The Refreshments – Let It Rock
An evening pause: Who says the world doesn’t love American culture? Watch a Swedish band and an English guitarist play classic rock.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Year: 2015
Curiosity has resumed science work
Engineers have decided they know enough about the short circuit produced by Curiosity’s drill two weeks ago that they can resume science operations while they figure out how to handle the issue.
Be prepared for more electrical problems in the future. This issue is unfortunately not going to go away.
Archeologists discover the world’s oldest pretzel
Archeologists have uncovered a pretzel 250 years old, as well as bread roll and a croissant, at an excavation in the eastern Bavarian city of Regensburg.
A peek into the world’s largest underground mine
Link here.
Obama learns of existence of mysterious ‘‘Hillary Clinton’’ from news!
President Obama was reportedly shocked and stunned to learn from simply watching the news on Wednesday of the existence of this formally unknown yet very important “Hillary Clinton” person whom not only had been his Democratic primary opponent in 2007 and 2008, but had also been his Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013.
Ganymede’s underground salt water ocean
By measuring the interaction of Jupiter and Ganymede’s magnetic fields, scientists have been able to estimate the size of the salt water ocean in Ganymede’s interior.
A team of scientists led by Joachim Saur of the University of Cologne in Germany came up with the idea of using Hubble to learn more about the inside of the moon. “I was always brainstorming how we could use a telescope in other ways,” said Saur. “Is there a way you could use a telescope to look inside a planetary body? Then I thought, the aurorae! Because aurorae are controlled by the magnetic field, if you observe the aurorae in an appropriate way, you learn something about the magnetic field. If you know the magnetic field, then you know something about the moon’s interior.”
If a saltwater ocean were present, Jupiter’s magnetic field would create a secondary magnetic field in the ocean that would counter Jupiter’s field. This “magnetic friction” would suppress the rocking of the aurorae. This ocean fights Jupiter’s magnetic field so strongly that it reduces the rocking of the aurorae to 2 degrees, instead of 6 degrees if the ocean were not present. Scientists estimate the ocean is 60 miles (100 kilometers) thick — 10 times deeper than Earth’s oceans — and is buried under a 95-mile (150-kilometer) crust of mostly ice.
That’s more water than contained in all of Earth’s oceans.
Family flees home due to death threats
Modern American freedom: The parents of one of the Oklahoma fraternity students caught on video making a racist chant have fled their home due to death threats.
As vile as the racist chanting was, it was not threatening anyone with death. Moreover, we have something called the first amendment, which protects all speech, even the vile kind. Threatening the parents of someone who says something you don’t like is hardly standing up for righteous principles.
In related news, Christians at George Washington University in the District of Columbia face punishment because they refuse to participate in gay sensitivity training sessions.
A conservative student group at The George Washington University faces punishment, including the loss of its funding, for refusing to engage in LGBT sensitivity training on campus. The students are now being condemned and attacked on campus by those who claim they’re committing an “act of violence” for standing up for their members’ individual rights and Judeo-Christian values. The Young America’s Foundation chapter at the Washington, D.C.-based academic institute has refused to participate in LGBT sensitivity training recently made as a requirement.
Amanda Robbins, vice president of GW YAF, told The Christian Post that their objection to the training “stems not only from many of our members’ Judeo-Christian values, but also from our organization’s commitment to defending the individual rights of every student on campus. We firmly believe that there should be no such preconditions for any student organization to be able to operate freely on campus,” said Robbins.
The closest exoplanet is Earth-sized
Having detected an exoplanet circling Alpha Centauri B in 2012, astronomers have now narrowed its mass to one to three times that of Earth, making this closest exoplanet an Earth-sized planet.
Crew returns safely from ISS
A Soyuz capsule returned three astronauts safely to Earth today, including the first Russian female astronaut since 1997.
Katie Melua – If you were a sailboat
An evening pause: Hat tip Danae.
New Horizons adjusts its course
In preparing for its July 14 fly-by of Pluto, engineers fired New Horizons’ engines on Tuesday for 93 seconds to fine-tune its trajectory.
They will have four more opportunities to make further course adjustments.
Tiny grains from the interior ocean of Enceladus
Using Cassini scientists have detected tiny grains of rock orbiting Saturn that they think were formed on the floor of the interior ocean of Enceladus and then spewed out its vents into space.
They believe that these silicon-rich grains originate on the seafloor of Enceladus, where hydrothermal processes are at work. On the seafloor, hot water at a temperature of at least 90 degrees Celsius dissolves minerals from the moon’s rocky interior. The origin of this energy is not well understood, but likely includes a combination of tidal heating as Enceladus orbits Saturn, radioactive decay in the core and chemical reactions.
As the hot water travels upward, it comes into contact with cooler water, causing the minerals to condense out and form nano-grains of ‘silica’ floating in the water. To avoid growing too large, these silica grains must spend a few months to several years at most rising from the seafloor to the surface of the ocean, before being incorporated into larger ice grains in the vents that connect the ocean to the surface of Enceladus. After being ejected into space via the moon’s geysers, the ice grains erode, liberating the tiny rocky inclusions subsequently detected by Cassini.
