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When the Big Bang happened, about 13.8 billion years ago, all the matter in the cosmos exploded from a singularity to produce the universe that we know today. But what existed before then? What existed before the start of time and everything? Professor Stephen Hawking says he might know just what existed.  In a very recent TV interview, the famous physicist says that 'nothing was around before the Big Bang'.   Stephen Hawking claims that time and space was there in a 'bent state' that was distorted with another dimension. Sharing his views on the newest episode of the National Geographic show 'Star Talk', which was broadcasted on Sunday evening, Hawking, 76, explained the beginning of the universe. The physicist says that the Big Bang was the creation of what we now refer as time because the event broke down the laws of physics as we know it. This means that anything that come first cannot be applied to our current understanding of time and existence. Stephen H...

Ever since Donald Trump emerged in media as High Priest of Idiocracy, the very word “hoax” has received new fame. Global warming is a hoax generated by the Chinese. Democrats are hoaxes. And now according to the Flat Earth community, the recent launch of the Falcon Heavy from Cape Canaveral with Elon Musk’s own Tesla Roadster aboard was also a hoax of epic proportions. The Flat Earth community has gained a lot of following and it also includes some high-profile members. Kyrie Irving, the NBA superstar now a affiliate of the Boston Celtics, is also the one. After the SpaceX launch, Edwards whacked together a YouTube video called “FLAT EARTH PROOF (ELON MUSK SPACEX FALCON HEAVY WAS FAKE)!!!!” which postures numerous questions such as “Where the f*ck the satellites at?” and “Why ain’t it spinnin’?” Then there is this one which completely closes the deal: “Where the f*ck the stars at?” It’s tough to debate with thoughtful insights like that. The people at Vice also report that some famo...

As our current video games become more and more lifelike and realistic, it's becoming clear that at some point, perhaps soon, our simulations will be indistinguishable from reality. If that's true, how do we know it didn't already happen? Could we be in a simulation now? A simulation created by someone? Moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium, put the odds at 50-50 that our entire existence is just a program on someone else’s hard drive. “I think the likelihood may be very high,” he said. He noted the obvious  gap between human and chimpanzee intelligence, despite that the fact that we share more than 98 percent of our DNA. Somewhere out there could be a being whose intelligence is that much greater than our own. “We would be drooling, blithering idiots in their presence,” he said. “If that’s the case, it is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment.” This is rea...

Cosmos” is returning to the National Geographic Channel and Fox . The networks have ordered a second season of the science documentary television series, which is a follow-up to the 1980s series “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage” with Carl Sagan. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and host of the Emmy Award-nominated “Star Talk,” returns as host of the series, scheduled to premiere globally in Spring 2019. The announcement was made at the Television Critics Association winter press tour on Saturday. The series hails from executive producer, writer, and director Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow and one of the writers on the original 1980s series. She and Steven Soter, another writer from the original show, won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming in 2014 for the show’s first season. Seth MacFarlane, Brannon Braga, and Jason Clark also serve as executive producers. It will be produced by Cosmos Studios, the Ithaca, NY-based company Druyan co-founded in 2000, and Fuzzy Door...

Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons has recently emerged as a top priority in the search for alien life. NASA has already announced their plans to send a robot to the moon with plans to carry out an investigation, but it is very possible that the agency might be beaten by a Russian billionaire. Yuri Milner has used his enormous wealth multiple times to advance the our current knowledge and understandings of the cosmos. For example, he has collaborated with physicist Stephen Hawking in creating an idea of an interstellar spacecraft. This concept has become a key component in the project named Breakthrough Starshot . Currently, Milner has taken on a new project. He plans to send an inexpensive probe to the moon Enceladus in hopes of finding life in one form or another in the geysers that are on its surface. He suspects that a mission that is backed by a major space agency (such as NASA, for example,) can possibly take as long as a decade to truly materialize. He also believes that t...

At times, scientists observe flashes of radio bursts with astounding levels of energy, which are called Fast Radio Bursts (FRB’S). Such a flash was observed in 2001, a brilliant burst of light breaching the skies was observed. This event was so powerful that in the matter of seconds, power was released that was equivalent to that of 500 million suns. Just as fast as it had come, the signal disappeared in the matter of milliseconds.  Ever since such an occurrence in 2001, approximately 30 of such flashes have been identified. However, new estimates indicate that these flashes occur almost every second. Dr.Avi Loeb, science professor of Harvard University, says that “in the time it takes you to drink a cup of coffee, hundreds of FRB’s may have gone off somewhere in the universe.”  The origins these flashes remain unknown but an explanation may have been found. The FRB 121102 is the only one of such flashes that repeats. In fact, scientists have observed at least 150 flashes fro...

