Giant Freakin Robot

The religion vs. science debate has been going on for centuries. Can both exist? Is there a place for religion if there is science? Questions like these began popping up the moment Galileo started observing the stars for an explanation of our existence. From that moment, science put religion in doubt and that doubt only got bigger and bigger.

Senior writer for Science.com Mark Wall recently attended the SETICon II conference in Santa Clara, CA and went to a panel discussion with panelist Doug Vakoch and Seth Shostak, along with award-winning Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer called “Would Discovering ET Destroy Earth’s Religions?”

The panel ultimately came to the conclusion that if alien life made contact with Earth, it would most likely not shatter people’s religious beliefs. It would probably strengthen them. Throughout history, even in Galileo’s time, religion grew in numbers when scientific fact was first introduced. The idea of Creationism and the one true God have been decaying since science has become more prevalent in the world but people still hold to their beliefs in these models.

The National Weather Service may not sound like the most exciting of government bodies, but some really interesting things fall under their umbrella. Take, for instance, the fact that it is responsible for the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), which “provides real-time monitoring and forecasting of solar and geophysical events which impact satellites, power grids, communications, navigation, and many other technological systems”.

The SWPC has been tracking the largest solar storm since 2005, which began after a large solar flare Sunday night and is accompanied by a radiation storm expected to continue at least until tomorrow morning.

Solar storms resulting from these kinds of flares come in three stages. Electromagnetic radiation comes first, followed by radiation via protons. We are still in the midst of this radiation storm, which has remained at a classification of S3 (Strong) all day but is expected to peak and start declining soon. This is the highest level from a solar storm in years, but still not enough to prompt astronauts on the International Space Station to take any additional or unusual steps to protect themselves from it. The last and most dramatic part of the solar storm – the Coronal Mass Ejection – will hit Earth at approximately 9am EST.

John D. Boswell’s Symphony of Science is kind of like Auto-Tune the News for science, if Auto-Tune the News was aimed to produce something more interesting than silly parodies of on-air gaffs. I enjoy Auto-tune the News as much as the next person, but they lack the beauty and sincerity of any given Symphony of Science video. It definitely helps that Boswell is working with stunning images of space and nature (from high-quality BBC productions, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Discovery Channel productions, and TED talks) and wonderfully eloquent scientists.

The thirteenth Symphony of Science video came out this week, and it is a “musical celebration of the wonders of biology, including evolution, natural selection, DNA, and more”. “The Greatest Show on Earth” samples David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins, and Bill Nye from their talks and television appearances, remixes them with a music track, and pairs these sounds with gorgeous images from BBC nature programs.

If you follow science news regularly, you’ve probably heard of the so-called “invisibility cloak” scientists have been working on. That technology is built on the principle of bending waves of visible light so that it wraps around an object rather than bouncing off it, thus rendering it invisible to the naked eye. Though still a long way from giving us actual, portable cloaks of invisibility, it’s still pretty amazing, and now the research has uncovered an even more mind-bending application: creating a “hole in time.”

Anyone who’s grown up on a steady diet of science fiction television can take a deep breath and calm down: we aren’t on the threshold of collapsing the space-time continuum. Instead, as National Geographic reports, the “time hole” involves applying the same principles used in the invisibility experiments – bending or diverting the path of light – to create a gap. Cornell physicist Alex Gaeta, who co-authored the study explains that “any event that occurs at that instant of time won’t lead to scattering of light. It appears as if the event never occurred.”

Still confused? I’m right there with you. Thankfully Gaeta provides a more concrete example of the theory. He conjures up an image familiar to anyone who’s watched a heist film, or the Mission: Impossible movies: a museum exhibit guarded by a crisscrossing array of security lasers. Buckle up, folks, here we go: