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Taylor Swift's 'Love Story' includes fans, friends and US women’s soccer team

Taylor Swift did not fail to impress Friday night in East Rutherford, NJ, as she performed for a sold out crowd of 60,000 at the Met Life Stadium.  

Swift made it clear from the beginning of the show, that it was all about the fans. You could tell from the energy of the crowd of “swifties” (the self given name of her loyal fans), that the feeling was mutual. Swift clearly adores her fans, and they her, but last night was about more than that -- it was about the music of it all. 

Swift spoke after most of her songs about how music was the catalyst to her developing a strong sense of self-worth and understanding for the world around her, and credited the art to who she is today. That is clear if you’ve ever heard one of her songs or seen one of her shows. 

This show was “unlike any other that will ever be” said Swift, and she was right. Swift kept surprising fans left and right throughout the night, starting with bringing out Abel Tesfaye of “The Weeknd” to perform his hit song “Can’t Feel My Face.” 

Swift then brought out supermodel Heidi Klum and the US women’s soccer team during “Style.” The entire team danced, walked, and sang along to the lyrics on stage, and waved 2 large American flags and even let Swift hold their new FIFA World Cup trophy. 

Swift then celebrated her best friends by inviting 4 of them onto the stage (Lena Dunham, Lily Aldridge, Hailee Steinfeld and Gigi Hadid) during “Bad Blood” and had a major girl power moment as they walked the catwalk together. The entire night felt like a big hug from Swift to her friends and fans.  

Swift performed a total of 18 songs (list below), and had 3 opening acts: Shawn Mendes, Vance Joy, and HAIM. 

Taylor Swift Set List (in performance order):

Welcome to New York

New Romantics

Blank Space

I Knew You Were Trouble

I Wish You Would

How You Get The Girl

I Know Places

All You Had To Do Was Stay

You Are In Love

Clean

Love Story

Style

This Love

Bad Blood

We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together

Enchanted/Wildest Dreams Mashup

Out Of The Woods

Shake It Off

It's showtime for Pluto; prepare to be amazed by NASA flyby

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. –  Pluto, reveal thyself, and Earthlings, enjoy the show.

On Tuesday, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will sweep past Pluto and present the previously unexplored world in all its icy glory.

It promises to be the biggest planetary unveiling in a quarter-century. The curtain hasn't been pulled back like this since NASA's Voyager 2 shed light on Neptune in 1989.

Now it's little Pluto's turn to shine way out on the frigid fringes of our solar system.

New Horizons has traveled 3 billion miles over 9½ years to get to this historic point. The fastest spacecraft ever launched, it carries the most powerful suite of science instruments ever sent on a scouting and reconnaissance mission of a new, unfamiliar world.

Guarantees principal scientist Alan Stern, "We're going to knock your socks off."

The size of a baby grand piano, the spacecraft will come closest to Pluto on Tuesday morning — at 7:49 a.m. EDT. That's when New Horizons is predicted to pass within 7,767 miles of Pluto. Fourteen minutes later, the spacecraft will zoom within 17,931 miles of Charon, Pluto's jumbo moon.

For the plutophiles among us, it will be cause to celebrate, especially for those gathered at the operations center at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. The lab designed and built the spacecraft for NASA, and has been managing its roundabout route through the solar system.

"What NASA's doing with New Horizons is uprecedented in our time and probably something close to the last train to Clarksville, the last picture show, for a very, very long time," says Stern, a planetary scientist with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

It is the last stop in NASA's quest to explore every planet in our solar system, starting with Venus in 1962. And in a cosmic coincidence, the Pluto visit falls on the 50th anniversary of the first-ever flyby of Mars, by Mariner 4.

Yes, we all know Pluto is no longer an official planet, merely a dwarf, but it still enjoyed full planet status when New Horizons rocketed from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Jan. 19, 2006. Pluto's demotion came just seven months later, a sore subject still for many.

