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A Personal Update: The Day To Day Work Of One Physicist.

A brief personal update as to what I have been doing.  There has been much interesting science...

A Simple Way To Assess The Likelihood K2-18 b Host Alien Life. The Odds Are Almost 50-50.

How can you as a person who is not a scientist know if a given claim of having found alien life...

Reported Failure To Reproduce Superconductivity, But Replication Of Apparent Diamagnetism, At Room Temperature In LK-99

Last week it was claimed that a material that would be superconducting at  normal pressure...

Understanding The Great Discovery of A Universal Gravitational Wave Background by the Interational Pulsar Timing Array Collaboration.

What are gravitational waves? What are Pulsars and what does it mean to time a pulsar? How does...

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Hontas FarmerRSS Feed of this column.

Currently I am an adjunct professor at the College of DuPage. My research focuses on astrophysics from massive star formation to astroparticle physics. Born and raised in Chicagoland I have lived... Read More »

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Dark matter is thought to be 85% of all the matter in the universe but we have no idea what it is. All we know is that there appears to be something that exerts gravitational forces that behave like ordinary matter. One theory is that there are very old and very small black holes that were created soon after the Big Bang, primordial Black Holes. These black holes might be the mysterious dark matter that makes up most of the matter in the universe. Stefano Bondani, Matteo Bonetti, and Luca Broggi et al, want to study these black holes by looking at how they affect a very big black hole at the center of our galaxy, called Sagittarius A* .

Michael Knowles said at CPAC and I quote “Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely”.  He would claim that he means to get people to not engage in the ideology in public.  The thing is what do you do with all of the people who are transgender and what will they and their supporters do back?  There is a base of solid and settled science that says why people are transgender, that it is rooted in neurology and biology.  Transwomen are males XY who due to various genetic, and hormonal reasons are neurologically feminized in key regions of the brain.  Transmen

Fascism is a term that has been used to a point of near meaninglessness in the United States of America. The left tortured the meaning of it to apply it to George Bush to such a degree that its new meaning would also apply to Barrack Obama. This leaves us without a word for what Ron DeSantis is. To call him a Trumpist is to miss that he wants to be more than what Trump is but with half the wit (so 1/4 of the usual wit) and none of the smarts. (At least Trump understands vaccines).

DeSantis’s party seeks to control education in the state and have any books that don’t meet his orthodoxy pulled from the shelves. That was just about CRT and indoctrination of kids into being transgender and woke ideology, they said.

Recent research has proposed that some black holes are the astrophysical origin of dark energy.  Is this true and what exactly does this mean?  What is dark energy in the first place?  These are all complex questions, and this short report is just a thin film on top of deep dark unknown waters.  The truth is that astrophysicists have many hypotheses about what dark energy is and are not at all certain, but the proposal found in the paper that prompted this blog post (1) is intriguing in that it does not require any new fundamental fields or forces of nature.  Instead, we need to better understand General Relativity. 

The scientific consensus on the causes and treatments of transgenderism are well known and settled just as much as the round Earth, the big bang, evolution, or a myriad of other things that superstitious people argue against.  As any science creator on Youtube who spends time debunking flat earth conspiracies, or the great flood will know no amount of evidence will convince some people.  So what I have here is a compilation of what is the most important recent evidence on these issues.  This article merely summarizes the findings and places them in a political context. 

On coverage of the Ohio train derailment remembers the issue isn’t scary chemical names it’s what the chemical compounds are and their concentrations in the environment that are an issue. Anyone who tells you a big black cloud of chemical smoke is good to breath or ok to breath is obviously lying. At the same time don’t be scared by merely referring to normal substances by their chemical names.  The mainstream media is rightly not overblowing this disaster.  It is bad.  You wouldn't want to consume the released substances.  At the same time, it is not anything like Chernobyl.