Director of Berkeley’s SETI Research Center, Andrew Siemion once said: “as we improve our understanding of ancient Earth and the history of our solar system, perhaps we may someday uncover evidence that suggests the activity of another technological civilization right here in our neighborhood.” Massive efforts have been put into the search for alien life in our universe. For example, in the year of 2015 a research study lead by The Pennsylvania State University astronomer Jason Wright, examined 100,000 neighboring large galaxies and concluded that none of them possessed any obvious symptoms of any highly technologically advanced civilizations. Now, the focus is steered closer to home-- in this past spring of 2017, Wright has proposed that an indigenous technological civilization could have arisen and lived within the solar system before Earth-bound life did. He also went on to suggest that its “technosignatures” may have potentially survived if they were made of a material that could...

Prepare for astounding investigation, for the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) has elaborated the 13 proposals that will compromise the initial set of scientific observations carried out by the highly anticipated James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).  The James Webb Space Telescope is a component of NASA’s Next Generation Telescope program that is to be launched in 2019, developed by NASA, Canadian Space Agency, and the European Space Agency.  JWST will ultimately provide unprecedented resolution and amazing sensitivity from the long-wavelength visible light through the mid-infrared range. John C. Mather, senior project scientist for the Webb telescope and senior astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland spoke out about the telescope in a news release: “I’m thrilled to see the list of astronomer’s most fascinating targets for the Webb telescope and extremely eager to see the results. We fully expect to be surprised by what we find.” ...

It has been asked frequently-- how come only the past is present in our memories and not the future? Why time travel is not an actuality and the process of aging is irreversible? Why is entropy a definitive constant? What came before the Big Bang? Was time existent before the Big Bang?  The answers to these complex questions can be potentially traced to the moment of the Big Bang. Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist of California Institute of Technology whose research focuses on theoretical physics, astrophysics and issues in cosmology, gravitation and field theory addresses this question below. Time definitively infuses our lives for it is constantly measured. It’s tracked, put to use, machines employ time and others are built to keep track of its passage and measure it just as a ruler measures distances. There is a stark difference between the ruler and the clock-- time doesn’t necessarily employ distances but it does take use of direction pointing past from future. Sean Carroll’...

China appears to have made a significant development with the latest announcement made by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASTC) of launching the next-generation spaceplane by 2020. Horizontally launching spacecraft was, in fact, NASA’s initiative envisioned in 1970s. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip2 and XCOR’s Lynx are both designed only for suborbital flight.  Artist's Impression SpaceX has already been manufacturing reusable space rockets, with the remarkable launching of Flacon 9 earlier this year, deploying it to the International Space Station as well as to ferry satellites from private corporations and several countries. But China’s upcoming “space plane” is envisaged to be different as Chen Hongbo, CASTC researcher, stated that unlike traditional space crafts, this new spaceplane “will fly into the sky like an aircraft”, distinguishing it from rockets, therefore cited as spaceplane. Hypothetically the spaceplane will take off from a runway, then firing ...

The existential notion of Earth-sized inhabitable exoplanets seems to be confronting our conventional understanding of the vast cosmos. However, the observations made by the Kepler spacecraft infer that one out of every five sun-like stars house an Earth-like planet within its “habitable zone” — area of space appropriately distanced from its host star likely to be comprising liquid water.  Observations made by Kepler, from its first mission, elucidates this possibility with the cutting-edge discovery of 20 potentially-habitable planets . The study is yet to be attested with further research and information, nevertheless it already seems to be quite promising. Of these 20 exoplanets, many orbit stars like the Sun. Among them, there’s a planet having the longest orbit and an extensive 395 Earth-day year, while the shortest orbits its star in 18 Earth-days. Other inhabitable planets orbiting smaller stars are found to have much shorter “years” than what was found within this Kepler d...

There are sections in Pluto where enormous ice structures occur. Researchers finally consider they know how they are made. Researchers have cracked one of Pluto's most puzzling mysteries. In 2105, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto. What it witness near Pluto's equator has puzzled researchers ever since: Huge spikes of methane ice that stand as high as a NYC skyscraper. "We asked ourselves why it forms all of those ridges as opposed to just being big blobs of ice on the ground." -Jeffrey Moore, NASA Ames Research Center The answer discloses that Pluto's weather is more active than previously thought. Minor types of these icy forests exist on Earth. The structures are called penitentes. They form near Earth's equator on top of tall mountains. Up there, circumstances are right to turn snow straight to water vapor. This procedure — called sublimation — generates hard, sharp spikes of snow. NASA researchers believe the similar procedure happens on Pl...

The bells of joyful news have begun ringing-- after quite the hiatus, the EM drive has returned! Researchers from China’s space agency have released a video through state media in which they show what appears to be a fully functioning EM drive. For those who are unfamiliar to the EM drive, here’s the crash course. An EM drive, also known as a radio frequency resonant cavity thruster, is theorized to be able to generate thrust without the need of a propellant. The thrust is of the electromagnetic world that is produced from bouncing microwaves back and forth inside a cavity. Think of it like this-- a person is sitting inside of a box and they are faced with a task to make the box move. They do so by pushing out the walls and moving around inside of the box. Also, to top it all off, the total momentum generated by the drive increases as it moves. If an EM drive is to enter our current world of reality, it would be revolutionary, to say the least. Faster space travel and cheaper spacefli...