A small meteorite hit the ground near Managua’s airport in Nicaragua on Saturday, creating a 39 foot wide crater.
By comparing data from the Voyager fly-bys of Saturn in the 1980s with new data collected by Cassini in the past decade scientists think they can now explain the changes that have occurred in Saturn’s outer F ring.
“The F ring is a narrow, lumpy feature made entirely of water ice that lies just outside the broad, luminous rings A, B, and C,” notes French. “It has bright spots. But it has fundamentally changed its appearance since the time of Voyager. Today, there are fewer of the very bright lumps.” The bright spots come and go over the course of hours or days, a mystery that the two SETI Institute astronomers think they have solved.
“We believe the most luminous knots occur when tiny moons, no bigger than a large mountain, collide with the densest part of the ring,” says French. “These moons are small enough to coalesce and then break apart in short order.”
The Rosetta science team has released their first geology map of Comet 67P/C-G, showing the nucleus’s surface divided into different kinds of terrain.
Scientists have found evidence that Jupiter’s moon Europa undergoes the same kind of plate tectonics seen on Earth.
Switzerland is about to open the first suspension bridge ever built between two mountain peaks.
The bridge, suspended 9,700ft in the air, will also have a partial glass floor to allow visitors a once in a lifetime view of the 6,500ft drop between the Glacier 3000 and Scex Rouge.
It is scheduled to open in November, and is being built in an effort to attract more tourists to the Swiss Alps.
Link here.
An excellent question. The answer? The IRS refuses to say.
Among the most pressing is the fact that a Blackberry belonging to Lois Lerner, a former official at the center of the scandal, was wiped clean shortly after investigators started asking questions about her alleged role in the targeting of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
Despite the fact that this revelation first came to light in August, the IRS has yet explain why this was done.
Considering her former role as chief of the IRS’ tax exempt division, and its proximity to the targeting scandal, the decision to wipe her phone after investigators started asking questions is both suspicious and troubling.
I have to admit I missed this minor detail. In previous examples where the IRS destroyed a hard drive, it was because the hard drive had had problems. The destruction was still illegal, but in at least in that case there was a somewhat reasonable if unlikely reason to do it. With Lerner’s Blackberry they haven’t given us any reason, other than it was done shortly after the investigation had begun.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has successfully launched its second commercial Asiasat satellite into orbit in just over a month.
“These two satellites launching a month apart are really growth satellites for us,” [William Wade, AsiaSat’s president and CEO] said. “They’re not replacements. They’re new, incremental growth satellites for us across Asia, with C-band on AsiaSat 6 mainly in China, and Ku-band on AsiaSat 8, which was mainly for the Indian subcontinent as well as the Middle East.”
AsiaSat paid SpaceX $52.2 million for each of the launches, according to regulatory filings. [emphasis mine]
As has been noted frequently, that price of $50 million per launch is anywhere from half to a quarter what other companies have been charging. Asiasat got a great deal, and every commercial satellite and launch company in the world is aware of this.
Using DNA evidence from a shawl that is believed to have been at one of the Jack the Ripper’s murders, forensic scientists think they have finally identified the serial killer.
The story is fascinating, but what makes it even more convincing to me is that the person they name is hardly the wild romantic suspect that many books and movies have proposed in past decades. Instead, he was one of Scotland Yard’s prime suspects.
Want to know which American professors are demanding an academic boycott of Israel? Here is a list.
Even as Islamic radicals and nations commit genocide against Christians, Jews, and Muslims, these so-called intellectuals only have anger at Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East and the only place in the Middle East where Christians, Jews, and Muslims can freely practice their religion and be full citizens. As the article notes,
“How can professors who are so biased against the Jewish state accurately or fairly teach students about Israel or the Arab-Israel conflict?” asked Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, AMCHA Initiative co-founder and faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “Students who wish to become better educated without subjecting themselves to anti-Israel bias, or possibly even antisemitic rhetoric, may want to check which faculty members from their university are signatories before registering.”
