The lost tomb of Cervantes found
Scientists think they have found the remains of Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, in a long forgotten tomb in Madrid.
Year: 2015
Water ice volcanoes on Ceres
Data collected by Dawn since it entered orbit around Ceres on March 6 now strongly suggests that the bright spots on the surface are produced by venting water,
Andreas Nathues, principal investigator for Dawn’s framing camera, says the feature has spectral characteristics that are consistent with ice. Intriguingly, the brightness can be seen even when the spacecraft is looking on edge at the crater rim, suggesting that the feature may be outgassing water vapor above the rim and into space. “Ceres seems to be indeed active,” he says. The feature brightens through the course of the day, and then shuts down at night. Nathues says the behavior is similar to that of comets.
More here. By mid-April Dawn should finally settle this with high resolution images.
Airline passengers subdue man screaming “Jihad!” on airplane
A United Airlines flight had to turn back when passengers on board were forced to subdue an unruly passenger who was yelling “Jihad!” as he charged the cockpit.
This is another example of why the TSA is a complete waste of money while doing terrible harm to our culture’s concept of freedom. No matter what the TSA does, it can never prevent bad guys from getting on a plane. In the end, it will always be the job of the passengers and crew to resist a terrorist. We should just give that responsibility back to them, as free Americans, and get rid of the TSA. It might increase the risk, but I promise you, if every flight had armed Americans aboard, randomly placed, terrorists would go elsewhere to try to do their dirty work.
Most Americans think my opinion here is crazy, but it is the way our country did things for its first two centuries, and things were actually no more dangerous but we all had much greater freedom.
Virgin Galactic says LauncherOne will make its first flight in 2016
The competition heats up: The CEO of Virgin Galactic, George Whitesides, revealed at a satellite conference that they are on schedule for LauncherOne to make its first flight before the end of 2016.
The company recently started hot-fire tests of an engine called Newton 3 developed by Virgin Galactic for the first stage of LauncherOne, Whitesides said. That engine, capable of generating 265,000 to 335,000 newtons of thrust, uses liquid oxygen and kerosene propellants. “We’re now to the point where we’re very confident that we can build a very affordable rocket,” Whitesides said. After his speech, he said the company was on schedule to begin flights by the end of 2016, with even initial test flights likely carrying some satellites.
That it is Whitesides and not Richard Branson saying this makes me more confident that it is true, though I remain very skeptical of any promise made by anyone these days at Virgin Galactic. However, the impression from this article confirms an earlier impression I have had, that the company is beginning to shift its resources away from suborbital tourism with SpaceShipTwo and towards orbital launch services with LauncherOne. Branson had announced LauncherOne as a concept in 2012, but only recently have we begin to hear of any actual work on it.
A Mars One finalist accuses the company of fraud
One of the finalists in the one-way-to-Mars competition by the company Mars One has now accused the company of fraud.
Most egregiously, many media outlets continue to report that Mars One received applications from 200,000 people who would be happy to die on another planet — when the number it actually received was 2,761.
As [finalist Joseph] Roche observed the process from an insider’s perspective, his concerns increased. Chief among them: that some leading contenders for the mission had bought their way into that position, and are being encouraged to “donate” any appearance fees back to Mars One — which seemed to him very strange for an outfit that needs billions of dollars to complete its objective. “When you join the ‘Mars One Community,’ which happens automatically if you applied as a candidate, they start giving you points,” Roche explained to me in an email. “You get points for getting through each round of the selection process (but just an arbitrary number of points, not anything to do with ranking), and then the only way to get more points is to buy merchandise from Mars One or to donate money to them.”
There’s more at the link. Essentially, the whole operation has apparently devolved into a petty scam to milk money from the finalists themselves.
None of this surprises me. From the beginning I considered the whole proposal unrealistic, which thus almost forced the people in charge to commit fraud.
Edie Brickell & Steve Martin – When You Get To Asheville
An evening pause: They usually give Martin first billing, but Brickell is really the star here. Martin is good on banjo, but it is her song. Though it is amazing to see how Steve Martin has reinvented himself again.
New results from Messenger at Mercury
As Messenger nears the end of its lifespan orbiting Mercury, the project scientists have put together a slate of talks on what they have learned, presented today at the 46th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston.
The images that go with these presentations can be found here.
The image on the right is a close-up of the mysterious and unexpected hollows that Messenger found scattered everywhere on Mercury’s surface. According to today’s presentation, scientists now believe they are very recent features, formed when material with a lower boiling point evaporated away because of Mercury’s harsh and very hot environment. Imagine for example a vein of dry ice in a rock crack. The temperature rises above freezing and the dry ice evaporates. And like the convection bubbles in tomato sauce as it simmers, some of that evaporation pushes its way up by popping out a bubble and leaving behind a hollow.
