The big news is out. Today the eagerly awaited press conference at the American Geophysical Society meeting in San Francisco on the recent results from the Mars rover Curiosity was finally held. The announced results had been hyped like crazy when rumors began to spread a few weeks ago that Curiosity had discovered something truly spectacular.
Well, here are some of the headlines heralding the results.
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New data suggests that the icy crust of Titan is twice as thick as previously estimated.
“The picture of Titan that we get has an icy, rocky core with a radius of a little over 2,000 kilometers, an ocean somewhere in the range of 225 to 300 kilometers thick and an ice layer that is 200 kilometers thick,” [said Howard Zebker of Stanford University]. Previous models of Titan’s structure estimated the icy crust to be approximately 100 kilometers thick.
This means that the methane lakes and rivers of Titan are flowing across a bedrock of ice, which at the cold temperatures there would be as solid as rock is here on Earth.
NOAA’S latest monthly update of the Sun’s ongoing ramp up to solar maximum has just been published and, as I do every month, I have posted the latest graph, with annotation, below the fold.
As the Sun had been somewhat active in November, I had expected the graph line to rise. It has, but not by very much.
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We’re here to help you: The head of the Interior Department has ordered the shutdown of a century-old California oyster company.
Two key quotes from the article illustrate the foolishness and oppressive nature of this decision:
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Finding out what’s in it: Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, will be eliminating healthcare coverage to its part time employees due to Obamacare.
Essentially, the company is trying to avoid the high costs imposed by Obamacare by dropping coverage for anyone working 30 hours or less, and then moving more employees into that category when possible. As I noted before, this idiotic law is forcing us to be a nation of part time workers.
Changes in the levels of sulphur dioxide (SO2) since Venus Express arrived in orbit around Venus in 2006 now suggest strongly that the spacecraft has detected volcanic activity on the planet.
The SPICAV data show that the concentration of SO2 above the main cloud deck increased slightly to about 1000 parts per billion by volume (ppbv) between 2006 and 2007, but then steadily decreased over the next five years, reaching only 100 ppbv by 2012. This is very reminiscent of a pattern observed by Pioneer Venus during the 1980s, the only other multi-year dataset of SO2 measurements.
One of best explanations for these changes is a volcanic eruption back in 2006, which would have inserted a great deal of SO2 into the upper atmosphere. Since then, ultraviolet radiation from the sun has steadily destroyed it.
North Korea has placed the first stage of its own rocket on the launchpad in preparation for a test flight later this month.
Japan, South Korea, the United States, and the United Kingdom (as indicated in the article above) have protested this launch, as well as Russia and China. Interestingly, no one has objected to the South Korea’s effort to build its own orbital rocket, which tells us a great deal about the differences between the two Koreas.
An evening pause: In memory to the 20,000 or so violent attacks committed by Islamic radical since September 11, 2001, I think this poem by William Butler Yeats is appropriate. Written it 1920, it somehow sensed the the coming conflict.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Better than nothing: The ATF has taken action against the agents involved in running the illegal gun-running operation dubbed “Fast-and-Furious.”
Most of these guys will still receive their full pensions. Moreover, this action suggests that they were in charge, something I doubt. Shouldn’t we know who inside the Obama administration actually conceived this illegal smuggling operation?
The day of reckoning looms: The overall debt from student loans now exceeds $1 trillion, with defaults skyrocketing. The solution from one Democratic Congressman: a $1 trillion bailout. More here.
Goodbye freedom: A North Carolina elementary school removed the word “God” from a poem written by one its students because another student’s parents complained.
After fully examining the issue during the BOE meeting, President and Chief Executive Officer Ken Paulson stated the school did in fact have the right to remove the word “God” from the child’s poem. “Courts have consistently held up the rights for students to express themselves unless their speech is disruptive to the school,” stated Patulson according to McDowell News. “When the little girl wrote the poem and included a reference to God she had every right to do that. The First Amendment protects all Americans. She had every right to mention God, (but) that dynamic changed when they asked her to read it at an assembly.” Paulson said that because the students were a captive audience – they were at a mandatory assembly with no place else to go if they didn’t want to attend – administrators had the right to remove the word “God.”
