The invader prepares its attack: For the first time today Curiosity flexed its robot arm.
Astronomers have now confirmed 41 new exoplanets, first pinpointed by the Kepler space telescope.
One paper, by Jiwei Xie at the University of Toronto, confirms 24 new planets in 12 systems. Another study, by Steffen and his colleagues, confirms 27 planets in 13 systems. Five of the systems, and 10 of the planets, are the same in both papers. All in all, the new research adds 20 new planetary systems to the 47 that Kepler had previously confirmed, marking a more than 40 percent increase.
Among the Kepler candidates are five Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone, according to the vidoe at the link. However, this announcement does not tell us if any of those candidates were confirmed by these two papers.
NASA has announced its next planetary mission, a lander to Mars that will drill down thirty feet into the planet’s surface.
Though exciting in its own right, this mission is far less ambitious than the two missions which competed against it, a boat that would have floated on the lakes of Titan and a probe that would have bounced repeatedly off the surface of a comet. I suspect the reason this mission was chosen is the tight budgets at NASA, combined with Curiosity’s success which makes it politically advantageous to approve another Mars mission. As the NASA press release emphasized,
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The competition heats up: Scaled Composites has posted the results of its latest test firing of the rocket motor for SpaceShipTwo.
Though the test is dated August 9, more than a week ago, I expect the number of engine tests to go up in the coming months as the company works toward the first powered flights of SpaceShipTwo.
On August 13, 2012, Voyager 2 became the longest-operating spacecraft in history, finally topping Pioneer 6, which was launched on Dec. 16, 1965, and sent its last signal back to Earth on Dec. 8, 2000.
And Voyager 2, along with its partner Voyager 1, are still working, and engineers hope they will still be working for another eight to twelve years, enough time for them to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space.
A man was arrested in Toronto on Saturday for walking his dog in a public park, because the dog’s presence offended some Islamic demonstrators.
News you can use: A sofa that doubles as a cat tower.
Engineers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed a robot hand that costs less than $10,000 and is capable of replacing a flashlight battery.
The researchers were able to scrimp in a number of clever ways. “One was scouring the globe for the least expensive, highest-performing components like motors, gears, etcetera,” says Curt Salisbury, the project’s principal investigator. “Another was to build the entire electronics system from commodity parts, especially those found in cell phones. We also moved from metal structural elements to plastic, being careful to design the structures so plastic would provide adequate strength.”
The article focuses on the potential of using such a robot hand to defuse bombs. I see it as a first step in providing amputees a replacement hand that is fully functional. And that their goal is to bring the cost down to $1,000 is even more exciting.
What does this tell us? A new poll of registered voters in Cook County, Illinois, has Obama leading by only 7 percent, 49 to 36.
Cook County is where Chicago is located, and is Obama’s home base.
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The man who invented the first programmable computer.
The stupid party: Todd Akin, the Missouri Republican running for the Senate, tried to explain his opposition to all abortion, even in instances of rape, by saying that “legitimate rape” rarely leads to pregnancy.
Note that this is more evidence that Republicans should listen to Sarah Palin, who endorsed and campaigned for one of Akin’s opponents in the primary. It is also evidence that for voters to favor a tea party candidate is not necessarily a big risk.
The 1006 AD supernova, thought to be the brightest in recorded history, apparently left no star behind.
You’ve almost certainly seen pictures of this geological formation, but this article gives the background.
They can’t seriously think anyone will believe this? Faced with small crowds at their campaign events, the Obama campaign is now claiming that they are intentionally limiting crowd size at rallies to save money on security.
More embarrassing is the original New York Times article, which goes out of its way to sell this absurd claim.
A detailed, fact-based look at the successes and failures of the Obama administration.
Sadly, they are mostly failures. What is significant to me is that this article is from liberal Newsweek of all places. It is another data point indicating that even the intellectuals on the left are beginning to realize how much of a failure Obama has been.
War of the Worlds! The Earth invading spacecraft on Mars has fired its laser for the first time!
Forgive me the hyperbole. I have this childhood vision from that moment when I first read H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, when the Martian tripod first rose up and fired its death ray at a crowd of curious humans. And here we are, a century after Wells penned that classic science fiction novel, and humans have put a spacecraft on Mars, Curiosity, capable of firing lasers! The laser isn’t a death ray but a scientific tool, but nonetheless the ironies remain delicious.
