Free Republic

Chaz Bono braved controversy to be the first transgender contestant on Dancing with the Stars, but he revealed in an interview today that it was jibes over his weight that troubled him the most. But it wasn't from ignorant, faceless haters that the 42-year-old faced these attacks, but rather from the show's judges, whom Bono has blasted as 'disrespectful.' The only child of Cher, 65 , and the late Sonny Bono, told Good Morning America: 'I was called a basketball, a penguin, an Ewok, and I just didn't appreciate it.' -snip- 'I took so much away from this. This was...

DALLAS -- After 21 seasons in the NHL, Mike Modano made it official Friday, announcing his retirement as a player. It was fitting that his farewell press conference was in Dallas -- since that's where he spent the bulk of his playing career. During his more than two decades as a player, he was an eight-time NHL All-Star who finished as the career leader among American-born with 561 goals and 1,374 points. He was a major contributor to the Stars' 1999 Stanley Cup championship, and he served as Dallas' captain from 2003-06. Modano, the first pick of the 1988 Entry...

The alien planet with two suns, as in the "Star Wars" films, will be visible Scientists have spotted a real-life Tatooine — a world with two suns, like Luke Skywalker's home planet in the "Star Wars" films — and you should be able to see this alien star system, too, using a good pair of binoculars. Astronomers announced the discovery of the alien planet, called Kepler-16b, Thursday. The Saturn-mass planet orbits a pair of stars known as Kepler-16A and Kepler-16B. Someone on Kepler-16b would see two suns hanging near each other in the sky, just as Luke did on Tatooine.

Intense pressure can force neutrons into cubes rather than spheres, say physicistsInside atomic nuclei, protons and neutrons fill space with a packing density of 0.74, meaning that only 26 percent of the volume of the nucleus in is empty. That's pretty efficient packing. Neutrons achieve a similar density inside neutron stars, where the force holding neutrons together is the only thing that prevents gravity from crushing the star into a black hole. Today, Felipe Llanes-Estrada at the Technical University of Munich in Germany and Gaspar Moreno Navarro at Complutense University in Madrid, Spain, say neutrons can do even better. These...

White dwarfs are the burned-out cores of stars like our Sun. Astronomers have discovered a pair of white dwarfs spiraling into one another at breakneck speeds. Today, these white dwarfs are so near they make a complete orbit in just 13 minutes, but they are gradually slipping closer together. About 900,000 years from now - a blink of an eye in astronomical time - they will merge and possibly explode as a supernova. By watching the stars converge, scientists will test both Einstein's theory of general relativity and the origin of some peculiar supernovae.The two white dwarfs are circling...

WASHINGTON, June 30, 2011 – Bronze campaign stars are now authorized for service members who have served in Iraq since Sept. 1, 2010, or in Afghanistan since Dec. 1, 2009, Defense Department officials announced today. The new campaign stars, worn on the Iraq and Afghanistan campaign medals, recognize service during Operation New Dawn in Iraq and the Consolidation III campaign phase in Afghanistan. Operation New Dawn began Sept. 1, 2010, marking the official end of Operation Iraqi Freedom and U.S. combat operations in Iraq and a new focus on advising, assisting and training Iraqi security forces. The Consolidation III campaign...

‘Blue Stragglers’ in the Galactic Bulge by Paul Gilster on May 30, 2011 I’m fascinated by how much the exoplanet hunt is telling us about celestial objects other than planets. The other day we looked at some of the stellar spinoffs from the Kepler mission, including the unusual pulsations of the star HD 187091, now known to be not one star but two. But the examples run well beyond Kepler. Back in 2006, a survey called the Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search (SWEEPS) used Hubble data to study 180,000 stars in the galaxy’s central bulge, the object being...

That's scientists' latest estimate for our galaxy alone, based on Kepler data Roughly one out of every 37 to one out of every 70 sunlike stars in the sky might harbor an alien Earth, a new study reveals. These findings hint that billions of Earthlike planets might exist in our galaxy, researchers added. These new calculations are based on data from the Kepler space telescope, which in February wowed the globe by revealing more than 1,200 possible alien worlds, including 68 potentially Earth-size planets. The spacecraft does so by looking for the dimming that occurs when a world transits or...

