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Earth is old. The sun is old. But do you know what may be even older than both? Water.

more than 4.6 billion years ago.

That means the same liquid we drink and that fills the oceans may be millions of years older than the solar system itself.

"Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?"If you answered the latter, you're among a quarter of Americans who also got it wrong

alarming truths about the state of science education across the countr

Only 39 percent answered correctly with "true" when asked if "The universe began with a huge explosion,"

a mountain-sized chunk of primordial solar system, will approach within 2 million kilometers of the sun and either fall apart or slingshot back into deep space. Astronomers aren’t sure yet how much of a spectacle ISON will be for earthbound observers, but from their vantage point the comet is already providing a brief, unprecedented glimpse into what the solar system was like in its infancy.

“It’s the sort of thing I’ve been waiting for my whole career,”

hat probably indicates large amounts of ice near the comet’s surface, where the sun can easily drive it off, he says. The finding confirmed that ISON is on its first pass through the inner solar system, not a periodic visitor like Halley’s comet.

The sages had placed the Earth at the centre of the universe for nearly two thousand years until Copernicus arrived on the scene and let it spin like a top around the Sun, as we know it today.

Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) was not the first to explain that everything revolves around the Sun, but he did it so thoroughly, in that book, that he initiated a scientific revolution against the universal order established by the greatest scholar ever known, the Greek philosopher Aristotle.

Aristotle said in the fourth century BC that a mystical force moved the Sun and the planets in perfect circles around the Earth. Although this was much to the taste of the Church, in order to fit this idea with the strange movements of the planets seen in the sky, astronomers had to resort to the mathematical juggling that another Greek, Ptolemy, invented in the second century AD.

This story was updated to reflect 2020’s perihelion.In the wee hours of Sunday (2:47 a.m. Eastern time, to be exact), Earth will make its closest approach to the sun and reach a point in its orbit known as perihelion.

Chilly as winter may feel in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re more than three million miles closer to our fiery star than we were in the dead of summer.

The change in distance occurs because our planet’s orbit is stretched into an ellipse

Actually fluoride is a natural mineral that, in the weak concentrations used in public drinking water systems, hardens tooth enamel and prevents tooth decay—a cheap and safe way to improve dental health for everyone, rich or poor, conscientious brusher or not. That’s the scientific and medical consensus.

when Galileo claimed that the Earth spins on its axis and orbits the sun, he wasn’t just rejecting church doctrine. He was asking people to believe something that defied common sense

all manner of scientific knowledge—from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change—faces organized and often furious opposition.

A century ago this year, a young Swiss physicist, who had already revolutionized physics with discoveries about the relationship between space and time, developed a radical new understanding of gravity.

He came up with a set of equations that relate the curvature of space-time to the energy and momentum of the matter and radiation that are present in a particular region.

Today, 100 years later, Einstein's theory of gravitation remains a pillar of modern understanding, and has withstood all the tests that scientists could throw at it

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Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.

A common tactic of those who claim that science and religion are compatible is to argue that science, like religion, rests on faith: faith in the accuracy of what we observe, in the laws of nature, or in the value of reason

Such statements imply that science and religion are not that different because both seek the truth and use faith to find it

science is often described as a kind of religion.

Google is announcing that it wants to cut out the middleman—that is to say, other websites—and serve you content within its own lovely little walled garden. That sound you just heard was a bunch of media publishers rushing to book an extra appointment with their shrink.

Back when search, and not social media, ruled the internet, Google was the sun around which the news industry orbited. Getting to the top of Google’s results was the key that unlocked buckets of page views. Outlet after outlet spent countless hours trying to figure out how to game Google’s prized, secretive algorithm. Whole swaths of the industry were killed instantly if Google tweaked the algorithm.

Facebook is now the sun. Facebook is the company keeping everyone up at night. Facebook is the place shaping how stories get chosen, how they get written, how they are packaged and how they show up on its site. And Facebook does all of this with just as much secrecy and just as little accountability as Google did.

GEORGE Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 has had “doublegood” sales this week after one of Trump’s advisers used the phrase “alternative facts” in an interview.

Orwell's novel 1984 is a bleak portrayal of Great Britain re-imagined as a dystopian superstate governed by a dictatorial regime.

Many concepts of the novel have crossed over to popular culture or have entered common use in everyday life - the repressive regime is overseen by Big Brother, and the government's invented language "newspeak" was designed to limit freedom of thought. The term "doublethink" - where a person can accept two contradicting beliefs as both being correct - first emerged in the dystopian landscape of Airstrip One.

