Reading Time: 2 minutes We might just have observed the first decent signs of life on another planet. We have NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to thank for the new evidence, gathering data from 120 light years away, outside of the Milky Way in the constellation Leo. The excitement stems from the possible detection of dimethyl sulphide (DMS), a molecule […]
Space
Sticking the landing: India’s moon shot, Prigozhin’s plane, Xi’s absence, and Africa’s entrance
Reading Time: 5 minutes One lucky lander escaped the world’s nonsense this week, when on August 23 India celebrated being the first country to successfully set down near the moon’s south pole. Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram lander holds a rover equipped for 14 days of exploration, to improve our understanding of lunar geology. The successful landing came days after Russia’s own […]
Congress with aliens? UFO stories return to Washington
Reading Time: 23 minutes UFOs (or UAPs) finally got the congressional hearing that proponents have demanded for decades. Was it convincing?
NASA’s quest for scientific literacy around so-called UFOs
Reading Time: 6 minutes In a four-hour public meeting on Wednesday, May 31, NASA gathered a team of scientific experts to discuss the role of the US civilian space agency in monitoring and analyzing Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs). Associate Deputy Associate Administrator for Research Daniel Evans chaired this conversation, which he described as the “first deliberative actions” for a […]
When Jesus became a star traveler
Reading Time: 5 minutes Across the Western world, the feast of the Ascension is coming up, celebrating the day Jesus rose up into heaven. It is the final story in his life that included him being killed and then, miraculously, returned to life. And now…he’s in outer space? The tale starts to look strange when put into the cosmology […]
You’d be a better billionaire than Elon Musk
Reading Time: 6 minutes Vain, capricious, erratic, spiteful—these sum up the billionaires who dominate our headlines. Any ordinary person with normal amounts of intelligence and common decency could do a better job of being rich.
The code of the universe
Reading Time: 8 minutes If religion and philosophy are an attempt to comprehend the universe and the meaning of life, then science is the best portal. Guest article by author James A. Haught.
Early black holes simplify the question of ‘dark energy’
Reading Time: 7 minutes The physics of our universe can be splendidly straightforward at times, even if it takes physicists a while to get there. That’s the current major takeaway from a paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters on February 15, authored by 17 astronomers in collaboration across nine countries, led by the University of Hawai’i. You’re going to […]
2022: The year in global review, Part II
Reading Time: 9 minutes Our exercise in the folly of year-end lists continues! In Part I of this global review for 2022, three key themes emerged from this year’s major news events. The first was “Europe on fire”, and the implications of energy infrastructure policy for the environment and future imperialist tyranny. The second dealt with the collapse of […]
How did the Star of Bethlehem move like Tinker Bell?
Reading Time: 6 minutes The most unexplainable part of the Star of Bethlehem story (found only in Matthew) is it moving like a firefly to lead the magi to the baby Jesus