Superfluids are strange states of matter, typically forming at very low and very high temperatures, exhibiting gonzo properties like a seemingly gravity-defying tendency to climb up the walls of containers and friction-free superconductivity. That is, they are perfect conductors that don't lose energy during transmission. And the fact that they appear to exist at the center of neutron stars tells scientists a lot about nuclear interactions in high-density matter and the life-cycles of neutron stars. The pressure within neutron stars is so intense that in the stars' cores, charged particles merge, resulting in a star mostly consisting of neutrons (hence...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Wormholes are one of the stranger objects that arise in general relativity. Although no experimental evidence for wormholes exists, scientists predict that they would appear to serve as shortcuts between one point of spacetime and another. Scientists usually imagine wormholes connecting regions of empty space, but now a new study suggests that wormholes might exist between distant stars. Instead of being empty tunnels, these wormholes would contain a perfect fluid that flows back and forth between the two stars, possibly giving them a detectable signature. The scientists, Vladimir Dzhunushaliev at the Eurasian National University in Kazakhstan and coauthors,...

SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia — The appearance of a Star of David on new national identity cards has alarmed opponents of President Evo Morales, who recall how the symbol was used to brand Jews in Nazi Germany. Tiny six-pointed stars within a tight circle are printed on the back side of some, but not all, recently issued picture IDs in the Santa Cruz region. The mark was present on three cards seen by The Washington Times. "It raises suspicions that the government is identifying individuals or segments of the population along racial, religious or ideological lines" said Carlos Klinsky, a member...

Take a moment and consider your place in the bigger scheme of things~ And while that's indeed illuminating (sorry)....  it's a  big universe with plenty of other stars out there: Jupiter only one pixel on that scale. But this behemoth Arcturus -25x the Sun's size and 110x as bright-is just 5th largest here...our own sun down to a single pixel: The monster above -Anteres- is the 15th brightest star in the sky, and is over 1000 light-years away. Feeling your place yet? Now try to wrap your mind around this: the photo below was taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and ultra-deep-field infrared shot of...

An international team of astronomers led by Mary Williams from the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam (AIP) has discovered a new stream of stars in our Milky Way: the "Aquarius Stream," named after the constellation of Aquarius. The stream of stars is a remnant of a smaller galaxy in our cosmic neighbourhood, which has been pulled apart by the gravitational pull of the Milky Way about 700 million years ago. The discovery is a result of the measurement of the velocities of 250,000 stars with the RAVE Survey based at the Australian Astronomical Observatory's UK Schmidt Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory, NSW,...

Best Art in the Universe? Hubble Space Telescope's Amazing Pics From 2010 (Dec. 15) -- You might think that taking highly detailed photographs of the darkest corners of the universe would be a purely scientific job. Turns out, there's an art to it. For the past 20 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has been orbiting the planet and wowing earthlings with breathtaking images of outer space, from jaw-dropping pictures of clusters of newborn stars to fantastic photos of colliding galaxies. But it's not just Hubble's cutting-edge optics that are responsible for these stunning photographs. Behind each image is the hard...

Celebrities were so frustrated with the time it took to raise $1 million for Keep a Child Alive's "Digital Death" campaign, they persuaded a wealthy savior to give them $500,000 so they could get back on Twitter. Brooklyn-born billionaire pharmaceutical executive Stewart Rahr donated $500,000 yesterday to meet the $1 million goal, thereby resuscitating Alicia Keys, Swizz Beatz, Kim and Khloe Kardashian, Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Ryan Seacrest,Daphne Guinness and others on Twitter and Facebook. .... "It's the worst mismanagement of star power I've ever seen in my life," said a source close to the program. Sources said the organization...

The night sky may be a lot starrier than we thought. A study suggests the universe could have triple the number of stars scientists previously calculated. The new estimate is 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's 300 sextillion. The study questions a key assumption that astronomers often use: that most galaxies have the same properties as our Milky Way. And that's creating a bit of a stink among astronomers who want a more orderly cosmos.

The issue isn’t Bristol’s dancing, but her popularity. And because of who Bristol is, that means the issue is the popularity of her mother. The unexpectedly large number of people voting for Bristol contradicts the going mood of the gallery of bubble-wrapped Palin-haters who really believed that Palin was being booed that night in the audience at DWTS, and that all of America was booing her, too. Like the old story of Pauline Kael, flabbergasted by Nixon’s landslide in 1972 when she didn’t know a single person who voted for him, the average Palin-hater has existed until now in safe...

On the 9th of May 2008, during a campaign speech in the state of Oregon, Barack Obama said the following: “I’ve now been to fifty-seven states, I think one left to go…one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to, because my staff couldn’t justify it.” Fifty-seven states plus Alaska and Hawaii? Usually, we could pass off a slip-up like this as the result of campaigning-fatigue. After all, it was a very energetic campaign. However, Obama paused, thought carefully about what he was going to say, said it and...