"We're kind of running the anchor leg with Pluto to finish the relay," Stern says.

The sneak peeks of Pluto in recent weeks are getting "juicier and juicier," says Johns Hopkins project scientist Hal Weaver. "The science team is just drooling over these pictures."

The Hubble Space Telescope previously captured the best pictures of Pluto. If the pixelated blobs of pictures had been of Earth, though, not even the continents would have been visible.

The New Horizons team is turning "a point of light into a planet," Stern says.

An image released last week shows a copper-colored Pluto bearing, a large, bright spot in the shape of a heart.

Scientists expect image resolution to improve dramatically by Tuesday. The 7,767-mile span at closest approach is about the distance between Seattle and Sydney.

New Horizons, weighing less than 1,000 pounds including fuel, has seven instruments that will be going full force during the encounter. It's expected to collect 5,000 times as much data, for instance, as Mariner 4.

"We're going to rewrite the book," Weaver says. "This is it — this is our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see it."

The team gets one crack at this.

"We're trying to hit a very small box, relatively speaking," says Mark Holdridge, the encounter mission manager. "It's 60 by 90 miles, and we're going 30,000 mph, and we're trying to hit that box within a plus or minus 100 seconds."

The only planet in our solar system discovered by an American, Pluto actually is a mini solar system unto itself. Pluto — just two-thirds the size of our own moon — has big moon Charon that's just over half its size, as well as baby moons Styx, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx. The names are associated with the underworld in which the mythological god, Pluto, reigned. New Horizons will observe each known moon and keep a lookout for more.

Scientists involved in the $700 million effort want to get a good look at Pluto and Charon, and get a handle on their surfaces and chemical composition. They also plan to measure the temperature and pressure in Pluto's nitrogen-rich atmosphere and determine how much gas is escaping into space. Temperatures can plunge to nearly minus-400 degrees.

Bill McKinnon, a New Horizons team member from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, expects to see craters and possible volcanic remnants. A liquid ocean and a rocky core may lie beneath the icy shell.

"Anybody who thinks that when we go to Pluto, we're going to find cold, dead ice balls is in for a rude shock," McKinnon says. "I'm really hoping to see a very active and dynamic world."

Pluto has tantalized astronomers since its 1930 discovery by Clyde Tombaugh using the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Some of Tombaugh's ashes are aboard New Horizons. His two children, now in their 70s, plan to be at Johns Hopkins for the encounter.

With its tilted, elongated 248-year orbit, Pluto has made it only a third of the way around the sun since its discovery. The amount of sunlight that reaches Pluto is so dim that at high noon it looks like twilight here on Earth. The massive surrounding Kuiper Belt, in fact, is called the Twilight Zone. The New Horizons team has its eyes on a few much smaller objects in the Kuiper Belt, and is hoping for a mission extension as the spacecraft continues toward the solar system exit on the heels of NASA's Voyagers 1 and 2 and Pioneers 10 and 11.

For now, signals take 4½ hours to travel one-way between New Horizons and flight controllers in Maryland.

Earth is losing its bumblebees

Climate change is causing wild bumblebees to disappear from large swaths of their historical range, which could spell disaster for pollinating crops in Europe and North America, new research suggests.

As global temperatures have risen, bumblebees have disappeared from the warmest regions they occupy, but have not spread northward to take advantage of new habitat, the study finds.

"They just aren't colonizing new areas to track rapid, human-caused climate change," study co-author Jeremy Kerr, a biologist at the University of Ottawa, said at a news conference. [See Images of Amazing Bumblebees]

Superstar pollinators

Honeybees have made headlines in recent years because their numbers are plummeting in a mysterious process called colony collapse disorder. Scientists have proposed a range of contributing factors, from overuse of neonicotinoid pesticides that disorient the buzzing insects to the rise of bee parasites.

