The law is such an inconvenient thing: The IRS under Obama decided last year that it can require licenses from tax preparers, even though no law gives the tax agency that power.
Competition rules! Russia’s space agency has proposed a space exploration plan through 2030, including missions to the Moon and Mars, in an effort to catch up with the U.S.
JPL lawyers want to limit media access and reporting during ‘intelligent design’ trial.
This suggests strongly to me that JPL did fire this guy because of his religious beliefs.
Good news for commercial space: SpaceX has gotten another launch contract, this time to put up four satellites for an Asian/Central American communications partnership.
Research on ISS has found that prolonged spaceflight causes vision problems and might even damage the human eye.
There had been hints of this discovery in an earlier report, but today’s paper is the first published science on the subject.
The results are not only important for finding out the medical challenges of weightlessness. They illustrate once again the need to do long extended flights on ISS. Without that research we are never going to be able to fly humans to other planets.
An evening pause: What every home must have!
The blistering hot exoplanet where it snows.
These results have led to a suggestion that [HD 189733b] could continually experience silicate snow. In the lower atmosphere of [the exoplanet], magnesium silicate sublimates, that is, it passes directly from a solid into a gas. But we know there are small silicate particulates in the upper atmosphere. Formation of these particulates requires that the temperature be lowered, and so must have been formed at a temperature inversion in the atmosphere. The generally windy conditions would help some of the tiny particulates grow into respectable snow crystals.
Venus Express was blinded for four days last week after being hit by a coronal mass ejection from the Sun.
No longer is it good enough to disagree with conservatives. They must be fired from their jobs, separated from their advertisers, booted from the airwaves, buried under a prehistoric rock. The tactics attributed to Joe McCarthy tied to the polemical rigor associated with Jenny McCarthy.
Lord Monckton tries to educate a college professor and his students about the science of climate change.
This is why:
“We shall lose the West unless we can restore the use of reason to pre-eminence in our institutions of what was once learning. It was the age of reason that built the West and made it prosperous and free. The age of reason gave you your great Constitution of liberty. It is the power of reason, the second of the three great powers of the soul in Christian theology, that marks our species out from the rest of the visible creation, and makes us closest to the image and likeness of our Creator. I cannot stand by and let the forces of darkness drive us unprotesting into a new Dark Age.”
Was an evangelical Christian fired from his job at JPL because of his religious beliefs? A court case beginning Monday might tell us.
The robot rules: Dextre has successfully completed its first round of operations in its satellite refueling demonstration on ISS.
Late last week NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center released its monthly update of the ongoing solar cycle sunspot activity, covering February 2012. Though I am slightly late in posting it, as I do every month, you can now see the full graph below the fold. I have also created a close-up of the graph’s relevant area, shown on the left, because it is hard to decipher what is happening on the full graph.
Since the Sun began it ramp up to solar maximum back in 2009, the pattern has been consistent, two steps forward, one step back. First there are several months in a row in which the number of sunspots show a steep rise, followed immediately by several months in which the sunspot numbers decline just as steeply, though by not as much. All told, since 2009 we have seen this pattern repeat four times.
February’s numbers have continued that pattern.
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On March 6, film director and deep water diver James Cameron grabbed the record for the deepest solo dive ever, 26791 feet or more than five miles.
Moreover, this dive was only practice for an even deeper dive to come.
An evening pause: From the late 1950s, Alastair Cooke introduces Les Paul and Mary Ford, who then demonstrate some advanced music technology (and some smokin’ music) that would only become commonplace in the coming decades.
The director of Russia’s manned program told the press today that the Russians do not have that a signed contract with NASA to fly astronauts to ISS after 2015, despite NASA’s announcement that such an agreement exists.
If true, NASA’s management has committed a very serious error which will cost the U.S. a great deal of money in the coming years, especially if there are significant delays in getting the new commercial companies online to provide the U.S. an American capability for ferrying humans to orbit.
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The head of the Russian space agency has been hospitalized.
One year ago today Japan was hit with one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history, followed almost immediately by one of the most powerful tsunamis in recorded history. Since then, that nation and its people have done an incredible job recovering from that disaster, proving once again that there really is no limit to what humans can do.
The video below is their thank you to the rest of the world for the help and support brought to Japan by people everywhere. As they say, “Arigato.”
I say, bless you all for never giving up.
An evening pause: Sometimes, it’s just more fun to do things differently.
