Category: Points of Information

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

SpaceX and Arianespace both launch multiple satellites

9:22 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX and Arianespace both had successful early morning commercial launches today.

The Ariane 5 delivered 4 Galileo GPS satellites, while SpaceX placed in orbit 10 Iridium communications satellites. SpaceX also successfully recovered the first stage.

The leaders in the 2018 launch standings:

20 China
14 SpaceX
8 Russia
5 ULA
4 Japan
4 Arianespace

In the national rankings, the U.S. and China are once again tied, now at 20-20.

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Santa Barbara requires jail time for giving out plastic straws

6:09 pm

Fascist California: The city of Santa Barbara has now passed a law that will impose jail time to any restaurant employee who hands out plastic straws.

The city of Santa Barbara has passed an ordinance that will allow restaurant employees to be punished with up to six months of jail time or a $1,000 fine for giving plastic straws to their customers.

The bill was passed unanimously last Tuesday, and covers bars, restaurants, and other food-service businesses. Establishments will still be allowed to hand out plastic stirrers, but only if customers request them.

This is always how fascist states begin, by passing what seems to be very innocuous laws that have golden and pure good intentions. They they pass more laws, and more laws, and impose stricter rules, and demand more and more from everyone, until the only individuals who are free are those in charge, since none of these rules are ever applied to them.

California has been traveling this road already for many years. They are right now about a decade behind Venezuela. I would not move there, at this time, if I were you. You will regret it.

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Another skylight entrance pit found on Mars

1:22 pm

Pit in Hephaestus Fossae

Cool image time! In my routine monthly review of the hundreds of new images released from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), I came across another most intriguing geological feature, the image of which is posted to the right, after cropping.

As the scale shows, the pit is about 300 feet across. Calculating the pit’s depth would require someone with better math skills than I. The website provides information about the sun angle, which can be used to extrapolate the shadows and then roughly calculate the depth.

The most fascinating aspect of this pit is the impression of incredible thinness for the pit’s overhung edges. All of the pit’s edges appear significantly overhung, and the thickness of the overhang seems incredibly paper-thin. This thinness is likely only an illusion, though in Mars’s light gravity it is perfectly possible for the overhang to be far thinner and more extended than anything you would find on Earth.

The image itself is in color, though the only color visible is within the pit itself. In that blueness at the base it seems to me that there is a pile of dust/debris, but once again, that conclusion should not be taken very seriously.

If you take a look at the full image, what is impressive is the bland flatness of the surrounding terrain. There is no hint that there might be underground passages hidden here. While most of the scattered craters are probably impact craters, many (especially those with unsymmetrical shapes) could be collapse features indicating the presence of underground voids. None however is very deep. Nor is there any other pits visible.

Below is a global map of Mars with the location of this pit indicated by a black cross. It is just on the edge of the transition zone between the lower northern plains and the southern highlands, where the shoreline of an intermittent sea is thought by some scientists to have once existed. This is also an area where not a lot of high resolution images have been taken, mostly because of its apparent blandness as seen in previous imagery.

This image demonstrates however that Mars is going to have interesting geology everywhere, and that we won’t really know it well until we have explored it all.
» Read more

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A Chinese skyscraper with a waterfall

10:48 am

Link here. The builders literally included a 350 foot high waterfall that exits the skyscraper and falls down the building’s side.

A spokesperson for the property, Mr Cheng, told Kan Kan News that the main water source is from recycled tap water, rain water or from other channels. ‘Our building has a four-storey underground water storage and drainage system, from which the water is pumped and recycled,’ Mr Cheng said.

The electricity bill for just one hour of operation is a whopping 800 yuan (£89), he added. ‘That’s why we don’t switch on the waterfall every day – only for special festivities in the city,’ he said. And each time, the waterfall is set to run for only about 10 to 20 minutes to save electricity.

Architects for skyscrapers are getting increasingly creative. They have added trees, vines, greenery everywhere. A waterfall, however, is really clever, though I’m not sure how practical this will be, in the long run. Water falling that distance can do a lot of damage over time.