But bumblebees are the real superstars of the pollinating world. Unlike almost every other bee species, bumblebees are out in the fields, sipping nectar and pollinating plants from spring to late fall, said study co-author Laurence Packer, a biologist at York University in Toronto.

Most other bee species pollinate just a handful of plants. What's more, bumblebees have unique moves, such as the ability to "buzz pollinate" tricky flowers like tomatoes, said study co-author Alana Pindar, a biologist at the University of Ottawa.

Bumblebees are of great economic importance, with studies putting their fruit and flower pollinating worth at $3 billion a year.

Sharp decline

Kerr and his colleagues looked at historical records of the habitat ranges for 67 bumblebee populations in Europe and North America between 1901 and 1974, when climate warming was negligible, and between 1974 and 2010, when climate change accelerated. On its southern edge, the bees' range has shrunk 186 miles, or about 5.6 miles every year, Kerr said.

Yet despite warming in northern latitudes, bumblebees haven't figured out a way to take advantage of the now less-frigid northern climes. The study, which was published July 9 in the journal Science, did not show any correlation between land-use practices or pesticide use and bumblebee populations.

Bees are dying out in the southern end of their range because of the rise of extreme heat waves.

"If you imagine a car that starts running out of coolant and starts blowing steam out of the front of the hood, that's kind of like an analogy for what bumblebees do when it gets too hot," Kerr said.

But it's not clear why they haven't flown north to make up lost ground. Many stars need to align, from just the right flowers to the right winter shelter, for queens to produce new bees for the next season; so perhaps they simply can't reproduce fast enough for new colonies to take root, said study co-author, Sheila Coila from Wildlife Preservation Canada.

Ancient exoplanets raise prospects of intelligent alien life

Can life survive for billions of years longer than the expected timeline on Earth? 

As scientists discover older and older solar systems, it's likely that before long we'll find an ancient planet in the habitable zone. Knowing if life is possible on this exoplanet would have immense implications for habitability and the development of ancient life, one researcher says.

In January, a group led by Tiago Campante — an astroseismology or "starquake" researcher at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom — announced the discovery of five tiny, likely rocky worlds close to an ancient star. The star is named Kepler-444 after NASA's planet-hunting Kepler mission, which first made a tentative discovery. [10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life ]

Campante's contribution was narrowing down the age of Kepler-444 and its planets to an astounding 11.2 billion years old. That's nearly 2.5 times as old as our solar system. None of Kepler-444's planets are thought to be habitable, as they circle the star at a scorchingly close distance. However, Campante said that finding those planets is a great stride forward in the search for older, habitable worlds, and the best may be yet to come.

"This system gives us hope that there are other habitable worlds that we can’t detect because we don’t have enough observing timespan yet," Campante said. 

Upcoming observatories could change that, he added. Whether life can live for billions of years, however, is pure speculation. 

"If intelligent life develops in a system as old as this one, would it still exist or would they extinguish themselves?" Campante asked. 

Results from Campante's paper were published in January in The Astrophysical Journal, in a paper entitled, "An Ancient Extrasolar System with Five Sub-Earth-Size Planets."

 Surprise composition

The researchers observed Kepler-444 with the W.M. Keck telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii to learn more about its chemical composition.

The star is deficient in iron but is rich in what are called "alpha elements," such as silicon, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. These elements were all formed in the first stellar explosions of our universe, when older stars ran out of fuel to burn and spread these elements far and wide. These elements make the composition of the star's orbiting planets a bit of a surprise, Campante said. 

Normally, scientists expect that "terrestrial" planets — rocky ones such as Mercury, Venus or Earth —  have lots of iron in their interiors. This discovery shows it's also possible to create planets that are primarily made of alpha elements, he said. This means that rocky planets may be able to form in multiple ways, making them more common across the universe.

