Free Republic

Our sun has had close encounters with other stars in the past, and it’s due for a dangerously close one in the not-so-distant future. Every 50,000 years or so, a nomadic star passes near our solar system. Most brush by without incident. But, every once in a while, one comes so close that it gains a prominent place in Earth’s night sky, as well as knocks distant comets loose from their orbits. The most famous of these stellar interlopers is called Scholz’s Star. This small binary star system was discovered in 2013. Its orbital path indicated that, about 70,000 years...

In an article over at Space.com, Leonard David describes a new development in the efforts by humans to contact extraterrestrial life elsewhere in the galaxy. While the SETI program (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has been in operation for decades, the results thus far have been mostly disappointing. There was a brief flurry of excitement in 1977 when “the WOW signal” was received, but in later years even that one has been called into question. Now, however, there’s a new player in the game. China has constructed the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world and they are reportedly gearing up...

More than half a century ago a fellow grad student invited me into his laboratory to show me his doctoral research. He introduced me to the science of animal reflexes. A novel stimulus induces in an animal, however briefly, a freeze reaction. This is called an “orienting reflex.” What happens next depends on the animal’s response to the potential threat. If the novel stimulus does not seem to be a threat the animal gradually relaxes. Repeats of this type of stimulus gradually habituate its orienting reflex so that the animal, in effect, learns to ignore this particular stimulus. On the...

NASA’s top executive concentrating on human spaceflight, Doug Loverro, has resigned just a week before the scheduled start of a milestone space mission. Loverro became NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations last December, and was playing a leading role in NASA’s Artemis moon program as well as preparations for next week’s launch of a SpaceX Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station. That mission, set for liftoff on May 27 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is due to send NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the station for a stay that could last...

Genetic enhancement may not be restricted to the pages of sci-fi novels for much longer. For example, scientists have already inserted genes from tardigrades — tiny, adorable and famously tough animals that can survive the vacuum of space — into human cells in the laboratory. The engineered cells exhibited a greater resistance to radiation than their normal counterparts... Tardigrades and "extremophile" microbes, such as the radiation-resistant bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, "are a great, basically natural reservoir of amazing traits and talents in biology," added Mason... "Maybe we use some of them." Harnessing these traits might also someday allow astronauts to journey...

NASA scientists working on an experiment in Antarctica have detected evidence of a parallel universe — where the rules of physics are the opposite of our own, according to a report. The concept of a parallel universe has been around since the early 1960s, mostly in the minds of fans of sci-fi TV shows and comics, but now a cosmic ray detection experiment has found particles that could be from a parallel realm that also was born in the Big Bang, the Daily Star reported. The experts used a giant balloon to carry NASA’s Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna, or ANITA,...

In a scenario straight out of “The Twilight Zone,” a group of NASA scientists working on an experiment in Antarctica have detected evidence of a parallel universe — where the rules of physics are the opposite of our own, according to a report. The concept of a parallel universe has been around since the early 1960s, mostly in the minds of fans of sci-fi TV shows and comics, but now a cosmic ray detection experiment has found particles that could be from a parallel realm that also was born in the Big Bang, the Daily Star reported. The experts used...

In one particular report from March 2014, which refers to the UFOs as “unidentified aerial devices,” a pilot described seeing a “metallic object” that was “small in size, approximately the size of a suitcase, and silver in color.” The pilot apparently came within only 1,000 feet of the object, but “was unable to positively determine the identity of the aircraft.” The pilot then “attempted to regain visual contact with the aircraft, but was unable.”

Physicists at TU Dresden have discovered spontaneous static magnetic fields with broken time-reversal symmetry in a class of iron-based superconductors. The past and the future of human life are not symmetric and therefore not reversible. In physics, this is different. The fundamental forces of nature in elementary particles, atoms and molecules are symmetric with respect to their development in time: Forwards or backwards makes no difference, scientists call this a time-reversal symmetry. However, for some years, physicists have been discovering new superconductors which brake time-reversal symmetry. To explain these observations, the basic mechanism of superconductivity, which has been known for...

An international team of astronomers has discovered a close-in super-Earth exoplanet in the HD 164922 planetary system. HD 164922 is a bright G9-type star located approximately 72 light-years away in the constellation of Hercules. Also known as Gliese 9613 or LHS 3353, the star is slightly smaller and less massive than the Sun and is 9.6 billion years old. HD 164922 is known to host two massive planets: the temperate sub-Neptune HD 164922c and the Saturn-mass planet HD 164922b in a wide orbit. The sub-Neptune is 12.9 times more massive than Earth, and orbits the parent star once every 75.8...

