The competition heats up: SpaceX’s first abort test of its Dragon capsule was completed successfully this morning.
The test not only demonstrated the capsule’s ability to escape the launchpad and land safely in the ocean nearby, it proved that its SuperDraco thrusters have the power to lift the spacecraft off the pad, which also means they have the power to lower the capsule to a soft landing on land.
Video embedded below.
An evening pause: The song was written for Lieberman after she saw Don McLean perform in concert, but was made a big hit by Roberta Flack in 1973. Here, Lieberman shows us how its done.
Hat tip Danae.
We’re here to help you: Federal officials have ordered New York to remove the billboards that make Times Square famous or else the state will lose $90 million in federal highway funds.
The edict comes from a 2012 law that makes Times Square an arterial route to the national highway system. And that puts it under the 1965 Highway Beautification Act, which limits signs to 1,200 square feet. It took the feds until now to realize that Times Square was included.
Working for the Democratic Party: A conservative journalist and strong critic of the Obama administration has obtained evidence through a Freedom of Information request that strongly suggests the IRS audits against him were ordered by the Obama administration and possibly a Democratic senator because of his political views.
My IRS auditor wrote into the margin of my file that he spent hours researching my political views. How chilling is that revelation? It sounds like the KGB, Stasi or even the Gestapo.
An IRS audit that required researching my political views clearly wasn’t a “normal random audit.” I was targeted for my political views. My civil rights were clearly violated.
The reason it may have taken the IRS fourteen months to turn my IRS files over to Judicial Watch [despite being required to do so in 30 days] is that they state a United States senator from Oregon was involved. At the time both senators from Oregon were Democrats. But only one, Ron Wyden, was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee with oversight over … the IRS. Could Ron Wyden have been the Democrat senator involved in my case?
There is a lot more at the link. Read it all.
The fascists win again: Tired of the constant abuse from animal rights activists as well as the unwillingness of his institution and colleagues to support him, a researcher has decided to abandon his neurology work.
The researcher was cleared of any wrong-doing in his treatment of his research monkeys. Nonetheless, he has written a letter to a number of scientists who did support him, explaining his decision.
“I am no longer willing or able to accept the never-ending stream of abuse from animal activists toward myself and my co-workers while seeing them encouraged to increase their aggressive activities by the tolerance and very slow reactions of scientific organizations. There is a clear lack of consequences for illegal actions such as infiltration, violation of privacy, theft of documents, and even intentionally caused distress to animals in order to film supposed animal torture or abnormal behavior,” the letter states.
Logothetis’s letter also faults his scientific colleagues in Tübingen for distancing themselves from the controversy. The neighboring Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology posted a disclaimer on its website emphasizing that there are no monkeys at the institute, he notes, and colleagues at the nearby Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research refused to issue a declaration of support.
The letter was not intended to be made public, Logothetis told ScienceInsider, and he regrets that it has been circulated beyond the people to whom he addressed it. He stresses that the problem of inaction is not specific to the Max Planck Society. “In my view organizations worldwide must change strategy immediately. Filing charges against infiltrators should be a ‘must’ whether or not radical activists manage to escape consequences in the first trials. In our case, there was more than enough evidence to support a number of accusations,” he says.
This kind of reminds me of a lot of situations these days, where obvious law-breakers — from minority rioters to feminist rape accusers to Islamic terrorists — are allowed to get away with abuse and illegal behavior simply because their “cause” is considered righteous in some way by our modern leftwing state religion.
The principle investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto gives us an overview of what is known, and what we might find, when the spacecraft does its fly-by on July 14.
Pluto has very distinct surface markings, including apparent polar caps, and it has an atmosphere (mostly nitrogen). We know that Pluto’s interior is primarily made of rock — about 70% by mass. Also, Pluto-Charon constitute a true binary planet, with a barycenter (center of mass) situated in the open space between them. We know Charon is a “rising star” among the solar system’s icy bodies, with evidence for recently created surface ices, possible internal activity (hinted at by the spectroscopic discovery of ammonium hydrates a few years ago), and some likelihood of an atmosphere itself — perhaps gas that was siphoned off Pluto! As for the small satellites — Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra — we know very little about them beyond their orbits and crude colors. Soon all six of those points of light, planet and moons, will be real worlds thanks to NASA’s New Horizons.
He also admits that trying to guess what we might find is quite hazardous, and likely will end up wrong.
The uncertainty of science: The x-ray space telescope NuSTAR has detected high energy x-rays at the center of the Milky Way coming from no obvious source.
In and of themselves, X-rays from the galactic center aren’t unusual. But the X-rays NuSTAR detects don’t seem to be associated with structures already known to exist. For example, a supernova remnant named Sgr A East emits low-energy X-rays but not high-energy X-rays. The high-energy blotch doesn’t correlate with structures seen in radio images either, such as the dust and gas clouds of Sgr A West that are falling toward the supermassive black hole.
Instead, Perez and her colleagues propose that thousands of stellar corpses could be responsible for the high-energy X-rays: massive (and still-growing) white dwarfs, spun-up pulsars, or black holes or neutrons stars feeding on low-mass companion stars.
All of their proposed solutions, however, have serious problems explaining all of the data.
Shades of Star Trek: In addition to drinking the first home-brewed coffee in space, the astronauts also used a 3-D printed mug, though the printing took place not in space but on Earth.
R.I.P. Grace Lee Whitney, who played Yeoman Janice Rand in the original Star Trek.
The competition heats up: In anticipation of its Wednesday, May 6, launchpad abort test of its Dragon capsule, SpaceX has put out a press release providing an overview of the test and what will happen.
The launch window opens at 7 am (Eastern), but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t happen then. They have a very long launch window, and could do it almost anytime during the day.
An evening pause: Some silliness from Johnny Carson and Dom Deluise.
NOAA today posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, showing the Sun’s sunspot activity in April. As always, I am posting it here, with annotations to give it context, as I have done since 2010.
The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The red curve is their revised May 2009 prediction.
Though sunspot activity increased in April, it remained well below the predicted numbers from the 2009 prediction, as has sunspot activity generally done for this entire solar cycle.
Note that if you extrapolate the red curve of the 2009 prediction down to its end you find that the solar minimum was predicted to occur sometime after 2020. Based on the rate of activity we have seen for the past year, it is very possible that the minimum will occur sooner, and will likely last longer.
But then again, the sun does what the sun wants to do. We don’t exactly understand the root causes of the solar cycle, and can only watch it unfold time after time as we try to peel back its mysteries.
