Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
The competition heats up: Boeing is considering building a civilian version of the X-37B mini-shuttle.
My heart bleeds: Congressman Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) told employees at the Goddard Space Flight Center yesterday that sequester might force some layoffs there.
So, who does Hoyer work for, the employees at Goddard or the taxpayer? He apparently thinks he is the union rep for government employees.
Curiosity’s first drilling sample has found that the ancient watery conditions in Gale Crater were especially suitable for life.
Finding out what’s in it: New Obamacare regulations produce a stack of regulations seven feet high.
And then there’s this: The burger chain Five Guys plans to raise the price of burgers and hot dogs in order to pay for Obamacare.
Astronomers discover a trinary — of quasars.
The radiation from the Fukushima nuclear power plant failure in Japan has turned out to be less of a problem than predicted.
[O]utside the immediate area of Fukushima, this is hardly a problem at all. Although the crippled nuclear reactors themselves still pose a danger, no one, including personnel who worked in the buildings, died from radiation exposure. Most experts agree that future health risks from the released radiation, notably radioactive iodine-131 and cesiums-134 and – 137, are extremely small and likely to be undetectable. Even considering the upper boundary of estimated effects, there is unlikely to be any detectable increase in cancers in Japan, Asia or the world except close to the facility, according to a World Health Organization report. There will almost certainly be no increase in birth defects or genetic abnormalities from radiation.
Even in the most contaminated areas, any increase in cancer risk will be small. For example, a male exposed at age 1 has his lifetime cancer risk increase from 43 percent to 44 percent. Those exposed at 10 or 20 face even smaller increases in risk — similar to what comes from having a whole-body computer tomography scan or living for 12 to 25 years in Denver amid background radiation in the Rocky Mountains.
The entire article is worth reading, as it outlines in detail the less than deadly consequences of both Fukushima and Chernobyl. This is the kind of information we should use to rationally decide whether we want to build more nuclear power planets.
Data from WISE has uncovered a binary brown dwarf star system only 6.5 light years away, the closest found in almost a century and the third closest overall.
The day of reckoning looms: North Korea has pulled out of its U.N. armistice agreement.
According to conservatives sources in the House, it was the Republican leadership that killed a measure to defund Obamacare.
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Pigs fly! The Democrats in the Senate are about to introduce their legally required annual budget — for the first time in four years.
Not that this budget will do much to solve the federal debt, as it will likely continue the out-of-control spending and is expected to be loaded with new taxes galore.
On that note, has anyone but me noticed this tendency of the modern Democratic Party to grab and grab and grab? They want a blank check in spending, for their own uses, while repeatedly demanding as much money from everyone else as possible. In another time, this behavior would have been perceived as somewhat power-hungry, even tyrannical.
And then there’s this: “We don’t have a spending problem.” Guess who said it.
Chicken Little Report: Four asteroids buzzed the Earth this past week.
I suspect that the increase in detected asteroids is not because there are more of them but because our ability to detect them continues to improve.
The dirty little secret of electric cars.
A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. The mining of lithium, for instance, is a less than green activity. By contrast, the manufacture of a gas-powered car accounts for 17% of its lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions. When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds. …
So unless the electric car is driven a lot, it will never get ahead environmentally. And that turns out to be a challenge. Consider the Nissan Leaf. It has only a 73-mile range per charge. Drivers attempting long road trips, as in one BBC test drive, have reported that recharging takes so long that the average speed is close to six miles per hour—a bit faster than your average jogger.
In other words, government subsidies for electric cars are nothing more than another feel-good program, accomplishing nothing.
Seven sound recordings made before Thomas Edison.
The uncertainty of science: New computer models find that the tropical rain forests will not be harmed by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Tropical forests are unlikely to die off as a result of the predicted rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases this century, a new study finds. The analysis refutes previous work that predicted the catastrophic loss of the Amazon rainforest as one of the more startling potential outcomes of climate change.
In the most extensive study of its kind, an international team of scientists simulated the effect of business-as-usual emissions on the amounts of carbon locked up in tropical forests across Amazonia, Central America, Asia and Africa through to 2100. They compared the results from 22 different global climate models teamed with various models of land-surface processes. In all but one simulation, rainforests across the three regions retained their carbon stocks even as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration increased throughout the century.
The study provides “robust evidence for the resilience of tropical rainforests”, says lead author Chris Huntingford, a climate modeller at the UK’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford. But uncertainties remain, he adds.
First, this prediction is based on a computer model, which is as likely to be as right as the previous pessimistic predictions. With that in mind, no one should start dancing for joy. The long term consequences of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere remain unknown.
Second, I am baffled by the previous predictions that favored catastrophe for the tropical jungles because of increased levels of carbon dioxide. Plants breath CO2. They prosper from it. If you put more in the atmosphere they will thrive. Moreover, the tropical jungles are already hot, and the plant life there is adapted to that heat. Raising the global temperature should not hurt them significantly.