By signing their names to this boycott, they reveal themselves to either be willfully ignorant of the complexity of the situation, or outright anti-semites.
Our tolerant Islamic allies! Even as they are doing an interfaith outreach internationally, Saudi authorities arrested 27 Christians in their own country for holding services in someone’s home.
The link includes lots of photos of the raid.
The uncertainty of science: Geysers that have been detected on Europa in 2012 have now disappeared.
An evening pause: The speed and efficiency in which this excavator mulches a tree is almost nightmarish. Makes me think of innumerable science fiction disintegrator ray guns.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
The competition is burning them up! With Germany and France unable to come to an agreement about the next Arianespace commercial rocket, the company is considering cancelling a December conference that was supposed to settle the issue.
The basic division remains despite the German government’s alignment with the French view that Europe needs a lower-cost rocket to maintain its viability in the commercial market — which in turn provides European governments with a viable launch industry.
Despite the consensus over the longer term, the two sides remain split on whether European Space Agency governments should spend 1.2 billion euros ($1.6 billion) to complete work on a new upper stage for the existing Ariane 5 rocket, which could fly in 2018-2019, or abandon the upgrade to focus spending on a new Ariane 6 rocket, whose development would cost upwards of 3 billion euros over 7-8 years. [emphasis mine]
Though SpaceX is not mentioned in this particular article, numerous previous articles on this subject (such as this one) have made it very clear that it is SpaceX’s low prices that are driving the need for Arianespace to cut costs. The problem, as this article makes very clear, is that Arianespace’s partners can’t figure out how to do it, at least in a manner that will still provide them all an acceptable share in the pie. The result might be that the entire partnership falls apart.
The competition heats up: Check out this photo spread of the final preparations being done to Europe’s intermediate experimental vehicle, dubbed IXV for short.
IXV is scheduled to do its first suborbital test flight in November, the data of which will be used by ESA to design their own reusable. mini-shuttle.
A new mosaic of four Rosetta navigation camera images shows a faint jet of material coming from the comet nucleus.
The jet appears to come from the neck between the two lobes, but that is uncertain.
Cover-up: The IRS claimed today that it has lost emails from five more employees that were involved in the agency’s harassment of conservatives.
The article also spends a lot of time talking about a partisan Democratic Senate report issued today that whitewashes the IRS harassment. As far as I can see, that Democratic report confirms only one thing: Senate Democrats are working hand-in-glove with IRS bureaucrats and the Department of Justice to stonewall the investigation and to justify the use of the IRS as a partisan weapon by Democratic politicians. Isn’t that nice?
Our government in action: An inspector general has found that the Army was unable to track the spending on a project designed to help the Army track spending.
As of this February, the Army had spent $725.7 million on the system, which is ultimately expected to cost about $4.3 billion. The problem, according to the IG, is that the Army has failed to comply with a variety of federal laws that require agencies to standardize reporting and prepare auditable financial statements. “This occurred because DOD and Army management did not have adequate controls, including procedures and annual reviews, in place to ensure GCSS-Army compliance with Treasury and DOD guidance,” the IG report concludes.
And some people wonder why I am always skeptical of giving the federal government any job you need done.
Fascism: A New York gun shop was raided by a SWAT team, without a warrant, and forced to turn over customer sales records.
This raid was supposedly legal under New York’s newest gun control law dubbed the SAFE act. However, under the Constitution no raid can be legal without a warrant. In addition, the store owner has repeatedly requested clarification of the law from officials in his attempt to be cooperative and legal and was still raided. He is suing.
Because of weather concerns SpaceX has delayed its commercial Falcon 9 launch 24 hours from Saturday to Sunday.
New York Mayor de Blasio has fired a team of NASA consultants that had been hired by the previous mayor to lead the overhaul of the city’s 911 system after costs skyrocketed and the project fell far behind schedule.
