You know what I'm getting fed up with? Environmentalists going on about how we should turn things off at the wall instead of leaving things on standby. OK good advice for saving power, but this won't reduce carbon emissions, it will slow them a tiny bit. In France which is 90% nuclear powered it will do bugger all. We need real solutions, and less of being told how to live our daily lives....
According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, the Big Bang represents The Beginning, the grand event at which not only matter but space-time itself was born. While classical theories offer no clues about existence before that moment, a research team at Penn State has used quantum gravitational calculations to find threads that lead to an earlier time. "General relativity can be used to describe the universe back to a point at which matter becomes so dense that its equations don't hold up,"...
Marxists have always argued that human beings are naturally co-operative and will help each other automatically "out-of-the-box" if you will. We argued this because logically that is the only way we could of survived, we evolved our natural helpful and co-operativeness because they were a huge advantage over other species, there was also much evidence on early communist societies to bolster the argument. We argue that class society puts a clamp on this natural behaviour due to bourgeois culture transmitted from the ruling classes over history, me me me money money money....
About 56 million years ago a star, exploded into what we call a Type 1A Supernovae. Click for a before and after shot Here it is announcing itself to us, we first detected this about 3 weeks ago and it's around peek brightness now, over time it will fade back down and we'll probabaly never see it again. I love supernovae, that one star outshines everything in it's galaxy. All the other stars in that image around the same brightness are actually in our galaxy - so they're around ten thousand times closer....
The European Space Agency is making a very big announcement tomorrow at 16:00 UTC. Nobody knows quite exactly what, other than it's at least related to an extra-solar planet. But the rumour mill is in over drive - an Earth-like planet? Who knows for sure, but it seems pretty special, a lot of hype is building - a lot more than when they announced the planet with half the mass of Uranus orbiting Gliese 876 - until that point all the planets had been huge, tens and even hundreds times more massive....
New Horizons finally got the all clear to launch at 18:52, resumed the countdown at 18:56 and launched at 19:00 on an Atlas V rocket. It's on it's way to Jupiter and then on to Pluto where it should arrive on the 14th of July, 2015.
...and 51% believe fairy tales are real. US public opinion is also extremely hostile to Darwinian theory. In a national poll two months ago, 51% of Americans said they believed that human beings were created by God. Another 30% said God guided human evolution, and only 15% thought that humans had evolved without divine intervention. Nick covered some of this in his recent blog entry. Mine is more of a call to arms....
Well it looks like Pluto could possibly have two new satellites - we should know for sure early next year when the team that made the discovery can get more telescope time to confirm it. But it looks pretty likely as they have likely discovered the two satellites in images of the area back in 2002 too - in roughly the same positions as they had calculated. The two objects designated by the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union as S/2005 P1 and S/2005 P2 will more formally named once it is confirmed they are indeed satellites....
First off I was flicking through Google News when I spotted something about Mars, an article, on a news site... I can see other astronomers cringing. CHENNAI: Sky gazers were treated to a rare celestial event as planet mars shone like a bright red ruby during its closest encounter with earth on Saturday night. In a rare phenomenon, the red planet, which was in the constellation of Taurus, came to a distance of about 69 million km from the earth, making it visible with naked eye....
I've just found a brilliant new article on the problem of Intelligent Design written by Pat Shipman, give it a read it's really good. Somebody sent me an e-mail last week asking why I care about the advancement of ID in the United States, sure I'm in Europe and I could never see anything like this being considered, let alone implemented here in the near future. But that's not the point....