A DNA autopsy of the Stone Age Iceman found in the Alps in 1991 has now told us something of his health and where his ancestors came from.
An evening pause: Man, they know how to sing.
The Zombie Mohammad judge defends his actions.
On the first amendment:
Here’s the thing: It’s a right, it’s not a privilege, it’s a right. With rights come responsibilities. The more that people abuse our rights, the more likely that we’re going to lose them.
So in other words, it’s an abuse of free speech to criticize Mohammad, but perfectly okay to physically attack that person for that criticism.
This judge has got to go.
“This judge needs to be out of office.”
An exclusive interview with the atheist who was assaulted by a Muslim for criticizing Mohammad, and then verbally attacked for that criticism by a Pennsylania judge.
Kepler today released an updated catalog of candidate exoplanets observed during the space telescope’s first sixteen months of observations. In this release, they list more than a thousand new exoplanet candidates, almost two hundred of which are Earth-sized. Among the new exoplanet candidates, twenty-five are in the habitable zone!
Now for some details.
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The Obama recovery: Durable goods orders fell 4% in January, the worst drop in three years and four times more than expected.
Coming soon to your neighborhood: A surveillance camera that can fly to heights of almost 200 feet.
Fingers crossed: According to Orbital Sciences’ CEO, problems in launchpad construction have been the primary reason the first launch of Antares rocket/Cygnus capsule has been delayed.
The day of reckoning looms: “Iran is developing techniques and technologies needed to turn weapons-grade uranium into an atomic bomb.”
Astronomers have discovered a five hundred foot wide asteroid that has a 1 in 600 chance of hitting the Earth in 2040.
“2011 AG5 is the object which currently has the highest chance of impacting the Earth … in 2040. However, we have only observed it for about half an orbit, thus the confidence in these calculations is still not very high,” said Detlef Koschny of the European Space Agency’s Solar System Missions Division in Noordwijk, The Netherlands.
More government madness: Local officials threatened a church with fines and forced them to cease giving away free water during the Mardi Gras parade.
An evening pause:
New evidence suggests that Stone Age hunters from Europe reached the New World ten thousand years before their Asian counterparts.
A remarkable series of several dozen European-style stone tools, dating back between 19,000 and 26,000 years, have been discovered at six locations along the US east coast. Three of the sites are on the Delmarva Peninsular in Maryland, discovered by archaeologist Dr Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware. One is in Pennsylvania and another in Virginia. A sixth was discovered by scallop-dredging fishermen on the seabed 60 miles from the Virginian coast on what, in prehistoric times, would have been dry land. …
What’s more, chemical analysis carried out last year on a European-style stone knife found in Virginia back in 1971 revealed that it was made of French-originating flint.
None of this is really surprising. Once we humans became the creatures we are, it became second nature for us to spread out quickly across the globe. In the case of these first European settlers, however, they came in too small numbers, and were thus eventually overwhelmed by the later settlers coming from Asia.
The difficulties making both wind and solar power practical sources of electrical power on the grid.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, when intermittent sources such as solar or wind reach about 20 percent of a region’s total energy production, balancing supply and demand becomes extremely challenging: rolling blackouts can sometimes become inevitable. The same problem exists elsewhere, notably in Germany, where a vast photovoltaic capacity has sprung up thanks to generous subsidies.
The article proposes several reasonable solutions for storing power for use when there are lulls in wind or sunlight. All, however, appear costly, and all appear to end up making fossil fuels themselves more cost effective. For example,
A pumped-hydro facility consists of two reservoirs with a substantial drop in height between them. When there is excess electricity to go around, electric pumps move water from the lower reservoir into the upper one, thereby storing energy in the form of gravitational potential energy. When wind and solar wane or simply cannot keep up with demand, operators let water flow down and through turbines, generating electricity. In compressed-air facilities, excess electricity pumps air into underground caverns, and it is later released at high pressure to turn turbines.
Pumped hydro has been used for decades to balance the load on large U.S. grids. About 2.5 percent of the electricity used by U.S. consumers has cycled through one of these plants. In Europe the amount is 4 percent and in Japan 10 percent.
Reading this, I immediately asked, why not use this technology now to help reduce the amount of fossil fuels you need to burn? Japan seems to have figured this out. Why not us?
Stupidity: The baseball Astros have been forced by league officials to remove the picture of a Colt revolver from their original baseball jerseys.
[Major League Baseball] gave the okay to the uniform, which the Astros will wear to kick off a season of throwbacks commemorating the 50th anniversary of the club. It nixed the pistol on the uniform in an era when guns are a sensitive issue, according to an Astros official.
The fix is in: Investigators have decided that it was sloppy bookkeeping rather than criminal activity that caused MF Global to illegally misuse and then lose more than a $1 billion of customer funds.
Regulators and law enforcement officials have spoken to numerous former employees of MF Global since the firm’s demise and continue to review the hundreds of documents before they make their final conclusion. But one employee who hasn’t been interviewed by the criminal investigators is [former Democratic Governor and Senator Jon] Corzine. People close to the probe say they won’t likely depose him unless a criminal probe appears more likely.
How convenient. The man in charge, Corzine, who was also the “go-to” guy for the Obama administration on economic matters, is somehow not questioned.
Surprise, surprise! A new poll shows that Obamacare continues to be a major political problem for Obama, and Romney.
In the poll, Obama lags the two leading Republican rivals in the 12 states likely to determine the outcome of a close race in November:
- Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum tops Obama 50%-45% in the swing states. Nationwide, Santorum’s lead narrows to 49%-46%.
- Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney edges Obama 48%-46% in the swing states. Nationwide, they are tied at 47% each.
Romney also has a health care problem: Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in the battleground states, 27% say they are less likely to support him because he signed a Massachusetts law that required residents to have coverage. Just 7% say it makes them more likely to back him.
At least Romney has made it clear he intends to repeal Obamacare, which should help him in the election should he overcome the Republican hostility to RomneyCare and become the Republican candidate. For Obama, however, there is no escape. Obamacare is his problem, and his alone, and he is likely going to go down in flames because of it more than anything else.
