And it may be an odd type of supernova that has yet to be confirmed observationally.

This supernova is one for the record books.

A mammoth star explosion known as SN2016aps, which occurred in a galaxy about 3.6 billion light-years from Earth, is the brightest supernova ever seen, a new study reports.

"We can measure supernovae using two scales: the total energy of the explosion, and the amount of that energy that is emitted as observable light, or radiation," study lead author Matt Nicholl, a lecturer in the School of Physics and Astronomy and the Institute of Gravitational Wave Astronomy at the University of Birmingham in England, said in a statement.

"In a typical supernova, the radiation is less than 1% of the total energy," Nicholl added. "But in SN2016aps, we found the radiation was five times the explosion energy of a normal-sized supernova. This is the most light we have ever seen emitted by a supernova."

SN2016aps is so odd and so extreme that Nicholl and his colleagues think it may be a "pulsational pair-instability" supernova, in which two big stars merge before the whole system goes boom. Such events are hypothesized, but astronomers have never confirmed their existence observationally.

Amid growing anxiety over the coronavirus pandemic, it would be nice if we could at least rely upon the solidity of the Earth. Think again, says a new study, which found the inner layer of our planet is discharging metal material.

The Earth's molten core may be leaking iron, according to scientists at the University of California, Davis.

The study concluded that a huge drop in temperature from our planet's liquid iron core to the outer rocky mantle pulls heavier iron isotopes out towards the Earth's surface, while lighter iron isotopes remain within the core.

In 2017, scientists from the University of Hawaii at Manoa spotted an enigmatic celestial body that turned out to be the first known interstellar object passing through the Solar System. Because of its unusual origin, it earned the name Oumuamua, which in Hawaiian means "first distant messenger".

Chinese scientists claim that the mysterious Oumuamua asteroid is a part of an Earth-sized exoplanet that was destroyed by its star. According to the study published in the journal Nature, the planet was ripped apart by tidal forces due to its close proximity to the star. The researchers say that during such a process, debris is ejected into interstellar space. Dr Yun Zhang, the study's lead author, says that this may explain why Oumumua has non-gravitational acceleration.

"If Oumuamua was produced and ejected in the way we suggest, plenty of residual water ice could be activated during its passage through the solar system. The resulting outgassing would cause accelerations that match Oumuamua's comet-like trajectory", Dr Yun Zhang wrote.

There's no longer any doubt. Comet ATLAS (C/2019 Y4) is falling apart. Around the world, amateur astronomers are beginning to witness the breakup, even imaging individual fragments. Jose de Queiroz photographed 3 pieces on April 11th:

Long described as useless leftovers of evolution, pseudogenes are rising from the junk pile as functional entities — so much so, that scientists think a change in terminology is needed.

Wikipedia can be counted on to parrot the Darwinian view. Here's what they say about pseudogenes:

Gene duplication generates functional redundancy and it is not normally advantageous to carry two identical genes. Mutations that disrupt either the structure or the function of either of the two genes are not deleterious and will not be removed through the selection process. As a result, the gene that has been mutated gradually becomes a pseudogene and will be either unexpressed or functionless. This kind of evolutionary fate is shown by population genetic modeling and also by genome analysis. According to evolutionary context, these pseudogenes will either be deleted or become so distinct from the parental genes so that they will no longer be identifiable. Relatively young pseudogenes can be recognized due to their sequence similarity. [Emphasis added.]

It's safe to say that many Darwin skeptics have felt intimidated by this apparent genetic evidence for evolution, not sure what to make of it or how to fit it into their own perspective. Prominent Darwin defenders like Kenneth Miller, meanwhile, trumpeted pseudogenes as prima facie evidence against intelligent design. "The human genome is littered with pseudogenes," he wrote in 1994. Pointless junk like this "cannot be attributed to anything that resembles intelligent design." He even characterized ID as a "retreat back to into an unknowledge of biology that is unworthy of the scientific spirit of this century" (Life's Grand Design).

CBET 4750 & 4752 & MPEC 2020-G94, issued on 2020, April 13, announce the discovery of a comet (total magnitude ~8.5) by M. Mattiazzo in the low-resolution public website hydrogen Lyman-alpha images obtained with the Solar Wind Anisotropies (SWAN) camera on the Solar and Heliospheric Observer (SOHO) spacecraft. The new comet has been designated C/2020 F8 (SWAN).

We performed follow-up measurements of this object while it was still on the PCCP webpage through the Telescope Live network.

