Tantalizing hints: Has Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser been picked as one of two finalists in NASA’s competition to ferry crew and cargo to ISS?
What is truly frightening is not that Obama is unable to recognize, much less own, his scornful derision toward those who disagree with him. It is that nearly half the voting age population of this country is unable to or is indifferent toward these qualities.
The uncertainty of science: A new study suggests that the glaciers in the Himalayas are shrinking, with different regions shrinking much faster than others.
This study both supplements and contrasts other work which suggested that the western Himalayan glaciers were not shrinking.
It is interesting that the article above does not give any specifics on the rate of shrinkage, other than to say it is getting faster in some areas. Instead, the focus of this work centers more on the discovery that India’s monsoon winds have a significant influence on glacier growth or retreat.
Three astronauts successfully lifted off on a Soyuz rocket earlier today, headed to ISS.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: The Obama administration has backed off and is giving Florida access to a database of noncitizens so the state can check for illegal voters.
What sadly surprises me about this is that the Obama administration obeyed the judge’s ruling. Based on this administration’s past behavior, I would have expected them to defy it.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: The EPA is attempting to enforce a regulation requiring ships to use low-sulfur fuel, despite the fact that the regulation has not yet been voted on by the Senate.
The treaty amendment at issue is a 2010 agreement under the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, or MARPOL. The United States has signed onto MARPOL, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has accepted the 2010 amendment. Domestic enforcement of the amendment is not permitted without ratification by two-thirds of the U.S. Senate.
And the Senate has not voted on this yet.
Don’t use this as a laser pointer: Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have achieved a record-setting laser shot with a peak power of 500 trillion-watts to a target of just two millimeters in diameter.
Mars Odyssey went into safe mode on Wednesday for about 21 hours.
The orbiter has had increasing issues recently. Since it is used mostly as a communications satellite, this has impacts data downloads mostly from the rover Opportunity, and will a bigger problem once Curiosity arrives in August.
Are you scientifically literate? Take the quiz.
Why the Presidential race looks so close: Too many pollsters are oversampling Democrats.
An honest poll would reflect the actual split of Democrats to Republicans. Instead, pollsters seem to repeatedly assume there are many more Democrats in the country than there actually are, which falsely skews the results to Obama’s favor.
The thing is, this oversampling will do the Democrats no good this coming election. It gives them the false impression that they are doing better than they are, which means they will not do what they should to make up ground. Moreover, too many people today are aware of this biased polling, and thus less influenced by them.
Finally, and most important, these biased polls illustrate a fundamental unwillingness of many on the left to recognize the country’s real political state. These leftwing pollsters reflect the attitude of many Democrats, who refuse to believe the majority of the county opposes their policies, even when the 2010 elections should have told them different. They are in denial, and when November comes they are going to be very surprised by the results.
The competition heats up: ESA is revamping how it builds rockets in order to compete with SpaceX.
ESA officials have been spooked by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) of Hawthorne, Calif., which has demonstrated its technical prowess with the launch of its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon cargo vehicle to the international space station. SpaceX officials say one of the keys to its success is that Falcon 9 is built in one factory owned by SpaceX.
Read the whole thing. The way ESA builds the Ariane rocket requires too many participants (what we in the U.S. call pork), raising its cost. ESA is now abandoning that approach to cut costs and thus compete with SpaceX.
Bad training of the ISS astronauts by the company supplying the experiments was the reason the student experiments were never turned on.
“Previous crews were given on the ground review and personal interaction prior to launch,” Manber said. “For this mission, the astronaut received hardware training solely via video while on the space station. Clearly, there was a miscommunication resulting from the video instruction.”
An evening pause: Good avant-garde music that was actually a hit song in 1981. Listen and watch close and you will catch hints of the naive and anti-American anti-nuke movement of the early 1980s.
The music is still haunting, has a touch of humor, and is definitely worth hearing.
Racists! Against the advice of almost every farm organization the USDA is proceeding with regulations that will require farmers to individually tag every chicken and cow.
Fidelis Hegngi, a senior staff veterinarian at USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, also has his doubts. “To really truly have something like tagging work on poultry you would need to have something absolute because birds move a lot, if you don’t have something absolute, it’s not going to work. … I don’t think the technology is there yet to really implement the bird ID to be fully, fully functional,” Mr. Hegngi said. Government officials have not said whether they would check animals for identification at traffic stops.
Ms. Bergener has a simple solution to the poultry police: “I’m going to do selective passive resistance,” she said. “I’m not tagging.” …
According to the letter to OMB, the USDA’s disconnect with farmers does not stop at rules for poultry. The USDA estimates a rancher’s cost to identify cattle at 18 cents a head, but the letter cites a study from North Dakota State University that places the actual cost of cow citizenship at $20 a head.
Nowhere is it explained why the USDA is demanding such stringent ID requirements of farmers, other than to make their lives difficult and to increase the petty power of the Washington bureaucracy.
In other words, for the Obama administration it all can be summarized like this: “Voter ID bad! Chicken ID good!”
The new colonial movement: Poland today was accepted as a member of the European Space Agency.
Leftwing civility: “There’s this reign of terror going on in the Republican Party.”
The law is such an inconvenient thing: The Obama administration has decided to waive the work requirements under the 1996 welfare reform law, even though the law does not give the executive branch that right.
An new material has claimed the record as the world’s lightest solid.
Developed by a team from the Technical University of Hamburg and Germany’s University of Kiel, the material is composed of 99.99 percent air, along with a three-dimensional network of porous carbon nanotubes that were grown into each other. Aerographite has a density of less than 0.2 milligrams per cubic centimeter, which allows it be compressed by a factor of 1,000, then subsequently spring back to its original state. Despite its extremely low density, it is black and optically-opaque in appearance. By contrast, the density of metallic microlattice sits at 0.9 mg per cubic centimeter.
Another psychologist has resigned amid questions over the validity of his research.
This and other recent cases (here, here, here, here, here, here) are more evidence that the peer review process in some fields is badly broken, that the reviewers are too often not doing the reviewing they are supposed to, and in some cases might very well be participating in scientific fraud themselves.
Chicken Little report: The Sun has emitted a big flare, and a coronal mass ejection from this is expected to hit the Earth on Saturday.
There will be some gnashing of teeth about this flare, but in truth, this sentence says it all:
The radiation storm, in progress, ranks “S1” on NOAA space weather scales, which means it poses no serious threat to satellites or astronauts.
Researchers have concluded that the dust on the Moon’s surface might pose serious health risks for lunar colonists.
At least 80 House Republicans have signed a letter demanding that Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) block any further funding of Obamacare.
This story illustrates two things. First, the House Republican leadership has been timid about using its power to block the implementation of Obamacare, even though the public clearly wants it blocked. Second, that about a third of the House Republican membership has already signed the letter, with more signatures expected, suggests that the bulk of the Republican Party is not as timid as their leadership. Moreover, I expect the November election to significantly strengthen this fiscally conservative trend.
Thus, it will not surprise me if we see some very radical budget cuts in the next Congress.
