Posted by admin! / Under Dark Days, Bright Nights
Imagine a Republican president regularly invoking the wisdom of a multibillionaire businessman who had profited off companies with questionable business practices, and who law-enforcement officials had recently asked to provide information about his own company’s questionable practices. No question about it: Democrats and the media would be having a field day. So why do we hear so little about the dark side of Warren Buffett? True, the double standard involving Buffett’s business record is longstanding. But now President Obama is using him as a central prop in his class-warfare strategy for winning a second term. Getting a free pass from...
Published on Monday 6th of February 2012 03:35:01 AM
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Posted by admin! / Under Dark Days, Bright Nights
Support for Dark Energy by Paul Gilster on May 20, 2011 The far future may be a lonely place, at least in extragalactic terms. Scientists studying gravity’s interactions with so-called dark energy — thought to be the cause of the universe’s accelerating expansion — can work out a scenario in which gravity dominated in the early universe. But somewhere around eight billion years after the Big Bang, the continuing expansion and consequent dilution of matter caused gravity to fall behind dark energy in its effects. We’re left with what we see today, a universe whose expansion will one day...
Published on Monday 6th of February 2012 03:35:01 AM
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Posted by admin! / Under Dark Days, Bright Nights
Is an Adjacent Universe Causing the Dark Flow of Hundred of Millions of Stars at the Edge of the Observable Universe? Or, Might It Be Something ElseBack in the Middle Ages, maps showed terrifying images of sea dragons at the boundaries of the known world. Today, scientists have observed strange new motion at the very limits of the known universe -- kind of where you'd expect to find new things, but they still didn't expect this. A huge swathe of galactic clusters seem to be heading to a cosmic hotspot and nobody knows why. The unexplained motion has hundreds of...
Published on Monday 6th of February 2012 03:35:01 AM
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Posted by admin! / Under Dark Days, Bright Nights
(PhysOrg.com) -- In a resent paper posted at arXiv.org and submitted to Astrophysical Journal, Dan Hooper and Jason Steffen, physicists at Fermilab in Illinois, present the theory that cold and dark planets, not heated by a star, could be heated by dark matter. In theory, this dark matter could produce habitable planets outside of what is known as a habitable zone. While no one knows exactly what dark matter is, it is believed to make up about 83 percent of the universe. The most accepted theory is this dark matter is made up of what are called WIMPs, or weakly...
Published on Monday 6th of February 2012 03:35:01 AM
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Posted by admin! / Under Dark Days, Bright Nights
Our Universe is an enormous place; that’s no secret. What is up for discussion, however, is just how enormous it is. And new research suggests it’s a whopper – over 250 times the size of our observable universe. Currently, cosmologists believe the Universe takes one of three possible shapes: It is flat, like a Euclidean plane, and spatially infinite.It is open, or curved like a saddle, and spatially infinite.It is closed, or curved like a sphere, and spatially finite. While most current data favors a flat universe, cosmologists have yet to come to a consensus. In a paper recently submitted...
Published on Monday 6th of February 2012 03:35:01 AM
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Posted by admin! / Under Dark Days, Bright Nights
VISTA (AP) — To trim $9 million from their budget, Vista officials say they will shut off half of the city’s residential street lights in March unless property owners agree to pay higher lighting fees. Fees could cost residents of the north San Diego County city between $4 and $20 a year. In turn, Vista residents complained about bright lights at the new City Hall. City spokeswoman Andrea McCullough tells the North County Times that lights in the park behind the building have been shut off and lights in front of the Civic Center have been dimmed. Inside the building,...
Published on Monday 6th of February 2012 03:35:01 AM
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Posted by admin! / Under Dark Days, Bright Nights
After 16 years and $1.5 billion of other people’s money, it is almost showtime for NASA and Sam Ting. Sitting and being fussed over by technicians in a clean room at the Kennedy Space Center in preparation for a February launching — and looking for all the world like a giant corrugated rain barrel — is an eight-ton assemblage of magnets, wires, iron, aluminum, silicon and electronics that is one of the most ambitious and complicated experiments ever to set out for space. The experiment, if it succeeds, could help NASA take a giant step toward answering the question of...
Published on Monday 6th of February 2012 03:35:01 AM
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