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Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) either misspoke or showed her historical ignorance in a speech on the House floor when she declared that United States has been operating under our Constitution for 400 years...

I don’t typically like to give anyone too much grief for what could easily be an innocent mental-to-verbal lapse, but… c’mon, now. Given that she took to the House floor to explicitly argue against the constitutionality of the GOP’s proposed Enforce The Law Act, I must say that her argument might have been a teeny bit more convincing if she was a little more firm in her background knowledge of the actual Constitution. Yikes.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, had an "oops" moment on the House floor, as seen in C-Span video. The Houston representative declared the U.S. Constitution was some 400 years old. Unfortunately, that's incorrect. The Constitution was created in 1787 and ratified nearly a year later. Four hundred years ago, Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, was founded.

Time travelers, if they exist amongst us, have yet to betray their period-hopping ways online, according to a fun, new study aimed at finding visitors from another time, based on their digital footprints. Theoretically, the idea of time travel forward in time should be possible according to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. In fact, scientists have already sent teensy particles called muons forward in time. But sending a large object, such as an entire person, into the future remains in the echelons of science fiction, for now. Even so, over a summer poker game, Robert Nemiroff, an astrophysicist at Michigan...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLQebqVQKcc The Senate, by not passing a budget, and by saying fund all or nothing, has taken away the House's power of the purse to defund courts or an other agency that goes beyond its power. If the House impeaches a judge, the current senate would neither try nor convict and remove from office. If the House abolished a court, or limited its jurisdiction, that law would never get through the senate. Every means by which the people can rein in a courts power would be halted by the US Senate and then by former Senator Barack Obama. Therefore, we...

You’ve all heard of anomalies, right? anomaly (plural anomalies) A deviation from a rule or from what is regarded as normal. Something or someone that is strange or unusual. (sciences) Any event or measurement that is out of the ordinary (astronomy) Any of various angular distances. (biology) A defect or malformation. (quantum mechanics) A failure of a classical symmetry due to quantum corrections. Black holes are considered a classic anomaly: Today I would like to suggest a new Wiktionary entry that I made up. I think it will go a long way towards addressing the current unsettled, disconcerted sentiments of...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Oct. 4 (UPI) -- The brilliance of Albert Einstein's brain may have been down to unusually well-connected left and right hemispheres, U.S. and Chinese researchers say. Florida State University evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk, using a technique developed by Weiwei Men of East China Normal University's Department of Physics, says the study was the first detailed look at Einstein's corpus callosum, the brain's largest bundle of fibers connecting the two cerebral hemispheres and facilitating interhemispheric communication.

Rocket: Ariane 5 ES Payload: ATV 4 Date: June 5, 2013 Time: 2152:11 GMT (5:52:11 p.m. EDT/2:52 p.m. EDT) Site: ELA-3, Guiana Space Center, Kourou French Guiana Docking: June 15 @ 1348 GMT Undocking: Oct. 28

The universe is about 13.82 billion years old. Although it is well within the error range of earlier estimates, this new number means that the universe is slightly older than cosmologists previously thought. The new age comes as a result of data just released from the European Space Agency’s Planck space telescope, which for the past 15 months has been taking the most precise images of the oldest light in the universe, the “cosmic microwave background radiation.” This microwave-wavelength light is the remnant of the universe’s earliest days, and is a key piece of evidence for the event we now...

Scientists have subjected Albert Einstein's famous theory of gravity to its toughest real-world test so far—and it has prevailed. Einstein's general theory of relativity states that objects with mass cause a curvature in space-time, which we perceive as gravity. Space-time, according to Einstein's theories of relativity, is a four-dimensional fabric woven together by space and time. For example, a bowling ball causes a dent in a mattress, and that dent changes the otherwise straight motion of a nearby marble on the same mattress. Similarly, the mass of the sun distorts the space-time around it. A body with less mass, like...

