Our place in the entire sequence of life is rather meager. Here is the Hillis plot of all life on Earth:

Full tree here.

A Mac laptop: $1,200. A Mac laptop with the Hillis Plot as it’s cover design: priceless:

Hillis Plot on a 13″ MacBook Pro.

I found it. The end of the rainbow, a double rainbow, in fact. Location: Tellico Lake, Tellico Village in Loudon, Tenn. I can report that there were no pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, green men, fairies or gods at the end. Just beauty.

How did something come from nothing? That’s it. That is the only question believers can hang their hats on and say, “Yes, we have a one-up on the scientific community. We have at least one question they can’t answer.” This article addresses it.

Until we learn more, the scientific explanation of how the universe and earth began is exponentially more satisfactory than the religious explanation, which would have us believe that, hey presto!, God did it. This is true because A) religious folks would have to explain the genesis of God and B) they would have to explain how and why such a god might be capable or even willing to create life in the first place. Claiming that he is benevolent and does it just because he is good is fallacious reasoning since I, nor anyone else, has any eye witness accounts that he is actually so.

It’s actually a little frightening when you consider that gravity, a force that we think is so strong on earth, is really not that strong at all. Because if it was even slightly less strong than it is, we might float out into the ether, and it is remarkable what subtle forces are needed to transcend the law of gravity:

We spend every day of our lives rooted to the Earth because of gravity, so it’s natural that most of us consider it a powerful force in the universe. Not so.

Think about it: The force of the entire Earth pulling down on a pin or a paperclip can be overcome with a small fridge magnet. Static electricity can make fabric and strands of hair stubbornly defy gravity — and all that takes is a short walk in a wool hat. Entire groups of people can be lifted off the ground for hours with a large balloon full of hot air. If gravity were as strong as the electromagnetic force, or the strong and the weak forces in an atomic nucleus, we’d all be a very finely distributed sludge over the surface of the earth.

Scientists recently witnessed the explosion of a Type 1a supernova that was born about 9 billion years ago. Type 1a supernovae are a specific kind of white dwarf star that occur only in binary system, in which two bodies are close enough to one another that they display gravitational interaction around the same center. Here’s a snippet from the article and a photo:

The team used the Wide Field Camera 3 instrument on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to observe the supernova in near-infrared wavelengths over eight months.

“In our search for supernovae, we had gone as far as we could go in optical light,” said principal investigator Adam Riess, of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, in a statement. “But it’s only the beginning of what we can do in infrared light.”

Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Riess (Space Telescope Science Institute and The Johns Hopkins University), and S. Rodney (The Johns Hopkins University)

A news of the weird item for you. A hollow ball of metal has dropped from space down into the Namibian countryside, according to a report from the Agence-France Presse.

Credit: AFP

This is not a new occurrence. Apparently, numerous similar objects have fallen from space over the last 20 years in various locations around the globe. I did see that any locals were hurt in the incident, and the ball does not seem to pose any risk, although I don’t know what to make of the testimony that locals heard “explosions” several days beforehand.

Here is some more information:

The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres (43 inches) was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres (480 miles) from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik.

Locals had heard several small explosions a few days beforehand, he said.

With a diameter of 35 centimetres (14 inches), the ball has a rough surface and appears to consist of “two halves welded together”.

It was made of a “metal alloy known to man” and weighed six kilogrammes (13 pounds), said Ludik.

It was found 18 metres from its landing spot, a hole 33 centimetres deep and 3.8 meters wide.

Several such balls have dropped in southern Africa, Australia and Latin America in the past twenty years, authorities found in an Internet search.

The sphere was discovered mid-November, but authorities first did tests before announcing the find.

Police deputy inspector general Vilho Hifindaka concluded the sphere did not pose any danger.

“It is not an explosive device, but rather hollow, but we had to investigate all this first,” he said.

Not that I understand this very well — I’m afraid I didn’t learn much about neutrinos in my English classes in college — but according to this article, scientists are preparing to build a telescope that will be the second largest structure ever constructed by man, coming in second only to the Great Wall of China.

The KM3net telescope planned for the sea bed under the Mediterranean will be a network of detectors with a volume of several cubic kilometres, built to detect neutrinos - tiny, fast-moving particles that pass straight through water and even solid rock.

And to what purpose: to scope out neutrinos under the Mediterranean sea. Neutrinos are fast-moving subatomic particles, and detectors are often installed deeply underwater to eliminate most of the interference. Each detector, and there will be a network of them, will be taller than the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai:

The sea water in between the 900m KM3Net detectors works as a giant optical ‘detector’ – the detectors look for ‘flashes’ caused by neutrinos hitting water atoms.

Most of the neutrinos pass straight through, but the few that do collide with atoms will be picked up by the huge telescope.

The detector’s discoveries could propel research in dark matter and high energy physics.

Construction could start as early as next year.