25 years of the Twin Towers catastrophe

 

Atheists do not like this cross-shaped object. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Joel Kontinen

I write this after the catastrophe of 2001:

"A group of American atheists are attempting to stop the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York from displaying a cross-shaped beam.

They see it as a religious symbol and as they are intolerant of all other ideologies except their own godless one, they are resorting to a lawsuit to get the offending beam from disturbing their peace of mind.

The beam was found by Frank Silecchia, who took part in clearing the rubble after 9/11, and it has been a symbol of hope.

However, atheists do not see the cross as a sign of hope. For them, it is foolishness – just like the apostle Paul wrote:

“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.”

It’s an entirely different story for us:

“But to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18, NIV)."

Source:

Merica, Dan. 2012. Atheists continue battle against World Trade Center cross at memorial. CNN. (September 10th).

NASA’s next major telescope might see alien oceans and rainbows

 

Image courtesy of Aaron Alien/Shutterstock

Joel Kontinen

A NASA telescope in early development should be able to detect light bouncing off the surface of oceans on alien planets, vital information in the hunt for alien life.

The Habitable Worlds Observatory is currently earmarked for launch in the 2040s. It will sport an advanced coronagraph, a device that can block out much of the light emanating from other stars. This will allow us to take images of potentially habitable Earth-like wsorlds outside our solar system for the first time.

Some researchers think that in the 2040 we will see oceans and rainbows on habitable exoplanets.

Source: 

Jonathan O’Callaghans 2026 NASA’s next major telescope might see alien oceans and rainbows | New Scientist 9 September

Pygmy raccoons teach each other to make toys out of paper and sand

 

Image cour.tesy of Nessie O'Neil

Joel Kontinen

Young pygmy raccoons on a Mexican island have been seen teaching each other to make toy balls out of rubbish, in a rare example of animals crafting objects purely to play with.

“My first reaction was, oh my gosh, that’s absolutely adorable!” says Nessie O’Neil at Miami University in Ohio, who is researching the impact of tourism on the critically endangered pygmy raccoons (Procyon pygmaeus) of Cozumel Island.

O’Neil filmed as one of the younger raccoons fished paper out of a rubbish bin, dipped it in a bowl of water and rolled it in sand, making a ball.

Over days of observation, she recorded the animals as they made more balls and used them to play “football” with other raccoons and dwarf coatis (Nasua narica nelsoni), another raccoon-like animal. Siblings taught each other the ball-making procedure, and even tried to get their mother involved, though she couldn’t quite figure it out – her coordination seemed to have been impaired after drinking a margarita she found at a beach bar earlier that day.

“The observations show how complex animal play behaviour can be,” says Marek Špinka at the Institute of Animal Science in the Czech Republic. “It will be intriguing to see whether the behaviour will get a hold in the population as a new cultural trait or will disappear.”

Some animals like to show off their intelligence, like the tiny racoons in México. They did not want to eat them but to play with them.

Source:

Matt von Hippel 2026 Pygmy raccoons teach each other to make toys out of paper and sand | New Scientist 3 September

 

Pacific Island Nation opens embassy in Jerusalem

 

Image courtesy of Instagram

Joel Kontinen

The Pacific nation of Naoero (formerly known as Nauru) opened an embassy in Jerusalem on Monday, becoming the ninth country to locate its diplomatic mission in Israel’s capital.

Linking the Pacific nation’s reclaimed indigenous name to Jewish history, Sa’ar added that “we, too, are the indigenous people of this land” and that “Jews are called Jews because we are from Judea.”

“Our support for Israel has been unwavering,” said Naoero’s Foreign Minister Lionel Aingimea. “Naoero is historically one of Israel’s most reliable and consistent diplomatic allies at the United Nations.”

The island nation is one of the smallest countries in the world, with a population of about 12,000 people.

Nine countries now have embassies in Israel’s capital: the United States, Fiji, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, Naoero, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay and Somaliland.

Source:

Etgar Lefkovitz, 2026 Pacific Island Nation Opens Embassy in Jerusalem | United with Israel 7 September

‘Not-quite-primordial’ black holes may explain baffling JWST discovery

 

Image courtesy of NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and D. Kocevski (Colby U.)/Space Telescope Science Institute Office of Public Outreach

Joel Kontinen

Some evolutionists believe that there  were some black holes before the creation of the world, This probably occurred before the big bang that started it all.

There may have been black holes in the early universe before the first stars, and a group of theoretical physicists has proposed a new way to explain how they could have formed using the heat of the cosmic microwave background. The idea may be a better explanation for the “little red dots” identified by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) – distant galaxies that seem to host surprisingly large numbers of astonishingly ancient black holes.

 Source: 

 Matt von Hippel 2026 'Not-quite primordial' black holes may explain baffling JWST discovery | New Scientist 3 September

 

Venus may have had a moon for nearly "2 billion years"

 

Image courtesy of NASA imiages/Shutterstock

Joel Kontinen

Darwinian fables are interesting, as there is no proof of them being true. As with Venus having a moon many billions of years ago.    

Venus has no moon, but a modelling study suggests it probably did have one for "nearly 2 billion years" – before the planet ate it. Understanding this could help us learn about Venus’s previous habitability.

Many large objects probably hit Venus in the early solar system, which could have formed a moon, similar to the giant impact that is thought to have formed Earth’s moon. “There’s a very good chance that Venus did have a moon-forming impact,” says Stephen Kane at the University of California, Riverside..

 Kane and his colleagues modelled what would have happened if Venus did have a moon, and found that in almost all scenarios, it would have been consumed by the planet,.

Venus rotates quite strangely with respect to the sun, completing a rotation once every 243 days, compared with its orbit of 225 days. This is possibly a result of its thick atmosphere slowing its spin.

In contrast, Earth’s much faster spin transfers angular momentum to our moon, meaning it is moving away a few centimetres each year. For Venus, the opposite would have been true. “The moon is transferring angular momentum inward instead of outward,” says Kane. “It causes the moon’s orbit to catastrophically collapse.”

The researchers found that at the upper limit of their models, a moon about half the mass of our own could have survived around Venus for 1.7 billion years. At twice the mass of our moon, it would have survived just 30 million years, because of the stronger tidal effect.

Paul Byrne at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, says the model is interesting but hard to prove. “It’s exceedingly hard to test this idea because there is basically nothing left behind.” This is because Venus’s surface has been repeatedly resurfaced by volcanism, he says.

In Genesis, God created the Earth and its moon without any evolution.

Source:

Jonathan O’Callaghan 2026 Venus may have had a moon for nearly 2 billion years | New Scientist 2 September 

The first signs of dark matter particles may finally have been spotted

 Inside the LUX-ZEPLIN detector. Image courtesy of Matthew Kapust/Sanford Underground Research Laboratory

Joel Kontinen

Most of the matter in the universe is dark matter, but for decades physicists haven’t been able to directly observe it – that may have just changed.

Some researchers think that dark matter does not exist.  Some think that it does.

Researchers may have spotted the first signs of a dark matter particle. If the result is confirmed, it could be one of the most monumental discoveries in the history of physics.

Dark matter makes up about 85 per cent of the universe, but for decades physicists have been unable to determine what it itself is made of. Hypotheses have ranged from different sorts of particles and forces to strangely-behaving gravity and everything in between – but the leading idea has always been that of the weakly-interacting massive particle, or WIMP. As we have built more and more powerful detectors to search for WIMPs, though, their failure to show up has led many to doubt their existence and move on to more exotic ideas.

Source:

Leah Crane 2026 The first signs of dark matter particles may finally have been spotted | New Scientist 1 September