A previously unknown tick-borne virus has been identified from samples taken from two infected farmers in Missouri.
The day of reckoning looms: The long term credit rating of the United States was lowered today by Standard and Poors.
The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics. More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011.
If you depend on the conservative commentary about Paul Ryan’s acceptance speech yesterday at the Republican convention to find out how he did, you would have no doubt that this was the greatest and most effective speech since Genesis. To quote just one report:
Paul Ryan’s speech, in two words? Nailed it. Everything that I like (and surmise that others will like as he becomes more and more familiar to them) about Paul Ryan was on perfect display during his half hour-ish on stage. He was intelligent without being intimidating; he was stern and serious but still optimistic and even funny; and he hinted at his wonkiness without getting into jargon and maintained his approachability. But the most beautiful thing about Paul Ryan as the potential vice president of the United States is his uncanny knack for breaking through populist myths and shrill leftist attacks and instead communicating the merits of free-market economics and small government, all without being shrill or polarizing.
Because I’m not spending a lot of time watching these conventions, mostly because they really are nothing more than public relations events staged by both parties, I didn’t see the speech live. After reading reports like the one above, however, I decided late last night to go to youtube and dig up Ryan’s speech and see this amazing performance for myself.
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At 4:05 am last night the two Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP), designed to study the Van Allen radiation belts, were successfully placed in orbit by an Atlas 5 rocket.
I am sure these two spacecraft will do good research and find out things about the Van Allen radiation belts that we will need to know when humans start traveling through them routinely. However, I must say that their name, the Radiation Belt Storm Probes, usually abbreviated as RBSP, is probably the worst name NASA has ever devised for a spacecraft: Impossible to remember, boring to hear, and completely forgettable. Other than that, it’s a public relations winner.
It’s easy to forget, but Republicans swept the 2010 midterms not through a sweeping indictment of Obama’s economic stewardship, but by hammering Congressional Democrats over their support of the president’s health care law, the stimulus and Democrats’ pursuit of a cap-and-trade energy policy. Running on a firmly ideological agenda, House Republicans picked up 63 House seats – a larger pickup for Republicans than in any election since 1946.
What’s remarkable is that all the fundamental indicators from that historic moment have hardly changed – and in some ways, have worsened for the president. The 2010 midterm NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed 32 percent believing the country was headed in the wrong direction; their latest poll shows that “right track” number exactly the same, with even more believing the country was on the wrong track. Obama’s job approval in the October before the midterm was at 47 percent; it’s only inched upwards to 48 percent in the most recent survey. [emphasis mine]
2010 wasn’t a fluke, it was a trend. And running on the “ideology” of fiscal responsibility, a balanced federal budget, and a smaller federal government does not seem to me to be very ideological. Rather, it is simple common sense, which is why it worked in 2010 and will work again in November.
Sweet! Astronomers have detected molecules of sugar in the gas cloud surrounding a young binary star about 400 light years away.
NASA successfully completed another test of the parachute system for the Orion capsule on Tuesday.
An analysis of the survey data produced by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has uncovered literally millions of black hole candidates as well as a thousand of the brightest galaxies yet found.
The journey begins: Curiosity heads east 52 feet on the first leg of its exploration of Gale Crater.
An evening pause: A taste of what every man and woman in the military has experienced and lived through.
But only a taste.
The Republican Party, as part of their national convention taking place in Florida this week, yesterday released their party platform for the upcoming election campaign.
Normally, I don’t waste my time with party platforms. No one really reads it, and no president ever follows it. Granted, it can give you a general sense of where a party and candidate is headed philosophically, but this is politics. If you think philosophy is their number one priority then I have a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you.
However, this document is helpful to us, at least when it comes to the nation’s space effort, as it actually devotes one entire (though short) section on the subject. Considering how vague Mitt Romney has been on what he will do with NASA and space, and how schizophrenic the Republicans in Congress have been, any hint on how they might approach this particular program should they win the election is helpful.
Here is the entire statement of the Republican party platform on the subject of space exploration:
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A scale that can measure the weight of a single molecule.
What every home needs: A home-built fire-breathing flying dragon.
