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Transgender women who have been on hormones for years have no advantage in sports.

A study has been making the rounds and has been published in BJSM. It is a meta-analysis of various...

2025 The Year Idiocracy Was Utopia Compared To Reality

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the charlatans now shaping policy at the highest levels of HHS represent...

Charlie Kirk An American On The Level of Louis Farrakahn. Rest In Peace. He often quoted 'science' in a misleading way though.

Charlie Kirk was shot while exercising his constitutional American right to free speech. ...

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Hontas FarmerRSS Feed of this column.

My research focuses on astrophysics from massive star formation to astroparticle physics. Born and raised in Chicagoland I have lived in Bellwood, IL since 1984 and attended public schools here... Read More »

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As a person of native American descent and quite a bit of native culture I know a thing or two about that world view.  Granted my family is well assimilated and mixed in as many who are descendants of some of the first Native Americans to make contact with the white man.  This gives me a fine-tuned sense of when someone is using nativness for nonsense. This is not to say that Native Hawaiians, Native Americans, or other indigenous people never have a point. The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protest was one where they did, and where real practical environmental damage is a legitimate concern.   UPDATE (Science Facing Ignorance.) 

At best we can speculate about GJ 357d. The case of GJ 357d we have a scientific paper which is about a planet that is in the habitable zone of its star, is at least six point one times the mass of the Earth, based on what we see, and we do not even know its radius (Luque, et al. 2019).  Yet the news media writes and reports on it as if we knew for certain it is Earth like.   (A brief word on Jessica Yaniv follows.)

Fundamental Theoretical Physics is the driver of big science projects.  Confirming old theories and testing new theories is how science advances.  That said what do we really do when part of big science projects?  The stereotype of the theoretical physicist is of a lone genius working in front of a chalkboard, or envisioning the mathematics written in brilliant light in the air in front of them, or dreaming of the solution to a deep problem.  This does really happen.  Theoretical physics is where the lone genius stereotype comes close to being true. Even then, it has always been just as important to bounce ideas off other physicists.    

Choosing a good but memorable password is hard. Here are some tips on how you can do it.  The best practice is to have a password manager, other than your web browser, and use it.  Do not use obvious personal information as part of a password. 

NASA welcoming private space flight participants is not new and it is misleading to call these people "tourist".

General Relativity (GR) is 100 years old and today.   Many writings will try to simplify it using illustrations with sheets and bowling balls and such.  If you want to have a more precise idea of what it really is and you know a bit of algebra this article is for you.  Here is what GR is in simple but still mathematical terms understandable to all who know high school algebra.


We will start with the Pythagorean theorem.  Then add to it until we get to the formula that gives us the big bang theory.  Then relate that to gravity.