Category: Points of Information

Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.

The FCC commissioner wants to regulate on the airwaves

10:22 am

Freedom of speech alert: The FCC commissioner has made it clear in a recent appearance on the BBC that he strongly supports having the FCC regulate in some manner the news coverage of radios and television. You can see the video here. Key quote from the article above:

In practice, Copps’s recommendations β€” however well intended β€” necessarily entail expanding the power of bureaucrats to monitor media content, power which can then be used for objectionable and politicized goals.

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Amino acids found on meteorite that crashed in the Sudan

12:09 am

Dead alien life arrives on Earth! Not really but still exciting anyway: Scientists have found the remains of space-born amino acids — essential to life — in the meteorite that crashed in the Sudan in 2008. Key quote:

“This meteorite formed when two asteroids collided,” said Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “The shock of the collision heated it to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit [1,093 degrees Celsius], hot enough that all complex organic molecules like amino acids should have been destroyed, but we found them anyway.”

The discovery is further evidence that the basic elements of life can form in even the most hostile of environments.

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Fraud, Abuse Found in NASA Research Funding to Small Companies

11:57 pm

NASA’s inspecter general has found fraud, waste, and abuse in NASA’s small business research program. Nor is this new news:

Problems with NASA’s SBIR program have been repeatedly criticized in recent years by the agency’s inspector general. Of some 46 investigations related to the SBIR program over the past decade, 17 percent resulted in criminal convictions, civil judgments, or administrative action, the inspector general told a Senate Commerce Committee hearing last year.

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Air Force agrees to Share data on the Meteorites its surveillance satellites detect

11:46 pm

The Air Force has agreed to share the meteorite data its surveillance satellites detect.

Though the article above makes it sound like this data includes a lot of Earth-destroying asteriods, almost all of these detections are of smaller rocks burning up in the atmosphere, information researchers need to produce a more complete census of the solar system.

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DeMint wants to have the omnibus read

9:34 am

Maybe this might stop the spending: Republican Senator Jim DeMint wants the Senate to read the entire 1900-plus omnibus budget bill before anyone votes on it. Key quote

The reading could take 40 hours, some news outlets estimate. Last year, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., forced the reading of an 800-page amendment on the Senate floor. The reading ended when Sanders, who had proposed the amendment, came to the floor to withdraw it.

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Violence erupts in Rome after Berlusconi wins vote

6:04 pm

This is how tyrants respond to democracy: Violence erupts in Rome after the head of Italy’s center-right government survived a no-confidence vote. Though the article does not tell us much about the political views of the protesters, this quote gives a strong hint that they might be leftwing:

The protesters were mostly students but also included workers and immigrants.

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Cassini Spots Potential Ice Volcano on Saturn Moon

3:57 pm

Scientists have used data from Cassini to identify what they think are ice volcanoes on Titan. The two volcanoes, each about 3000 feet high, are located near the equator and appear to resemble the volcanoes on Earth, with a central crater on top of cone-like peak and finger-like flows coming down the sides from the crater. The lava here, however, is not molten rock, but water.

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