Additional data suggest that the interior of Enceladus is very porous, which means that interior ocean might not be one large bubble but a complex liquid-filled cave.
Orbital ATK successfully tests the largest solid rocket motor ever made
Early today Orbital ATK successfully completed a two minute test firing of its five segment solid rocket booster, the largest solid rocket motor ever built and intended for NASA’s SLS rocket.
Video at the link.
Feel the middle-class rage
While this story is about the testimony of a mother before the Arkansas State Board of Education, objecting to Common Core standards and demanding that they be changed or abandoned, I think its most important take-away is watching the intelligent and thoughtful anger she expresses.
I have included the video of her testimony below the fold. Anyone who thinks the tea party movement is dead needs to watch this video to find out how wrong they are. This woman speaking as a representative of over a thousand parents and teachers, all of whom object to Common Core, the federally-imposed education standards. She also reveals the increasing level of rage and anger that is percolating in the general public over the incompetent and destructive dictates that are being imposed on them by bureaucrats in Washington.
The Republican leadership in the House and Senate might think they were elected to keep the government open, but this woman’s testimony tells me that the mid-term elections were a demand by the public for the Republicans to shut it down.
And they better do it soon, because the rage is continuing to build. If our elected officials don’t respond to it soon the very system of democracy on which our society was built — founded on the principle that government is the servant to the people — is going to become very seriously threatened.
The Milky Way is like ripples in a pond
The uncertainty of science: New survey data of the stars in the Milky Way suggest that the galaxy is not only corrugated with concentric ripples — like you’d see if you dropped a stone in a pond — it is also about 50% larger than previous estimates.
I have watched the size of the Milky Way fluctuate up and down depending on the research for the past forty years. Sometimes it is larger than expected. Sometimes smaller. Without doubt we are getting a better idea of its actual size, but don’t be surprised if the numbers continue to bounce about for decades, even centuries, to come.
The confirmation that the spiral arms are the equivalent of ripples in a pond is also not surprising, as it confirms the intuitive conclusion of anyone who looks at a whirlpool-shaped spiral galaxy: It is a whirlpool spiraling into the gravity well at its center.
Virgin Galactic test flights to resume in 2015?
I’ll believe it when I see it: The executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, which runs Spaceport America, said Tuesday that she hopes Virgin Galactic will resume test flights of a SpaceShipTwo suborbital ship sometime in 2015, with commercial flights beginning in 2016.
She claimed that work on the new ship is about 80% completed, with construction of another ship also underway.
Forgive me if I have my doubts. Virgin Galactic has spent more than a decade making these promises, with no results.
A new song for space
At a press conference Sarah Brightman yesterday revealed that she is working with Andrew Lloyd Webber to create a new song to sing when she visits the International Space Station later this year.
She also said that she will sing it from the station near the end of her visit. While the reason she gave for this schedule was because she needed time to adjust to weightlessness, I also see this as good marketing, allowing time for a pr build-up to get the largest audience possible.
Insane shift change at lighthouse
An evening pause: Or as Tom Biggar, who sent this to me, noted, “Hell of a commute.” He also noted that “the lighthouse was automated in 1989 and insane shift changes no longer take place.”
Two astronauts gear up for one year in space
The final preparations are under way for sending two astronauts, one American and one Russian, to ISS for a full year.
Their launch is scheduled for March 27 in a Soyuz capsule.
One other cool aspect of this long mission: The American astronaut, Scott Kelly, has a twin brother, Mark Kelly, who is also an astronaut, though retired. Mark will be duplicating some of Scott’s in-space activities during the mission. Doctors will also compare how Scott’s body changes in weightlessness over time, in comparison to his brother here on Earth.
More evidence NOAA has tampered with climate data
More global-warming fraud: Scientists have uncovered more tampering by NOAA of its climate temperature data to create the illusion that the climate is warming.
When Dr. Roy Spencer looked up summer temperature data for the U.S. Corn Belt, it showed no warming trend for over a century. But that was before temperatures were “adjusted” by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate scientists. Now the same data shows a significant warming trend.
Spencer, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said that the National Climatic Data Center made large adjustments to past summer temperatures for the U.S. Corn Belt, lowering past temperatures to make them cooler. Adjusting past temperatures downward creates a significant warming trend in the data that didn’t exist before. “I was updating a U.S. Corn Belt summer temperature and precipitation dataset from the NCDC website, and all of a sudden the no-warming-trend-since-1900 turned into a significant warming trend,” Spencer wrote on his blog, adding that NCDC’s “adjustments” made the warming trend for the region increase from just 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit per century to 0.6 degrees per century.
As Spencer notes, correcting the data for errors would normally cause adjustments in both directions. NOAA’s adjustments, however, are always in one direction: from cooler to warmer. This suggests manipulation and fraud, not an effort to improve the data. And that they have consistently refused to explain their adjustments in detail further reinforces this conclusion.