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Avi Loeb And Aliens: The Right And Wrong of Science Funding. (Also Bing Image Search Brings up Porno When you Search for him)

Avi Loeb he prolific Harvard astrophysicist, dances on the edge of cosmic controversy. His research...

What Is And Is Not Plagiarism In Scientific Papers? Neri Oxman And Claudine Gay Did Nothing Seriously Wrong. A Basic Guide To Citation.

The online discourse of our time has come to the issue of plagiarism. Now Claudine Gay and Neri...

Asteroid 2007 FT3 Will Not Hit Us, And Other Predictions For 2024. Suppose It Did Hit Us.

In the past I have predicted certain things at the start of certain years.  This is a selection...

UPDATE: Claudine Gay Not Fired By Harvard. Claudine Gay Did Not Plagiarize. Weeks Later Resigns Due To Ongoing Pressure.

Christopher F Rufo has accused the president of Harvard of plagiarism in an effort so clumsy that...

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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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The International Astronomical Union is holding a competition to assign common names.
Astronomy clubs  and other public groups may submit names.   The general public will then get to  vote on proposed names.

The full process is as found on the website. http://www.nameexoworlds.org/
According to Roscosmos an ammonia leak in the US section of the International Space Station has necessitated the evacuation of that section of the station.  
From what I have read this diagram depicts where the no-go zone is. 


Image courtesy of the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos.  

Nothing justifies the killing of people for expressing ideas no matter how repugnant one finds them. However, these things don't happen in a vacuum. These things are not simply the fault of the minority other person and their refusal to see how superior the majority is and adopt their ways.  The Marianne LePen's of France are more the reason for this than Charlie Hebdo is.  Charlie was just a soft target that those cowards decided to attack.  Hearing a major political candidate advocate for the deportation of a large group would tend to make radicalism more likely. 
The advent of open access (OA) publishing has lead to a proliferation of journals which offer a peer reviewed publication venue for a nominal charge.  Some of these journals are associated with scholarly associations.  Such as Physical Review X.  Others are not, such as a journal I published in called the International Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics (SCRIP) or the journals published by Elsevier, and other such companies. 
Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein made black holes hot, my latest work shows just how cool they really are.   I have derived a formula for the temperature of a black hole which has the same basic shape as that derived by Bekenstein and Hawking, but which differs in slope, and has what would be observably different behavior for black  holes of about 10 to 12 percent the mass of Sagittarius A* the super massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.  In short according to my fully quantum fully relativistic calculations black holes are just a tiny bit cooler than is generally thought.