Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Starvation, scurvy, or lead poisoning? A skeleton from the 1848 Franklin Expedition to the Arctic may tell scientists what caused the expedition’s destruction.
The House spending panel today proposed cutting the budget of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) office, run by John Holdren, by 55%.
“OSTP has chosen to disregard a strong and unambiguous legislative prohibition on bilateral engagement with China or Chinese-owned companies,” says language accompanying the 2012 bill, to be voted on tomorrow by the full appropriations committee. “OSTP’s behavior demonstrates a lack of respect for the policy and oversight roles of the Congress.”
I think the Obama administration is about to discover that ignoring the law as passed by Congress can have bad consequences.
Neptune has just completed its first orbit around the sun since its discovery in 1846. And the Hubble Space Telescope has taken some pictures in celebration.
Al Gore has announced a new campaign “to broadcast the reality of the climate crisis and mobilize citizens to help solve it.”
And I ask: what the hell does a propaganda campaign tell us about the climate? The answer: nothing. Just because you say so, Al, does not make it so.
On another note, satellite data continues to show absolutely no warming for the past decade.
James McLane points out that the shuttle shape is not the only way to build a spaceship.
In an email to me Jim noted that he “is still trying to save NASA.” My response to him was that trying to save NASA right now is more hopeless than Don Quixote chasing a windmill. However, the engineering ideas he outlines in his essay are just the kind of innovative thinking required by the new private companies. And the more ideas the merrier!
Public debt and the peril of Obamacare.
Countries with universal healthcare fall into two camps:
1. Totalitarian regimes like Cuba and North Korea, and authoritarian Third World countries in the Middle East and Africa.
2. Western nations that free-ride off of American military spending and its provision of international security, but nonetheless run unsustainable budgets with immense debts trying to pay for their social welfare states. [emphasis mine]
In other words, we had better repeal this monstrosity or we face economic collapse, probably preceded by a dictatorship.
The first rule of liberalism: Government failure always justifies more government.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: The Obama administration has unilaterally imposed new gun regulations on the border states to Mexico. The NRA has announced it will sue.
The House bill that brings NASA’s budget back to 2008 levels essentially leaves it to NASA to figure out what to cut.
If true, what this means is that NASA itself will have to choose what it considers important. The one problem is that according to this article Congress is still requiring NASA to spend $3 billion on the program-formerly-called-Constellation. which gives the agency less flexibility in doling out the cash.
The shuttle mission has been extended one day.
Interested in caves on other worlds? You might want to attend the First International Planetary Caves Workshop to be held October 25-28, 2011 in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
Underwater Antarctic volcanoes discovered in the Southern Ocean.
In the realm of science, when a computer model is contradicted by empirical observation, the model is deemed to have been refuted. Only in the field of global climate do purported scientists refuse to recognize that basic principle.
The real future: “We’re building spacecraft, not bizjets.”
Titan’s ethane lakes in a red haze.
So far, there are no recognisable signs of organic life. That’s not surprising: by terrestrial standards, Titan is a deep freeze with surface temperatures at a chilly -180°C. Yet Titan is very much alive in the sense that its atmosphere and surface are changing before our eyes. Clouds drift through the haze and rain falls from them to erode stream-like channels draining into shallow lakes. Vast dune fields that look as if they were lifted from the Sahara sprawl along Titan’s equator, yet the dark grains resemble ground asphalt rather than sand. It is a bizarrely different world that looks eerily like home. Or as planetary scientist Ralph Lorenz puts it: “our prototype weird-world exoplanet”.
TSA agents pat down 6-year-old twice.
Giving more power to unelected bureaucrats: A new bill would let federal health researchers unilaterally ban certain chemicals.
Confessions of a moon rock thief.
And in a related story: Fish captain fights to keep long-missing moon rock.
The space shuttle docks with ISS, for the last time.
Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) and pilot, sanctioned by the FAA for landing on a closed runway — the closure of which had not been publicly announced by the FAA — has introduced a bill to change how the agency polices pilots.
Mount Etna had its fifth eruption this year Saturday, closing the local airport and causing local clocks to run 15 minutes fast. With lots of good images.
It ain’t ever happening: NASA continues to stall on their final design for Congress’s mandated heavy-lift rocket.
No one should be surprised by this. Obama has never wanted NASA to build this rocket, when it was Constellation and now when it is the program-formerly-called-Constellation. Moreover, Congress hasn’t given NASA enough money or time to do it anyway. Better the program die and the money is used for something else, or cut entirely in order to reduce the crushing federal debt.
The government’s war on cameras and free speech.
Washington’s never-ending scam of fake spending cuts.
The politicians only get away with this because the press has let them. Which is why I always make reference back to past budgets to give some context to the so-called “cuts,” which often are exactly not that.
A new study has found new evidence that dinosaurs were warm-blooded and active, unlike modern reptiles. Even more surprising,
“The dinosaurs appeared to be even more active than the mammals. We certainly didn’t expect to see that. These results provide additional weight to theories that dinosaurs were warm-blooded and highly active creatures, rather than cold-blooded and sluggish.”
Obama’s stimulus bill: $7 million per house to provide seven homes internet access in Montana.
After a very short hold at 31 seconds, the space shuttle Atlantis has launched and reached orbit without any obvious hitches.
Throw these bums out! The Senate canceled its July 4th break to deal with the debt and literally did nothing.
A paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph preprint website has attempted to model the habitable zones within the Milky Way galaxy. From the abstract:
We predict that ~1.2% of all stars host a planet that may have been capable of supporting complex life at some point in the history of the Galaxy. Of those stars with a habitable planet, ~75% of planets are predicted to be in a tidally locked configuration with their host star. The majority of these planets that may support complex life are found towards the inner Galaxy, distributed within, and significantly above and below, the Galactic midplane.[emphasis mine]
They took into consideration the hazard of supernovae for killing off planetary life, as well as other factors such as the where the necessary heavier elements would be available for producing planets.
You can download the paper here [pdf].