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Interstellar Technologies releases video of launch failure

10:33 am

Capitalism in space: The private Japanese company Interstellar Technologies today released a video of its June 30th launch failure.

The company is investigating the exact cause of the June 30 failure, which saw the 33-foot (10-meter) tall MOMO-2 lift off from a test site near the town of Taiki on Japan’s island of Hokkaido before crashing to the ground seconds later after it lost thrust. “The cause of the MOMO-2 failure is still under investigation,” Takahiro Inagawa, IST’s CEO, told Astrowatch.net. “However, we assume that its engine and hot-gas thruster for the roll control are responsible.

They say they are proceeding toward their third launch attempt.

[A]lthough the exact date of the launch has not been disclosed, Inagawa said that MOMO-3’s flight should be expected within months. “We will begin the next launch as soon as we are ready,” Inagawa said. “We were able to launch MOMO-2 within less than a year after MOMO-1. The launch interval of MOMO-3 and MOMO-2 will be shorter.”

I have embedded the video of the launch failure below the fold. You do want to view this. Trust me.
» Read more

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Congress nixes Space Force, for now

10:22 am

You can put your decoder rings back in the attic! The Defense authorization for fiscal year 2019 that has now been negotiated between the House and Senate does not include any mention of Trump’s proposed “Space Force.”

President Trump himself has taken center stage in advocating for a Space Force. While the terms Space Corps and Space Force are sometimes used interchangeably, Space Corps notionally refers to an entity with the Air Force while Space Force is separate from the Air Force. Trump made clear last month what he wants: “We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force. Separate but equal.”

The President cannot accomplish that on his own, however. Congress must authorize and fund a new service. Because of the attention Trump is bringing to the issue, one question was whether the NDAA conference committee might say something about it even though the House- and Senate-passed bills did not.

The answer is no. While the conference report adopts the House provision requiring creation of a U.S. Space Command within USSTRATCOM to carry out joint space warfighting and addresses a number of other space issues, it does not require creation of a Space Force or Space Corps (or another alternative, a Space Guard similar to the Coast Guard). The conference report does require the Secretary of Defense to develop a space warfighting policy and a plan that identifies joint mission-essential tasks for space as a warfighting domain (Sec. 1607).

In other words, Congress has punted, for the moment. They have not said no to the idea, but they also are not ready to create a new armed force devoted expressly to fighting war in space.

Makes sense to me. A military force in space is going to be necessary, without question and especially because of the terms imposed on us by the Outer Space Treaty. It just isn’t the time yet for such a thing.

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Treason investigation opened against Roscosmos research unit

10:12 am

The Russian government has arrested at least one person and opened a treason investigation against a specific Roscosmos research unit that has been focused on hypersonic technology.

Member of the Moscow Public Monitoring Commission Yevgeny Yenikeyev earlier told TASS that a Moscow court had authorized the arrest of TsNIImash’s 74-year-old staffer Viktor Kudryavtsev accused of high treason. He didn’t specify, however, which court had sanctioned the staffer’s arrest. Ustimenko confirmed to TASS that the scientist had been taken into custody but offered no details. TsNIImash declined to comment on the information on the arrest.

The Russian business daily Kommersant earlier reported that an investigative team from the Federal Security Service (FSB) had searched the officers of TsNIImash staffers, as well as the office of Director of the Roscosmos Research and Analytical Center Dmitry Paison. According to the paper, investigative measures were being carried out as part of criminal proceedings instituted on charges of high treason under Russia’s Criminal Code, and about 10 employees working in the space industry were under investigation for collaborating with Western intelligence services.

The FSB determined that Western intelligence agencies had found out about the results of the Russian space industry’s ‘top secret’ work on hypersonic technologies, the paper reported.

I cannot help wondering if the numerous leaks by anti-Trump ideologues in the FBI, the Department of Justice, and Congress, all related to their futile effort to pin Russian collusion charges against Trump, have ended up exposing these internal sources of information in Russia.

