A pair of mathematicians have proposed a unified theory of dark matter and dark energy that alters Einstein’s equations describing the fundamentals of gravity. The researchers suggest the law of energy and momentum conservation in spacetime is valid only when normal matter, dark matter and dark energy are all taken into account. For normal matter…
After nearly a full term in office, fewer than half (49%) of voters correctly identify Obama as Christian. Around 1-in-5 (17%) voters continue to incorrectly say that Obama is a Muslim, up from 12% in 2008. Most strikingly, 31% of voters say they are unsure of his religious beliefs. Other questions confirm this identification problem:…
A Japanese deep sea drilling vessel, Chikyu, recently set a new world record, by drilling down over 2,111 meters below the seafloor to collect rock samples. The ship is off Shimokita Peninsula of Japan in the northwest Pacific Ocean, as part of the Deep Coalbed Biosphere expedition, which aims to collect high-quality samples from the…
An unusual pair of galaxies travel through the interstellar cosmos in this striking image obtained by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The unusual pair are jointly called Arp 116, but are composed of a large elliptical galaxy known as M60 and a smaller spiral galaxy called NGC 4647. Although the two galaxies appear to overlap in…
The discovery of the first alien planet with two suns — like the “Star Wars” world Tatooine — residing in its parent star’s habitable zone is good news for the search for life beyond Earth, scientists say. The planet, known as Kepler-47c, is a gas giant and therefore probably not suitable for life as we…
An international team of researchers has published their paper demonstrating quantum teleportation between two Canary Islands. While quantum teleportation doesn’t lead to instantaneous communication, what it does lead to is incredibly secure communications. That’s because no matter what instructions the sender sends over normal communications channels, those instructions are completely useless without the receiver’s entangled…
To build a planet you need lots of rubble and that means lots of heavy elements – stuff more massive than atoms of hydrogen and helium. The elemental composition of the collapsing nebula that gave birth to the Sun and the planets of the Solar System included things like iron, silicon and magnesium that form…
The Voyager 1 spacecraft’s 35th anniversary is proving to be unexpectedly exciting, as scientists gathered to examine new hints that the spacecraft is on the verge of leaving our solar system. Voyager 1 is now more than 11 billion miles away from Earth. It blasted off in September 1977, on a mission to Jupiter and…
Almost a decade after the U.S. human genome project was completed, scientists say they have mapped the underlying regulatory system that switches DNA on and off, potentially spurring a wave of new research into the molecular basis of complex diseases such as Type 1 diabetes. Many parts of DNA previously termed “junk” by scientists are,…
To see a hopeful future for science education, look no further than the Raccoon Creek watershed in rural Ohio. There, Vinton County High School students are literally getting their feet wet, testing water and examining fish to investigate the impact of acid drainage from more than a century’s worth of coal mining in the Appalachians….