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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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Why does the new space craft look like a capsule?  The simple fact is that between a capsule and a space plane like the shuttle, a capsule is the better vehicle for a direct return trip from interplanetary space to Earths surface. 
People my age, early-mid 30's, and younger look at a space capsule as being an artifact from a past era.  The 1960's and 1970's were the age of the capsule.  Then in the 1980's and 1990's we had the Space Shuttle Program in full swing.  The shuttle was so much more than a spacecraft.  As president Reagan put it the Shuttle was a symbol of our aspirations for freedom. 

In the below it can be said that he dedicated a Shuttle launch to people who 20 years latter would become the Taliban. 
I have been given the privilege of publishing during the Beta test period in the Open Access journal The Winnower for no cost but my time and care.  I was also given assistance by the International Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics to publish my work on massive star formation there.  A work unrelated to the first two, on the LCDM model is in press at ScienceOpen Research.  All of these are Open Access Journals.  Two have open peer review and all have post publication commenting.
The formation of stars of mass greater than 8 times that of the Sun occurs in distant and very obscured areas of the sky.  To form a massive star requires a massive and dense interstellar cloud.  To see what is going on there requires more than an optical telescope.  We rely on intense and compact sources of radio emission, masers. Inquiry into the formation of massive stars is a very active area of astronomy. Do they form based on a beefed up version of the disk-outflow model which works for less massive stars, or do they form by accretion and collision of smaller protostars?  There is evidence for both.
Cambridge University Press website mislabels and Astronomy text as an Astrology text. 
I was looking for open access open source freely downloadable and good textbooks to use in my future Astronomy classes.  The City Colleges require a very good text, but the supply of it to students in a timely manner hasn't been reliable as of late.  Over half of students in the City Colleges did not get books they ordered until the midterm.  

So I saw a page about books printed by Cambridge and the Open University.  Links on that website were broken so I went to search for them and found this.
If the distribution of dark matter in the region near Earth is lower than it is usually assumed then the interpretation of null results of direct detection efforts must be reconsidered. Astrophysicists have been searching for hard evidence of dark matter for decades.  The most favored model has been that dark matter consist  weakly interacting massive particles or WIMPS.  The basic assumption has been that dark matter is more or less evenly spread through the galaxy with no large scale variations.  The work of C. Moni Bidin, R. Smith, G. Carraro, R. A. Méndez, and M.
Open Access Post Publication Peer Review as done on the Winnower is a bold experiment which my new model for reconciling General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory has tested.  The model I propose is simply a conceptual inversion.  Instead of making General Relativity into a QFT by some means, instead we can attempt to make QFT even more relativistic than it already is.  (Since QFT is a result of formulating quantum mechanics so that it obeys Special Relativity)  This idea like every new idea meets with a deal of healthy skepticism.  Even I am skeptical of it, out of five stars I'd give it at most three.