Stacking of 3 unfiltered exposures, 30 seconds each, obtained remotely on 2020, April 11.4 from X02 (Telescope Live, Chile) through a 0.6-m f/6.5 astrograph + CCD, shows that this object is a comet with a compact coma about 5' in diameter and a tail 6' long in PA 220. Total magnitude 8.4.
Stacking of 3 unfiltered exposures, 120 seconds each, obtained remotely on 2020, April 11.7 from Q56 (Telescope Live, Australia) through a 0.1-m f/3.6 astrograph + CCD, shows that this object is a comet with a compact coma about 8' in diameter and a tail 25' long in PA 220.

Our confirmation images (click on it for a bigger version):

When law professor Phillip E. Johnson¹ was asked whether he wouldn't be "a bit out of [his] element" writing about evolution, neo-Darwinism,² and intelligent design, he gave the following intriguing answer. It is acutely relevant for all readers and researchers who are interested in the origin of man but who are not paleoanthropologists:

Well, if I am out of my element then Charles Darwin must also have been out of his element because his training was in medicine and theology³ although he was, in fact, a very good scientist, self-taught, a gentlemen amateur like others of his time. Charles Lyell, the father of modern geology, was a lawyer. But you know, the thing about Darwinian evolution today is that it is a general philosophical concept that connects many disparate fields of science. So that you see, a molecular biologist [is] relying on fossil experts, paleontologists, and vice versa. And they are all relying on geneticists and each one of these groups of scientists outside their own element is just a generalist, is just a layman like anyone else. So there aren't really any specialists in evolution. It's a generalist's country.

He could have mentioned as well the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel⁴, often called "the father of genetics," and many others in biology up to the present⁵. A further statement by Johnson is all the more relevant for the general reader, as well as for any philosopher, scientist, or other researcher:

The leaders of two controversial pandemic simulations that took place just months before the Coronavirus crisis - Event 201 and Crimson Contagion - share a common history, the 2001 biowarfare simulation Dark Winter. Dark Winter not only predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks, but some of its participants had clear foreknowledge of those attacks.

During the presidency of George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s, something disturbing unfolded at the U.S.' top biological warfare research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Specimens of highly contagious and deadly pathogens - anthrax and ebola among them - had disappeared from the lab, at a time when lab workers and rival scientists had been accused of targeted sexual and ethnic harassment and several disgruntled researchers had left as a result.

In addition to missing samples of anthrax, ebola, hanta virus and a variant of AIDS, two of the missing specimens had been labeled "unknown" - "an Army euphemism for classified research whose subject was secret," according to reports. The vast majority of the specimens lost were never found and an Army spokesperson would later claim that it was "likely some were simply thrown out with the trash."

An internal Army inquiry in 1992 would reveal that one employee, Lt. Col. Philip Zack, had been caught on camera secretly entering the lab to conduct "unauthorized research, apparently involving anthrax," the Hartford Courant would later report. Despite this, Zack would continue to do infectious disease research for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and would collaborate with the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) throughout the 1990s.

Design redundancy is not only an invention of engineers for building machines, but also a principle of nature for designing organisms. This principle is at play in the regulation of the genes responsible for directing stem cells to multiply themselves in the developing mouse embryo, as described in a new study in Science Advances.

In the study, scientists Oliver Bell, Jorge Zepeda-Martinez, and their collaborators from the Vienna BioCenter and USC studied the "silencing" of key genes that direct stem cells to differentiate into specific cell types or lineages. When these lineage-specific genes are silenced, the stem cells produce more stem cells, enabling the normal embryonic development of a mouse.

Silencing these genes involves a group of proteins called Polycomb repressive complexes, or PRCs. The PRCs make what are known as epigenetic changes, which reduce the activity of the lineage-specific genes that would commit a stem cell to becoming a more specialized cell type.

The redundancy is that there are two separate groups of PRCs, and both groups independently and simultaneously work to silence the same lineage-specific genes. If PRC group one stops working, then group two can handle the job. If PRC group two fails, then group one is a capable backup.

Recent research conducted into the genetic network analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic, done jointly by British and German experts, testified the variant of novel coronavirus that is closest to that discovered in bats was actually found mainly among cases from the US, rather than in Wuhan, Central China's Hubei Province.

To explain the pandemic origins, experts from the University of Cambridge and their peers from Germany analyzed 160 virus genomes that were extracted from human patients around the world and they found the coronavirus mutated into three distinct strains.

They found that most cases carried type A virus - the ancestral type of virus, which is bat coronavirus, with 96 percent sequence similarity to the human virus - were largely seen in patients from the US and Australia.