I chose to do my first year of college at a small school in southern Texas—sixteen hundred miles from home. Shirley was pregnant with our first child and had complications with her pregnancy. That meant we were unable to travel back to the Chicago area for the Christmas holidays. Even if she had been able […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Hubble Legacy Archive, NASA, ESA; Processing: Judy Schmidt] What will survive this battle of the galaxies? Known as Seyfert’s Sextet, this intriguing group …. actually contains only four interacting galaxies. Near the center of this Hubble Space Telescope picture, the small face-on spiral galaxy lies in the distant background […]
Breitbart.com Comedian Sarah Silverman is proudly “godless” but spends plenty of her stand-up acting addressing religion all the same. Silverman described her lack of spirituality with HuffPost Live late last month, slamming faith in the harshest terms possible. Religion kills, she says, not mentioning her full-throated embrace of abortion or a strain of religion today […]
Signs of life beyond Earth could be found within a decade under the most optimistic scenarios but the U.S. will need to keep up spending to maintain pace in a 21st century space race, astrobiologists told Congress on Wednesday. Sara Seager, a physics and planetary science professor at MIT and recipient of a 2013 MacArthur […]
Nanoparticles can reveal information held by fingerprints that is currently inaccessible. In particular, they can be engineered to bring antibodies that bind with metabolites contained in the sweat of the fingerprint. These metabolites are breakdown products of the consumption of cocaine or nicotine. When the antibodies recognize the metabolite, they cause a colour change. This […]
President Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a […]
Atheists in San Diego, Calif. are trying a new approach to recruiting non-believers by offering food, such as pretzels and cheezits, and putting up large banners that read “Relax: hell does not exist, or heaven either, enjoy your life.” … “We like to have a gathering place for our members, people that want to chat, […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Hubble, NASA] Stars, like bees, swarm around the center of bright globular cluster M15. This ball of over 100,000 stars is a relic from the early years of our Galaxy, and continues to orbit the Milky Way’s center. M15, one of about 170 globular clusters remaining, is noted for […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / Constantine Emmanouilidi] In a flash, the visible spectrum of the Sun changed from absorption to emission on November 3rd, during the brief total phase of a solar eclipse. [Normally a spectrum of the sun will show dark lines where where wavelengths of energy for elements have been absorbed […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / credit: Antti Kemppainen Sometimes the sky itself is the best show in town. In January 2007, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far […]