The competition heats up: The Russian owned Sea Launch successfully launched an Intelsat communications satellite today.
This Ohio newspaper editorial about the Presidential race and the choices it offers us might be the most forcefully blunt I have ever read.
Read it and then return. Back yet? Okay, two comments:
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The failed predictions of the last half century of scientific doomsayers.
It is entertaining to read this long list of foolish predictions describing the certain and soon-to-arrive end of humanity. Maybe the best is the prediction of Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, who in 2007 predicted that “if there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late … This is the defining moment.”
However, it is Ridley’s concluding thoughts about climate change that are maybe the most worthwhile:
We hardly ever allow the moderate “lukewarmers” a voice: those who suspect that the net positive feedbacks from water vapor in the atmosphere are low, so that we face only 1 to 2 degrees Celsius of warming this century; that the Greenland ice sheet may melt but no faster than its current rate of less than 1 percent per century; that net increases in rainfall (and carbon dioxide concentration) may improve agricultural productivity; that ecosystems have survived sudden temperature lurches before; and that adaptation to gradual change may be both cheaper and less ecologically damaging than a rapid and brutal decision to give up fossil fuels cold turkey.
Read the whole thing. It is a truly educational experience.
The modern leftwing disconnect from reality.
[L]ast week a man called Floyd Corkins shot another man called Leo Johnson, the security guard at the Family Research Council, a “conservative” group, according to the muted media coverage, or a “hate group,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who spray that term around like champagne on a NASCAR podium. Mr. Corkins, an “LGBT volunteer,” told his victim, “I don’t like your politics.” In his backpack, he had one box of ammunition and 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches. Had he had one Chick-fil-A sandwich and 15 boxes of ammunition, he might have done more damage. Or then again perhaps not, given that, as bloggers Kathy Shaidle and “the Phantom” pointed out, he reached his target and then started “monologuing,” as they say in The Incredibles….
I’m not blaming Floyd Corkins’s actions on the bullying twerps at the Southern Poverty Law Center or those thug Democrat mayors who tried to run Chick-fil-A out of Boston and Chicago. But I do think he’s the apotheosis of narcissistic leftist myopia. He symbolizes that exhaustion of the other possibilities — the dwindling down of latter-day liberalism to ever more self-indulgent distractions from the hard truths of a broke and ruined landscape. Our elites have sunk into a boutique decadence of moral preening entirely disconnected from reality: A non-homophobic chicken in every pot, an abortifacient dispenser in every Catholic university, a high-speed-rail corridor between every two bankrupt California municipalities.
Read the whole thing. Steyn once again notes the bankruptcy of modern liberalism and the Democratic Party, which — unless the American public rejects it — will lead to the bankruptcy of our country and probably the world.
Not good: A federal court has thrown out a lawsuit by an automobile industry consortium that wanted to prevent the EPA from approving the use of 15% ethanol in gasoline.
One businessman’s comment on Barack Obama.
It starts here and only gets better.
As a small business owner all I can say is that I think the current sentiment in the small business community is that we didn’t sign up for this shit. Y’all can vote for whatever the hell you want but we are not going to be a part of it.
A modern intellectual looks at the Syrian revolt and immediately concludes that it was caused by global warming!
Climate change: is there anything it can’t do?
Seriously, the drought in Syria might be a factor behind the revolt, but to assert that the drought was caused by global warming is weak at best. There is no data to make that assertion, none at all. All we have is the opinion of some global warming scientists that such extreme droughts might happen more frequently as the Earth warms. And since the temperature increase as predicted by those very same scientists has not occurred, we should take all their predictions with a big grain of salt.
Racists! 400 economic experts have signed a petition supporting Romney’s economic plans.
They also condemned the efforts and future proposals of the Obama administration.
Curiosity’s travel plans tentatively outlined.
A dinosaur footprint has been discovered on the Goddard Space Flight Center grounds in Maryland.
Leftwing civility: An elderly leftwing protester spits in the face of at Romney supporter at a campaign event today.
When the left made the accusation that a tea party protester had spat at a Democratic Congressman during the healthcare debate, Andrew Breitbart offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who could provide video proving it happened. Three years later that award remains unclaimed, since the only videos of the event show nothing of the sort took place. Today, not only was this disgusting act actually done by a Democratic protester, in mere hours the video is all over the internet.
Tells us something about who are the uncivil ones in this debate.