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Is the entrance to space 80 kilometers up instead of 100?

9:56 am

A new analysis by one scientist suggests that the official line when one enters space should be lowered from 100 kilometers to 80 kilometers.

A close look shows that the traditional definition flies in the face of evidence, says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a hobby, McDowell compiles an influential, detailed record of rocket launches online.

…Most people continued to use 100 kilometers as a boundary, including the World Air Sports Federation (FAI) in Lausanne, Switzerland, the keeper of outer space records. Although definitions are always points of contention in science, it seemed worthwhile to McDowell to dig deeper, knowing such companies as Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin could soon be offering tourism flights to this boundary realm.

He started with data: namely, public records of satellite telemetry he had downloaded from the North American Aerospace Defense Command about the orbits of 43,000 satellites. Most didn’t matter for his project—they orbited far too high above the edge of outer space. But at least 50 had orbits that occasionally operated below 100 kilometers, such as the Soviet Elektron-4 satellite, which made 10 spins at 85 kilometers or below before disintegrating into the atmosphere in 1997. “Are you going to say [these satellites are] in space and then not in space every 2 hours?” he asked. “That doesn’t seem very helpful.” Below 80 kilometers, the story changes: It is highly unlikely a satellite will make another orbit, as thickening atmosphere sends it to a fiery end.

Considering that the Air Force has for many years used 50 miles, which is about the same as 80 kilometers, all McDowell is doing is accepting the American definition rather than an international one. It is also amusing how his actions help Virgin Galactic, since there have been rumors for years that their SpaceShipTwo design was never going to go as high as 100 kilometers, and was going to use the Air Force 50 mile definition to say their passengers reached space.

Putting Virgin Galactic aside, however, the Air Force definition has always made more sense. As McDowell notes, it better describes the dividing line between orbital space and the atmosphere where no satellite can remain in orbit.

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The dust on Mars comes from one specific Martian region

9:39 am

Scientists have concluded that a large bulk of the dust that covers much of the Martian surface actually comes from one specific region called Medusae Fossae, located to the southwest of the planet’s giant volcanoes.

The dust that coats much of the surface of Mars originates largely from a single thousand-kilometer-long geological formation near the Red Planet’s equator, scientists have found.

A study published in the journal Nature Communications found a chemical match between dust in the Martian atmosphere and the surface feature, called the Medusae Fossae Formation. “Mars wouldn’t be nearly this dusty if it wasn’t for this one enormous deposit that is gradually eroding over time and polluting the planet, essentially,” said co-author Kevin Lewis, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary science at the Johns Hopkins University.

It is thought that Medusae Fossae is volcanic in origin.

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Nicaraguan socialists move to kill opposition

10:17 pm

Soon to be like Venezuela: The socialist government of Nicaragua, led by liberal heart-throb Daniel Ortega, has now declared the Catholic Church its enemy, and is scaling up it assassinations and death squads against its opponents.

The government “has declared war on the church,” said Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a member of the opposition alliance.

While the church tried to strike the delicate balance between mediator and defender, it was Monsignor Báez who emerged as the face of the opposition, with a commanding presence over social media. The role gives him the freedom to denounce the government without reservations.

“What there is here is an armed state against an unarmed people,” he said in an interview at the seminary where he lives on the outskirts of Managua. “This is not a civil war.”…

Protesters die daily, and many more have been injured and arrested as the resistance hardens against the rule of Mr. Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo. Most of the dead were civilians, some teenagers — but police officers have also been killed.

This is how every collectivist/socialist/communist government ends up, with murder and violence and the imposition of tyranny. Every. Single. Time.

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North Korea’s actions post-summit remain unclear

5:10 pm

Two stories today highlight for me the murky state of North Korea’s nuclear bomb program.

The first story is originally from the Washington Post, which might not want to say good things about Trump’s foreign policy efforts with North Korea. The second story however is from the French news service AFP, which also has no kind thought’s about Trump.