Hey, I thought being “edgy” and offensive was the way to go for truly creative people? Or does being “edgy” and offensive only apply when offending Christians and Jews?
Seriously, if the logic of this school official was taken to its natural limit, it would mean that you could silence any speech you disagreed with by merely complaining that you didn’t want to hear it. Under that logic, there is no such thing as freedom of speech.
We’ve only just begun: A federal appeals court has issued a temporary injunction halting enforcement by the federal government of the contraceptive mandate under Obamacare.
“1,200 days and $5 trillion in new debt since Senate Democrats passed a budget.”
An annual budget is required by law. Harry Reid’s answer: “It would be foolish for us to do a budget at this stage.” And what do the American people do? They reward the Democrats, providing proof positive that we are in very bad shape and heading for disaster.
The more the merrier: Two more states have now decided not to set up health exchanges, a key component of Obamacare.
That makes 22 states total have have refused to participate in this disaster of a law.
Messenger has found new and “compelling” evidence that there is water ice locked in the permanently shadowed craters of Mercury.
On Monday I had spoken to one of the project scientists for this discovery, David Lawrence, in connection with an article I am doing for Astronomy on the evidence of water on the Moon. I knew the Mercury announcement was coming, and asked him for some details. Based on what he told me, it struck me that the evidence for water on Mercury is actually more conclusive than the evidence for the Moon. (In fact, inconclusive nature of the lunar data is the point of my Astronomy article, based on previous posts here and here on Behind The Black.
The more intriguing aspect of this discovery on Mercury, however, is the unknown dark material that covers and protects some of this water ice. That some scientists believe it might even be organic material deposited there by comets and asteroids is most interesting.
Two stories today illustrate the levels of corruption that now percolate through many fields of science, helped by a willing and sometimes ignorant press.
First, a final report has been issued in the investigation into the fraudulent research of social psychologist Diederik Stapel. Sadly, it appears the report condemns the entire field:
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South Korea scrubbed the launch of its own homemade rocket last night.
This was their second attempt to get the rocket, called Naro-1, off the ground. More details about the rocket and today’s scrub here.
Cassini has taken some spectacular new images of the gigantic hexagon-shaped vortex on Saturn’s north pole.
I am off to Ames, Iowa, today where I will be giving a lecture tomorrow at Iowa State University to the Iowa section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The subject: Predicting the future of space travel based on the past.
The biggest black hole yet found, 17 billion times the mass of our sun.
The unusual black hole makes up 14 percent of its galaxy’s mass, rather than the usual 0.1 percent. … NGC 1277 [the galaxy] lies 220 million light-years away in the constellation Perseus. The galaxy is only ten percent the size and mass of our own Milky Way. Despite NGC 1277’s diminutive size, the black hole at its heart is more than 11 times as wide as Neptune’s orbit around the Sun.
Based on these measurements, it appears that this black hole is literally eating this galaxy whole.
Intellectual bankruptcy: 52 Nobel Peace Prize winners, artists, and activists have called for the boycott of Israel for its recent attacks in Gaza.
And where were these so-called intellectuals when Hamas was lobbing rockets into Israel? For them, I guess it is all right to kill Jews. And God forbid the Jews decide to defend themselves.
The day of reckoning looms: The federal government’s debt ceiling will be reached no later than the end of February, and possibly sooner.
Space tourism — in a balloon.
A newly successful test of a balloon could allow paying human customers to enjoy stunning Earth views and the weightless astronaut experience by 2014. The test balloon carried a humanoid robot up to an altitude of almost 20 miles (32 kilometers) on Nov. 12 — just a few miles shy of where skydiver Felix Baumgartner leaped from during his “space dive” in October. Startup Zero 2 Infinity wants to eventually offer hours of flight time for space tourists to do whatever they want in a near-space environment.
Ticket prices are $143K. And they have a list of customers who have already plunked down deposits.
Twenty places that you should try to visit before you die.
