Space, as Douglas Adams once so aptly wrote, is big. To try imagining
how big, place a penny down in front of you. If our sun were the size
of that penny, the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would be 350 miles
away. Depending on where you live, that’s very likely in the next state
(or possibly country) over.
Attempting to imagine distances larger than this quickly becomes
troublesome. At this scale, the Milky Way galaxy would be 7.5 million
miles
The secret of looking up to 40 years younger is a chemical that rewinds the effects of old age and can make you look 20 again. Harvard Medical School made the discovery that a protein found in all living cells called NAD, could be the key
They are also exploring whether it can be used to treat rare diseases. It could be possible one day, as scientists claim to have found the secret to eternal youth.
Experts believe they may be able to turn back the clock as much as 40 years after identifying a natural compound proven to rewind the effects of old age in mice. A protein found in all living cells - NAD, could be the key to slowing down the aging process. Tests on two-year-old mice who had been given the NAD-producing compound for just one week had body tissue which resembled that of a six-month old. In human years, this would be like a 60-year-old converting to a 20-year-old in these specific areas. The compound works by restoring communication between energy cells within the body which have broken down as we get older. The aging process is like a married couple - when they are young, they communicate well, but over time, living in close quarters for many years, communication breaks down. And just like with a couple, restoring communication solved the problem.
If these results stand, then many aspects of ageing may be reversible if caught early. Researchers are now looking at the longer-term outcomes of the NAD-producing compound in mice and how it affects the mouse as a whole.
They are also exploring whether the compound can be used to safely treat rare diseases or more common diseases such as Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes.
Is climate change making Earth expand? Melting ice sheets are altering the shape of our planet Researchers at Newcastle University studied the motion of Earth's crust and found it was moving much faster than thought in Antarctica. The movement may be caused by climate change. As the heavy ice above melts, Earth's mantle moves more easily. Growth has happened in just decades but should have taken much longer. Antarctica is a motionless and frozen landscape. Yet hundreds of miles down the Earth is moving at a rapid rate. The study explains why the motion of the Earth's crust in the Northern Antarctic Peninsula is currently taking place so quickly. Researchers have revealed rapid growth of Earth's crust in Antarctica. The reason for the growth is the lightening load above as ice on the surface melts, which allows the mantle to move upwards more quickly
Previous studies have shown Earth is 'rebounding' due to the overlying ice sheet shrinking in response to climate change. This movement of the land was understood to be due to an instantaneous, elastic response followed by a very slow uplift over thousands of years. The theory that Earth is growing suggests that the movement of the continents is caused by our planet getting bigger. There are three different forms of the theory; the first is that the mass of the planet has stayed the same as the planet grows, so gravity has decreased. The others suggest Earth has grown in accordance with mass to keep gravity constant. The final theory suggests gravity has increased as the mass has grown ever more. In 1888 Russian engineer Yarkovsky said this added mass could come from space. GPS data has revealed that the land in this region is rising at a phenomenal rate of 0.6 inches a year – much greater than can be accounted for by elastic response alone. Also the mantle below the Antarctic Peninsula is flowing much faster than expected, pdue to subtle changes in temperature or chemical composition. This means it can flow more easily and so responds much more quickly to the lightening load hundreds of miles above it, changing the shape of the land.
Since 1995 several ice shelves in the Northern Antarctic Peninsula have collapsed and triggered ice-mass unloading, causing the solid Earth to 'bounce back'.
The ice is pressing down and the crust bounces back. Collating data from GPS stations across the Northern Peninsula, the team found the rebound was so fast that the upper mantle viscosity had to be at least ten times lower than previously thought for the region and much lower than the rest of Antarctica.
אמר לה הקב"ה בתי י"ב מזלות בראתי ברקיע ועל כל מזל ומזל בראתי לו שלשים חיל ועל כל חיל וחיל בראתי לו שלשים לגיון ועל כל לגיון ולגיון בראתי לו שלשים רהטון ועל כל רהטון ורהטון בראתי לו שלשים קרטון ועל כל קרטון וקרטון בראתי לו שלשים גסטרא ועל כל גסטרא וגסטרא תליתי בו שלש מאות וששים וחמשה אלפי רבוא כוכבים כנגד ימות החמה וכולן לא בראתי אלא בשבילך
Babylonian Talmud, Brachot 32b
My daughter, twelve constellations have I created in the firmament, and for each constellation I have created thirty hosts, and for each host I have created thirty legions, and for each legion I have created thirty cohorts, and for each cohort I have created thirty maniples, and for each maniple I have created thirty camps, and to each campI have attached three hundred and sixty-five thousands of myriads of stars, corresponding to the days of the solar year, and all of them I have created only for thy sake...
Multiplying these numbers gives a value of about 1 x 1018 for the number of stars in the quote above.
The late Carl Sagan is known for his famous "billions and billions" quote and there are probably more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable Universe. If you multiply the number of stars in our galaxy by the number of galaxies in the Universe, you get approximately 1024 stars. That’s a septillion stars. Of course no knows for sure, still the Chazal's quoted number of 1 x 1018 looks very reasonable.