The mother of "The Brady Bunch," a former NFL quarterback, one of the self-proclaimed "guidos" from "Jersey Shore" and the daughter of Sarah Palin are among the celebrities who will cha-cha-cha on the 11th season of "Dancing with the Stars."

Life originated in a nebular cloud, over 10 billion years ago, but may have had multiple origins in multiple locations, including in galaxies older than the Milky Way. Multiple origins could account for the different domains of life: archae, bacteria, eukaryotes. The first steps toward life may have been achieved when self-replicating nano-particles initially comprised of a mixture of carbon, calcium, oxygen, hydrogen, phosphorus, sugars, and other elements and gasses were combined and radiated, forming a nucleus around which a lipid-like permeable membrane was established, and within which DNA-bases were laddered together with phosphates and sugars; a process which may...

What would the 4th be without some John Philip Sousa

TORONTO — Former Minnesota North Stars standout Dino Ciccarelli was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame, it was announced today. Ciccarelli played 19 NHL seasons with five teams, recording 608 goals and 592 assists in 1,232 games. In nine seasons with the North Stars, he led the team in scoring five times. "This is a tremendous honor that I will cherish for the rest of my life," Ciccarelli said. "I really appreciate the support of my coaches, the fans and mostly importantly my family throughout my 19-year career."

I know most of us don't care about Hollywood and a lot of you probably despise Hollywood. This is NOT a post in support of Hollywood at all though. I just find it mind boggling that so many little girls want to be as beautiful as these stars. I wish those girls would all take a look at these pictures of how ugly these stars actually are in real life. (Admittedly, some of them are good looking with out all the paint)

Take heart, America. Even celebrities pay taxes on April 15. Well, sometimes. Nicolas Cage’s bookkeeping got a bit muddled, and now he has to shell out $13.3 million to the federal government. Joe Francis, founder of “Girls Gone Wild,” forgot, too. His tab? $29.4 million -- or roughly 5 million margaritas. Sinbad the Comedian? A very unfunny $8.15 million, which doesn't even include interest and legal fees.

The Editors of the Fashion Time Magazine sought out the most glamorous, stylish and sultry star and were Moored over… When we’re in our late 40s, we want to look exactly like Demi Moore did at the LA premiere of “The Joneses”.

The Gliese 710 from the constellation Serpens Cauda is due to arrive in about 1.5 million years, and has an 86 per cent probability of passing through the Oort Cloud, says Vadim Bobylev at the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St. Petersburg.The prediction is based on analysis of data from the European Space Agency’s Hipparcos astrometric spacecraft, which measured velocities of almost 120,000 stars in the early 1990s, as well as some recent data.Bobylev analyzed the measured movements of about 35,000 stars in our neighborhood in the time interval from 2 million years in the past to 2 million years...

Kylie Minogue attended the 2010 Elle Style Awards in a beautiful YSL frock and paired her look with Giuseppe Zanotti heels. The 2010 ELLE Style Awards was a star studded engagement involving celebs, actresses, actors, models, designers, stylists, the top luminaries of the fashion world and a multitude of A, B, and C-listers. Leona Lewis struck a pose in a black Alexander McQueen Pre-Fall 2009 dress.

Glee actress Lea Michelle Our favorite locale at the SAG Awards, The Red Carpet, was equally impressive, with superb appearances by the likes of Diane Kruger, Carey Mulligan, Dianna Agron, Anna Paquin and a whole host of other glitterati who bedazzled us. We love award shows! Carey Mulligan blew us away in a breathtaking red Lanvin gown.

Zoinks! Jinkies! Pow! The 2009 People Choice Awards Red Carpet was filled to the brim with a bevy of Glam Goddesses so beautifully attired, our mouths were left agape in wonder. That old Hollywood style came happily crashing down upon us, in one thunderous boom after another, and we were one, united in a transcendental fashion nirvana. Be still our fashionable hearts! It was Jessica Alba who outshone everyone at the event, wearing a dazzling Antonio Berardi mini dress.

For almost 50 years, astronomers have puzzled over the youthful appearance of stars known as blue stragglers... They shine brightly, they are older than they appear, and they have, disconcertingly, gained mass at a late stage of life... Now, Mathieu and Wisconsin colleague Aaron Geller, writing Dec. 24 in the journal Nature, show that blue stragglers, in most if not all cases, steal that mass from companion stars and that they sometimes do so by crashing into their neighbors, a scenario once thought far-fetched by astronomers. In the new Nature report, Geller and Mathieu show that the mass-gathering ways of...

