Year: 2012
Islamic medical students are refusing to learn how to treat female patients because “they believe it is wrong to touch women to whom they are not married or related.”
The sickness of Islam: Islamic medical students are refusing to learn how to treat female patients because “they believe it is wrong to touch women to whom they are not married or related.”
A competitor has debuted its full-size prototype rover designed to hunt for water in the craters of the Moon.
The Google Lunar X-Prize: One competitor has unveiled its full-size prototype rover, designed to hunt for water in the craters of the Moon.
The company, Astrobotic Technology, is consider to be in second place in the race to build the first private lunar rover.
Resurrecting the chestnut tree.
Resurrecting the chestnut tree.
As chief scientist of the American Chestnut Foundation (ACF), a group of chestnut enthusiasts and scientists, Hebard has bred thousands of hybrids at the organization’s research farm in Meadowview, Virginia. He crosses descendants of the original American chestnut with the much smaller Chinese variety (Castanea mollissima), which has some natural immunity to the Asian fungus. And after decades of work, he is within reach of his goal, a tall American tree with enough Chinese traits to keep it healthy. Other researchers are trying to attack the blight with viruses or are creating trees that are genetically modified (GM) to resist the fungus, and could be the first GM forest trees released in the wild in the United States. Progress with all three approaches is raising hopes that chestnuts will soon start to flourish again in the forests of the American east. “We’re starting to pull the American chestnut tree back from the brink of extinction,” says Hebard.
This work is an example of human behavior at its best, using our ability to adapt as well as our brains to help another species come back to life. And we aren’t doing just to help the trees. Bringing the chestnut tree back will benefit us as well as other species.
Crushing a 55 gallon steel drum with icecubes
An evening pause: This is not what happened during yesterday’s Falcon 9 launch.
The solar maximum continues to fizzle
As it does every month, NOAA today posted its monthly update of the ongoing sunspot cycle of the Sun. This latest graph, covering the month of September, is posted below the fold.
Not only is the Sun’s sunspot production continuing to fizzle, it is fizzling even more than before.
» Read more
The world’s second largest infrared telescope on Mauna Kea is for sale.
Want to buy a telescope? The world’s second largest infrared telescope on Mauna Kea is for sale.
The price is relatively cheap, $1.24 million. All that is needed is a private corporation eager to get some good publicity while contributing to the science of astronomy.
An update on the Falcon 9 engine problems.
An update on the Falcon 9 engine problems.
Based on SpaceX’s press release, the rocket functioned as designed to overcome the engine failure. Nonetheless, it behooves them to find out why that engine shut down prematurely.
More worrisome for the company is the failure the Falcon 9 rocket to place in its proper orbit a secondary payload, an Orbcomm communications satellite. The satellite ended up in too low an orbit, probably because of the engine failure during launch. Orbcomm has a contract with SpaceX to launch a whole series of these satellites. This failure now, right at the get-go, won’t do them much good in terms of public relations.
The Obama administration had declared that a company whose sole business is to publish Bibles is not religious enough for an exemption to the HHS contraceptive mandate.
The Obama administration had declared that a company whose sole business is to publish Bibles is not religious enough for an exemption to the HHS contraceptive mandate.
The company has of course gone to court. The mandate itself is odious and unconstitutional. It is not the business of the federal government to decide who is religious and who is not. Nor is it that government’s business to force behavior on anyone that they do not believe.
A GAO investigation into fraudulent and foreign campaign donations has discovered that the Obama.com website is owned and managed by a man in China with ties to the Chinese government.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: A GAO investigation into fraudulent and foreign campaign donations has discovered that the Obama.com website is owned and managed by a man in China with ties to the Chinese government.
That’s not all.
The unusual Obama.com website redirects traffic directly to a donation page on the Obama campaign’s official website, my.barackobama.com, which does not require donors to enter their credit card security code (known as the CVV code), thereby increasing the likelihood of foreign or fraudulent donations. The website is managed by a small web development firm, Wicked Global, in Maine. One of Wicked Global’s employees, Greg Dorr, lists on his LinkedIn page his additional employment with Peace Action Maine and Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights. According to the GAI report, 68 percent of all Internet traffic to Obama.com comes from foreign visitors.
The Obama administration had this same problem in 2008. Donations to its website did not verify the donation, allowing donations from anywhere, even if illegal or from foreign sources. There’s more here.
One engine of the Falcon 9 failed during launch.
Confirmed: One engine of the Falcon 9 exploded during launch.
Video at the link. The other 8 engines picked up the slack — as designed — and got Dragon into orbit.
This spectacular engine failure will of course have to be reviewed. However, if I were a commercial satellite company looking for a rocket to get my satellites into orbit, this failure would be recommendation, not a deterrent. The Falcon 9 demonstrated that even if one engine fails (and this one did by blowing up!), the rocket can survive the failure and make it to orbit. If that isn’t clear proof that this is a well designed and well built rocket, nothing is.
Dragon is in orbit
Another success for SpaceX: Dragon is now in orbit.