George Washington has been declared the greatest military foe Great Britain ever faced.
An evening pause: The Purdue Society of Professional Engineers team set a new record last week for longest ever Rube Goldberg machine, taking 300 steps to flawlessly blow up and then pop a balloon.
More bad news for peer-reviewed science: Researchers have found that they cannot reproduce the results for almost ninety percent of the fifty-three “landmark” cancer research papers they reviewed.
It is worse than you think. Consider this quote:
Part way through his project to reproduce promising studies, Begley met for breakfast at a cancer conference with the lead scientist of one of the problematic studies. “We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure,” said Begley. “I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they’d done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It’s very disillusioning.”
The bodies found in Ben Franklin’s basement.
USA, NASA’s prime contractor for operating the space shuttle, on Friday laid off nine percent of its work force.
I honestly have to ask: why did it take so long? The last shuttle flight was in July of last year. It couldn’t possibly have required that many people to prepare these spacecraft for display in museums.
Update: Typo corrected. Thank you Erik.
Some wisdom from Pravda: “Humans explore space only for profit.”
And then there’s this, from the U.N., not surprisingly published at MSNBC: “Private property in outer space: The other side of the argument.” To quote the U.N. expert: “More rules are needed, but I am also of the opinion that you do not need to create property rights [in space].”
It is a sad world when support for capitalism, private property rights, and competition comes from Pravda, while in the U.S. such ideas get slapped down.
The uncertainty of science: Satellite photos have revealed that there are twice as many emperor penguins in Antarctica than scientists had predicted.
Not surprising in this era of spin-generated science, every article I’ve seen on this story (here’s another) has felt obliged to say how this news means the poor penguins will start off stronger when global warming arrives to decimate their population. However, wasn’t global warming already happening? And wasn’t that warming supposed to have decimated their population already?
The truth is we really don’t know. This new data could actually mean that emperor penguins like global warming. It could suggest that global warming hasn’t started yet. It could even be evidence that the climate isn’t warming at all.
But no, let’s just spin it in one direction: global warming is happening, and it will kill penguins. No matter how many penguins we find.
Want to own a cave? Now you can buy one, and even move it and install it wherever you want!
ISS’s robot arm has now been moved into position in preparation for the Dragon berthing flight, scheduled for April 30.
The article also gives a nice outline of the entire Falcon 9/Dragon test flight.
The world’s biggest atlas: Yours for only $100K.
Europe’s primary Earth-observation satellite, Envisat, has gone silent.
Launched in 2002, the satellite is billed as the most sophisticated environmental monitor in orbit, with ten instruments providing streams of valuable data on everything from ozone, clouds and greenhouse gases to land-use trends and sea-surface temperatures — data that have figured in more than 2,000 scientific publications, ESA says. Over the years, Envisat has also offered a unique vantage point on major environmental disasters such as the December 2004 earthquake and tsunami in southeast Asia and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Now, scientists fear that the satellite’s decade-long run has come to an abrupt end.
Problems began on 8 April when the satellite’s signal cut out as it was passing over a ground station in Sweden. ESA has been working with a team of scientists and engineers to diagnose the problem and to re-establish contact, but the outlook remains unclear.
North Korea’s attempt to put its first satellite into orbit today was a failure, breaking up less than two minutes after liftoff.
An evening pause: From frigid Russia, some Russians put on the Ritz.
Good news for wind power: A new study suggests that building wind turbines is a far greater problem to birds than actually operating them.
The uncertainty of science, however: the study also showed a wide range of effects, depending on bird species.
Though I am a bit late in covering this story (due to moving, unpacking, Passover, and an unexpected visit to the dentist), NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center on April 9 released its monthly update of the ongoing sunspot cycle of the Sun. The most recent graph is below the fold.
In order to understand the context of this new graph, however, it is necessary to make a correction and clarification.
» Read more
New data suggests that a microscopic creature called a tardigrade, along with its eggs, could survive an interplanetary trip.
European subsidies have put Arianespace in the black for 2011 and 2012.
The key quote however is this:
But ESA governments have made clear they are not happy having to cover losses, especially since the workhorse Ariane 5 rocket, introduced in the mid-1990s, is well past its teething stage and has conducted 47 consecutive launch successes. Its last failure was in late 2002.
Arianespace has dominated the commercial launch market in recent years, yet can’t make a profit. In this case, however, I suspect that if the company lost its subsides it would somehow find a way to finally reduce its budget.
Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s graveyard of wrecked race cars.
Why the mainstream media hates new media, Alabama edition.
The 100-year march of technology in one graph.
Russia commits to a twenty year space program, including building a new spaceport to replace Baikonur.
More news from commercial space: Assuming it gets the necessary funds, Boeing anticipates flight tests of its CST-100 reusable manned capsule by 2016.
This story is part of the on-going lobbying effort to convince the Luddites in Congress to subsidize the new commercial space companies. To get some context, even if Congress gives NASA all of the money it has requested for this program, the annual cost will still be less than a third of the NASA-built Space Launch System, and will get us four different ways to get humans and cargo into orbit, and do it in far less time.
New observations from the new ground-based submillimeter ALMA telescope in Chile have given astronomers a clearer picture of the ring/disk of debris orbiting the nearby star Formalhaut. Moreover, the data suggests that two planets that are shepherding that ring are smaller than previously thought, no larger than a few times the size of the Earth.
» Read more
More commercial space news: Orbital Sciences has rolled the first stage of its commercial Antares rocket to the launchpad for tests.
Good news: Virgin Galactic has been cleared by the State Department to fly foreign tourists without obtaining an export license.
[Mark Sundahl, an associate professor of law at Cleveland State University in Ohio], said that without this determination from State, allowing a non-U.S. citizen to ride in a Virgin spacecraft — or even training a non-U.S. citizen to do so — would legally have been an export activity that required federal approval. The time it takes to obtain an export license varies, but several months is a reasonable estimate, said Sundahl, who specializes in international commerce and space law. “Under ITAR, any disclosure of controlled technical data to a foreign national, even if the disclosure takes place in the U.S., is treated as an ‘export’ of the technical data — which would require a license from the Department of State in addition to imposing other regulatory burdens on the exporter,” Sundahl said.
Freed from this regulatory requirement will make it easier for Virgin Galactic, as well as others, to sell tickets.
