READER QUESTION:My understanding is that nothing comes from nothing. For something to exist, there must be material or a component available, and for them to be available, there must be something else available. Now my question: Where did the material come from that created the Big Bang, and what happened in the first instance to create that material? Peter, 80, Australia. “The last star will slowly cool and fade away. With its passing, the universe will become once more a void, without light or life or meaning....

Surrounding Earth is a powerful magnetic field created by swirling liquid iron in the planet’s core. Earth’s magnetic field may benearly as old as the Earth itself– and stands in stark contrast to the Moon, which completely lacks a magnetic field today. But did the Moon’s core generate a magnetic field in the past? In the 1980s, geophysicists studying rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts concluded the Moononce had a magnetic fieldthat was as strong as Earth’s....

According to Business Insider, The New York Times has just laid offAbout.com‘s entire editorial staff.* This is the first drastic move that the former CFO now CEO Darline Jean has taken since starting her new position on September 1, 2011.Mediacoder reportsthat the appointment was part of a broader management shuffle at the company in which new heads for the sales and finance divisions were also named. The Times Companyfirst acquiredAbout Inc....

Numerous reputable news sites and media personalities have spent the past couple of weeksallegingthat the current year is “2022.” How can they be so sure? Here at Neural we believe in science. And the presence of evidence isn’t necessarily evidence that we’re present. That’s why we’re not willing to concede that it’s 2022 yet. What if the world really did end on 21 December 2012? The fact that you’re reading this makes it a bit hard to accept, but we think we can make a pretty strong argument....

Tomorrow, the moon will be closer to the Earth than it’s been in 18 years, a phenomenon astronomers refer to as a “Super Moon.” The giant moon will be visible “pretty much any time during the night,”saidGeza Gyuk, astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. The moon’s egg-shaped orbit means that there are times when it is at perigee- its shortest distance from Earth or at apogee- its farthest distance from Earth....