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

Five exoplanets and eight planet candidates have been found around nearby stars, including a "cold Neptune" and two super-Earths that are potentially habitable, according to a new study. The two super-Earths, GJ180d and GJ229Ac, were found around small red dwarf stars that are 19 and 40 light-years away from our sun, while the cold Neptune was found around a similar star that's 29.5 light-years away.

Meanwhile, the other super-Earth, GJ229Ac, is the nearest temperate super-Earth in a system where the host star is also orbited by a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs are known as failed stars that can't sustain the hydrogen fusion needed to power them

"GJ 433 d is the nearest, widest and coldest Neptune-like planet ever detected," said Fabo Feng, lead study author and astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science. A multitude of exoplanets, especially terrestrial planets like Earth, have been found around red dwarf stars. They're smaller and cooler than our sun, and they're the most common star in our galaxy. Exoplanets tend to orbit closer to these stars and still be within the star's habitable zone, or the perfect distance for the planet to be temperate and potentially host liquid water on their surfaces.

A team of scientists hunting dark matter has recorded suspicious pings coming from a vat of liquid xenon underneath a mountain in Italy

If the signal is real and persists, the scientists say, it may be evidence of a species of subatomic particles called axions — long theorized to play a crucial role in keeping nature symmetrical but never seen — streaming from the sun.

Instead of axions, the scientists may have detected a new, unexpected property of the slippery ghostly particles called neutrinos. Yet another equally likely explanation is that their detector has been contaminated by vanishingly tiny amounts of tritium, a rare radioactive form of hydrogen.

Even when people understand in some sense – and often even in detail – how the algorithms work they still tend to see these platforms as modern, digital versions of the town square. There have always been people saying nonsensical things, lying, unknowingly peddling inaccurate information. And our whole civic order is based on a deep skepticism about any authority’s ability to determine what’s true or accurate and what’s not. So really there’s nothing new under the sun, many people say.

But all of these points become moot when the networks – the virtual pubic square – are actually run by a series of computer programs designed to maximize ‘engagement’ and strong emotion for the purposes of selling advertising.

But really all these networks are running experiments that put us collectively into the role of Pavlov’s dogs.

“I really believe these stories, but they’re just hard to explain,” said Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Colorado. “Maybe being street-smart, maybe reading animal cues, maybe being able to read cars, maybe being a good hunter. I have no data for this.”There is, in fact, little scientific dogma on cat navigation. Migratory animals like birds, turtles and insects have been studied more closely, and use magnetic fields, olfactory cues, or orientation by the sun.

Strange, faraway locations would seem problematic, although he and Patrick Bateson, a behavioral biologist at Cambridge University, say that cats can sense smells across long distances. “Let’s say they associate the smell of pine with wind coming from the north, so they move in a southerly direction,”

Professor Tabor cited longer-distance reports he considered credible: Murka, a tortoiseshell in Russia, traveling about 325 miles home to Moscow from her owner’s mother’s house in Voronezh in 1989; Ninja, who returned to Farmington, Utah, in 1997, a year after her family moved from there to Mill Creek, Wash.; and Howie, an indoor Persian cat in Australia who in 1978 ran away from relatives his vacationing family left him with and eventually traveled 1,000 miles to his family’s home.

In learning any art the important things to learn are, first, Principles, and second, Method. This is true of the art of producing ideas. Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up [of] so called rapidly aging facts. Principles and method are everything.

So with the art of producing ideas. What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas.

Every really good creative person…whom I have ever known has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested — from, say, Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information.

A panoply of devices and ideas are named after Archimedes. Besides the Archimedes screw, there is the Archimedes principle, the law of buoyancy that states the upward force on a submerged object equals the weight of the liquid displaced. There is the Archimedes claw, a weapon that most likely did exist, grabbing onto Roman ships and tipping them over. And there is the Archimedes sphere, a forerunner of the planetarium — a hand-held globe that showed the constellations as well as the locations of the sun and the planets in the sky.

Dr. Rorres said the singular genius of Archimedes was that he not only was able to solve abstract mathematics problems, but also used mathematics to solve physics problems, and he then engineered devices to take advantage of the physics. “He came up with fundamental laws of nature, proved them mathematically and then was able to apply them,” Dr. Rorres said.