Explanation: How fast can a black hole spin? If any object made of regular matter spins too fast -- it breaks apart. But a black hole might not be able to break apart -- and its maximum spin rate is really unknown. Theorists usually model rapidly rotating black holes with the Kerr solution to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which predicts several amazing and unusual things. Perhaps its most easily testable prediction, though, is that matter entering a maximally rotating black hole should be last seen orbiting at near the speed of light, as seen from far away. This prediction...

All of this is to say that binary oppositions are both pattern and method. In the field of Physics Einstein and Bohr represent the tug-o-war between determinism and non-determinism. Einstein preferred the determinism of classical physics over the complementarity and the uncertainty principle of Bohr and Heisenberg. Yet none of them could deny that all properties and actions in the physical world are to some degree non-deterministic. None can deny that every snowflake is unique. Yet every snowflake has a perfect pattern. Niels Bohr was right that light behaves like both waves and particles. This led him to conclude that...

Coffee with Friends A day at the beach Cheering for your team Dinner out with friends On a date Lunch with BFF Enjoying the art museum Crusin' with friends... h/t Roberto

The story begins with a letter from Albert Einstein to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939. The celebrated physicist warned the president that Nazi Germany was developing the makings of an atomic bomb. Roosevelt knew what would happen if Hitler got such a weapon. The president ordered a massive secret project to make sure the U.S. beat him to it. Scientists from all over the country were enlisted in the effort. Early in 1942 Enrico Fermi and a team of physicists gathered at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory. Their goal was to develop a self-sustaining nuclear pile. This was the...

Portions of Albert Einstein’s brain have been found to be unlike those of most people and could be related to his extraordinary cognitive abilities, according to a new study led by Florida State University evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk.

Turkish schoolchildren in Istanbul received a series of books denouncing scientific figures, including one denying the theory of evolution and describing Charles Darwin as a big-nosed Jew, the Financial Times reported Friday. According to the paper, the books were distributed last week to hundreds of students in the Maltepe district of Turkey's capital after the government-affiliated local education authority approved their content. The book on Darwin reportedly states that the evolutionary biologist “Had two problems: First he was a Jew; second, he hated his prominent forehead, big nose and misshapen teeth.” Darwin was not Jewish. A separate book on Albert...

ACHIEVING an IQ score higher than Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking seems almost impossible, but not for one young girl. Northwood College School pupil, Fabiola Mann, of Harrow on the Hill, scored a remarkable IQ of 162 in this summer’s University of London’s (UCL) Mensa medical test. It is the highest possible score anyone can achieve in the UK and European test. The 15-year-old beat physicists Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein, who both scored 160 when they took it. Being a whizz kid at puzzles and mathematical tests, Fabiola decided to give it a go, she sat the test on...

New theory describes faster than light travel, could explain CERN's results Some of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, including Albert Einstein, consider the speed of light a sort of universal "speed limit".  But over the past couple decades physicists theorized that it should be possible to break this law and get away with it -- to travel faster than the speed of light. I. CERN Results Potentially Described One of several possible routes to faster-than-light travel was potentially demonstrated when researchers at CERN, the European physics organization known for maintaining the Large Hadron Collider, sent high-energy particles through the Earth's crust from Geneva, Switzerland...

We don’t (yet) have any way to test this, but University of Adelaide applied mathematicians are suggesting that an extended version of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity also holds true for velocities beyond lightspeed. One of the main predictions of Special Relativity is that the speed of light is treated as an absolute cosmic speed limit, the line which can never be crossed; and even the notorious “faster-than-light neutrino” incident in 2011 has left the theory intact as one of the most robust in physics. However, during the speculation that surrounded the neutrino discussion last year1, the University of Adelaide’s...

A handwritten letter by Albert Einstein goes on auction tomorrow on eBay. The online auction site has set the opening bid at a staggering $3 million. That’s more than seven times as much as the letter fetched just four years ago. “This is the most historic and significant piece we have listed on eBay,” said Eric Gazin, president of Auction Cause, the Los Angles-based agency consigned to sell Einstein’s two-pager. So what makes this particular letter by the 20th century’s most renowned physicist so much more valuable than any other missive he hand wrote? Did he scribble his famous formula...