NORAD is ready to track Santa’s flight
Important! NORAD is ready to track Santa’s flight.
Year: 2011
What Tim Tebow Can’t Do
Funny and to the point: What Tim Tebow can’t do.
Strange red galaxies
Diederik Stapel, the Dutch social psychologist who admitted to faking data in numerous published papers, has retracted his first paper
Diederik Stapel, the Dutch social psychologist who admitted to faking data in numerous published papers, has retracted the first paper of many, with more retractions sure to follow.
A day earlier, the Dutch university committees investigating Stapel issued a preliminary report that indicated that Stapel had fabricated or manipulated data in at least several dozen publications, but the report did not name specific papers (see Report finds massive fraud at Dutch universities).
The committees, at the universities of Amsterdam, Groningen and Tilburg where Stapel studied and worked between 1994 and 2011, plan to identify tainted papers in a final report that will not be completed until mid-2012 at the earliest, says Pim Levelt, head of the Tilburg committee and director emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Why can’t the climate field do this? It would help them recover the trust they have lost resulting from the obvious research frauds uncovered by the climategate emails.
Over-the-counter osteoporosis drug appears to keep astronauts from losing bone density on long space flights
Big news: New research on ISS now shows that the standard over-the-counter osteoporosis drugs used by millions on Earth appears to keep astronauts from losing bone density during long space flights.
Beginning in 2009, the group administered the drug to five long-stay astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS), including Koichi Wakata, 48, and Soichi Noguchi, 46. The five took the drug — an over-the-counter bisphosphonate used to treat osteoporosis — once a week starting three weeks before they lifted off until they returned to Earth. The researchers then monitored the astronauts’ bone mass over time and compared the results to those for 14 astronauts that had never taken the drug.
The results showed that the 14 who had never taken the drug had average bone density loss of 7 percent in the femur, and 5 percent in the hip bone. The five astronauts on bisphosphonate, however, only had average bone density loss in the femur of 1 percent, and even a 3 percent increase in the hip bone. Calcium levels in their urine, which rise the more bone mass is lost, were also very low.
If these results hold up, they might very well solve one of the biggest challenges faced by any interplanetary traveler. Up until now, bone loss during long weightless missions never seemed to average less than 0.5 percent per month. After spending three years going to and from Mars, an astronaut could thus lose about almost 20 percent of their bone mass in their weight-bearing bones, and would probably be unable to return to Earth.
Thus, a mission to Mars seemed impossible, unless we could build a ship with some form of artificial gravity, an engineering challenge we don’t yet have the capability to achieve.
If these already tested drugs can eliminate this problem, then the solar system is finally open to us all. All that has to happen now is to do some one to two year manned missions on ISS to test the drugs effectiveness for these long periods of weightlessness.
The meltdown at Fukushima in Japan came within a foot of breaching the reactor
The meltdown at Fukushima in Japan came within a foot of breaching the reactor.
In other words, the engineering worked.
German authorities ask 45,000 people to evacuate their town this weekend while bomb experts defuse a just discovered World War II bomb
German authorities have asked 45,000 people to evacuate their town this coming weekend while bomb experts attempt to defuse an unexploded World War II bomb.
“Can we go again?”
An evening pause: “Can we go again?”
NASA confiscates stolen rocket engine that had been put up for sale on ebay
NASA has confiscated a stolen rocket engine from a man who put up for sale on ebay.
Rocket engines are supposed to be under particularly tight control at NASA: the US is keen to avoid its rocket technology winding up in the hands of countries with which it has a tense relationship, such as China. “Security at NASA is not adequate in my opinion,” says Joseph Gutheinz, a former investigator for OIG.
You think, eh?
Boeing and union settle NLRB suit over South Carolina plant
Government extortion wins! Boeing has agreed to concessions to its Washington state union in order to settle their NLRB suit over Boeing’s new South Carolina plant.
Uncovering China’s vast network of nuclear weapon tunnels
Students at Georgetown University have uncovered details about China’s vast network of nuclear weapon tunnels.
According to a report by state-run CCTV, China had more than 3,000 miles of tunnels — roughly the distance between Boston and San Francisco — including deep underground bases that could withstand multiple nuclear attacks.
New evidence suggests the Earth’s early atmosphere was not what scientists have up-to-now expected
The uncertainty of science: New evidence now suggests that the Earth’s early atmosphere was not the “methane-filled wasteland” theorized by scientists for decades, but instead much more like today’s oxygen-filled atmosphere.