The cha-cha-cha is just three small steps in a Latin dance but last night it was one giant step for Tom DeLay. The former House Majority Leader stole the show on “Dancing With the Stars,” the popular cringe-fest D-list celebrity reclamation project on ABC. Touted as the program’s “highest-ranking star,” DeLay partnered with ballroom pro (and two-time winner) Cheryl Burke for a booty-shaking, lip-syncing, winking number set to the tune of “Wild Thing.” And if you wanna know for sure: The whitest man in America can dance. In a mud-brown vest trimmed with sequins and matching sansabelt trousers straight out...

It's considered to be one of the more recent innovations to help the hapless traveller. But the satnav system may not be as modern as we think. According to a new theory, prehistoric man navigated his way across England using a similar system based on stone circles and other markers. The complex network of stones, hill forts and earthworks allowed travellers to trek hundreds of miles with 'pinpoint accuracy' more than 5,000 years ago, amateur historian Tom Brooks says. The grid covered much of southern England and Wales and included landmarks such as Stonehenge and Silbury Hill, claims Mr Brooks,...

A conference like the recent on in Aosta offers plenty of opportunity to listen in on fascinating conversations, one of which had to do with what would happen if we found a brown dwarf closer to the Earth than the Centauri stars. The general consensus was that such a find would be a powerful stimulus to the public imagination and would probably result in renewed interest in getting to and exploring such a place. A boon, in short, for all our interstellar efforts, an awakening to a new set of possibilities.But if there were a brown dwarf that close,...

Astronomers love their sky maps, and this latest is a doozie. It reveals thousands of previously undiscovered knots of cold cosmic dust, each a potential star waiting to be born. The new atlas of dust covers the inner regions of our Milky Way Galaxy, where stars, gas and dust are all packed tightly together, where chaos reigns, where massive stars are born. It's so dusty in there that optical telescopes can't see anything. But cosmic material emits and reflects various forms of radiation besides the visible. The new observations were made in submillimeter-wavelength light, which is between infrared light and...

The stars are not twinkling bright this summer. Hollywood's movie studios, hopeful that marquee-name actors would push their summer box-office receipts to record levels, are finding that the heavyweights aren't winning over audiences like they used to. With all but a couple of big-budget films already opened, the summer of 2009 is shaping up to be one of the worst on record for Hollywood's A-list talent.

The tattooist embroiled in a row with a teenage girl who claims he tattooed 56 stars on her face when she only asked for three has said he will help pay for them to be removed. Rouslan Toumaniantz said today that Kimberley Vlaminck 'absolutely' agreed she wanted 56 stars tattooed on the left side of her face. But now the 18-year-old is suing Toumaniantz, claiming she had asked him for only three stars - and had fallen asleep during the procedure, waking up to a nightmare in her Belgian hometown of Courtrai.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California's Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, CEOs and celebrity doctors took up U.S. President Barack Obama's campaign for healthcare reform on Monday, saying millions of Americans need help.

Show us what you got Hollywood… In the year the Oscars extolled the virtues of Slumdog Millionaire, there was nothing “slummy” about the charmingly-coffered stars who preened for the cameras in their fabulous designer-wear, accessorized-to-the-millions best at the 81st annual Academy Awards. Anne Hathaway didn’t win her Oscar but she definitely stood out on the red carpet. The actress wore an ivory Armani Privé Spring 2009 gown and Cartier jewelry. Beyonce Knowles dazzled in the dress of her own brand - House of Dereon Couture. No cliche-riddled affair, it was brilliant opiate for the masses

They came. We saw. They conquered us. Hollywood’s beautiful elite dazzled with an extraordinary display of fashion and style at the 2009 SAG (Screen Actors Guild) Awards. Kate Winslet stole the spotlight at yesterday’s SAG Awards wearing an electric blue Narciso Rodriguez body-con gown that emphasized her bountiful cleavage and sensuous figure. She added Chopard jewels to complete the look. Rosario Dawson wore a silk champagne Dolce & Gabbana gown with ruche bodice that spoke of old style glamour.

The first stars to light the early universe may have been powered by dark matter, according to a new study. Researchers from the University of Michagan, Ann Arbor call these very first stars "Dark Stars," and propose that dark matter heating provided the energy for these stars instead of fusion. The researchers propose that with a high concentration of dark matter in the early Universe, the theoretical particles called Weakly Interacting Massive Particles(WIMPs), collected inside the first stars and annihilated themselves to produce a heat source to power the stars. "We studied the behavior of WIMPs in the first stars,"...

