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« We’ve already speculated here that if the Kepler mission finds few Earth-like planets in the course of its investigations, the belief that life is rare will grow. But let’s be optimists and speculate on the reverse: What if Kepler pulls in dozens, even hundreds, of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of their respective stars? In that case, the effort to push on to study the atmospheres of such planets would receive a major boost, aiding the drive to launch a terrestrial planet hunter with serious spectroscopic capabilities some time in the next decade.Budget problems? Let’s fold Darwin...

Nobody knows what dark matter is, but scientists may now have a clue where to look for it. The strange stuff makes up about 85 percent of the heft of the universe. It's invisible, but researchers know it's there because there is not enough regular matter -- stars and planets and gas and dust -- to hold galaxies and galaxy clusters together. Some other unseen material, dubbed dark matter, must be gluing things together... A new computer simulation of the evolution of a galaxy like our Milky Way suggests it might be possible to observe high-energy gamma-rays given off by...

article physics is one of the most intriguing scientific fields, probing the nature of the very makeup of the universe itself. However, over the last half decade, due to the growing economic crisis and various items such as war funding taking precedence in government budgets, the budget to help the U.S. stay leaders in the field of particle physics has been slipping. The U.S. currently is down to only one remaining particle physics lab, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, associated with the University of Chicago and the lab was looking to be on the way out....

Detroit Edison's Fermi 2 Power Plant recently received renewal of its MVPP Star Award, the state's highest workplace safety and health award, from the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration (MIOSHA).

Thursday November 08 09:37 AM EST Fermi's Paradox II: What's Blocking Galactic Civilization? Or Are We Just Blind To It? By Seth ShostakAstronomer, Project Phoenix, SPACE.com    Could galactic empires exist? In a previous article, we noted that there has been plenty of time for aliens keen on colonizing the Milky Way to pull it off. However, we see no signs of galactic federation ("Star Trek" aside). Why does the cosmos look so untouched and unconquered? What is keeping advanced extraterrestrials from claiming every star system in sight? This puzzle, known as the Fermi Paradox, has burned up a lot ...

The error is the a priori assumption that UFOs cannot exist therefore no evidence to the contrary will be considered, never mind accepted. Few scientists would allow such faulty logic to prevail in their own field of expertise. Yet, in the emotionally laden field of UFOs, scientists let Condon stand uncorrected and disregarding pertinent facts has become the accepted norm... There are over 3000 cases reported by pilots, some of which include interference with flight controls. On numerous occasions air traffic controllers and other radar operators have noted unexplained objects on their scopes. So too have several astronomers and other...

The Fermi paradox—the estimation that extraterrestrial civilizations are common and would naturally expand into space, contradicting the lack of evidence that they exist anywhere—is the subject of fascinating speculation and guesswork. Every possible fate of extraterrestrial intelligence is proposed and explored. These thought experiments are not only interesting in their own right, but may help evaluate the state of a more terrestrial civilization. What will happen to humankind in the future? By examining the possible futures of extraterrestrial civilizations, we are simultaneously examining the possible futures of our own civilization. Put in another way, if an alien civilization somewhere had...

NASA-funded researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., have created a new form of superfluid matter. This research may lead to improved superconducting materials, useful for energy-efficient electricity transport and better medical diagnostic tools. The research marks the first time scientists have positively created a friction-free superfluid using a gas of fermionic atoms, atoms with an odd number of electrons, protons and neutrons. The breakthrough happened on the night of April 13. "It's a night I won't forget. It was overwhelming to watch on our computers as the lithium atoms behaved in a way that no one had...

Fermi's Paradox Fermi's Paradox (i.e. Where are They?): The story goes that, one day back on the 1940's, a group of atomic scientists, including the famous Enrico Fermi, were sitting around talking, when the subject turned to extraterrestrial life. Fermi is supposed to have then asked, "So? Where is everybody?" What he meant was: If there are all these billions of planets in the universe that are capable of supporting life, and millions of intelligent species out there, then how come none has visited earth? This has come to be known as The Fermi Paradox. Fermi realized that any...