A team of amateurs has discovered evidence for 42 alien planets, including a Jupiter-size world that could potentially be habitable, by sifting through data from a NASA spacecraft. Forty volunteers with the crowd-sourcing Planet Hunters project discovered the new planet candidates, which include 15 potentially habitable worlds and PH2 b, a Jupiter-size planet that the…
An international team of astronomers says analysis of NASA data on a distant stellar system has led them to crown it the largest-known spiral galaxy. The spectacular barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872, long ranked among the biggest observed stellar systems, spans more than 522,000 light-years, making it more than five times the size of our…
Egypt’s Antiquities Minister says Italian archaeologists have unearthed tombs over 3000 years old in the ancient city of Luxor. Mohammed Ibrahim says the discovery was made beneath the mortuary temple of King Amenhotep II, seventh Pharaoh of the 18th dynasty who reigned from 1427 to 1401 B.C. The temple is located on the western bank…
As the Internet and other media invade American life, our vices have gone virtual, according to a new study. Nearly half of Americans say they are tempted to idle the hours away on the Internet, video games and television, according to Barna Group, a California-based Christian research organization. And more than one in four American…
Developing nations are facing growing health and environmental risks from increased exposure to mercury, according to a UN report. It says a growth in small-scale mining and coal burning are the main reasons for the rise in emissions. As a result of rapid industrialization, South-East Asia is the largest regional emitter and accounts for almost…
How much warning will we really have if a Near Earth Asteroid (NEO) is about to hit Earth? The answer is pretty grim. “With so many of even the larger NEOs remaining undiscovered, the most likely warning today would be zero,” NASA informs us. We would see nothing at all until suddenly, just as the…
The announcement that astronomers have found a potential alien world that could be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet is raising a big question: How will scientists confirm the existence of a true alien Earth? While NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, which discovered the newfound Earth-like planet candidate KOI 172.2, is great for finding large numbers…
What if you had a “Wayback Television Set” and could watch an entire month of ancient prehistory unfold before your eyes in real time? David Rubin of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory presented just such a scenario to the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting when he announced the discovery of a…
Take a deep breath; Dec 21, 2012 is behind us. The Mayan calendar end-of-world debacle is over: zip, zilch, gone! The silliness, anxiety, and paranoia leading up to the predicted end of times was so bad that on Dec. 21st — the appointed doomsday — a worried citizen left a message on my office phone…
Does E always equal mc²? University of Arizona physicist Andrei Lebed suspects not – and plans to try and check. Einstein’s famous equation describes the fact that energy and mass are essentially the same thing and can be converted into one other. It’s since been validated in countless experiments and calculations – indeed, many technologies…