The Kepler-444 system is not much like ours, though. Kepler-444 is slightly smaller than our sun, and its planets orbit extremely close in. The habitable zone in this system starts around 0.4 astronomical units (AU), or Earth-sun distances. Yet the outermost planet huddles at only 0.08 AU. That's roughly five times closer than Mercury is to our own sun.

Widening the search

Mystery solved: Why large dinosaurs avoided the tropics for millions of years

New research has revealed why it took more than 30 million years for large Triassic dinosaurs to populate the tropics after they first appeared on Earth, ending a mystery that has kept researchers baffled for decades. Using new geological evidence culled from Ghost Ranch, N.M., researchers from the University of Southampton in the U.K. have found that an extremely unpredictable hot and arid climate due to elevated carbon dioxide levels (four to six times of what they are today) kept large herbivorous dinos at bay until after 200 million years ago.

“For several decades, researchers have noticed a curious case: large plant eating dinosaurs seemed to be much more common at high latitudes during the Triassic,” Jessica Whiteside of the University’s National Oceanography Centre in Southampton told FoxNews.com. “However, it has only been in the past decade that we’ve realized they’re completely missing from the tropics, where only a few small carnivorous dinosaurs dwelled.”

According to Whiteside, researchers had suspected that climate had played a role, though no one had developed a detailed environmental record from the same sediments that also preserved extensive fossil vertebrate records (including small dinosaurs) – until now.  “Our major finding is that wild swings in climate and extremes of drought and intense heat have implications for survivability of Triassic vertebrates, including early dinosaurs.”

These “wild swings in climate” included raging wildfires that would sweep the dry landscape and continually reshape the vegetation that large plant-eating dinosaurs like Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus, and Brontosaurus would have fed on. These fires occurred every few dozen years and would reach temperatures up to 1112 degrees Fahrenheit. While these conditions suited smaller carnivorous dinosaurs such as Coelophysis just fine, the larger plant eaters decided to temporarily forgo equatorial areas for the higher latitudes.

“The large, plant-eating forms (the long-necked sauropodomorphs, predecessors of the giant Jurassic sauropods) are found from Late Triassic age sites in Europe, South America (Brazil and Argentina), South Africa, and the polar regions,” Whiteside said. “Essentially everywhere from the same time period except the tropics.”

The team culled their evidence from an area that’s no stranger to hot and arid climates– Ghost Ranch, N.M.  The scenic 21,000–acre retreat – famous as the place where artist Georgia O’Keefe painted for most of her career –  was located close to the equator 205-215 million years ago at 12 degrees North (it lies at 36 degrees North today).

Mysterious inscription from the time of King David offers glimpse into the past

A mysterious inscription from the time of King David provides a fascinating glimpse into the past, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced on Tuesday.

The inscription was discovered at Khirbet Qeiyafa, in the valley of Elah southwest of Jerusalem. A ceramic jar around 3,000 years old that was broken into numerous shards was discovered in 2012. Researchers were fascinated by letters written in Canaanite script that could be seen on a number of the shards.

Extensive restoration work was conducted in the laboratories of the Israel Antiquities Authority Artifacts Treatment Department, during which hundreds of pottery shards were glued together to form a whole jar. Researchers then discovered the inscription “Eshba’al Ben Beda’.”

The inscription suggests that Eshba’al Ben Beda was an important person. Ben Beda was apparently the owner of a large agricultural estate, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority, which says that produce from the estate was packed and transported in jars that bore his name. “This is clear evidence of social stratification and the creation of an established economic class that occurred at the time of the formation of the Kingdom of Judah,” it said, in a statement.

The name Eshba’al was reminiscent of the Canaanite storm god Ba’al, according to researchers, and the inscription marks a unique find in Israel.

“This is the first time that the name Eshbaʽal has appeared on an ancient inscription in the country,” said Professor Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Saar Ganor of the Israel Antiquities Authority, in the statement. “It is interesting to note that the name Eshbaʽal appears in the Bible, and now also in the archaeological record, only during the reign of King David.”

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