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http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy - I am an astronomer, writer, and skeptic. I likes reality the way it is, and I aims to keep it that way. My real name is Phil Plait, and I run the Bad Astronomy blog.
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Continuing with Australian Skeptics awards, they are giving out a new award in honor of Fred Thornett , a skeptic who died earlier this year. The first recipients of The Fred, given to outstanding promoters of reason, are David and Toni McCaffery.
The McCafferys are heroes of mine. Earlier ...
Physical Science
Richard Feynman
Meryl Dorey — the truth-impaired mouthpiece of the Australian Vaccination Network, a group of antivaccination conspiracy-mongers who couldn’t find reality with both hands, a compass, and detailed instructions — was "honored" by the Australian Skeptics this week. ...
Physical Science
Last month, I wrote about thousands of people at the Knock shrine in Ireland who stared at the Sun because they thought they were seeing visions of the Virgin Mary. I specifically said, "That’s a bad idea: it can cause temporary blindness, and permanent damage to the retina…"
...
Physical Science
If you’re in Chicago, then you might want to head over to the Adler planetarium today, when they unveil an enormous 2.5 billion pixel mosaic of the Galaxy ! It’s composed of 800,000 separate Spitzer Space Telescope images (I mean, c’mon, holy Haleakala, eight hundred thousand ...
Physical Science
Milky Way
You know I support real science when it comes to medicine, of course. I will always fight the nonsense like antivaccination purveyors, homeopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, and so on and so forth– so-called "alt-med" that’s been shown pretty conclusively to not be ...
Physical Science
I am no fan of Deepak Chopra. For years he has gone on TV, in print, and in his books, peddling all manners of nonsense. Here’s a quick reality check: if his claims of "quantum healing" are correct, why is he getting older?
Anyway, he has gone to the very font of new age ...
Physical Science
The Big Picture website is once again doing a Hubble Advent calendar : releasing a new picture from the great observatory once each day this month until Christmas. It’s a clever idea, and should get everyone clicking over there first thing to see what beauty he has chosen every day. His ...
Physical Science
Edwin Hubble
I did an interview with journalist Brian Truitt for USA Weekend, the supplement magazine of USA Today, about my book Death from the Skies! The article is now online , and basically gives you your odds of being killed in various nasty ways by astronomical overload. I haven’t seen the ...
Physical Science
Oops! Sorry. I mean "most" powerful. Particle accelerator, that is. On November 30, 2009, it accelerated two beams of protons moving in opposite directions each to an energy of 1.18 TeV – that’s trillion electron volts, well above the previous record of 0.98 TeV. When ...
Physical Science
Large Hadron Collider
The 131rd Carnival of Space is scurrying around at Starry Critters . Lots of great astronomy and space posts are all collected there all in one spot for your cosmic enjoyment. Go look!
Physical Science
Last year , the Cassini spacecraft found solid (haha) evidence for the existence of lakes of liquid methane and ethane on the giant moon Titan. Of course, Titan is barely a moon at all — bigger than Mercury, it would be a planet in its own right if it weren’t orbiting Saturn. It has ...
Physical Science
Saturn
Earth
A little while back, a bright fireball lit up the evening sky in Utah . There was a repeat performance just last week, on November 21, this time in South Africa. A CCTV camera captured the dramatic scene :
If you happened to see this fireball and got footage, the local news wants to ...
Physical Science
Most people that science is done by, well, scientists . Men and women in white lab coats buzzing away in a lab somewhere.
There are a lot of stereotypes in that description, but the important thing to note here is that science can be done by anyone. You don’t need to be in a lab or at ...
Physical Science
blogs.discovermagazine.com - 2 days ago
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blogs.discovermagazine.com —
You’ve probably heard by now that a hacker
got into the computer system of some climatologists and...
grabbed a bunch of files, including private emails, from the scientists. The global warming deniers have been trumpeting these as evidence of ...
(more)
The global warming emails non-event
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found this 2 days agofound this
Regular readers know of the man love I have for Zach Wiener, who pens the web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. It frequently features great skeptical material, and this new one is a great example :
Click to see the punch line. He’s exactly right, of course. My favorite is ...
Physical Science
blogs.discovermagazine.com - 3 days ago
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blogs.discovermagazine.com —
Earlier this year, I spent a few days
in Wyoming attending Launch Pad , a NASA-sponsored workshop...
for science fiction writers to help familiarize themselves with astronomy. It’s run by Mike Brotherton, himself an astronomer and science fiction ...
(more)
CERN, Flash Forward, and Robert Sawyer
blogs.discovermagazine.com - 3 days ago
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blogs.discovermagazine.com —
Sigh. OK, so a woman in Massachusetts thinks
she sees Jesus in her iron . If she...
wants to believe that, it’s fine. It should come as no surprise to anyone that I think she is mistaken, and that this is simply a random happenstance, and that ...
(more)
Ironic icon
blogs.discovermagazine.com - 3 days ago
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blogs.discovermagazine.com —
This makes me want a) to be in
Portugal, and 2) to be 8 years old again....
But then, looking at it does make me feel like a kid . So cool! For those wondering what this is all about: here you go . Tip o’ the commlock to Ron Britton .
(more)
Portugal: 1999
blogs.discovermagazine.com - 3 days ago
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blogs.discovermagazine.com —
At 9:44 a.m. local time, Atlantis touched down
safely in Florida after an 11 day flight in...
Earth orbit, ending mission STS-129. She’ll be cleaned up for one final mission — STS-132, slated for May 2010 — before permanent retirement. ...
(more)
Shuttle lands in Florida
By now, the whole system of tubes knows that creationist Ray Comfort is little more than a laughing stock, a buffoon who spews out more noisome, awful, contaminated bilge than a Soho water pump in 1854 * .
I deal with creationism a lot, and even so I am still capable of being a bit stunned ...
