002 AA29 is only about 100 metres wide and never comes closer than 3.6 million miles to our planet. But it shares the Earth's orbit around the Sun, at first on one side of the Earth and then escaping to travel along our planet's path around the Sun until it encounters the Earth from the other...

Thursday, 12 September, 2002, 11:57 GMT 12:57 UKEarth's new 'moon' is space junk Has this rocket returned to Earth? By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor So, it looks like Earth does not have a new "moon" after all The latest analysis of the mysterious object called J002E3 suggests it could well be a leftover Saturn V rocket component from one of the Apollo lunar missions. The suspicious, fast-moving object was discovered on 3 September by Bill Yeung from his observatory in Arizona, US. Initial orbit calculations indicated that it was only about twice as far away as...