When space probes like Voyager started sweeping past the outer planets like Jupiter and Saturn, they caused a sensation. What the first high-resolution images of the moons of the gas giants showed was that those satellites were a whole lot weirder than we’d ever imagined. Io turned out to
A recent BFD article reported new research suggesting that the first stars may have shone much earlier than we thought. Now we have an insight into how at least one of those first-generation stars died. Spectacularly, in a word. Most of you will be familiar with novae. These occur when
DaveOnTheWestBank The constant braying of the media about greenhouse gas emissions and how we must spend more and more taxpayers dollars to investigate ways to reduce these emissions are a major source of irritation to many of us. Everyone is on board with this twaddle as far as I can
Don Brash bassettbrashandhide.com Don Brash was Reserve Bank Governor from 1988 to 2002, and National Party Leader from 2003 to 2006 A few years ago, when I was visiting friends in Colorado, my host suggested going for a walk in the foothills of the Rockies. I readily agreed. We
Try to imagine the sky without stars. It’s almost inconceivable, yet we know it must have been true at some time. Stars today are formed when clouds of interstellar dust and gas condense under their own gravity. Eventually, the sheer force of gravity causes elements to begin to fuse
Taxpayers’ Union The Taxpayers’ Union is responding to reports that the Government has quietly changed the rules so that the Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) will now pay Maori researchers 2.5 times the rate of non-Maori, while Pasifika academics will be paid two times the non-Pasifika rate. Union spokesman
Michelle Langley Griffith University Michelle Langley is a Senior Research Fellow in the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution and Lecturer in Archaeology in the School of Environment and Science at Griffith University in Brisbane. An international group of archaeologists have discovered a missing piece in the story of human
Recently, The BFD reported how US detectives had used a genealogy website to catch a notorious serial-killer rapist who had escaped justice for decades. In the case of the Golden State Killer, detectives created a profile on GEDmatch using DNA samples, held for years, from the criminal. From there, they
It’s a sign of how far post-Marxist ideology has subsumed every aspect of the academy that even science has succumbed. Science was once, theoretically at least, about the fearless pursuit of truth. If that were ever true, it certainly isn’t any more. The assault on science is multi-pronged:
Michelle Grattan University of Canberra Michelle Grattan is one of Australia’s most respected political journalists. She has been a member of the Canberra parliamentary press gallery for more than 40 years, during which time she has covered all the most significant stories in Australian politics. Jeannette Young sounded at
The below video seems to have been missed when it came out back in April this year. Probably because it was of John Campbell slavishly fawning over our three ‘award winning scientists’ and nobody with half a brain or any shred of dignity watches Campbell anymore, or indeed, could even
Once again, the mainstream media are catching up to independents like The BFD. No, I’m not talking about the first rumblings of dissent with Jacinda Ardern (I’ll deal with that in another post): What I’m talking about is the mainstream media finally admitting the unthinkable. Unthinkable for
Dr Pierre Kory is an ICU and lung specialist who is an expert on the use of the drug ivermectin to treat COVID-19. Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist, visiting fellow at Princeton, host of the DarkHorse podcast and co-author ( with his wife Heather Heying) of the forthcoming “A Hunter-Gatherer’
NZDSOS New Zealand Doctors Speaking out with Science NZDSOS is a group of doctors, dentists and scientists who are concerned about the safety of the roll-out of the Pfizer vaccine in New Zealand and the lack of balance in the information being presented. They have written polite, insistent, and repeated
When one of the USA’s worst serial killers and rapists, who terrorised a state for decades, was finally caught, surely no one could object? But they have. Because the killer was caught using publicly available genealogy database technology. Now, not only are private companies refusing to cooperate with police,
For a while there, some scientists thought we were about to lose Betelgeuse. Betelgeuse is an easy star to find in the Southern hemisphere summer: it’s the bright red star directly below the base of the “saucepan” (Orion). It’s one of the closest red supergiant stars to Earth.