So, we really do not have a clear idea yet whether North Korea is shutting down its nuclear bomb and missile program. What we do know for certain is that since November 28, 2017 North Korea has conducted no ballistic missile tests. Prior to that date they were launching test missiles at a rate of two to three a month, for years. North Korea might not be completely dismantling its missile and nuclear program, but it has at least ceased its most bellicose behavior since Trump’s diplomatic effort.

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Brick thrown through window of Democratic senator

11:55 am

They are coming for you next: This morning staffers arrived at the regional Roanoke office of Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia) to find the front window smashed by a brick.

“This morning prior to 8 a.m., an individual threw a brick through the front office window of Sen. Warner’s Roanoke office,” Warner’s communications director Rachel Cohen said in a statement to CNN. “Thankfully due to the early hour no one was in the office at the time.

Local police were reportedly called to the office after being notified of an individual carrying bricks walking around the area. The suspect, who has yet to be identified, is a slender white man expected to be in his early to mid-20s with light-colored hair, according to CNN. Local police are also reportedly looking through surveillance footage of the incident to identify the man.

We do not yet know if this was politically motivated. It if was, however, it is unacceptable. You cannot have a freely elected government of, for, and by the people if the opposition parties are at each other’s throats with guns, bricks, pitchforks, and torches. And that applies to conservatives as well as liberals.

In the end, the evil people who commit this violence will team up, and use their power against everyone, regardless of party or policy. It will be a bloodbath, a reign of terror, as has been seen repeatedly from France in the 1700s to Soviet Russia in the 1920s to Germany in the 1930s to Cambodia in the 1970s to Rwanda in the 1990s to Venezuela today.

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Radiation maps of Europa

10:08 am

By culling together data from Voyager 1 and the Galileo orbiter, scientists have created a radiation map of the surface of Europa.

Using data from Galileo’s flybys of Europa two decades ago and electron measurements from NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, Nordheim and his team looked closely at the electrons blasting the moon’s surface. They found that the radiation doses vary by location. The harshest radiation is concentrated in zones around the equator, and the radiation lessens closer to the poles.

Mapped out, the harsh radiation zones appear as oval-shaped regions, connected at the narrow ends, that cover more than half of the moon.

…In his new paper, Nordheim didn’t stop with a two-dimensional map. He went deeper, gauging how far below the surface the radiation penetrates, and building 3D models of the most intense radiation on Europa. The results tell us how deep scientists need to dig or drill, during a potential future Europa lander mission, to find any biosignatures that might be preserved.

The answer varies, from 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters) in the highest-radiation zones – down to less than 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) deep in regions of Europa at middle- and high-latitudes, toward the moon’s poles.

This model, which by the way probably has large margins of error, will be used as a guide by the Europa Clipper scientists now planning that orbiter’s mission.

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A dark dust avalanche on Mars

10:01 am

No dust avalanche

After dust avalanche

Cool image time! The two images to the right, both cropped to post here, were taken six years apart by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of the western lava slopes of the giant volcano Olympus Mons. They show the appearance of a dark dust avalanche during the interim. As noted by members of the MRO science team.

Dust avalanches create slope streaks that expose darker materials usually hidden below a lighter-toned layer. Cascading fine-grained material easily diverts around boulders or alters direction when encountering a change in slope. The dark steak … is approximately 1 kilometer in length that we didn’t see in a previous image. Past avalanche sites are still visible and fading slowly as dust settles out of the atmosphere and is deposited on the dark streaks over time.

We also see boulders and their shadows that are a meter or greater in size. Movement of any of these boulders down the slope could trigger future avalanches.

The appearance of these Martian dark streaks on slopes is actually not uncommon. As more pictures are taken of Mars scientists are beginning to accumulate a large number all across the Martian surface.

