Free Republic

In 1893, Orlando Ferguson, a real estate developer based in South Dakota, drew a map of the Earth that combined biblical and scientific knowledge in a unique way. The map accompanied a 92-page lecture that Ferguson — referring to himself as a "professor" — delivered in town after town, traveling far and wide to share his theory of geography, highlighted by his belief that the Earth was flat. Only one fully intact version of Ferguson's map, which represents the Earth as a giant, rectangular slab with a dimpled upper surface, remains. Don Homuth of Salem, Ore., just donated the map...

When the Swift Gamma Burst Mission spacecraft first detected the flash within the constellation Draco, astronomers thought it was a gamma-ray burst from a collapsing star. On March 31, however, UC Berkeley's Joshua Bloom sent out an email circular suggesting that it wasn't a typical gamma-ray burst at all, but a high-energy jet produced as a star about the size of our sun was shredded by a black hole a million times more massive. Careful analysis of the Swift data and subsequent observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory confirmed Bloom's initial insight. The details are...

FAIRFAX, Va., June 15, 2011—George Mason University scientists discovered recently that a phenomenon called a giant magnetic rope is the cause of solar storms. Confirming the existence of this formation is a key first step in helping to mitigate the adverse effects that solar storm eruptions can have on satellite communications on Earth. The discovery was made by associate professor Jie Zhang and his graduate student Xin Cheng using images from the NASA Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) spacecraft. Though the magnetic rope was believed to be the cause of these giant eruptions on the Sun, scientists had previously not been...

Experimental test of a mini-Rossi device at the Leonardocorp, Bologna 29 March 2011. Participants: Giuseppe Levi, David Bianchini, Carlo Leonardi, Hanno Essén, Sven Kullander, Andrea Rossi, Sergio Focardi. Travel report by Hanno Essén and Sven Kullander, 3 April 2011. We gathered in the Leonardo Corporation building where the 10 kW apparatus for anomalous energy production by nickel and hydrogen was demonstrated during a press conference on 14th of January. References [1] to [4] for the original papers describing the innovation are listed at the end. In the same building, two CHP facilities were located, based on biodiesel from waste which...

Called blue stragglers, these cannibal stars have been spotted in other parts of the Milky Way. They seem to lag in age next to the other stars with which they formed—appearing hotter, and thus younger and bluer. Astronomers suspect blue stragglers look so youthful because they've stolen hydrogen fuel from other stars, perhaps after colliding into their victims. These cannibal stars are routinely found in dense star clusters, where stars have many chances to feed off each other. Now, however, scientists have found blue stragglers in the Milky Way's galactic bulge, a dense region of stars and gas surrounding the...

With a new printing technique, researchers can now make enough metamaterials to begin fabricating invisibility cloaks and superlenses.A new printing method makes it possible to produce large sheets of metamaterials, a new class of materials designed to interact with light in ways no natural materials can. For several years, researchers working on these materials have promised invisibility cloaks, ultrahigh-resolution "superlenses," and other exotic optical devices straight from the pages of science fiction. But the materials were confined to small lab demonstrations because there was no way to make them in large enough quantities to demonstrate a practical device. "Everyone has,...

Link and headline onlyClick Here~

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A pair of NASA probes wandering in deep space discovered that the outer edge of the solar system contains curious magnetic bubbles and is not smooth as previously thought, astronomers said Thursday. The NASA Voyager twin spacecraft, which launched in 1977, are currently exploring the furthest outlays of the heliosphere, where solar wind is slowed and warped by pressure from other forces in the galaxy, the US space agency said. "Because the sun spins, its magnetic field becomes twisted and wrinkled, a bit like a ballerina's skirt," said astronomer Merav Opher of Boston University. "Far, far away...

Surprising discovery may offer clues to emergence of high-temperature superconductivityUPTON, NY — Magnetic studies of ultrathin slabs of copper-oxide materials reveal that at very low temperatures, the thinnest, isolated layers lose their long-range magnetic order and instead behave like a “quantum spin liquid” — a state of matter where the orientations of electron spins fluctuate wildly. This unexpected discovery by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland may offer support for the idea that this novel condensed state of matter is a precursor to the emergence of...

RICHMOND, Va. (June 8, 2011) – A team of Virginia Commonwealth University scientists has discovered a new class of 'superatoms' – a stable cluster of atoms that can mimic different elements of the periodic table – with unusual magnetic characteristics. The superatom contains magnetized magnesium atoms, an element traditionally considered as non-magnetic. The metallic character of magnesium along with infused magnetism may one day be used to create molecular electronic devices for the next generation of faster processors, larger memory storage and quantum computers. In a study published online in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy...

