Gravity emerges from curved spacetime, and spacetime curves wherever there is a concentration of energy (mass being a very concentrated form of energy). In curved spacetime, time slows down. This is what causes gravitational red shift. There is also another redshift, cosmological, which is caused by the metric expansion of space.

Because the photon always follows the shortest path in spacetime, aka a geodesic, which is a straight line in free space. Curved spacetime causes geodesics to be curved in 3D space (and dilated in time, a different side of the same coin), hence the name. Gravity is really just an apparent force, while in reality the effects are caused by the geometric shape of local spacetime

No, you should read up on Relativity. All things that move at light speed have a rest mass of exactly zero (technically, they don't have a rest mass, since they can never be at rest). So light can never have mass. Maybe a video from PBS Space Time can explain some things.

The question is did they originate from earth

Occam's Razor says "yes"

and we just didn't notice them yet

It's just a matter of there being an estimated 1E19 species of bacteria, and we only gene sequenced 1E4 of them.

or [seeing as how they are aerobes] did we just release bacteria that live in space in our environment [even one we think is protected]?

These things don't live in space, they need water and air. Even in experiments where bacteria survived in space, they did so by creating spore capsules, basically stopping their metabolism. We don't know any species that can really live in space, and the biology of such creatures would be almost magic...

No, it really isn't. It's fearmongering based on not understanding science/biology.

Actually, this "fungi and bacteria couldn't eat the wood" theory was refuted by a 2016 study.
The real reason why so much coal was formed during this time is because the world was a lot wetter at the time, with large portions of land covered with shallow lakes and marshes. When wood was submerged in these and started to rot, this created the oxygen-free, acidic environments needed for peat to form. This peat was then subducted and compressed by tectonic activity into coal.
Coal also formed after the Carboniferous period btw, but in smaller quantities, because the climate changed significantly since.

I guess nowadays EPA stands for the Environmental Pollution Agency...

We apologise for the fault in the comments. Those responsible have been sacked.

I remember reading about this years ago. Here's a short article about it.

But does it run Linux? And did NetCraft confirm it??

People have tried this, but there are two reasons why it doesn't work well: it's very difficult to get the Mylar in the required parabolic shape, and more importantly, the surface finish of a telescope mirror needs to be perfectly shaped with the error less than a wavelength.
Mylar is not smooth enough at the microscopic level and also not thermally stable (if you hit it with light, it deforms enough to ruin the image). It's why we make telescopes out of special ceramics nowadays instead of much lighter plastics.

Actually, this is a common misconception about gravity.
In the framework of General Relativity, in curved spacetime, you are at rest during free fall.
When standing on the surface, you're actually accelerating upwards (caused by electrostatic repulsion between the ground and you).

When galaxies merge, the stars don't collide, because there is so much space between them. Black holes are collapsed stars, so they would have even more space in between them, and not merge either.

But you touch on a good point: when galaxies collide, they move a lot of interstellar gas around. Some of this should end up accreted by the black holes, lighting them up like a Christmas tree. Since we never observed this, it is doubtful that they are there.

People keep forgetting these sorts of particles already exist. Neutrinos barely interact via the strong force, and being neutral, not at all electromagnetically. If their strong force interaction was a few orders of magnitude less, we might not even be able to detect them at all. So when you say kooky, nature says "Hold my boson condensate!" .

Yup, they already found additional KBOs that break the bias, meaning Planet 9 probably doesn't exist.

A black hole in our solar system would be very luminous in radio and X-ray (emitted by accreted matter), and since we didn't find any such nearby objects already, it's weird that they even consider it.

You would be mistaken. Earth's outer atmosphere extends way beyond the moon

3) There is no planet nine, just the combined gravitational influence of a lot of smaller stuff.

How about starting with calling it "Mathematical Computing" or something similar to make clear the focus is on math instead of programming?

To get hands on with the programming part, I would recommend starting on a small 8-bit microcontroller, like an Atmel AVR, on a board with some LEDs connected and such. Let them play around with low level stuff in (simple) C, to get a feel of what the hardware actually does. Write to some I/O location to toggle a LED or send a byte over a serial port. Use a debugger to see how the C translates to machine code while stepping through it. Don't other getting into all the dirty intricacies of C, as this is just a stepping stone.

Then for the second part, use some higher-level language, like Python or Kotlin to teach more advanced concepts like flow control, classes, lambdas, etc.

Anecdote: I started out with Commodore Basic, and for me it only started to click when I realized Basic was basically a strict form of English, and I could tell the computer what to do by "writing a story". The syntax is much less important than the abstract notions that come with it.