What I find fascinating is the wet look of these dark streaks. Below is a close-up of the new avalanche, near its head.
» Read more

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Protesters rampage against Kosher Cafe because owner supports Trump

6:49 pm

They are coming for you next: A Kosher cafe in Los Angeles has seen violent protests, including the throwing of feces against its windows, merely because the owner, an ordinary citizen, exercised his free speech prerogative to express support for President Trump.

What set the protest off is the local Chamber of Commerce, which was going to participate in the cafe’s grand opening. When this California organization, typical of fascist California, discovered the political leanings of the owner, however, it canceled his membership and backed out of the grand opening. It then apparently used its contacts in the community to whip up anger against the cafe itself.

“They really intensely protested and accosted all the visitors that came to our grand opening event,” said son David. “It was very scary,” said Shalom’s daughter Yael. “There was a lot of people protesting outside wearing masks […] and they threw a significant amount of feces at our windows.”

I wonder, maybe Californians might want to force these evil conservatives to wear gold stars, so they can be identified easily? Maybe they should all be tattooed, so that they can’t hide their evil political positions?

Why not? It now sure appears that if you dare express a dissenting opinion to the dominate leftist culture of California, they are going to send a mob after you, to threaten violence and to try to destroy you. Why not make it easy and gather up all these evil Republicans in one fell swoop? It would be such an easy and final solution.

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Threats by Portland Occupy ICE protesters force closure of homeless food cart

6:39 pm

They are coming for you next: Violent threats by Occupy ICE protesters in Portland have forced a food cart, whose profits were used to feed the homeless, to shut down.

Scott Hakes said some of the protesters told his daughter they would hurt her. He said the threats got worse after his daughter sold food to a DHS officer. “They’re constantly cussing at her and screaming at her. You know she’d finally had enough. She finally called me up on the phone, crying,” Scott Hakes said. “They already know what she drives. They see her walking around, and they run after her. You know, they videotape her, and they’re telling her they know where she’s at. And there’s no reason for it. She hasn’t done anything,” said Julie Hakes.

The cart, located at 0651 SW Bancroft St., is owned by the nonprofit homeless outreach organization, Operation Off The Grid, according to its Facebook page, and helps pay for food, clothing and hygiene products for the homeless. “Unfortunately, over the last month, we have been threatened and verbally attacked for not backing the immigration agenda at the DHS location and wanting to stay neutral and serve all who are hungry,” said a post on the cart’s Facebook page. “We tried repeatedly to try to work out peaceful solutions with the organizations and individuals protesting, but it all came back to being told almost daily to either support the anti-DHS agenda or suffer the consequences.”

The Happy Camper’s Facebook post says owners have not received any help from Portland police.

The Portland government is in league with these fascists. God forbid you are an ordinary citizen who happens to disagree with them. Expect to experience a modern version of Kristallnacht.

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New FISA release confirms Obama and FBI illegally conspired to spy on Trump

12:20 pm

Working for the Democratic Party: The release this weekend of the heavily redacted FISA application that apparently began the Russian collusion investigation at the FBI has confirmed that the warrant was obtained under false pretenses, and that Obama and FBI illegally used it to justify spying on Trump and the campaign of their political opponent.

Several takeaways noted in the article:

  • Peter Strzok is a liar, though this is hardly news
  • The FISA warrant hung entirely on the claim that Carter Page was working as a spy for the Russians, but two years later he has never been charged with any crimes, suggesting that his name was used merely as a tool to open the spying operation on Trump and the Republicans.
  • The FISA warrant was almost entirely dependent on the fake dossier that had been produced as opposition research by the Clinton campaign, paid for by Clinton campaign dollars, and was not verified then, and remains unverified now. In fact, it remains an absurd tissue of lies and falsifications that should never have been brought before a judge.

More here, including the fact that it appears the warrant application was far too dependent on news stories from partisan Democratic press outlets, information that is unverified and unacceptable to use as justification for a warrant to spy on any American, no less a presidential candidate, and by the opposing party as well.

Even more here, including showing that James Comey is also a blatant liar.

