The American Indian Student Union at the University of Virginia has upset some conservative students on campus with an “Anti-Thanksgiving” event. The student group planned and advertised the “Anti-Thanksgiving” event as a potluck where students would “share free food.” They also recently held a screening of “The Only Good Indian,” a film about a Native…
For all Il Papa’s social media encouragement the last few years, the Roman Catholic Church continues to struggle with digital ministry practice, particularly where new media intersects the Church’s medieval sacramental structure. In 2011, a new smartphone app aimed to support preparation for and the practice of confession ended up generating more confusion than contrition…
Finding a good alternative energy stock isn’t easy, investors are finding. One problem is that is that the market in general has dropped since the election. Also, alternative-energy stocks tend to lag when the price of oil falls. Another problem is that some alternative-energy companies are start-ups with little in the way of earnings.
A study using a unique new instrument on the world’s largest optical telescope has revealed the likely origins of especially bright supernovae that astronomers use as easy-to-spot “mile markers” to measure the expansion and acceleration of the universe. In a paper to appear in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers describe observations of recent supernova 2011fe that…
For the first time, ESA’s Planck space telescope has detected a bridge of hot gas connecting a pair of galaxy clusters 10 million light-years apart. Abell 399 and Abell 401, each containing hundreds of galaxies, are billions of light years away. The presence of hot gas linking them had already been hinted at in X-ray…
The “uncrackable codes” made by exploiting the branch of physics called quantum mechanics have been sent down kilometres of standard broadband fibre. This “quantum key distribution” has until now needed a dedicated fibre separate from that used to carry data. The technique, reported in Physical Review X, shows how to unpick normal data streams from…
Atmospheric volumes of greenhouse gases blamed for climate change hit a new record in 2011, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported. The volume of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas emitted by human activities, grew at a similar rate to the previous decade and reached 390.9 parts per million (ppm), 40% above the pre-industrial level,…
If we hope to understand creationism, we need to abandon the trope that only the ignorant can oppose mainstream evolutionary science. It is a comfortable delusion, a head-in-the-sand approach to improving evolution education in the United States. In the end, it stems from a shocking ignorance among evolutionists about the nature of creationist beliefs.
You know we’ve found something new and interesting when scientists don’t really know how to classify it. Using the Subaru Telescope an international team of astronomers has discovered a “super-Jupiter” so massive that it seems they’re not quite sure whether to call it a planet or a low-mass brown dwarf (in other words, a star…
A team of NASA scientists and their colleagues have found evidence from meteorites that Mars and Earth had a similar origin, but then the two planets evolved quite differently. Based on their analyses of two Martian meteorites, researchers have concluded that water in the Martian interior originated from planetary building blocks similar to those that…