Yesterday I indicated that NASA would be releasing the  first full-color image released from the James Webb Space Telescope .  Well, here it is: Our universe is around 13.7 billion years old.  The JWST,  launched on December 25, 2021 , will have the potential to look back perhaps 13.4 billion years.   It is six times larger and 100 times more powerful than   Hubble, sent out 32 years ago in 1990.   Here is a graphic of the same portion of the sky comparing Hub with Jim: Galaxy clusters, as seen above, are the most massive objects in the universe.  This boggles the mind, but a cluster of galaxies can consist of hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity.  The typical mass of each is 10 to the fourteenth power - 10 to the fifteenth power the mass of our sun!  Then, there are  bodies such as the  Laniakea SUPERcluster  as seen to the right.   Laniakea is Hawaiian for  immense heaven .  Remember that asteroid that recently zoomed through our solar system?   Oumuamua  was d

Today, I'll just borrow from traditional sources.  From the  New York Times : Russia’s Victory Day, celebrating the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany, is May 9. Western officials   worry Vladimir Putin may exploit it to intensify attacks .   (May 9 is this coming Monday.) Trying to tame inflation, the Fed approved its   biggest interest rate increase since 2000 . Tucker, Thiel, Trump: How J.D. Vance   won Ohio’s Republican Senate primary . About Vance's victory, many think, aha, Trump is still very influential, and will make a huge difference in the upcoming November mid-term elections.   Nope, what will happen is that a small percentage of Republicans will be so negatively effected by this Trump-effect that they will skip voting, and a small percentage of Independents will vote for the Democratic opponent.   This differential will in several elections only favor the Democrat.   I suspect Democrats will end up after the 2022 general election with greater than their  current majo

Yesterday I announced my intent to spend future Tuesdays featuring the best of my 14 years of posting this blog.  As Wednesday is my sci-tech day, I will provide a similar alert indicating what science topics I will focus on over next few days and weeks: What is a star?  Part 2 will feature dwarf stars, which are relatively small, and rest somewhere between stars and large planets, from a fascinating  Scientific American  article. Chemistry's quantum future.  Many products developed by industry were pure accidents, like teflon.  Chemistry is nearing a phase of being able to bypass this thing called serendipity. A possible solution to global warming:  the answer might be within our mantle, as seen in a remote desert of Oman. Virus scoreboard:  what can we expect in the future. A new understanding of Alzheimer's:  is microglia the real target? While only 1% of us stutter, as I once did, we getting closer to better understanding and curing this problem. Are hypersonic weapons over