It’s been raining for a few weeks nightly here, but I did catch it before then.
Ya well this Pluto article has text!!! From the BBC New Horizons: Spacecraft survives Pluto encounter
Not sure where to post this, but I think it belongs here: the surface of Pluto.
The image, as cool as it is, seems to suffer quite a bit from the compression. I am looking forward to the high resolution images over the next 14 months… 
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Earth-like planet discovered by Kepler telescope
Aurora found around brown dwarf beyond our Solar System
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Large Hadron Collider discovers new pentaquark particle
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33517492
They don’t claim to know what it is. 6:19 long. It’s good for beginners, like me.
“What is Dark Matter and Dark Energy?” There title.
Martian salt streaks ‘painted by liquid water’
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Anyone else familiar with the theory of ‘Subquantum Kinetics’ by Dr. LaViolette? If not, I’d be happy to give a quick discourse on it. I’m particularly familiar with the theory as I’ve been running simulations based on it for a few years now. Might even seek publication on a couple modifications to the theory (while a unified physics theory, it has its roots in nonlinear chemical reactions, so the work I’m doing can apply to both fields).
I’m vaguely familiar with him now that you’ve brought him up. It’s all interesting stuff and in my gut I prefer it over mainstream astrophysics, but I’m fine waiting for him to go a bit more mainstream before spending any time in serious contemplation of his theories.
Working on it 
But in the meantime, for those unfamiliar with the theory, here’s a link to some of the a priori predictions it’s made (i.e. predictions countering the prevailing belief which were later vindicated):
http://starburstfound.org/predictions-part-2/
The top two on that page, reproduced below, are some of my favorite. The first, because it has some of the most affirming proof, the experiment having been repeated many times now. And the second, because it completely upsets (and fixes) modern astrophysics:
Translation: The universe aint expanding, folks. Light ‘decays’ as it travels over vast distances, so light coming from more distant sources has lost more energy and thus appears red-shifted. You know Edwin Hubble - yes, that Hubble - ? Well, he coined this theory in the first place (the ‘Tired Light’ theory), and continued supporting it until his very end. Tired light beats out Expanding (accelerating) universe theory (including one with MOND included) on every single analysis of the data. Plus, it removes the need for “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy” as ad-hoc patches on the standard model presently needed to explain why things look the way they are. KISS.
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Being dark matter effects has been shown, what are you (they) countering it with?
Dark matter is an ad-hoc assumption to fix the standard theory and make it agree with actual observations. This began when radio telescope measurements of a rare emission line in massive hydrogen clouds indicated a red-shift. The interpretation at the time was that the galaxy was rotating far faster than expected, and that at current mass estimates it should have spun itself apart a long time ago. Thus dark matter was postulated to account for the other 95% of the ‘missing mass’.
The problem is, we don’t see Dark Matter anywhere, and so it was simply a postulate (it still is a postulate) until a better answer could be found. People have been straining to ‘demonstrate’ dark matter since then, and all attempts have been questionable at best.
The standard model assumes that any red or blue shift is the result of a doppler effect, in other words the result of motion towards (blue) or away (red) from the observer, at very high speeds. We see a red-shift just about everywhere in the universe, and the further out we look, the more red it becomes. Hence, the assumption that this shift is caused only by a velocity differences lead to the assumption that the entire universe is expanding, quite fast. Not just expanding, but SPEEDING UP its expansion every second (which is where ‘Dark Energy’ comes in - the ‘missing term’ needed as a mechanism to explain the force behind this acceleration). This is because the standard model expects EM waves to propagate infinitely in all directions forever without ever losing a drop of energy through any form of loss. Instead, if propagating EM waves CAN indeed lose energy, the cosmological red-shift is to be expected.
According to SQK, blue shift occurs in the same manner as red-shift: intergalactic space is not perfectly uniform, and in fact the presence of large amounts of matter create either an abundance of a specific subatomic particle - the “G etheron” (the model requires 5 subatomic particles to yield a unified theory… as opposed to the 30+ particles required by the standard model to yield a disjointed theory that is decided not scale invariant). According to the 5 equations which underlie the entire theory and create the reaction-diffusion medium giving rise to physical structure, the rate of production of X etherons (analogous to the electric field) is directly proportional to the concentration of G. Thus the ‘chemical reaction’ that produces propogating electromagnetic waves literally speeds up (observed as a blue-shift) in a super-critical region of space (lots of mass / lots of G etherons), and conversely slows down (red-shifts) in a sparse region (typically intergalactic regions of space). This is also very consistent with observations of the ‘large scale structure’ (you’ve probably seen those pictures of simulations of the universe on a massive scale looking like a ‘foam’ with ‘channels and pockets’, etc), which no other theory to date can do.
Not familiar with that word but a very good job of explaining the theory. I have read a few paragraphs about it in a 3ed or 4th rate science rag. This is the 2ed time I herd it mentioned.
Etherons- simply the word for the ‘smallest particles’ in this model. Think gluon, meson, pion, electron, proton, etc, but change the prefix to “Ether” and you get Etheron. Basically it’s envisioned that at the tiniest levels there is an ever-present medium - the Subquantum Reaction-Diffusion Ether - comprised of 5 species of etheron (kind of like different chemicals). These species are constantly diffusing according to concentration gradients (the way food coloring diffuses when dropped in a glass of water), and also reacting with each other according to a set of just 5 chemical reaction equations. The rate of the reactions tend to depend on how high the concentration of one species is over another.
The neat thing about these specific reaction equations is that they form self-stabilizing, oscillating wave patterns. They are an example of (originally inspired by) a Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction. Here’s a video of one of these equations hapenning in a petri dish.
These waves are formed purely by the chemical reactions. SQK postulates that the larger particles we see, such as a proton, are actually made up of these waveforms at their very core - the reaction wavelength bring akin to the particle’s Compton wavelength. So a particle is more like a ‘pattern’ in the Ether, constantly fluxing, constantly self-rejuvinating, and interacting with each other always and only according to the simple mechanics of diffusion and 5 etheric reactions. From such a simple foundation, the complexity of all four fundamental forces arises naturally, and unified across all scales from quantum to cosmic.
Questions:
Primordial H/He abundances?
CMB? And CMB homogeneity?
CMB’s black body curve?
Coma cluster?
Gravitational lensing? And more importantly, lensing out of proportion with visible regular matter measurements/calculations?
Type Ia SN luminosities at large Z?
I know what those words are at least. (I know what hydrogen and helium are but not what is meant in that sentence)
I’ll save the train thing for later.
Strange, I didn’t get any notification of replies to this thread. Anyway, just saw your response. Off the top of my head SQK addresses most of these. I know for a fact it addresses H/He abubdance in the early universe. I’m at work right now but will start compiling a list of explanations.