The second day of the “Neutrino Conference XIII” in Venice was dedicated to, well, neutrino telescopes. I have written down in stenographical fashion some of the things I heard, and I offer them to those of you who are really interested in the topic, without much editing. Besides, making...

Black holes once existed exclusively in the realm of theory, but astronomers have become increasingly adept at spotting the telltale signs of objects that are hard to spot due to the fact that they suck in any light that happens to cross an event horizon. Black holes have fallen into two separate ca...

Last Sunday Rev. Dr. David Sammons, Visiting Professor of Unitarian Universalist Heritage & Ministry, Star King Ministry, gave his a presentation on "That Confusing Word Called 'Love'". He made an extension to what is commonly called "the Unitarian-Universalist trinity" of freedom, reason and tolera...

Dark energy is the deus ex machina of cosmology, able to save even the most inflation-prone calculations from destruction or - worse - being provably wrong.  But while we've been busy watching the X-energy apparently accelerating all of creation while hiding in plain sight, some believe it's re...

There simply isn't a bigger question: wrapping up "Why are we here?", "Why is everything the way it is?" and "What if I don't believe a gigantic invisible skybeard did it?" -it's a Holy Grail of science.  The theoreticians want to explain it, the experimenters want...

Albert Einstein was famously annoyed about God playing dice with the universe.  Perhaps as an apology, God has set up the perfect demonstration of the theory of general relativity - it seems that if He moves in mysterious ways, those ways are at least consistent with four-dimensional spacetime....

Last week, I was driving home to Los Angeles from Santa Barbara along the 101, when a random piece of debris flew off a truck in the right lane and struck the hood of my shiny red Prius. It was just a little piece of rock, but at highway speeds, it carried enough kinetic energy to gouge the paint wh...

Like many denizens of teh Internets, I'm a huge fan of Mr. Deity , the online satirical series of shorts (usually around 5 minutes long) about a silver-haired middle-aged deity --reimagined as the ultimate Hollywood producer -- and his two sidekicks, Jesus and Larry (not to mention his on-again, off...

Things have been so hectic of late that I almost missed this February 28 article in Nature announcing that the new Kjell Henriksen Observatory on Svalbard, a remote Norwegian island, is now open for business. The observatory is described as "a window into space," since it's designed to stu...

Two of our galaxy's most massive stars, until recently shrouded in mystery, have been viewed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, unveiling greater detail than ever before. The image shows a pair of colossal stars, WR 25 and Tr16-244, located within the open cluster Trumpler 16. This cluster is e...