By now, we have discovered hundreds of stars with multiple planets orbiting them scattered throughout the galaxy. Each one is unique, but a system orbiting the star HD 158259, 88 light-years away, is truly special. The star itself is about the same mass and a little larger than the Sun - a minority in our exoplanet hunts. It's orbited by six planets: a super-Earth and five mini-Neptunes... These two bodies are in what is described as a 2:3 orbital resonance. For every two laps Pluto makes around the Sun, Neptune makes three. It's like bars of music being played simultaneously,...

There may be multitudes of Earth-like planets sprinkled throughout the Milky Way galaxy, but they are not so easy to find. To date, only around a third of the over 4,000 exoplanets found and confirmed are rocky -- and most of those are within a few thousand light-years of Earth... So the announcement of a new rocky exoplanet is always exciting -- but this particular newly discovered rocky exoplanet is even more exciting yet... it's a whopping 24,722.65 light-years away from us -- which could make it the most distant Milky Way exoplanet discovered yet. It's so distant, it's close...

The most striking feature about the impact of Covid-19 on children is how little research has been conducted in the field. Only a handful of studies have been carried out across the world, and scientists are divided over their interpretation. As a result, politicians are now being asked to decide if they should open schools in order to protect children’s mental health and education without any clear scientific guidance about the risks of triggering a second wave of Covid-19 and infecting school staff in the process. It is known that children are less likely to become ill if infected with...

Like most, I’ve been working from my home for over two months now. At first it made sense due to the uncertainty involved with the Covid-19 virus. Back in Mid-March we were looking at data from China that was suspect, massive deaths in Italy and a virus that spread in such an insidious way that it would be nearly impossible to prevent it’s spread without drastic actions. We were looking at hospitals being overwhelmed and with too few beds to take care of the ill. It was a pretty scary time.By Mid-April we knew that the virus was most deadly...

Reports newly released by the Naval Safety Center reveal more information on the bizarre encounters U.S. Navy pilots have had with unidentified flying objects off the east coast of the United States. Eight hazard reports filed with the center's web-based reporting system were acquired under the Freedom of Information Act by The Drive and detail strange run-ins that include a near mid-air collision with a balloon-like object and a sighting of a suitcase-sized aircraft. In one 2014 encounter, the Navy jet reported even being able to lock onto the object with an air-to-air missile.

Well over half of all documented coronavirus deaths in the United States have occurred in just five states, a statistic which mirrors the heavily concentrated and localized nature of COVID-19 outbreaks in several other countries. Of the nearly 80,000 deaths from the virus in this country as of Saturday afternoon, nearly 48,700, or about 60 percent, had occurred in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan and Pennsylvania. New York remains the hardest-hit state of any in the country by far, having logged nearly 27,000 deaths as of Saturday afternoon. The next-hardest-hit state, New Jersey, had recorded over 9,100.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is still rising, even though people are driving and flying less during the COVID-19 pandemic. CO2 reached an all-time daily high on May 3rd, hitting levels that haven’t been seen in the more than 60 years since records began. The annual average is also expected to rise, according to an analysis published today by scientists at the national meteorological service for the UK and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. They found that the overall amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is still climbing steadily, and that the dramatic changes from the pandemic...

Enter comet Swan, speeding past Earth before it laps our sun and takes another long, elliptical trip through the outer solar system. Swan last waved at Earth 25 million years ago, when mammals grazed on sprawling grasslands in the Oligocene Epoch. Now, this sun-tinged cosmic snowball may illuminate our early morning sky this month. Swan was discovered by Michael Mattiazzo, an Australian amateur astronomer who analyzed images from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory spacecraft that observes our sun. Swan is outgassing hydrogen from water-ice on its toasty approach to the sun. This hydrogen “burp” shows up in ultraviolet images from...

REASON 4: EDUCATION A classical education focuses on the study of the classical languages, Latin and Greek, and on the study of the classical civilization of Greece and Rome. But why is the word classical reserved only for the languages of the Greeks and Romans and only for their civilization? What really is so special about the Greeks and Romans and why should Christians study them? After all they were not Christians, they were pagans. Some have objected to the word pagan and misunderstood its meaning. Pagan is a word Christians coined in the later Roman Empire to refer to...

In this Episode, we will take a look at the ongiong work by SpaceX in Boca Chica. We will look at Starship SN4 & SN5. Progress is continuing at an incredible rate. We will also take a look at the newly contracted Lunar Landers by Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX. NASA has chosen to give the private sector an opportunity for their own Moon shots. SpaceX is contributing the Lunar Starship, which has quite a few differences compared to the Earth based variant!