Since the double disaster of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami that affected hundreds of thousands of people and seriously damaged the Fukushima Daichi power plant in Japan on 11 March 2011, minute traces of radioactive emissions from Fukushima have spread across the entire Northern Hemisphere. A monitoring network designed to detect signs of nuclear explosions picked up these traces from the stricken power plant.

Electricity is an immensely more powerful force than gravity, and far more complex in the ways it interacts with matter. Yet modern astronomy remains wedded to a belief in gravity as the dominant mover and shaper of the universe, and seeks to explain new observations in terms that conceptually go back hundreds of years. James Hogan describes an emerging alternative theory that recognizes the important role played by electricity on cosmic scales, offering explanations based on principles that are well understood and demonstrable in laboratories, without need of recourse to unobserved, untestable physics or speculative mathematical abstractions.

©Unknown

Electric currents in space. The Double Helix nebula, located near our own galactic center

Humans have a wonderful ability for creating visions of ways to improve themselves, thereby making the world a better place; and then, it seems, for losing track somewhere along the way of turning the visions into reality.

Take the business of science, for instance. After several thousand futile years of fighting wars over whose revealed truth was really true, and attempts to impose truth by decree with the aid of rack and thumbscrew or deduce it via rigorous logic from self-evident premises that nobody could agree on, the idea finally emerged that a better way of finding out about the way things are in the world might be to stop fixating on how they ought to be, actually look at what's out there, and accept what it's telling you, whether you like it or not. It works pretty well with such questions as figuring out why cannon balls and planets move the way they do, what heat is, and other matters that can be decided beyond argument according to whether your motor starts or not, or if your plane gets off the ground - all of which rapidly become engineering. But when it comes to issues that aren't settled so easily - the meaning and origin of life; how the cosmos gets to be the way it is, and where it came from: areas where authority can still command and get away with it - things don't seem to have really changed that much. Powerful establishments enjoying political favor and monopoly privileges in teaching and promotion rigidify into orthodoxies defending their beliefs tenaciously, with dissenting views being dismissed, ridiculed, and marginalized, even when supported by what would appear to be verifiable fact and simpler arguments. In possibly an ultimate of ironies, in areas where hopes for science were at their highest, instead of showing the openness to alternatives and readiness to follow the evidence wherever it pointed that were supposed to characterize the new way of understanding the world, much of what we hear today seems to be taking on more the trappings of intolerant religion protecting dogma and putting down heresy.

A NASA spacecraft has uncovered the solar system's "nose," which points in the direction our sun is moving through the Milky Way galaxy, astronomers say.

The finding is based on newly released data from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer satellite (IBEX), an Earth-orbiting probe that has been mapping the solar system's outer frontier since 2008.

As the sun travels through the galaxy, the solar wind - actually charged particles streaming from the sun - collides with interstellar gases, forming a cocoon around the solar system called the heliosphere.

The edge of this cocoon, the heliopause, lies more than 9 billion miles (14.5 billion kilometers) from the sun.

"The Voyager spacecrafts were the first to reach these outer boundaries, and [they] gave us very localized information," said study leader Nathan Schwadron of the University of New Hampshire.

"But IBEX now allows us to pull back and finally show us its global properties. We are now overturning 40 years of theories about this gigantic bubble which surrounds and protects our solar system from harmful galactic cosmic rays," high-energy particles that zip through the universe.

Cosmic rays constantly bombard our solar system, but the heliosphere shields us from most of the radiation. Still, the small amounts that leak through and reach Earth can fry satellite electronics and pose a health hazard for astronauts.

With the drastic rise in the disappearance of honeybee colonies throughout the world in recent years there has become a large focus on the study of honeybees and the effects of pesticides on their colonies. Termed 'colony collapse disorder' in 2006, the decline in honeybees throughout the world has been attributed to everything from pesticides to disease and parasites. The loss of the honeybee population is a concern for the agricultural community, given these bees are responsible for pollinating crops worldwide.

Dr. Jeffrey Pettis, head of the Bee Research Laboratory with the US Department of Agriculture recently addressed the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Science and Technology in Agriculture in England to discuss his recent study on the honeybees.

Pettis has found that the bees are apparently able to detect the pesticide residue found in pollen they bring back to the hive. In examining honeybee hives, they have found cells containing pollen with high levels of pesticide have been sealed off by the bees using a waxy substance called propolis. While these bees are able to sense the contaminated pollen and try to seal it off from the rest of the hive, Pettis says this attempt is only proving futile and that the findings of sealed off cells in a hive are the biggest indicator of probable colony loss.

Nasa scientists are trying to solve one of the most puzzling cosmic blasts ever observed.

Stunning images show flaring emission from an explosion which is thought to be the destruction of a massive star in a galaxy 3.8 billion light-years away.

Nasa will use the Hubble Space Telescope, Swift satellite and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to study the blast.

Astronomers say they have never seen anything this bright, long-lasting and variable before.

