Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
A University of Arizona law student has won a trip into space in the Seattle Space Needle’s “Space Race,” beating out 50,000 other contestants.
Winter on Mars has finally ended, and Opportunity is on the move again.
The competition continues to heat up: ATK today announced that it is building its own manned capsule for its Liberty launch system.
The capsule’s first two flights are scheduled in 2014, both abort tests, followed in 2015 by an orbital flight and, finally, a crewed orbital flight. The spacecraft is designed for ten flights each, and ATK plans to build a minimum of four capsules. All flights will be launched by the Liberty launcher, and ATK is not actively exploring adapting the capsule for other [launch vehicles].
Liberty is based on the upgraded shuttle solid rocket boosters that were developed for the Ares rocket, now cancelled.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has found that some dunes on Mars move and change as much as those on Earth.
Israel’s new coalition government: Why this new political deal happened and how it will change Israel.
The sad state of academic freedom: The Chronicle of Higher Education has fired a blogger merely for criticizing black studies programs.
What is worse is the number of the Chronicle’s readers who could not tolerate reading this point of view, and demanded the blogger’s writing be squelched.
Update: The blogger has responded.
A bad day for Obama and the Democrats.
As I’ve said repeatedly, the 2010 elections were not a fluke, but a trend. The public intends to fire this President and those in Congress — from both parties — who have put the U.S. on verge of bankruptcy.
Fighting over bones: An Indian tribe has sued and three researchers have counter-sued over possession of two 10,000-year-old skeletons unearthed during construction in San Diego.
Not surprisingly, the problem here stems from a poorly written federal law amended by a bureaucratic rule in 2010 that gives any Indian tribe control over any ancient human bones found in the U.S., even if those bones come from a human that lived long before the tribe even existed.
A Japanese astronomy professor has been found murdered in Chile.
Photos of East Berlin, taken in 1990 and today.
What is interesting to me is how delapidated East Berlin was in 1990 after forty years of communist dictatorship, and how completely those same spots have become revitalized by freedom and capitalism.
A trend, not a fluke: Indiana Republicans have dumped incumbent Senator Richard Lugar for a tea party favorite.
In related news, a prison inmate has gotten the highest percentage of votes, 40 percent, of any candidate in any previous state primary against Barack Obama.
Washington politicians had better stop ignoring the fiscal concerns of the tea party. The federal budget has got to be brought under control.
Curiosity takes a picture of itself on its way to Mars.
Theater: The White House today threatened to veto the House budget because of NOAA and NASA trims.
It just keeps going and going: Air Force officials declare the on-going X-37B mission, now over 400 days long, “a spectacular success.”
The twenty-five coolest garages in the world.
Any society that can still afford this is not yet completely doomed.
One astronomer has found that the inner edge of the habitable zone around some dwarf stars is smaller than first calculated because tidal forces overheat planets close to the star.
Then again, this heating might expand the habitable zone in other directions. Stars might overheat when close to the star, but get a boost of needed heat when they would normally be too far away.
A trio of twisters captured on Mars in a single image.
The commercial space industry continues to heat up: A space tug to bring secondary commercial payloads to different orbits.
The uncertainty of science: Astronomers now believe that Type 1a supernovae — used to discover dark energy — can be produced in two different ways.
Type Ia supernovae are known to originate from white dwarfs – the dense cores of dead stars. White dwarfs are also called degenerate stars because they’re supported by quantum degeneracy pressure. In the single-degenerate model for a supernova, a white dwarf gathers material from a companion star until it reaches a tipping point where a runaway nuclear reaction begins and the star explodes. In the double-degenerate model, two white dwarfs merge and explode. Single-degenerate systems should have gas from the companion star around the supernova, while the double-degenerate systems will lack that gas.
For astronomers, this possibility raises several conflicting questions. If two different causes produce Type 1a supernovae, could their measurement of dark energy be suspect? And if not, why is it that these two different causes produce supernovae explosions that look so much alike?
We’re here to help you: Massachusetts state officials are restricting the kinds of foods that can be sold at bake sales.
Bake sales, the calorie-laden standby cash-strapped classrooms, PTAs and booster clubs rely on, will be outlawed from public schools as of Aug. 1 as part of new no-nonsense nutrition standards, forcing fundraisers back to the blackboard to cook up alternative ways to raise money for kids.
Scientists have found that a solar Grand Minimum 2800 years ago might have caused a period of cooling in Europe.
The evidence for this link is at this moment slim, based upon a single data point from a lake in Germany. Nonetheless, it is further evidence that the Sun’s production of sunspots is more important to global climate than climate scientists had previously believed.
The SpaceX test launch of Dragon to ISS has now been rescheduled for May 19.
The competition heating up: Aerojet successfully completed a hot-fire test yesterday of its AJ26 engine, to be used in Orbital Sciences Antares rocket.
Using the Moon as a mirror.
The CERN physicist who planned bombing attacks with Islamic terrorists has been sentenced to five years in prison.
The sentence includes one year “suspended”, and might end up being shortened further for time served and other sentence reductions. I wonder what he’ll do when he gets out.
Why am I not surprised? The five men arrested for planning to blow up a bridge in Ohio turn out to all be active Occupy Wall Street activists.
As despicable as this act of violence might have been, it is just as despicable for major news organizations to fail to mention the important fact that they are Occupiers.
The uncertainty of science: A new study has found that the glaciers of Greenland are not behaving as predicted.
In northwestern Greenland, for example, where most of the glaciers move relatively quickly and flow directly into the sea rather than ending on land, average speed jumped by 8% between 2000 and 2005 and rose another 18% from 2005 to 2010. Nevertheless, the researchers report online today in Science, the glaciers in this region showed no uniform pattern of acceleration. About one-third flowed at the same rate throughout the decade, one-fourth slowed during the interval, and about 15% slowed during the first half of the decade and then surged from 2005 to 2010.
Similarly, many of the individual glaciers in southeastern Greenland don’t follow the region’s overall trend. Although the average speeds for these glaciers increased by 28% over the decade, substantial accelerations by some glaciers were balanced by considerable slowing by others. About 43% of the glaciers in the region sped up between 2000 and 2005, but around 25% slowed down by more than 15% from 2005 to 2010.
In other words, if there is any warming, it hasn’t manifested itself in a predictable manner in the glaciers of Greenland. In fact, the data above suggests instead that if there has been any warming, it either has been far less than predicted, or has had relatively little influence on the Greenland ice sheet.
Boeing’s CST-100 commercial manned capsule successfully completed its second parachute drop test from 14,000 feet on Wednesday.