It’s been calculated that the observable Universe is a bubble of space 47 billion years in all directions. It defines the amount of the Universe that can be seen, because that’s how long light has taken to reach us since the Big Bang. This is a minimum value, the Universe could be much bigger. It’s even possible that the Universe is infinite, stretching on forever, with an infinite amount of stars. So add a couple more zeros. Maybe an infinite number of zeroes.
The Mishnah (Uktzin 3:12 - the concluding mishnah of Shas) states that "in the future Hashem will cause each tzaddik to inherit 310 worlds." These are understood to be spiritual realms (R. Shmuel of Lubavitch, Maamar Shabchi Yerushalayim 5627); but since the physical is an outgrowth of the spiritual, it may well be that there is actual physical "real estate" involved, from which they can derive benefit. (Even nowadays the idea is sometimes floated to extract natural resources from the moon, asteroids, etc.)
So those trillions of galaxies, etc., may simply be waiting for their rightful claimants!
Darwin's evolution removed the need for a god to have designed all living things. A century of brilliant scientists cracked the mysteries of physics, cured feared diseases and explained inheritance through DNA. Science was on a roll and, to atheists, must have seemed to be on the verge of finishing off religious belief.
By the 1950s, life was about to be made in a test tube, artificial intelligence in computers was around the corner, and the mind would be fully accounted for by behaviorist psychology and brain chemistry.
Then the going got tough for the atheists. While the amount of successful science done increased enormously, the spectacular breakthroughs of the previous century dried up. Especially in the areas that were supposed to make the world uninhabitable for religious belief or for any non-materialist view. The process of making life from nonlife, believed to have happened by chance at the beginning of history, could not be replicated in the lab even in the most favorable conditions.
Artificial intelligence has remained
rudimentary; its signature success—
victory over the world chess champion in 1997—was mostly a demonstration of human intelligence. The Deep Blue played chess by searching hundreds of millions of moves a second, assisted by rules cloned from human experts. It could not think like a human. The programmers' inability to make computers imitate understanding exploded our simplistic views of the mind.
Worse, physics unexpectedly created trouble. (Physics? Et tu, Brute?) Physics is the science of matter itself, the foundation of all the other natural sciences.
In the 1960s and 1970s, it became clear that the universe was very "fine-tuned" for the existence of life. If the basic constants, like the strength of gravity, had been very slightly different, the universe would be unable to support life. The fine-tuning is very, very fine: for the strength of gravity, perhaps one part in 10 to the 40th. For those who prefer no Divine Engineer tuning the dials, the alternatives are unpalatable. The most natural are multiverse theories where all possible universes exist simultaneously and we simply find ourselves in the one that makes our existence possible.
This is not out of the question, but there is no actual evidence. It is just an "atheism of the gaps," calling imaginary entities plug a theoretical hole. The postulation probably involves gods, too—maybe not the omnipotent creator but surely some unlikely combination of quantum fluctuations could produce Zeus and his colorful activities? Zeus is just a very big superman up on Olympus and thus something that physics could manage to account for. The other possibility is to hope that there is some unknown mathematical reason why the constants are locked in as they are—again, a possibility, but one for which there is currently no other evidence.
In "Why Science Does Not Disprove God," the mathematician Amir D. Aczel runs through these issues. He writes on a range of scientific topics, most strongly on physics. He rightly calls to account physicists who claim to show that the universe can arise "from nothing" but who have a subtle technical meaning of "nothing" related to Paul Dirac's prediction of antimatter and not at all to the zilch of the common man. He covers such matters as "why archaeology does not disprove the Bible" (it shows that the cities of the Bible existed) and the difficulties that evolution has explaining the emergence of symbolic thought and art (the birth of consciousness and its
effects is a phenomenon that happened at some time in prehistory, and science has almost nothing to say about it).
The book will be satisfactory as a reliable introduction for those who know nothing about the subject. There are others by serious philosophers: "There Is a God" by Antony Flew; Ronald Dworkin's "Religion Without God"; and Thomas Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos." They reach similar conclusions. But the days of triumphalist scientism are over.
Experts believe they may be able to turn back the clock as much as 40 years after identifying a natural compound proven to rewind the effects of old age in mice. A protein found in all living cells - NAD, could be the key to slowing down the aging process. Tests on two-year-old mice who had been given the NAD-producing compound for just one week had body tissue which resembled that of a six-month old. In human years, this would be like a 60-year-old converting to a 20-year-old in these specific areas. The compound works by restoring communication between energy cells within the body which have broken down as we get older. The aging process is like a married couple - when they are young, they communicate well, but over time, living in close quarters for many years, communication breaks down. And just like with a couple, restoring communication solved the problem. 
אמר לה הקב"ה בתי י"ב מזלות בראתי ברקיע ועל כל מזל ומזל בראתי לו שלשים חיל ועל כל חיל וחיל בראתי לו שלשים לגיון ועל כל לגיון ולגיון בראתי לו שלשים רהטון ועל כל רהטון ורהטון בראתי לו שלשים קרטון ועל כל קרטון וקרטון בראתי לו שלשים גסטרא ועל כל גסטרא וגסטרא תליתי בו שלש מאות וששים וחמשה אלפי רבוא כוכבים כנגד ימות החמה וכולן לא בראתי אלא בשבילך