The first link above sums up as follows:

The FBI’s use of flimsy and uncorroborated evidence to support spying on Page, combined with the fact that a 3-month extension was granted despite the fact that it was obvious by June, 2017 he wasn’t a Russian agent, will most certainly embolden those, like President Trump, who have called the entire Russia investigation a “witch hunt.”

The second link also adds:

What I really want to know is the identity of the judge who signed off on the surveillance of Carter Page, based on such flimsy grounds. Some are speculating that he must be from Hawaii.

That judge should be removed from office.

Moreover, the entire FISA law should be repealed. It is unconstitutional, and designed to encourage the abuse of power by those in power. Not enough people are saying this, but it really is the fundamental takeaway from this whole scandal. Just because Obama abused the law does not mean Republicans won’t. It must be repealed.

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SpaceX successfully launches commercial communications satellite

9:54 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX last night successfully launched Telstar 19v, a commercial communications satellite.

This was the second Block 5 rocket to fly successfully.

Correction: Previously I had said that these two flights served to satisfy NASA’s demands for seven successful Block 5 launches before they would certify it for commercial crew. It turns out that neither accomplishes this, because the tanks within are not the finalized versions. Thank you readers!

The leaders in the 2018 launch race:

20 China
13 SpaceX
8 Russia
5 ULA
4 Japan

In the national standings China is now only one launch ahead of the U.S., 20-19.

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Starliner has propellant leak during launch abort test

9:28 am

Capitalism in space: Boeing’s Starliner capsule experienced a propellant leak near the end of a launch abort test in late June.

The company said it conducted a hot-fire test of the launch-abort engines on an integrated service module at the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico in June. The engines successfully ignited and ran for the full duration, but during engine shutdown an anomaly occurred that resulted in a propellant leak. “We have been conducting a thorough investigation with assistance from our NASA and industry partners,” the statement said. “We are confident we found the cause and are moving forward with corrective action.”

The capsule being tested is an engineering model, not one that is intended to fly. Boeing also has said that “they believe there is an operational fix to the problem rather than a need to significantly rework the Starliner spacecraft itself.”

This incident however is certain to delay Boeing’s crew launch schedule, especially considering NASA’s own timidity about the privately built space capsules. The agency will insist on a complete review, no matter how long it takes, even if the company has pinpointed the problem already and has instituted corrections.

In a normal world, this event should not effect SpaceX’s schedule. I also expect however that the agency will use this event to slow SpaceX down again, demanding further reviews there as well.

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Europe initiates website to name ExoMars 2020 rover

9:26 am

The European Space Agency has created a website where people can offer their suggestions to name the ExoMars 2020 rover.

Astronaut Tim Peake is leading the hunt for a great moniker. He wants everyone to go to a special website set up for the purpose and enter a suggestion. But don’t think “Spacey McSpaceFace” is a goer because this is not an online poll. All ideas will be put before an expert panel and it is they who will make the final choice.

If all goes right, 2020 should see two new rovers arrive on the Martian surface.

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Most biomedical research cannot be replicated

9:13 am

New studies looking at the work of scientists in the biomedical field has found that their research is difficult if not impossible to replicate, partly because much of their raw data is never made available for other researchers to review.

But over the past several years, a growing contingent of scientists has begun to question the accepted veracity of published research—even after it’s cleared the hurdles of peer review and appears in widely respected journals. The problem is a pervasive inability to replicate a large proportion of the results across numerous disciplines.

In 2005, for instance, John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, used several simulations to show that scientific claims are more likely to be false than true. And this past summer Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, attempted to replicate the findings of 100 psychology studies and found that only 39 percent of the results held up under rigorous re-testing. “There are multiple lines of evidence, both theoretical and empirical, that have begun to bring the reproducibility of a substantial segment of scientific literature into question,” says Ioannidis. “We are getting millions of papers that go nowhere.”

There’s a lot more. Read it all. It appears that much if not all of biomedical research is suspect. Their conclusions might be correct, but their methods are questionable, at best.