Finally, faced with a result that defuses all the crisis-mongering of the global warming crowd, the author of the article feels obliged at the end to emphasis their new bugaboo: extreme weather! It’s coming! Duck your heads!
But don’t worry. When weather extremes also fail to appear, they will find something else to scream about.
Worse than Pop-tarts! A Philadelphia girl was searched and ridiculed for having a gun made of paper at school.
Barbarians: Islamic militants threaten and beat parents in Pakistan for having their children vaccinated against polio.
What Obama won’t cut: Calligraphers, 77,000 empty buildings, junkets, and robot squirrels.
From a former TSA screener: “A lot of what we do is make believe.”
Read the whole thing. It will give you a touch of reality. Everything the TSA does is an abomination to freedom and common sense.
The uncertainty of science: The Russians now say that they have not found any previously unknown life forms in the sample from Lake Vostok.
Sergei Bulat of the genetics laboratory at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics had said Thursday that samples obtained from the underground Lake Vostok in May 2012 contained a bacteria bearing no resemblance to existing types. But the head of the genetics laboratory at the same institute said on Saturday that the strange life forms were in fact nothing but contaminants.
It appears that the earlier announcement was either premature, or inappropriate.
The competition heats up: Grasshopper flies again, but even higher.
SpaceX’s Grasshopper doubled its highest leap to date to rise 24 stories or 80.1 meters (262.8 feet) today, hovering for approximately 34 seconds and landing safely using closed loop thrust vector and throttle control. Grasshopper touched down with its most accurate precision thus far on the centermost part of the launch pad. At touchdown, the thrust to weight ratio of the vehicle was greater than one, proving a key landing algorithm for Falcon 9.
Surprise, surprise! The Federal Reserve reports that Obamacare is causing layoffs and a slowdown in hiring.
This is wrong too: Some US communities are trying to make gun ownership mandatory.
As much as I think gun ownership and personal defense a good idea, forcing people to do it is just as bad as denying them that right. In each case it is an act of tyranny, using the power of government to impose the will of the majority on everyone, even those who disagree. Nor does it satisfy that some of these local laws allow for an exemption from gun ownership because of religious or personal beliefs. The use of the law to force people to do things is still wrong, no matter what the cause.
The frightening thing to me is the trend. Everyone, from both sides, seems eager to use the law to solve every problem, when the law is probably the worse tool for solving any problem you could possibly imagine. All it ends up doing is robbing everyone of freedom and their fundamental rights to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.
Does this make you feel safer? The TSA issued security badges to at least eleven airport employees with criminal backgrounds.
According to a Feb. 22 report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), the TSA’s mishandling of the program caused a backlog of security badges that had yet to be issued. As a result, the TSA permitted airports to issue security badges to employees without conducting federally required background checks between April 20 and June 1 of 2012. The OIG concluded that there still may be individuals with criminal records who are working in secured areas of airports.
A small Russian satellite has been struck and damaged by space junk created from a 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test.
Comet Pan-STARRS will likely be at its brightest for northern hemisphere viewers this weekend.
Look to the west low on the horizon at sunset to see it.
Good news: A federal appeals court has ruled that the Obama administration does not have the right to search or seize a person’s electronic devices when they cross the border.
The [Department of Homeland Security’s] civil rights watchdog, for example, last month reaffirmed the Obama administration’s position that travelers along the nation’s borders may have their electronics seized and the contents of those devices examined for any reason whatsoever — all in the name of national security.
The San Francisco-based appeals court, ruling 8-3, said that view was too extreme. Under the ruling, border agents may undertake a search of a gadget’s content on a whim, just like they could with a suitcase or a vehicle. However, a deeper forensic analysis using software to decrypt password protected files or to locate deleted files now requires “reasonable suspicion” that criminal activity is afoot. The court left rules intact that a “manual review of files on an electronic device” may be undertaken without justification. [emphasis mine]
Why is it that I sometimes get the feeling that this administration does not know how to read? They certainly seem all too often completely unfamiliar with the Constitution.
Here’s a good idea: South Dakota has passed a law to train teachers to wear guns and provide security.
In South Dakota, supporters of the “sentinel” plan argued that schools in rural areas were too isolated to expect immediate help from police in the event of an attack. They could not afford to pay full time security officers to protect them, so they want to arm teachers and volunteers.
Does this make you feel safer? The TSA screeners at Newark Airport allowed a federal agent with a fake bomb to pass through security.
This covert test of security only proves once again how pointless the whole TSA charade is. Get rid of it. If we simply let the pilots and passengers be armed so they can defend themselves, which was the way we did things until the early 1960s, the chances of a repeat of 9/11 will be considerably less, and we would all have considerably more freedom.
Which is what this country is supposed to stand for, y’know.
