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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 test of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity the Event Horizon Telescope image shows us an extreme example of light being bent by the mass of a black hole. General Relativity (GR) predicts that solar mass objects will do this to some degree which is very hard but not impossible to measure. In the case of a black hole it predicts what Event Horizon Telescope saw to within the measurement precision of the EHT. Any modified theory of gravity that stands a chance would have to match these observations.

Real astronomical images rarely look like their artist representations.  The images produced by the Event Horizon Telescope will be no different.  That said, an image of the light near the event horizon of the black hole at the center of our galaxy will be many times more detailed than the famous image of a similar black hole from the galaxy M87.  The main reasons for this are distance and improvements in the instrument.  M87 is about 53 million light years away.  While the center of our own galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is just about 26,000 light years away.  

Veritasium is still wrong by his own standards because he did not give the full real explaination which is rooted in the real theory of electricity and magnetism.  Quantum Electro Dynamics.  In fact with that theory in hand the way this works out is more straight forward.

It is very unlikely that Fermilab’s new findings on the mass of the Wboson mean that the standard model is broken. It will be exciting if it does. This is not to say that their experimental findings are wrong. Fermilab themselves propose the much more likely possibility that we need to compute the predicted values more precisely in the standard model. Another possibility that occurs to me is that we scientists need to both compute the values predicted by established theory even more precisely and also extend the established theory a little bit.

Don't Look Up did not win an Oscar tonight.  Generally, I don't care about the Oscars but then Will Smith legit slapped Chris Rock so hard that it made the Russo-Ukrainian war stop trending.

The harsh truth of nuclear war in our modern era is not that everyone would die right away but that hundreds of millions would die in the combatant states while hundreds of millions would have to survive radiation and starvation. If you are one who sees the flash, has time to Duck and Cover, and for whom the light is distant you are not in the clear. Instead, soon fallout will be upon you a deadly black rain, and black ash will be upon you. How to survive this if you have not prepared at all up to this point? Dirt and Distance are your friends.