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Trump administration proposes revisions to Endangered Species Act

8:58 am

The Trump administration has proposed some regulatory revisions to Endangered Species Act that would scale back somewhat its sometime draconian powers.

The proposed regulatory changes are both technical and consequential. One, for instance, bears the deceptively dull title of “elimination of blanket 4(d) rule” (E&E News PM, 4 April). The ESA prohibits the “take” of species designated as endangered, while Section 4(d) of the law allows the agency to establish special regulations for threatened species. In 1978, FWS used this authority to extend the prohibition of take to all threatened species. This is known as the “blanket 4(d) rule.”

Take covers a wide range of actions, including those that “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture or collect” a threatened or endangered species. This blanket 4(d) rule for threatened species can be modified by a species-specific 4(d) rule.

Conservatives and private-property advocates have previously sought to scale back the blanket 4(d) rule, which they say erases what should be a meaningful distinction between threatened and endangered species. The proposal would cover only future listings. “Some of our regulations were promulgated back in 1986, and frankly, a great deal has been learned by the agencies administering the act and by the public,” Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt told reporters today.

Another change would establish that the “foreseeable future” definition used in making ESA listing decisions extends only so far as officials “can reasonably determine that the conditions posing the potential danger of extinction are probable.”

A potentially key change involves critical habitats, which are areas important for recovery of a species. Sometimes an area can be considered important for recovery even when it is not currently occupied by the species in question. Under the new proposal, FWS and NOAA Fisheries will designate unoccupied critical habitat only when the occupied areas are inadequate to ensure the conservation of the species or if inclusion of unoccupied areas would yield certain other specified benefits.

In some “rare” cases, officials say, there may be no critical habitat designated.

The article above, from the journal Science, shocked me by its reasonable discussion of these proposed changes. I had expected an anti-Trump screed, similar to the original version of this Daily Mail article from yesterday. Today it reads more reasonably, but yesterday the article was far more devoted to airing opposition to the Trump proposals.

No matter. There is madness out there, it has taken possession of the entire anti-Trump community. It won’t make a difference how reasonable the administration’s proposals might be, there will be over-the-top declarations about the evils of these proposals and how they will destroy everything.

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A detailed look at upcoming SpaceX launch recovery operations

11:19 pm

Link here. They are expanding their drone fleet and their capsule recovery fleet. Though we should expect some big developments in the coming year, there was also this tidbit:

Earlier this year, the company’s president Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC that next year will see a decrease in the company’s launch cadence. The slip is due to a decline in the number of large geostationary communications satellites needing a launch.

Missions to a geostationary transfer orbit make up the majority of launches requiring a droneship recovery. Therefore, it is unlikely that two east coast droneships will be needed to support Falcon 9 over the next year or two.

It appears that after five years of effort, SpaceX has finally begun to clean out its backlog of contracted launches, caused by the initial development delays of the Falcon 9 and its two failures.

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China developing a robot satellite refueling spacecraft

11:11 pm

The new colonial movement: China today reported that it is developing a robot satellite that would attach itself to satellites that are out of fuel and use its own fuel to make the spacecraft usable again.

Hu Di, the chief designer of the vehicle, said compared with foreign research that focuses on refueling satellites that have run out of fuel, their option is much simpler and efficient. The vehicle will take about two years to complete.

Hu Di is wrong. In fact, I wonder if they have stolen this idea from Northrop Grumman, which as Orbital ATK has been developing a project exactly like this for several years.

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Hayabusa-2 finds Ryugu covered with scattered large boulders

11:02 pm

Hayabusa-2 has found that the asteroid Ryugu is covered with many scattered large boulders.

The Hayabusa 2 space probe discovered many boulders scattered on the asteroid Ryugu, suggesting it was formed from fragments of other celestial bodies, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said July 19. More than 100 rocks larger than 8 meters in length were confirmed on the surface of the “spinning top” asteroid from images captured by Hayabusa 2, according to JAXA. The largest boulder was about 130 meters in length near the south pole.

