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POPS Learning’s online fate ,The digital age challenges teachers, teaching, books "This expansive, open age of digital information challenges the traditions of scholarship, learning, and even the act of reading. So what will be the fate of higher education in the digital age?" An important understanding concerning the changing face of higher education, we need more panels of this kind to fully realize the revolution taking place.
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POPSWe All Want To Know "We will probably never find that cosmic connection to our lost royalty. Someday I will visit Norway and look up those ancestors. They died not knowing the fate of the universe, and so will I, but maybe that’s all right." TN told me once she felt closer to knowing God through science. Well, she has her way and I have mine, but we all want to know :)
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POPSWhy Pluto is No Longer a Planet Astronomers from the association were given the opportunity to vote on the definition of planets. In the end, astronomers voted for the controversial decision of demoting Pluto (and Eris) down to the newly created classification of "dwarf planet". For an object to be a planet, it needs to meet these three requirements defined by the IAU: * It needs to be in orbit around the Sun – Yes, so maybe Pluto is a planet. * It needs to have enough gravity to pull itself into a spherical shape – Pluto…check * It needs to have "cleared the neighborhood" of its orbit – Uh oh. Here's the rule breaker. According to this, Pluto is not a planet.
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POPSScientists Discover An Earth-Sized Planet Possibly With An Ocean Scientists also discovered that the orbit of planet Gliese 581 d, which was found in 2007, was located within the "habitable zone" — a region around a sun-like star that would allow water to be liquid on the planet's surface, Mayor said. He spoke at a news conference Tuesday at the University of Hertfordshire during the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science. Gliese 581 d is probably too large to be made only of rocky material, fellow astronomer and team member Stephane Udry said, adding it was possible the planet had a "large and deep" ocean. "It is the first serious 'water-world' candidate," Udry said.
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POPSSuper-Earths Orbit Neighboring Stars
An international team of researchers detected the new planetary systems by combining information collected during years of observations at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the Anglo-Australian Telescope in Australia. The astronomers combed the data looking for minute variations in the starlight caused by gravitational tugs of orbiting planets. "This was not the kind of 'ah-ha' moment where you look into the telescope and see the planet sitting there," Laughlin said. "The signal builds up over time." Refinements in planet-hunting techniques should make detection of Earth-sized planets possible in about a year, he added. "The practical limits for finding terrestrial planets around nearby stars is a lot more optimistic than what was thought to be the case a few years ago," Laughlin said. The newly discovered planets are too close to their parent stars for liquid water to exist on their surfaces, a condition that is believed to be necessary for life. Still, scientists say
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POPSIs There Global Warming on Other Planets in the Solar System? Martian climate is primarily driven by dust and albedo and there is little empirical evidence that Mars is showing long term warming. Neptune's orbit is 164 years so current brightening is a seasonal response (Neptune's southern hemisphere is heading into summer). Triton's warming is due to the moon approaching an extreme southern summer, a season that occurs every few hundred years. Jupiter's storms are fueled by the planet's own internal heat (the sun's energy is 4% the level of solar energy at Earth). When several storms merge into one large storm (eg - Red Spot Jr), the planet loses its ability to mix heat, causing warming at the equator and cooling at the poles.
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POPSSet Your Alarm For The Orionids!
"Last but not least, the display will be framed by some of the prettiest stars and planets in the night sky. In addition to Orionids, you'll see brilliant Venus, red Mars, the dog star Sirius, and bright winter constellations such as Orion, Gemini and Taurus. Even if the shower is a dud, the rest of the sky is dynamite." "According to Japanese meteor scientists Mikiya Sato and Jun-ichi Watanabe, 2006 marked Earth's first encounter with some very old debris. "We have found that the was caused by dust trails ejected from 1P/Halley in 1266 BC, 1198 BC, and 911 BC," they wrote in the August 2007 edition of Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan. In their paper "Origin of the 2006 Orionid Outburst," Sato and Watanabe used a computer to model the structure and evolution of Halley's many debris streams stretching back in time as far as 3400 years. The debris that hit Earth in 2006 was among the oldest they studied and was rich in large fireball-producin
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POPSDavid Wilcock - Coast 2 Coast AM - October 6, 2009 But the Illuminati's agenda could be halted by a full-scale disclosure of the ET presence, Wilcock asserted. His sources have told him that such a disclosure is planned to occur before the end of 2009, and a 2-hour international TV special has already been booked that will introduce an alien species, similar to humans, to the world. Yet, a variety of ET species are visiting the Earth, including the Annunaki, who are reptilian in appearance, and a controlling force behind the Illuminati, he continued. The entire solar system is undergoing change as a galactic wave or energy field comes in, making the planets hotter, brighter and more magnetic, said Wilcock. This wave is pushing humanity to evolve to the next level or frequency, he added. But according to his sources, a spacecraft was secretly sent out to study the wave, and it was determined it will lead to planetary cataclysm between 2012-2017.
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POPS'Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi' cont (more at source): And this drama was at the heart of a place we now call Cahokia, ancient America's one true city north of Mexico—as large in its day as London— and the political capital of a most unusual Indian nation. At that time all the stars and planets in the Northern Hemisphere's night sky were visible above Cahokia, situated in a broad expanse of Mississippi River bottomland just east of what is now St. Louis, Missouri. Cahokia's people looked to the Morning and Evening stars for guidance and— inspired by ideas from Mesoamerica, possibly brought back from Cahokian rulers' travels or priests' vision quests— incorporated them into a religion that would displace traditions across the American Midwest, South, and Plains.
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POPSThe Incredibly Tiny Christian Universe "..astronomers estimate that hundreds of billions of galaxies exist in the universe and that each galaxy could contain hundreds of Christian-sized universes!" See? There's no "real" conflict between religion and science...is there?