Author: Jordan Ellams

space.com Religion and astronomy may not overlap often, but a new NASA X-ray image captures a celestial object that resembles the “Hand of God.” The cosmic “hand of God” photo was produced when a star exploded and ejected an enormous cloud of material, which NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, glimpsed in high-energy X-rays, shown in blue in the photo. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory had imaged the green and red parts previously, using lower-energy X-rays.  “NuSTAR’s unique viewpoint, in seeing the highest-energy X-rays, is showing us well-studied objects and regions in a whole new light,” NuSTAR telescope principal investigator Fiona Harrison, of...

The Week While blistering cold continues to punish most of North America, here is your friendly annual reminder that summer is in full swing down in Australia. Unfortunately for residents of several towns scattered across the north-east state of Queensland, enjoying all that wonderful sunshine may be a bit difficult, especially when surrounded by the rotting, noxious corpses of thousands of dead bats. Several newspapers report that over the weekend, 100,000 of the winged creatures have seemingly fallen out of the sky, littering trees, yards, and sidewalks with dead or dying animals. The culprit in this case is apparently a scorching summer heat wave,...

Popular Resistance Protest of mirrors held to commemorate Nov. 30 police beating of demonstrators At noon on Dec. 30, protesters in central Kyiv held mirrors in front of police for 30 minutes to commemorate the night of Nov. 30 when riot police used excessive force to breakup a peaceful rally on Independence Square consisting mostly of university students.  Above: At noon, demonstrators lined the streets of central Kyiv for 30 minutes to hold up mirrors in front of police in commemoration of the Nov. 30 violent dispersal of protesting students from Independence Square. All photos by Kostyantyn Chernichkin  In a gesture...

The Daily Caller https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7zJrBCCNw4 Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul claimed it would be “enlightening” for National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden and intelligence director James Clapper to “share a prison cell,” noting “the law has to be applied equally.” The senator made the comment during an interview with Fox News’ Eric Bolling Friday night, where Paul unveiled a new class-action lawsuit targeting the Obama administration over the NSA’s invasive domestic surveillance program. “The question here is whether or not, constitutionally, you can have a single warrant apply to millions of people,” he explained. “So we thought what better...

photographyisnotacrime.com A North Carolina deputy insisted that the county sidewalk in front of the jail belonged to him, ordering a man off the sidewalk solely for the reason that he was video recording. Although he refused to identify himself as he threatened to arrest the man, he has since been identified as Lieutenant Wright with the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Department.  Wright began referring to the sidewalk as “county property,” but then when asked if it was “public property,” he clarified that the only public property in the area was the city-owned sidewalk across the street from the jail. Then...