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The block universe theory says that our universe may be looked at as a giant four-dimensional block of spacetime, containing all the things that ever happen, explained Dr. Kristie Miller, the joint director for the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney.In the block universe, there is no "now" or present. All moments that exist are just relative to each other within the three spacial dimensions and one time dimension. Your sense of the present is just reflecting where in the block universe you are at that instance. The "past" is just a slice of the universe at an...

Don't sleep on NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. The history-making probe, which famously zoomed past Pluto in July 2015, is closing in on its next flyby target, a frigid chunk of ice and rock about 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) from Earth dubbed Ultima Thule.  New Horizons is now just 80 million miles (130 million km) from Ultima Thule, mission members said Wednesday (Sept. 19). That's less than the distance from Earth to the sun (about 93 million miles). [Destination Pluto: NASA's New Horizons Mission in Pictures]  The spacecraft has already begun photographing Ultima Thule for navigation purposes and remains...

SDSS J1050+0017, also known as ClG J1050+0017, is approximately 6 billion light-years away from Earth. The gigantic mass of this galaxy cluster creates the fascinating phenomenon of strong gravitational lensing.SDSS J1050+0017’s gravity bends light coming from behind it in a similar way to how the base of a wine glass bends light.The effects of this lensing can be clearly seen as curved streaks forming a circular shape around the center of the Hubble image.Astronomers can use these distorted galaxies to calculate the mass of the cluster — including the mass of the dark matter within it — and to peer...

Miguel Claro is a professional photographer, author and science communicator based in Lisbon, Portugal, who creates spectacular images of the night sky. As a European Southern Observatory photo ambassador, a member of The World At Night and the official astrophotographer of the Dark Sky Alqueva Reserve, he specializes in astronomical skyscapes that connect Earth and the night sky. Join him here as he takes us through his photograph "An Eclipsed Moon with Mars, Milky Way with Saturn, and a Satellite near Jupiter." Captured 15 minutes after the end of totality during the longest total lunar eclipse of the century, this...

The suspense is over: Two tiny hopping robots have successfully landed on an asteroid called Ryugu — and they've even sent back some wild postcards from their new home. The tiny rovers are part of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa2 asteroid sample-return mission. Engineers with the agency deployed the robots early Friday (Sept. 21), but JAXA waited until today (Sept. 22) to confirm the operation was successful and both rovers made the landing safely. The rovers are part of the MINERVA-II1 program, and are designed to hop along the asteroid's surface, taking photographs and gathering data. In fact, one of the...

Scientists delight in devising explanations for the great dinosaur extinctions. But there are several questions which they have failed to even ask, much less tried to answer. Why, for instance, in all of the time claimed to have passed since the dinosaur extinctions, has nothing ever re-evolved to the sizes of the large dinosaurs? If such sizes worked for creatures which ruled the Earth for tens of millions of years, then why would not some species of elephant or rhinoceros have evolved to such a size again? What kinds of problems, if any, would sauropod sizes entail in our world...

Spacecraft and satellites could in future be launched into space without the need for fuel, thanks to a revolutionary new theory. Dr Mike McCulloch, from the University of Plymouth, first put forward the idea of quantised inertia (QI) – through which he believes light can be converted into thrust – in 2007. He has now received $1.3million from the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for a four-year study which aims to make the concept a reality. The QI theory predicts that objects can be pushed by differences in the intensity of so-called Unruh radiation in space, similar...

Two stunningly preserved ice age mammals were unearthed by gold miners in northwest Canada and unveiled in a ceremony on Thursday. A wolf pup and a caribou calf were found by the miners in the Yukon territory in 2016 in the area's melting permaforst. It's exceedlingly rare for fur, skin and muscle tissues to be preserved in the fossil record, but all three are present on these specimens, which have radiocarbon-dated to more than 50,000 years old, reports the Guardian. The wolf pup is reportedly preserved in its entirety, including exceptional details of the head, tail, paws, skin and hair,...

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken a detailed image of a spectacular part of the Coma cluster, a structure of over a thousand galaxies bound together by gravity. The Coma Cluster, also known as Abell 1656, lies in the northern constellation of Coma Berenices, about 300 million light-years away from Earth.Many of the galaxies in the cluster are ellipticals, as is NGC 4860, the brighter of the two galaxies dominating this Hubble image.However, the outskirts of the cluster also host younger spiral galaxies that proudly display their swirling arms.Again, this image shows a wonderful example of such a galaxy...