I've been grappling with whether the Energy Catalyzer that Focardi & Rossi are claiming will go into production in 6 months is a fraud or not. I wandered over to the Energy from Thorium discussion board to see how they are dealing with the latest set of facts, and I find many of their comments constructive to the ongoing debate. So I'm cherry picking some of them below, the ones I found most valuable. I think it's important to preserve this discussion because they have had threads on cold fusion pulled before, and this one is getting heated. various excerpts...

Enlarge Image Out with a bang. In this artist's rendition, an antihydrogen atom rattles around the ALPHA trap before escaping to create a pair of pions. Credit: CERN/ALPHA collaboration Just 6 months ago, physicists reported that they had trapped atoms made of antimatter for a fraction of a second. Now, the same team has held on to individual atoms of antihydrogen, each of which consists of an antiproton bound to a positron, for up to 15 minutes. That's long enough for an atom to lose all of its internal energy and settle into its least-energetic "ground state," a prerequisite...

The long, slow decay of carbon-14 allows archaeologists to accurately date the relics of history back to 60,000 years. And while the carbon dating technique is well known and understood (the ratio of carbon-14 to other carbon isotopes is measured to determine the age of objects containing the remnants of any living thing), the reason for carbon-14's slow decay has not been understood. Why, exactly, does carbon-14 have a half-life of nearly 6,000 years while other light atomic nuclei have half-lives of minutes or seconds? (Half-life is the time it takes for the nuclei in a sample to decay to...

Researchers have shown off a "DNA computer" of unprecedented complexity, which can calculate square roots.> For example, it was used to calculate the square root of a four-bit number, but the process took between six and 10 hours. However, Professor Winfree said that contrary to conventional electronics, the goal is not just high speeds. "We are no longer pursuing the goal targeted by Len Adleman's original DNA computing experiment: to compete with silicon by using the massive parallelism of chemistry to solve combinatorial problems in mathematics," he explained. "Instead, our goal is now - and has been for many years...

GENEVA (Reuters) - British physicist Peter Higgs said on Monday it should soon be possible to prove the existence of a force which gives mass to the universe and makes life possible -- as he first argued 40 years ago. Higgs said he believes a particle named the "Higgs boson," which originates from the force, will be found when a vast particle collider at the CERN research centre on the Franco-Swiss border begins operating fully early next year."The likelihood is that the particle will show up pretty quickly ... I'm more than 90 percent certain that it will," Higgs told...

Imagining the Tenth Dimension part 1 of 2Imagining the Tenth Dimension part 2 of 2 I thought this was particularly interesting and I always thought a 3rd dimensional creature couldn't visualize a higher dimensional outlook.

A gamma-ray burst detected by NASA's Swift satellite in April 2009 has been newly unveiled as a candidate for the most distant object in the universe. At an estimated distance of 13.14 billion light years, the burst lies far beyond any known quasar and could be more distant than any previously known galaxy or gamma-ray burst. Multiple lines of evidence in favor of a record-breaking distance for this burst, known as GRB 090429B for the 29 April 2009 date when it was discovered, are presented in a paper by an international team of astronomers led by former Penn State University...

A Monash student has made a breakthrough in the field of astrophysics, discovering what has until now been described as the Universe’s ‘missing mass’. Amelia Fraser-McKelvie, working within a team at the Monash School of Physics, conducted a targeted X-ray search for the matter and within just three months found it – or at least some of it. What makes the discovery all the more noteworthy is the fact that Ms Fraser-McKelvie is not a career researcher, or even studying at a postgraduate level. She is a 22-year-old undergraduate Aerospace Engineering/Science student who pinpointed the missing mass during a summer...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has been trained on a single variable star that in 1923 altered the course of modern astronomy. V1 is a special class of pulsating star called a Cepheid variable that can be used to make reliable measurements of large cosmic distances. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Progress Toward the Dream of Space Drives and Stargates by Paul Gilster on May 23, 2011 by James F. WoodwardI first wrote about James Woodward’s work in my 2004 book Centauri Dreams: Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration, and have often been asked since to comment further on his research. But it’s best to leave that to the man himself, and I’m pleased to turn today’s post over to him. A bit of biography: Jim Woodward earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics at Middlebury College and New York University (respectively) in the 1960s. From his undergraduate days, his chief...