More cost increases due to Obamacare
Finding out what’s in it: Obamacare is forcing health insurers in New York to request premium increases from 12 to 20%.
Year: 2014
Newly discovered dinosaur tracks
A cluster of dinosaur tracks discovered recently in Alaska has revealed to paleontologists a wealth of new information about their behavior.
The thousands of impressions, created on a 180-meter-long portion of near-coastal flood plain, today pepper a steep mountainside. Most of the tracks, made somewhere between 69 million and 72 million years ago, were left by hadrosaurs, commonly known as duck-billed dinosaurs (the crested creatures in this artist’s representation).
The consistent and excellent preservation of tracks suggests all the footprints were created within a short time period. Varying in width from 8 to 64 centimeters, the footprints cluster within four distinct size ranges, which researchers suggest represent specific age groups within a multigenerational herd. About 84% of the tracks were made by adult and near-adult hadrosaurs and 13% by young presumed to be less than 1 year old. A mere 3% of the tracks represent juvenile hadrosaurs, a rarity that strongly suggests the young of this species experienced a rapid growth spurt and therefore spent only a short time at this vulnerable size, the researchers report online this week in Geology.
Gigantic underground trampoline about to open
Want to have some fun? An amusement park in Northern Wales is about to open a gigantic underground trampoline ride to the public..
Battle Below is located deep within a 100 ft (30.5 m) deep and 60 ft (18.3 m) wide disused mine. The new site features three large trampolines stretching across the cave-like mine walls and are positioned at varying heights. The trampolines are linked together by 60 ft (18.3 m) slides and a spiraling staircase. Adding to the atmosphere, multi-colored LED lights have been installed throughout the mine, which project onto the walls of the cavern.
It took over a kilometer of nett and 4,500 man hours to complete the underground trampolines, which can accommodate 100 bouncing visitors at a time. Patrons are required to wear protective gear, including overalls and a helmet before gaining access to the site via an old mining train. They’re also encouraged to bounce as high as they dare, potentially reaching a maximum height of 80 ft (24 m).
Bounce Below opens on July 4, with tickets starting from £15 (about US$25) per person.
A profile of the designer of China’s Yutu lunar rover.
A profile of the designer of China’s Yutu lunar rover.
The details about Jia Yang’s life as well as some of the challenges he faced building the rover and other spacecraft for China is most interesting. I also suspect that if we pay close attention we will see his name pop up again in connection with future missions.
Cygnus/Antares launch date scheduled
Orbital Sciences has set July 11 as the launch date for its next Cygnus cargo mission to ISS.
They have concluded their inspection of the refurbished Russian engines on the Antares rocket and are satisfied it does not have the problems that caused another engine to blow up during tests.
NASA and Boeing finalize contract to build the SLS rocket
NASA and Boeing today signed a $2.8 billion contract for Boeing to build the core stage of the SLS rocket
Scheduled for its initial test flight in 2017, the SLS is designed to be flexible and evolvable to meet a variety of crew and cargo mission needs. The initial flight-test configuration will provide a 77-ton capacity, and the final evolved two-stage configuration will provide a lift capability of more than 143 tons.
It would be nice for the U.S. to have this heavy-lift rocket, but I fully expect the funds to run out immediately after it makes its inaugural flight, despite the wonderful pork it provides to so many Congressional districts. It just costs too much per launch.
Russia abandons Sea Launch
Running from competition: The Russian space agency Roskosmos has decided not to spend the money necessary to buy Sea Launch and make it part of its consolidated United Rocket and Space Corporation (URSC).
Part of the reason the Russians are abandoning Sea Launch is that the rocket the ocean-going platform uses is the Ukrainian-built Zenit rocket, and Russia wants URSC to a wholly Russian operation. Rather than partner with Ukraine for profit, they will let the business die.
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket gets a customer
The competition heats up: The commercial satellite company Inmarsat has booked SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket for one firm launch and two additional options.
The firm contract is for the launch, scheduled perhaps aggressively for late 2016, of a satellite being built for both Inmarsat and Arabsat of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Arabsat will use the satellite for conventional telecommunications services for its wholly owned Hellas-Sat fleet operator of Greece. The Inmarsat payload uses S-band to provide mobile communications in Europe as part of a satellite-terrestrial broadband network, which is a new business line for Inmarsat.
Inmarsat’s launch contract is for a rocket that has not even yet been tested once, which tells us something about the faith they have in SpaceX. While I would be shocked if they didn’t have an option to pull out should there be significant delays or problems in launching Falcon Heavy, that they are willing to commit to it now is a convincing endorsement of SpaceX.
FIRE sues to end university speech codes
Pushback: The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) today filed lawsuits against the speech codes at four universities.
Read the article. The specific examples are quite oppressive. For example:
At Citrus College in California, student Vincenzo Sinapi-Riddle is challenging three unconstitutional policies, including a free speech zone that the school already agreed to abolish after a 2003 lawsuit. Not only did Citrus College reinstitute its “Free Speech Area,” comprising a miniscule 1.37% of campus, but it also requires student organizations to undergo a two-week approval process for any expressive activity.
Millions of Obamacare applications can’t be processed
Federal officials have admitted that, of the 2.9 million Obamacare applications that have problems and thus cannot be processed, 85% cannot be resolved.
You ask a government bureaucracy to run things, you get these kinds of problems. Everyone knows this, even liberals, which is why I am endlessly puzzled that they still demand the government to do things for us.
More fraud in peer-reviewed science
The science journal Nature today announced the retraction of two controversial stem cell papers.
The two papers reporting the stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) phenomenon appeared online on 29 January. Questions about the papers arose almost immediately, leading to an investigation by RIKEN, the headquarters of the network of the nationally funded laboratories that is based in Wako near Tokyo. Investigators documented several instances of fabrication and falsification in the papers and concluded that some of these constituted research misconduct on the part of [Haruko] Obokata [the lead author].
Japanese media recently reported that authors had agreed to retract the papers but were discussing the wording of the notice. In the note that appeared today, the authors point to errors previously identified by RIKEN investigations in supplementary documents. They also identify additional errors in both papers, including mix-ups in images, mislabeling, faulty descriptions, and “inexplicable discrepancies in genetic background and transgene insertion sites between the donor mice and the reported” STAP cells. [emphasis mine]
The list of errors now documented sound astonishing. In fact, I can’t see how any serious review by any competent specialist in this field could have missed them all, which suggests that for this research at least the peer-review process is mostly a sham. In fact, in the article Nature admits that its
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OCO-2 in orbit
Second time’s the charm: A Delta 2 rocket successfully launched the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) into orbit on Wednesday, five years after the first OCO was lost at launch when its Taurus XL rocket fell into the ocean.
The Earth-observing satellite is designed to globally track the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
I have to note that if the science of climate change was so “settled,” as President Barack Obama keeps insisting, why did we then spend half a billion dollars on this satellite? Wouldn’t it make more sense to drop the research and focus entirely on saving the planet?