NGC 2264 lies about 2600 light-years from Earth in the obscure constellation of Monoceros, the Unicorn, not far from the more familiar figure of Orion, the Hunter. The image shows a region of space about 30 light-years across.

BAR HARBOR, Maine - On a clear night, the Milky Way cuts across the sky and down to the horizon like a celestial lightning bolt, a giant, luminescent spear shrouded in a graceful veil of back-lighted stardust. The sight has always been up there. But today, few Americans can see it, especially not in brightly lighted cities like Boston. On the densely populated East Coast, Mount Desert Island is one of the last inhabited places where the naked eye can still clearly observe the heavenly wonders that have inspired religion, mythology, science, and culture. To preserve that natural spectacle -...

High overhead around the 8 p.m. local standard time is a bright configuration of stars that people unfamiliar with the sky often mistake for the Big Dipper. Big it is, but — at least in an official sense — a dipper it is not. This large figure is not usually described as a dipper in most stargazing guides; The Autumn Dipper, in fact, looks like a much larger and brighter version of the Little Dipper.

Scientists confirm that parts of earliest genetic material may have come from the stars Scientists have confirmed for the first time that an important component of early genetic material which has been found in meteorite fragments is extraterrestrial in origin, in a paper published on 15 June 2008. The finding suggests that parts of the raw materials to make the first molecules of DNA and RNA may have come from the stars. The scientists, from Europe and the USA, say that their research, published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, provides evidence that life's raw materials came from...

ST. LOUIS — Quark stars, exotic objects that have yet to be directly observed, are part of a new theory to explain some of the brightest stellar explosions recorded in the universe. Super-luminous supernovae, which produce more than 100 times more light energy than normal supernovae and occur in about one out of every 1,000 supernovae explosions, have long baffled astrophysicists. The problem has been finding a source for all of that extra energy. University of Calgary astrophysicists Denis Leahy and Rachid Ouyed think they have a possible source — the explosive conversion of a neutron star into a quark...

WASHINGTON, April 22, 2008 – New campaign stars authorized for wear on the Afghanistan and Iraq campaign medals represent tangible recognition and honor for the sacrifices and contributions servicemembers have made in support of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, a senior defense official said today. The Defense Department announced the campaign stars yesterday to recognize participation in specific campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Servicemembers who quality for the Afghanistan Campaign Medal or Iraq Campaign Medal may now display a bronze campaign star on their medals for each designated campaign phase in which they participated. In keeping with military tradition,...

CAMP BUEHRING, Kuwait, March 11, 2008 – For more than four hours last night, Camp Buehring, in the middle of the Kuwaiti desert, became a hard-rocking outdoor amphitheater. Before the music began, about 5,000 servicemembers heard a message of support and appreciation from President Bush. Both Lt. Gen. James J. Lovelace, commander of U.S. Army Central and Combined Forces Land Component Command, and his deputy, Maj. Gen. Dennis E. Hardy, visited with the performers and thanked them for their support. Then, before comedian Carlos Mencia got the troops laughing, he gave them some words of thanks. “You guys work...

The first stars to appear in the Universe may have been powered by dark matter, according to US scientists. Normal stars are powered by nuclear fusion reactions, where hydrogen atoms meld to form heavier helium. But when the Universe was still young, there would have been abundant dark matter, made of particles called Wimps: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. These would have fused together and obliterated each other long before nuclear fusion had the chance to start. As a result, the first stars would have looked quite different from the ones we see today, and they may have changed the course...

You would think that a star anywhere from 400 to 200,000 times wider than the Sun would be fairly easy to detect. But not if it’s a ‘dark star,’ the name for a new, theoretical entity about to make its appearance in Physical Review Letters. Astrophysicist Paolo Gondolo (University of Utah) makes the case that dark matter would have affected the temperature and density of the gases that formed the first stars. Dark stars would mostly contain normal matter — hydrogen and helium — but they would have been much larger than the Sun, glowing largely in the infrared. Hypothetical...

EXCLUSIVE Celebs and VIPs snub plea to share private planes and cut CO2 emissions. Just 78 out of 3,500 rich & famous agree to stop flying solo to red carpet. By Susie Boniface 02/12/2007 VIPs have snubbed a plea to go green - by refusing to share their luxury private jets. Thousands of the rich and famous were invited to pool their planes in an effort to cut carbon emissions. But so far just 78 out of 3,500 who either own or regularly use private planes have signed up. Prince Charles, climate campaigner Al Gore, Simon Cowell, Madonna and Kate...