Usually gamma-ray bursts mark the end of a massive star and emission from these events never lasts more than a few hours.

But radiation from the blast continues to brighten and fade from the location a week after the explosion.

Andrew Fruchter, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, labelled the event as truly extraordinary.

Bright blasts of radiation from the center of a galaxy 3.8 billion light-years from Earth are puzzling astronomers.

Astronomers are tracking unusual, extremely bright blasts of radiation coming from the center of a galaxy 3.8 billion light-years from Earth.

Typically, a burst as powerful as the one seen in the Draco constellation marks the death throes of a massive star, but that's usually a one-time event. So far, the source has brightened four times since Tuesday.

The first sign of the event was on March 28 when the Swift gamma-ray detector picked up a burst. Automated messages went out to astronomers' cell phones and they quickly mobilized to get a better fix on the blast's location.

Follow-up observations showed the source was a distant galaxy. But most surprising is that the outburst didn't stop.

"Most gamma-ray bursts go off once and then they fade away into nothingness," astronomer Andrew Levan, with the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, told Discovery News. "This burst went off four times in the space of two days and it carries on being bright even now."

Donald E. Scott, Ph.D. (Electrical Engineering)

Author of the book - The Electric Sky

There is a revolution just beginning in astronomy/cosmology that will rival the one set off by Copernicus and Galileo. This revolution is based on the growing realization that the cosmos is highly electrical in nature. It is becoming clear that 99% of the universe is made up not of "invisible matter", but rather, of matter in the plasma state. Electrodynamic forces in electric plasmas are much stronger than the gravitational force.

Mainstream astrophysicists are continually "surprised" by new data sent back by space probes and orbiting telescopes. That ought to be a clue that something is wrong. New information always sends theoretical astrophysicists "back to the drawing board". In light of this, it is curious that they have such "cock-sure" attitudes about the infallibility of their present models. Those models seem to require major "patching up" every time a new space probe sends back data.

Astrophysicists and astronomers do not study experimental plasma dynamics in graduate school. They rarely take any courses in electrodynamic field theory, and thus they try to explain every new discovery via gravity, magnetism, and fluid dynamics which is all they understand. It is no wonder they cannot understand that 99% of all cosmic phenomena are due to plasma dynamics and not to gravity alone.

When confronted by observations that cast doubt on the validity of their theories, astrophysicists have circled their wagons and conjured up pseudo-scientific invisible entities such as neutron stars, weakly interacting massive particles, strange energy, and black holes. When confronted by solid evidence such as Halton Arp's photographs that contradict the Big Bang Theory, their response is to refuse him access to any major telescope in the U.S.

Despite shifting into higher gear within the consumer's green conscience, hybrid vehicles are still tethered to the gas pump via a fuel-thirsty 100-year-old invention: the internal combustion engine.

However, researchers at Michigan State University have built a prototype gasoline engine that requires no transmission, crankshaft, pistons, valves, fuel compression, cooling systems or fluids. Their so-called Wave Disk Generator could greatly improve the efficiency of gas-electric hybrid automobiles and potentially decrease auto emissions up to 90 percent when compared with conventional combustion engines.

The engine has a rotor that's equipped with wave-like channels that trap and mix oxygen and fuel as the rotor spins. These central inlets are blocked off, building pressure within the chamber, causing a shock wave that ignites the compressed air and fuel to transmit energy.

A new condition is causing many penguin chicks to lose their feathers, with some victims dying as a result of the mysterious problem, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society.

The condition, called "feather-loss disorder," appears to have emerged recently and is now affecting penguin colonies on both sides of the South Atlantic.

"Feather-loss disorders are uncommon in most bird species, and we need to conduct further study to determine the cause of the disorder and if this is in fact spreading to other penguin species," Dee Boersma was quoted as saying in a WCL press release. Boersma has conducted studies on Magellanic penguins for more than three decades.

"We need to learn how to stop the spread of feather-loss disorder," she added, "as penguins already have problems with oil pollution and climate variation. It's important to keep disease from being added to the list of threats they face."

Researchers from the RIKEN Centre for Developmental Biology have become the first to grow a complex organ using embryonic stem cells from mice.

Yoshiki Sasai, study leader from the RIKEN Centre for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, and a team of researchers, have used embryonic stem cells from mice to create a rudimentary eye, which could eventually allow scientists to treat blindness and other eye-related problems.

Other researchers in the past have participated in similar research, but were not able to create a complex organ such as the eye from a group of cells. For instance, Professor Robin Ali, a molecular geneticist at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology in London, successfully transplanted light-sensitive cells from newborn mice to the retinas of adult mice. Ali is still unsure as to whether the vision of the adult mice has improved.

Now, Sasai has grown an eye by using an optic cup, which is a structure that holds light-sensitive cells and neurons required to see properly. The optic cup is responsible for forming the retina. The team then cultured a floating cluster of embryonic stem cells, and the cells required to make the eye took shape on their own. The result was a 2mm diameter eye, which is the size of an eye of an infant mouse.