When you have only had telescopes for a few hundred years, it can be difficult to determine the history of our Sun and figure out what it was like billions of years ago. One way to do that, and to predict the future of our star, is to find those rare stars that are almost exactly like our own, but at different stages of their lives.

Astronomers have identified a star that is essentially an identical twin to our Sun, but 4 billion years older — almost like seeing a real version of the twin paradox in action.[1]

Stacy McGaugh, professor of astronomy at Case Western Reserve, and Mordehai Milgrom, the father of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) and professor of physics at Weizmann Institute in Israel, say the MOND modified law of gravity correctly predicted, in advance of the observations, the velocity dispersion - the average speed of stars within a galaxy relative to each other - in 10 dwarf satellite galaxies of the Milky Way's giant neighbor Andromeda.

The relatively large velocity dispersions observed in these types of dwarf galaxies is usually attributed to dark matter. Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) is an alternative hypothesis to dark matter and succeeded in anticipating the observations.

The radioactive ocean plume from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear incident will reach the shores of the US within three years from the date of the incident - but it will be harmless, according to a new paper.

Atmospheric radiation was detected quickly even in the US but radioactive particles in the ocean plume take considerably longer to travel the same distance so, in the paper, researchers outline a range of ocean simulations they use to track and predict the path of the radiation from the Fukushima incident.

The models identified where it would likely travel through the world's oceans for the next 10 years.

The spinorial space-time that I suggested in 1996-7 [1,2] naturally predicts a privileged space dimension for each observer. This was emphasized in some of my recent works [3,4], well before the Planck collaboration wrote on March 21-22 [5] :

http://sci.esa.int/planck/51559-hemispheric-asymmetry-and-cold-spot-in-the-cosmic-microwave-background/

Two Cosmic Microwave Background anomalous features (...) are confirmed (...). One is an asymmetry in the average temperatures on opposite hemispheres of the sky (...).

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The administration can turn a blind eye to enforcing federal laws when it comes to marijuana farming but they won't have a choice when it comes to pollution - because they will get sued into taking action.

Time of year and weather conditions don't have much influence on depressive symptoms. Getting depressed when it's cold and dreary outside may not be as common as believed.

Though some Europeans were still hunter-gatherers in 4,600 BC, there was interaction between the hunter-gatherer and farming communities and a 'sharing' of animals and knowledge  which led to acquisition of domesticated pigs from nearby farmers, according to new evidence. 

A new study conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) found that it might be possible for solar and wind generation to be cost-competitive with conventional energy, without federal subsidies, by 2025 - if new renewable energy development is allowed in the most productive locations.

It used to be that religion impacted politics but now politics is instead changing religion. And the catalyst for how religious people are modifying their other beliefs to achieve a common political goal is abortion.

The cozy political lines of the last generation, where Republicans are generally against abortion and Democrats are for it, may get more blurry. The reason is evangelicals; a whole lot of them are Democrats and a whole lot of them are increasingly concerned about abortion.

Girls are told they are supposed to experience math anxiety and so they claim to on surveys but they are not actually more anxious during math classes and exams, according to a new paper. 

Sociology surveys suggest that females are more anxious when it comes to mathematics than their male peers. But education researchers identified a critical limitation of previous papers examining math anxiety: They asked students to describe more generalized perceptions of mathematics anxiety, rather than assessing anxiety during actual math classes and exams.