Go for it: Brandon Raub, the ex-Marine who was arrested and placed in a psychiatric ward because government officials didn’t like his Facebook postings, has announced he is suing the officials involved.
The possibility that NASA might finally agree with Russia’s repeated request to fly a year-long mission to ISS grew stronger this morning with two stories:
The first, by James Oberg, digs into the underworld of NASA politics to find that plans might very well be more advanced than NASA is letting on:
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Planets without end: A solar system with two suns.
Kepler had previously found two planets orbiting two different binary stars. Here, the space telescope has found a binary star which has its own solar system of two planets.
Russian officials today announced that they will hold additional open cosmonaut recruitment drives, similar to the first held earlier this year, but with revisions.
It appears that the first drive was too short, only six weeks long, and did not get them as many applicants as they would have liked.
The competition heats up: Bigelow Aerospace has expanded its workforce as well doubled its factory space in response to the commercial contracts NASA recently awarded.
The company just opened a 185,000-square-foot addition, bringing its North Las Vegas plant up to about 350,000 square feet. It slashed its work force from 150 before the recession to 50 during the downturn; now, it’s looking to jump back up to 90 workers by Christmas. It’s hiring structural, mechanical and electrical engineers, as well as chemists, molecular biologists and workers who craft composite spacecraft parts.
Hat tip to Clark Lindsey at NewSpace Watch.
How not to go cave exploring:
An international crew of six astronauts will start training for a caving adventure designed to prepare them for spaceflight. CAVES, an abbreviation of Cooperative Adventure for Valuing and Exercising human behaviour and performance Skills, prepares astronauts to work safely and effectively and solve problems as a multicultural team while exploring uncharted areas using space procedures.
Or to put it more bluntly, overly complicated, bureaucratically organized, and not very efficient. For example:
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A special Iowahawk guest commentary by Barack Obama, stargazer-in-chief.
Neil’s passing gives all of us all pause to consider deeper questions. What does it mean for the future of space exploration? How proud would Neil have been to have a famous historic president refer to him by first name? And, most importantly, how did his death inspire that historic president to make ever more gigantic leaps for mankind?
The commentary might be satire written by Dave Burge, but the photo at the link is real, our President’s idea of honoring Neil Armstrong, with a photo of himself.
Not the same kind of photo legacy that Neil Armstrong left us.
The photo legacy of Neil Armstrong.
More here: “The missing man: There are no good pictures of Neil Armstrong on the Moon.”
Russian authorities struggle to contain the spread of African swine fever, a deadly virus that attacks pigs.
Russian authorities have incinerated tens of thousands of pigs and closed roads in the past few weeks, in an attempt to contain an emerging outbreak of African swine fever, a viral disease so lethal to the animals that it has been likened to Ebola. The spread of the disease comes with a heavy economic toll — last year, the Russian Federation lost 300,000 of the country’s 19 million pigs to swine fever, at an estimated cost of about 7.6 billion roubles (US$240 million).
Images from Curiosity have spotted some unexpected geology in Gale Crater.
A mosaic of high-definition images of Mount Sharp, the central peak dominating the landing site at Gale Crater, reveals tilted strata never before seen on Mars. The strata dip downwards at an angle close to that of the slope of the foothills of the 18,000-ft. tall mountain within which they are formed.
“The cool thing is the cameras have discovered something we were unaware of,” says mission chief scientist John Grotzinger. “This thing jumped out at us as being very different to what we expected,” he adds. Lying in the low-lying foothills beyond the dune field between the rover and the base of Mount Sharp, the inclined layers are a “spectacular feature” that could not be seen from orbit.
I think there are two reasons these tilted layers are puzzling scientists.
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An evening pause: This short clip from the Discovery Science series Rocket Science illustrates one reason Neil Armstrong got the job to land the first spacecraft on the Moon, even though it shows Armstrong crashing his test vehicle!
The man was cool-headed. Not only did Armstrong not panic when a thruster failed, he kept trying to regain control of the craft until the last moment, ejecting less than a second before impact. Then, he was calm about it afterward, hardly mentioning the incident to others.
