Stars have life cycles. They're born when bits of dust and gas floating through space find each other and collapse in on each other and heat up. They burn for millions to billions of years, and then...
One of the most fascinating things about the evolution of life on Earth is its connection to the sky above. Only under the most precise conditions could tiny molecules have burst forth into life, and...
The world’s largest radio telescope is expected to come online sometime in 2020. The S quare Kilometre Array (SKA) is an internationally sponsored and funded initiative that will include more than...
The IceCube Observatory carries the distinction of being the most remote astronomical facility on Earth. Anchored deeply in the ice of Antarctica, in the very definition of the middle of nowhere, the...
Europa is one of Jupiter’s 79 moons. It is one of four large moons that revolve around the planet, and is slightly smaller in size than our moon. Europa was discovered in 1610 by Galileo Galilei, and...
Conditions on Mars are harsh. Its atmosphere is made up mostly of carbon dioxide and is 100 times thinner than Earth’s. Temperatures on the surface can plummet to minus-126 degrees Celsius. But the...
The origin of the Moon has been a subject of research for many years and theories about its creation abound. Hypotheses vary from non-scientific proposals, such as that the Moon is a spaceship, to...
Tiamat is an ambiguous deity who played an important role in the creation myth of ancient Mesopotamia . She was their personification of the primordial sea, from which the first generation of gods...
In the early 1960s, renowned chemist Dr. James Lovelock was approached by NASA to develop systems and methods that could be used in determining whether or not a planet harbored life. Specifically,...
The first civilizations didn’t have satellites in the sky, mapping every inch of the world in real time. They only knew the parts of the world they’d seen. Everything beyond that, they had to imagine...
During Medieval times almost all Christian theologians accepted the Ptolemaic earth centered Greek view of the universe as an absolute universal truth of both nature and religion. The Catholic...
Tlazolteotl was an earth goddess in the pantheon of the Aztecs, although her area of influence is a little wider and more unusual than some goddesses of the earth and fertility. Filth was her domain...
An omphalos is a powerful symbolic artifact made from stone. Considered the ‘navel of the world’, the central point from which terrestrial life originated, an omphalos was an object of Hellenic...
This is the concluding part of a two-part article that offers a unifying scientific hypothesis that connects diverse ancient flood myths with mainstream scientific fact. Part 1 offered scientific...
The following is a unifying scientific hypothesis that connects diverse ancient flood myths with mainstream scientific fact. Currently the biblical narrative of the great flood falls short of...
Magnetic pole shifts are in the news a lot recently because our Magnetic North Pole is racing towards Russia while the Earth’s magnetic field strength is falling fast. The European Space Agency said...
Historians often declare that at least 3500 end of world prophecies have appeared over the same number of years. And those are only the written ones! Eschatology is theology concerned with the final...
What do Mount Fuji in Japanese culture, the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, Mecca in Islam, and the Black Hills for the Sioux all have in common? They are all examples of a belief in the axis...
It’s entered modern lore as a nightmare scenario for planet Earth: A huge asteroid or comet or a swarm of smaller comet fragments hits Earth and causes a major catastrophe. Now, scientists think they...
“Each of the criminals is bound to an iron pillar and the ox-headed demon is in the process of administering punishment—using iron or copper blades he peels the skin of the person's face, just as a...
If you are sensitive about matters pertaining to sex and sexuality it's probably best that you press the back button now. For those with a more exploratory attitude, what I hope you take away from...
If you had a globe at home when you were a child, you may have played the game of spinning the globe, placing your finger on it lightly, and wherever the globe stops under your finger is where you...
The builders of the pyramid complex in Egypt had a very good astronomer. We call him Senenmut (the Mother’s Brother, or the Uncle). Today, our astronomers are so good that they build computer...
Although there are different versions of the Visayan creation myth, they are similar in characters, conflicts and resolutions. The way the story was narrated and its different subsequent retellings...
