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I've already done a petition to journalists on the issue of dramatized reporting of doomsday stories that make young children and vulnerable adults suicidal. This is another petition on the same topic, this time to Youtube. The  petition is to remove the ads from doomsday videos on the sane grounds that these videos make vulnerable young children and adults scared and suicidal and the ads provide a financial incentive to youtube users to make and reupload them. If you agree, do sign and share the petition. Here it is in full This petition was prompted by a video, with amateur…

KIC 8462852 (or Tabby's star) made headlines in October of last year because of  very deep and very unusual drops in its brightness, which led to speculation that the star might be home to a Type-2 alien civilization. Since then, new discoveries (e.g. Montet and Simon, 2016) have continued to baffle researchers. There has been scant success in coming up with astrophysical models that explain these drops. Bodman&Quillen (2015), for example, propose a comet family model. Nevertheless, as the authors admit, they are unable to model the second-largest flux drop because "the flux changes…

There are various hypotheses for the origin of the Moon but a chemistry analysis says it has disproved the leading one - that a low-energy impact left the proto-Earth and Moon shrouded in a silicate atmosphere. Instead, they say, a much more violent impact vaporized the impactor and most of the proto-Earth, expanding to form an enormous superfluid disk out of which the Moon eventually crystallized. Tiny differences in the segregation of the isotopes of potassium between the Moon and Earth were hidden below the detection limits of analytical techniques until recently. But in 2015,…

This is an intriguing paper which has hit the news, see  Planet Nine Could Doom Our Solar System - If It Exists. If our solar system has a planet in a distant orbit, way beyond Neptune, such as the planet X candidates, it could lead to instability of our solar system far into the future. That's a rather unintuitive result - how could such a distant planet make any difference to our solar system's stability? It's not only intriguing, it might also provide the solution to a major puzzle about white dwarf stars. It might explain why so many white dwarfs are surrounded by debris fields…

The solar system could be thrown into disaster when the sun dies if the mysterious 'Planet Nine' exists, according to Dr. Dimitri Veras in the Department of Physics at University of Warwick, who says he has discovered that the presence of Planet Nine - the hypothetical planet which may exist in the outer Solar System - could cause the elimination of at least one of the giant planets after the sun dies, hurling them out into interstellar space through a sort of 'pinball' effect. When the sun starts to die in around seven billion years, it will blow away half of its own mass and inflate itself…

Just another short post on Nibiru following on from my recent petition calling for responsible mainstream journalist reporting on "doomsday stories". It's featuring in many mainstream news sites again. Thank goodness one paper, the Independent, has run a straight hoax debunking story on it. "‘Blood moon’ and ‘rogue planet Nibiru’ are on their way to kill us all, conspiracy theorists wrongly claim", kudos to them. Hurrah! It's the first straightforward Nibiru debunking article I've seen in the mainstream newspapers in the last year (since I started writing these articles). I hope this is a…

The Venus Table of the Dresden Codex, an ancient Mayan book containing astronomical data, has been studied for 120 years, with some confusion and accuracy. If you can recall the Mayan calendar Doomsday prophecy, it stated that at the end of a 13th period of 400 years, known as Baktuns, on the equivalent of Dec. 21, 2012, we would see the return of mysterious Mayan god Bolon Yokte. But U.C. Santa Barbara's Gerardo Aldana, a professor of anthropology and of Chicana and Chicano studies, believes the Venus Table has been misunderstood and thus underappreciated.  In the Journal of Astronomy…

As a long-time meteor observer, I never lose an occasion to watch the peak of good showers. The problem is that similar occasions have become less frequent in the recent times, due to a busier agenda. In the past few days, however, I was at CERN and could afford going out to observe the night sky, so it made sense to spend at least a couple of hours to check on the peak activity of the Perseids, which this year was predicted to be stronger than usual. Meteor showers occur when the Earth's orbit intersects the filament of dust left by comets or other celestial bodies (yes, there are…

I've been writing "doomsday debunking" articles here for a while now, and was surprised to find that some people are terrified by these stories, occasionally suicidal, with hundreds of comments by scared people on my posts here. To help raise awareness of this issue, I've made a petition:  "To: Journalists and lawmakers: Let's End Dramatized Reporting of "Doomsday" Stories - The Vulnerable Get Suicidal". The petition's video is by David Morrison (distinguished former NASA astrobiologist, expert on meteorite impacts and former head of the Sagan institute) talking about cosmophobia,…

This is just AWFUL - the worst case of irresponsible journalism I have ever seen. Quite a few on a similar vein today, but including an article in the Telegraph, of all places, and when originally published, the article featured an actual "Count down timer" to the moment when according to the video they publicized, we all die a few hours later, on 29th July. It's obviously meant humorously, especially as this is the "Silly Season" in the UK, but these stories get read by young children and vulnerable people who are not especially good at logical / geometrical thinking or may…