In the case of Mercury the material is likely not dry ice, though scientists as yet are unsure what it is.
They are also presenting talks on magnesium on Mercury, the planet’s many scarps, and detailed observations of the permanently shadowed polar craters that might have water-ice in them.
Wait times at the VA remain months long, not 4 days as claimed
The federal government marches on! The wait times to get medical appointments at the VA continue to be months long, not 4 days as the claimed by agency officials in congressional hearings.
Records show on January 15, more than 1,600 veterans who were new patients were waiting 60 to 90 days for appointments. Another 400 veterans have waited up to six months, and 64 veterans had been waiting six months to a year for their appointments. The documents provided to CNN show the lengthy wait times are still happening, within the last several months, and sources say the backlog is happening even now.
And yet last month, the VA’s acting director for the Western region overseeing the Los Angeles VA told Congress that veterans who are new patients there only have to wait a few days for appointments. “The average wait time for a new patient right now is about four days,” Dr. Skye McDougall, the acting director of the Desert Pacific Healthcare Network, Veterans Health Administration, testified before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.
Who ya gonna believe, the actual facts or what an important government official claims? Obviously, the official is right and any skepticism by anyone makes them a denier who should just shut up. It makes people uncomfortable!
Muslim university students campaign to shut down free speech
Fascists: Muslim students at the University of Missouri want to prevent the screening of the film American Sniper because they don’t agree with it.
At the heart of the controversy is a Muslim student activist who declared showing the film on campus would make her feel “unsafe” and demanded an “apology and explanation” as to how and why the movie was even selected for Mizzou audiences.
The uproar was taken quite seriously, and prompted the student government to conduct a meeting to determine whether the flick should be shown. “This film is blatant racist, colonialist propaganda that should not be shown under any circumstances and especially not endorsed by a branch of student government that purports to represent me and have my best interests in mind,” student Farah El-Jayyousi had stated. [emphasis mine]
I haven’t seen the movie, and I am sure neither has Farah El-Jayyousi above. I however wouldn’t dream of censoring it. El-Jayyousi would love to, along with any other person who dares to criticize Islam and the culture of violence and hate that now dominates it.
New areas of Comet 67P/C-G come out of the shadows
Rosetta has snapped a new image of Comet 67P/C-G’s smaller lobe that not only shows the increased activity around the nucleus but captures areas of the comet that had formally been in darkness. The image also includes the region where engineers think Philae landed, which I think is the area just below the brightest flat area in the center of the lobe. That this area is now in daylight is why engineers are hopeful that Philae might soon wake up.
Sloppy biosafety procedures found at federal disease center
Does this make you feel safer? An investigation of a federal center for studying dangerous diseases in primates has found serious biosafety procedure violations.
Concerns arose at the center in Covington, Louisiana, after two rhesus macaques became ill in late November with melioidosis, a disease caused by the tropical bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei. In January, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Department of Agriculture investigators traced the strain infecting the primates to a vaccine research lab working with mice. Last month, as the investigation continued, CDC suspended the primate center’s 10 or so research projects involving B. pseudomallei and other select agents (a list of dangerous bacteria, viruses, and toxins that are tightly regulated). Meanwhile, a report in USA Today suggested the bacterium might have contaminated the center’s soil or water.
…In addition, workers “frequently entered the select agent lab without appropriate protective clothing,” the release says. No center staff has shown signs of illness. On 12 March, however, Tulane announced that blood tests have found that one worker has low levels of antibodies to the bacterium, suggesting possible exposure at the center, according to ABC News.
Is there any area of government expertise that isn’t screwing up royally these days? As far as I can tell, the answer is no. The sooner we as a people can cut back on the government’s resources so that they won’t have the ability to do us harm, the better off we will be.
Whistling now forbidden
Fascists: After several black employees in a television newsroom were horrified when they heard a photographer casually whistling the folk tune “Dixie”, the station management immediately clamped down and promised such evil will never be allowed to happen again!
On Thursday, two meetings were held with staffers and WBTV general manager Nick Simonette and news director Dennis Milligan. “We wanted the staff to know that we don’t tolerate things in the workplace that make people uncomfortable,” Milligan said. “We encourage people to come forward. I think it was handled in an appropriate way.”
I’m so glad. Now those black employees know that if anyone says anything at all that they disagree with — making them “uncomfortable” — all they have to do is complain and they can shut them up. Modern American freedom!