The rocks are likely too big to be meteor fragments from collisions with Ryugu, which has a diameter of about 900 meters. “(The finding) is compelling evidence to prove that the Ryugu asteroid was formed by fragments of larger celestial bodies,” said Seiichiro Watanabe, head of the study team and professor of Nagoya University.

The asteroid’s slightly tilted axis of rotation gives Ryugu two seasons: summer and winter. Hayabusa 2 found the temperature ranged from about 20 to 100 degrees on Ryugu’s surface.

Surprise! This finding makes Ryugu very different from every other asteroid previously visited. Most have had relatively smooth surfaces, with lots of dust.

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Dust storm update on Mars

2:03 pm

Link here. This press release basically reviews what each Martian spacecraft, in orbit or on the surface, is doing to study or survive the global dust storm that erupted on Mars in in early June.

The storm itself has not yet eased, and the general expectation is that it will last for a couple of months, through August.

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Global mosiacs of Titan in infrared

8:53 am

Titan in infrared

The Cassini science team today released global infrared mosaics of Titan, created from images accumulated during the more than 100 fly-bys of the moon during the spacecraft’s thirteen years in orbit around Saturn.

The image on the right, cropped and reduced in resolution to post here, is only one such global mosaic. Go to the story to see them all.

Making mosaics of VIMS images of Titan has always been a challenge because the data were obtained over many different flybys with different observing geometries and atmospheric conditions. One result is that very prominent seams appear in the mosaics that are quite difficult for imaging scientists to remove. But, through laborious and detailed analyses of the data, along with time consuming hand processing of the mosaics, the seams have been mostly removed. This is an update to the work previously discussed in PIA20022.

Any full color image is comprised of three color channels: red, green and blue. Each of the three color channels combined to create these views was produced using a ratio between the brightness of Titan’s surface at two different wavelengths (1.59/1.27 microns [red], 2.03/1.27 microns [green] and 1.27/1.08 microns [blue]). This technique (called a “band-ratio” technique) reduces the prominence of seams, as well as emphasizing subtle spectral variations in the materials on Titan’s surface. For example, the moon’s equatorial dune fields appear a consistent brown color here. There are also bluish and purplish areas that may have different compositions from the other bright areas, and may be enriched in water ice.

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July 17, 2018 Zimmerman/Livingston podcast

1:32 pm

The podcast of my two hour appearance on The Space Show is now available here. I like this quote from David’s summary of the program at the link:

Bob spent the better part of the first segment of the program responding to Linda and in the customary Zimmerman fashion, making the case for private commercial space to champion because of freedom and liberty and the core values of the country.

Twas a really interesting show. Lots of very good questions as well as intriguing dialogue from callers.

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New close-up images of Ceres

12:15 pm

Cerealia Facula on Ceres

Cool image time! The image on the right, cropped and reduced in resolution to post here, is one of two images released today by the Dawn science team of the double bright spots found in Occator Crater, taken from the spacecraft’s tight final orbit above Ceres. This image shows what they have dubbed Cerealia Facula. The second image shows Vinalia Faculae.

This mosaic of Cerealia Facula is based on images obtained by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft in its second extended mission, from an altitude as low as about 21 miles (34 kilometers). The contrast in resolution obtained by the two phases is visible here, reflected by a few gaps in the high-resolution coverage. This image is superposed to a similar scene acquired in the low-altitude mapping orbit of the mission from an altitude of about 240 miles (385 km).

Inset of Cerealia Facula

The second image on the left is a crop at full resolution of the area in the white box above. This gives you a taste of the many interesting things found in the full resolution image. For example, the bright spots scattered throughout this image suggest they are recent upwellings from below. The ridgelines in the upper right are either the remains of the water-ice volcano they think once stood here but subsequently slumped back down to form a depression, or pressure ridges being pushed up by later upwellings.

The full image has lots more. So does the image of Vinalia Faculae. Check them out.

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