North Carolina could find itself more vulnerable to damage from storms like Hurricane Florence due to a state law passed six years ago that banned using recent climate science to plan for the consequences of rising sea levels.

How Fast Is Earth Moving? As an Earthling, it's easy to believe that we're standing still. After all, we don't feel any movement in our surroundings. But when you look at the sky, you can see evidence that we are moving. Some of the earliest astronomers proposed that we live in a geocentric universe, which means that Earth is at the center of everything. They said the sun rotated around us, which caused sunrises and sunsets — same for the movements of the moon and the planets. But there were certain things that didn't work with this vision. Sometimes, a...

In what may be one of the more bizarre stories of 2018 so far, an undisclosed security threat has shut down a solar observatory in New Mexico, and angered local authorities in the process.

BOSTON — For some, it’s the best four years of their lives. For others, it’s a period of constant struggle, whether academically, socially, or both. College brings about new experiences and challenges for young adults that can be difficult to adapt to and overcome, so perhaps it’s no surprise that a new study reports high rates of stress and mental health conditions among students.

The Dangers of Scientism By Philip Cottraux “Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains in power, it proves itself incapable of handling the power. Because things are going very fast now…it will be in everyone’s hands. It will be in kits for backyard gardeners. Experiments for schoolchildren. Cheap labs for terrorists and dictators. And that will force everyone to ask the question - ‘What should I do with my power?’ Which is the very question science says it cannot answer.” -Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park****** Atheists often accuse religious people of being anti-science. They cite past examples...

Just because Jupiter's moon Europa is coated in ice doesn't mean all that ice is the same temperature. And now, scientists have mapped the hot and cold spots on the moon's surface using data gathered from Earth, with accuracy down to 125 miles (200 kilometers). While most of the temperature variations they measured can be explained by sunlight's influence on the ice, there's one unusually cold spot that is stumping the scientists behind the new research. That spot, which falls on the moon's northern hemisphere, stood out in images taken at different times of the day, which surprised the scientists....

A remarkable ring of bright X-ray sources — black holes or neutron stars — has been discovered in a galaxy approximately 300 million light years from Earth. This ring was forged when one galaxy smashed through the middle of another, creating ripples in the gas. “Where did the ring of black holes or neutron stars in this galaxy — the so-called ring galaxy AM 0644-741 — come from? We think that it was created when one galaxy was pulled into another galaxy by the force of gravity,” said Dr. Anna Wolter of the Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera and co-authors.“The first...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is starting to earnestly evaluate space resources for future mining.  Since its establishment in the 1870s, the USGS has focused pretty much solely on Earth. But now it's also investigating what benefits may or may not exist in tapping extraterrestrial water, minerals and metals. The agency seeks to portray accurately how humanity could exploit off-Earth assets — a no-nonsense approach that contrasts with the pie-in-the-sky estimates of trillions of dollars of profit proffered by some less scientifically minded space-mining advocates.Proven expertise This past June, several USGS experts took part in a Space Resources Roundtable held at...

The seven planets orbiting the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 are mostly rocky, with some potentially holding more liquid water than Earth. New research reveals the density of the worlds within this crowded system to a greater precision than ever before. The findings reveal that some of the planets could have up to 5 percent of their mass in liquid water form, about 250 times as much water as found in Earth's oceans. "All the TRAPPIST-1 planets are very Earth-like — they have a solid core, surrounded by an atmosphere," In addition to narrowing down the composition of the exoplanets, the...

Late last week, the astronauts aboard the International Space Station woke up to some distressing news: There was a leak somewhere on the station, and air was escaping into space. After an extensive search, the leak was finally found and plugged with tape and gauze, and the air pressure inside the station has been stabilized. But now that the crisis has passed, there’s a new concern for the astronauts and the space agencies that manage the station. How exactly did that hole get there in the first place? At first, the theory was that a stray micrometeorite collided with the...

After a catastrophic fire blazed through the National Museum of Brazil on Sunday (Sept. 2), destroying many of the institution's 20 million artifacts, the museum's meteorites were some of the few relics left standing. Among the space rocks that survived the blaze is the Bendegó meteorite, which is the largest meteorite ever found on Brazilian soil. The iron-nickel meteorite is one of about a dozen meteorites housed at the museum. … Officials have not yet been able to tally the damages, as investigators have been instructed to hold off on their work until engineers declare the building safe to enter,...