A defunct seven-ton NASA climate satellite is about to fall to Earth.
The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS, is expected to come down in late September or early October, the space agency said today in an advisory. “Although the spacecraft will break into pieces during re-entry, not all of it will burn up in the atmosphere,” NASA said.
Virgin Galactic announced today that it will co-host an industry day at Spaceport America in New Mexico on October 18 in order to locate suppliers for its space tourism business.
“This is a fantastic opportunity for companies ranging from local New Mexico firms to national corporations to understand our unique needs for goods and services, including our requirements in building and servicing multiple commercial spaceships as the market further develops,” said Virgin Galactic’s President and CEO George Whitesides. “Our intention is to establish these relationships and emphasize our desire to hire locally as much as possible.”
A Dutch university has fired a noted social psychologist who has admitted his science research was based on faked data.
[Diederik] Stapel has worked at the university, located in southern Netherlands, since 2006. He is known as a prolific researcher and a successful fundraiser. His studies appeared to offer new insights into the workings of the human mind; for instance, a Science paper published in April showed that people are more likely to stereotype or discriminate in messy environments.
In the TV interview, [university rector Philip] Eijlander says he was first contacted on 27 August by “junior researchers” in Stapel’s lab who alleged that his conduct was fraudulent. Stapel immediately admitted that there was “something strange” in his papers, Eijlander says, and “yesterday, he told me that there are faked data.” The university has asked Willem Levelt, a psycholinguist and former president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, to lead a panel investigating the extent of the alleged fraud. Eijlander says that all “tainted papers” will be retracted. [emphasis mine]
I purposely emphasis the publication of this faked research in the peer review journal Science to illustrate how this story once again demonstrates that just because a science paper is peer reviewed, that is absolutely no guarantee that it is either correct, or even legitimate. The field of science (with a small “s”) always requires everyone to exercise a strong sense of skepticism. Appeals to authority (“It was published in Science!”) should carry no weight.
The nearest supernova in almost a quarter century is now visible using binoculars.
An evening pause: From the movie, The Westerner (1940).
The Left has fought the spread of genetically modified (GM) foods with every weapon in its arsenal. Leftists did this in the name of combating a long list of “potential risks” that never materialized. They have been permitted to overlook the fact that their assaults on GM food were not cost free. For instance, they have greatly delayed and in some places stopped cold the use of rice modified to increase vitamin A content. For the Left this is cause for celebration. In fact, widespread use of this “golden rice” would have prevented a half-million cases of child blindness a year. So the next time someone talks to you about the evils of genetically modified foods, remind him of the millions of poor children this crusade has condemned to a lifetime of blindness. How do folks prepared to allow millions to needlessly go blind still command the respect of any truly moral person?
And that’s only the start. Read the whole thing.
And in other news from the religion of peace: A film about religious tolerance in Indonesia has been pulled from a major TV network after an Islamist group warned the film could trigger nationwide violence.
Explain to me again why the Palestinians deserve a nation? Last month Israel security forces foiled a terrorist attack planned by Hamas in Jerusalem.
The main cell charged with carrying out the attack was based in Hebron [in the West Bank]. The cell was in touch with the Hamas headquarters in Syria, and the date of the attack was set for August 21. The planned attack involved a fire extinguisher which contained six kilograms of explosives. The device was supposed to be carried by a suicide bomber in a bus or a mall in the Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood in Jerusalem.
The monthly graph from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center of the Sun’s solar cycle sunspot activity is out and I have posted it below. Though activity increased for the second month in a row, the totals are still below the activity levels of March and April 2011.
I am beginning to think that I sound like a broken record. This monthly graph once again suggests that the next solar maximum will be weak, possibly weaker than the most up-to-date predictions for the next solar maximum. And even if that prediction is correct, the data continues to point towards a quieter Sun, with the likelihood of a long period of no sunspots beginning in the next decade.
Based on past history, the consequences of a long Maunder-type minimum, where there are no sunspots for decades, should be very profound. Every time the Sun has gone this quiet in the past, the Earth’s climate has cooled. Furthermore, new results just released add weight to this conclusion. A less active Sun allows more intergalactic cosmic rays to hit the atmosphere, and the CLOUD experiment at CERN strongly suggests that the higher rate of cosmic rays could in turn increase the atmosphere’s cloudiness, thereby reflecting more light and energy and making the Earth colder.
A just released report from the National Academies, Preparing for the High Frontier: the role and training of NASA astronauts in the post-space shuttle era, describes the challenges that NASA faces in staffing its astronaut corps in the coming years. More important, however, is some new information buried in the report about the hazards of long term exposure to weightlessness.
For example, it seems a significant number of astronauts have come back from spending months at ISS with serious vision problems, caused by a newly discovered condition dubbed papilledema, the swelling of the optic disk.
» Read more
Obscure editor resigns from minor journal: why you should care.
We have sadly reached that stage in the climate debate where the Alarmist establishment isn’t even going to bother trying to make its case through force of argument. And the scary part is that it senses – probably correctly – that it doesn’t need to. The junk-science establishment – from the UEA to the Royal Society to NASA GISS to the National Academy of Sciences – has done so well out of its whitewash enquiries, its FOI breaches, its appeals to authority, its craven, unquestioning support from the MSM and the political class, its silencing of critics, that it has lost all sense of shame. It is out of control, unaccountable, yet directly responsible for a large chunk of the costly regulation, taxation and environmentally disastrous schemes from biofuels to wind farms which are helping to destroy the global economy. The great global warming scam is the biggest scandal of our age. It is time someone took it seriously.
