A dubious predatory academic publisher called Open Access Publishing London (OAPL) seems to have died. Their website has gone down, taking some 1,500 scientific papers with it. What can we learn from this? Long-time readers will remember my series of posts on OAPL back from when I first investigated it in 2013. As far as I can tell, it was a one-man operation. The man turned out to be a Dr. Waseem Jerjes. Jerjes is a dental surgeon with many legitimate research papers to his name, and […]

It’s natural to believe in the supernatural. Consider how many people worldwide belong to a religion: nearly 6 billion, or 84 percent of the global population, and these figures are expected to rise in the coming decades. In the U.S., surveys show 90 percent of adults believe in some higher power, spiritual force or God with a capital G. Even self-proclaimed atheists have supernatural leanings. The same study found all atheists reject God, but one-in-five accept higher powers or spiritual […]

For the second time this year, the five brightest planets in our solar system — Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars — will be visible in the night sky at the same time. The planets will form a line that rises up from the horizon in the western sky and it will be easiest to see after sunset this Thursday, October 18. However, all month these planets will be visible in the same general areas of the sky. Mercury and Venus will be most visible west and closer to the horizon, […]

This past summer, Hayabusa2 — a spacecraft, operated by the Japanese Space Agency JAXA, sent to collect and return asteroid samples — arrived at asteroid Ryugu. Today, the craft comes close to the asteroid in the first of two touchdown rehearsals. After reaching the asteroid on June 27, Hayabusa2 primarily observed Ryugu from “The Home Position,” which is a position about 65,617 feet (roughly 2,000 meters) away from the asteroid. Today, Hayabusa2 is descending to only […]

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory will soon be observing the cosmos once again, the space agency said Monday. A scare last week left the spacecraft in safe mode. Chandra is a space observatory that observes extreme objects that emit X-rays, like black holes. The problems with Chandra surfaced on October 10, just days after the iconic Hubble Space Telescope also went into safe mode due to issues with its gyroscopes, which help point the spacecraft. Together, the pair make up half of NASA's […]