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The Northern Lights Seen As Far South As Arizona. G5 Magnetic Storm To Continue Through Sunday.

The northern lights as one would expect and see them if they were in the frozen reaches of Canada...

DEI Without Compromise: Embracing Diversity in the LISA Global Scientific Collaboration. A ESA NASA Project.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) have become buzzwords often debated within the United States...

Avi Loeb And Aliens: The Right And Wrong of Science Funding. (Also Bing Image Search Brings up Porno When you Search for him)

Avi Loeb he prolific Harvard astrophysicist, dances on the edge of cosmic controversy. His research...

What Is And Is Not Plagiarism In Scientific Papers? Neri Oxman And Claudine Gay Did Nothing Seriously Wrong. A Basic Guide To Citation.

The online discourse of our time has come to the issue of plagiarism. Now Claudine Gay and Neri...

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Hontas FarmerRSS Feed of this column.

My research focuses on astrophysics from massive star formation to astroparticle physics. Born and raised in Chicagoland I have lived in Bellwood, IL since 1984 and attended public schools here... Read More »

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The UK Daily Mail published a story with the misleading headline “Humans DID live with dinosaurs…” The story then talks about placental mammals that coexisted with dinosaurs. This shows a lack of basic knowledge by the writer, the editors and anyone else involved in the story. Placental mammals are not humans. They are a large group of mammals that give birth to fully developed offspring. These ancestors were not human 65 million years ago or even 6 million years ago. They were not even primates, which had not evolved yet. The closest relatives of humans in the Cretaceous period were small, shrew-like animals. Some other branches of mammals were larger, like cats or dogs.

Most if not all deep submergence vehicles that take people to the deepest parts of the ocean have a spherical pressure hull, not a cylinder. There is a simple reason for this: symmetry. The spherical symmetry of these crafts ensures that the pressure and forces will distribute in a way that causes, as much as possible, the cancellation of the forces acting on the hull. Ocean Gate’s Titan being a cylinder with two hemispherical end caps, one under the pointed fairing, violated this principle to an extent. The curved cylinder does have this same effect going on… but not to the same extent as a spherical shape. Carbon fiber vehicles have been made as pressure vessels for holding in 1 atmosphere of pressure against very low outside pressures.

Impressive research conducted at ETH Zurich did show that quantum entanglement applies to even macroscopic quantum systems. In that case, superconducting Qbits. They did not show that Einstein was wrong or causality does not exist at the quantum level.  Despite media reports over the years, on various great experiments, to better test quantum entanglement, Einstein’s Relativity still stands and applies even at the quantum level. In fact, the standard model of particle physics, tied with General Relativity for best tested theory in all of science, requires this to be the case. While the causality at the quantum level is not like it is at the classical level causality still applies because quantum correlations do not contain information.

Sabine Hossenfelder attempts to answer the question of transgender youth healthcare by applying a physicist mindset to the literature on this matter.   I've commented on this to her elsewhere, but, the fundamental error is applying a physicist mindset to science that is very different from physics.   Reading around the net some responses to this go on about how she's a "quantum physicist" therefore she knows more than psychologist about psychology.  This blog is as much of a response to that mindset among the public.  

Direct imaging of a gas giant is not totally new. What is new is the combination of direct imaging with an indirect method that allows better understanding of the mass of gas giants in other solar systems. Knowing the mass of a planet is crucial to understanding what kind of world it is. For example, if we were talking about Earth-like planets, a more massive Earth would have gravity so strong that land could not build up as high as it does. The result would be a water world. A more massive Jupiter would not necessarily be bigger but merely denser. A denser Jupiter would have completely different internal dynamics. While gas giants may seem boring, they are bigger than Earth-like planets hence easier to study.

The Restrict Act would ban anyone from accessing a online service ran by a US adverssary, which would mean any and all apps owned by Tencent.   Tik Tok is a very malignant and horrible app that tracks you in so many ways if it is on your phone.  So says even CNN.  However, this law is so sweeping it even mentions things like "Post Quantum Cryptography" and "Synthetic Biology" Some readings of it could imply that accessing such a service via a VPN would be against this law.  However, this act is not intended to go after Joe user trying to find dance or cat videos but is intended to stop such