Up to 20 NASA consultants had spent the past two years working on the project, at average annual salaries of $250,000. They’ve conducted technical designs for new radios and computer dispatch systems. That technology will eventually link police, FDNY and emergency medical system dispatchers and field units to the city’s main emergency call center in downtown Brooklyn, and to a still-unfinished backup call center in the Bronx.
City officials did not say they were dissatisfied with NASA’s performance. They simply believe the work can be done cheaper in-house.
Why does this sound familiar?
An evening pause: From the 1954 Jimmy Stewart film, The Glenn Miller Story. They play on, even as a German V1 buzz bomb comes flying in.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Working for the Democratic Party: New IRS emails reveal that the agency’s demand for donar lists was unnecessary according to the law and took place almost entirely against conservatives.
Worse, the donor lists were then used by the IRS to compile a list of conservatives to be audited.
Then-IRS Commissioner Miller initially testified to Congress on May 17, 2013 that “instructions had been given to destroy any donor lists,” but donor lists were actually produced to the House Ways and Means Committee four months later. The House Ways and Means Committee also announced at May 7, 2014 hearing that, after scores of conservative groups provided donor information “to the IRS, nearly one in ten donors were subject to audit.” In 2011, as many as five donors to one conservative (c)(4) organization were audited, according to the Wall Street Journal. [emphasis mine]
Apparently, the only reason these people were audited by the IRS is because they were contributors to conservative causes. In other words, the IRS was working to squelch the free speech rights of Americans who opposed the Democratic Party.
Read the whole article. There’s a lot more, such as proof that the claim by Lois Lerner and Barack Obama that the harassment was instigated solely by low level IRS employees was an outright lie. They didn’t misspoke. They didn’t misunderstand. They didn’t make a mistake. They lied, knowingly, consciously, and with forethought.
The first results from Rosetta’s ultraviolet spectrograph find the surface of Comet 67P/C-G to be surprisingly lacking in exposed ice patches.
The lack is unexpected, considering that this same instrument has also detected evidence of water in the comet’s coma.
Heh. Doug Messier has found exclusive footage of the arrival of Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin at the new Vostochny spaceport under construction in eastern Russia, just prior to Vladimir Putin’s visit on Tuesday.
Paleontologists have discovered an almost complete skeleton of a dinosaur that they estimate was 85 feet long and weighed 65 tons when it died.
And it appears that the dinosaur was still growing when it died.
More information here.
The competition heats up: The start of Sarah Brightman’s astronaut training has been delayed from this fall to the beginning of 2015.
I suspect this delay has more to do with accommodating her schedule and the fact that she is very enthusiastic and well-prepared than any negative issues related to her or the mission. They have probably decided that she just needs less time to train.
Her actual flight to ISS is scheduled for the fall of 2015.
The Rosetta science team announced today that they will unveil the chosen landing site for their Philae lander on September 15.
This is intriguing: A secure cell phone maker has uncovered 17 cell towers designed to attack cell phones that have no known owner, all located close to military bases.
The highly self-monitored phone does more than protect itself; according to Popular Science, it found 17 different phony cell towers known as “interceptors,” detected by the CryptoPhone 500 around the United States during the month of July. Interceptors are described to look to a typical phone like an ordinary tower, but once a phone connects with the interceptor, a variety of over-the-air attacks become possible, such as eavesdropping on calls and texts to pushing spyware to the device.
ESD America CEO Less Goldsmith found it suspicious that a lot of these interceptors are right on top of U.S. military bases. “So we begin to wonder – are some of them U.S. government interceptors? Or are some of them Chinese interceptors?” Goldsmith told Popular Science. “Whose interceptor is it? Who are they, that’s listening to calls around military bases? Is it just the U.S. military, or are they foreign governments doing it? The point is: we don’t really know whose they are.”
An evening pause: The closing music from the 1983 film Local Hero, performed live by its composer Mark Knopfler.
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli.
