Free Republic

"Next 18 months going to be EVERYTHING. Bigger than campaign news: Obama's scorched Earth exit. You've been warned..."

A scorched alien planet is flying so close to its parent star that its atmosphere is being swept off it in a glowing tail like some sort of giant comet, NASA announced Thursday. The existence of the planet and its strange tail, which was suggested in previous studies, was confirmed recently by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. These new observations of the gas giant planet, called HD 209458b, suggest strong winds from its nearby star are blowing the atmosphere off the scorched world and shaping it into a comet-like tail. "Since 2003 scientists have theorized the lost mass is being pushed...

A federal appeals court on Friday ordered a temporary halt to logging in two sections of the Eldorado National Forest east of Sacramento that were damaged by wildfires in 2004. A lower court in August denied a request by two environmental organizations to immediately end the logging, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the Earth Island Institute and the Center for Biological Diversity are likely to eventually win their lawsuit. Allowing logging to continue could cause too much damage to the forests while the lawsuit proceeds, the San Francisco-based appeals court ruled. Many of the trees killed...