Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
A battle builds over naming a Colorado mountain for John Denver.
Sadly, everything is politics today.
And this fixes everything? TSA has apologized for confiscating diabetic pregnant woman’s insulin.
Note that in the very same breath the TSA also denied ever taking the woman’s insulin. Makes that apology somewhat pointless, doesn’t it?
You can’t make this stuff up: Michelle Malkin points out that the logo created by Smithsonian’s Department of Innovation shows a gear arrangement that simply can’t function in the real world.
Check out the logo. 3 interlocking gears arranged in this fashion will not move in any direction. They are essentially locked in place. Which when you think about it, is a perfect analogy of today’s government!
The comments on the Department of Innovation’s own webpage are hilarious as well:
Perhaps this should be the new logo for Congress….since no motion could come from this arrangement.
An excellent summary of the consequences of a lower credit rating for the U.S. government.
There is a lot of anger at the moment in the US over the embarrassment of the downgrade, as well as shock. I’m most amused by the shock, to tell the truth. S&P didn’t say anything yesterday that was not common knowledge and common sense. If you had to rate a potential investment that had an income of, say, $22,000 a year but had costs of $37,000 per year, a standing debt of $143,000, and contracted future debt that exceeded $1 million, would you give that investment a gold-plated AAA rating and buy their bonds at the lowest interest rate possible, or at all? Of course not, but that’s exactly the fiscal situation of the US, at a 100,000,000:1 scale.
Boeing unveiled its 787 Dreamliner airplane on Saturday after years of delay.
A discovery in Nebraska of rare earth minerals appears set to challenge China’s monopoly.
To me these were the key quotes from this article:
The U.S. used to produce rare earths through the Mountain Pass Mine in California, but it was shut down in 2002, primarily because of environmental concerns, including the spillage of hundreds of thousands of gallons of water carrying radioactive waste into a nearby lake.
and
Although studies have shown the U.S. has 13 million metric tons of rare-earth minerals, National Mining Association spokeswoman Carol Raulston said it does not mine any of it – partly as a result of the difficulty of obtaining permits. “One of the key problems that investors tell us about is that the permitting regime in this country is so complicated and time-consuming that it has hurt investments here in the United States,” Ms. Raulston said.
Global warming: Half of the Earth’s internal heat comes from radioactive decay.
A thin belt of antimatter particles trapped by the Earth’s magnetic field has been spotted for the first time.
Virgin Galactic’s suborbital shuttle: Sydney to London in 4 hours.
I’ve been told that there are engineering reasons why SpaceShipTwo could not make this flight. Nonetheless, the possibility is quite alluring.
Maybe this is why NASA has been stalling about releasing its plans: The Congressionally-designed moon rocket, what I call the program-formerly-called-Constellation, is estimated to cost $38 billion to complete.
Opportunity is now less than 400 feet from the rim of Endeavour Crater.
After a delay slightly under one hour, the Jupiter probe Juno has lifted off. Check here for updates on its status.
The north pole of Mars in summer: the dry ice is gone, leaving an icecap of water only.
Don’t you feel safer now? The TSA screener in Denver decided a pregnant woman’s insulin and ice packs were a threat and confiscated them.
She asked 7NEWS not to use her name for fear of retaliation for speaking out. “I got a bottle of nail polish. I got hair spray bottles. I got needles that are syringes. But yet I can’t take through my actual insulin?” she asked. [emphasis mine]
Stand by for space weather: three coronal mass ejections were released by the sun in the past few days and are aimed directly at the earth. The first hit tonight, without doing much damage.
Though it is important to prepare for these solar storms, don’t expect them to do much harm. Power companies use the warnings to protect their grids. What you can expect is an increased chance of seeing the aurora at lower latitudes.
A truck 400 feet long with 192 wheels crosses California to Utah.
More evidence that there are active flows of water on Mars.
Dark, finger-like features appear and extend down some Martian slopes during late spring through summer, fade in winter, and return during the next spring. Repeated observations have tracked the seasonal changes in these recurring features on several steep slopes in the middle latitudes of Mars’ southern hemisphere.
Though there are a number of unsolved issues about these features, the best explanation appears to be a liquid brine.
Saltiness lowers the freezing temperature of water. Sites with active flows get warm enough, even in the shallow subsurface, to sustain liquid water that is about as salty as Earth’s oceans, while pure water would freeze at the observed temperatures.
Go here to see the full image.
Boeing has now officially chosen the Atlas 5 rocket to launch is manned capsule.
The government war on kid-run businesses. With a map.
Repeal it: Five insurers have announced they are canceling their healthcare coverage in Indiana due to Obamacare regulations. The reason?
Aetna was leaving the Indiana individual market over a rule in the federal health care overhaul that insurers essentially must dedicate 80 percent of the premiums they collect to medical care. Anything less than 80 percent would be paid as rebates to policyholders the following year.
In other words, Obamacare tries to legislate the percentage of overhead a company spends, something that in the real world is simply impractical. Under this kind of regulation, every private company will eventually go out of business, leaving us stuck with a nationalized healthcare system run by our government.
And we all can see how efficiently the government runs things, right? Imagine a visit to the doctors’ office being like going to the motor vehicle administration.
New research on the influence of a large moon to a habitable planet.
Gun groups to sue over new Obama gun regulations in the southwest border states.
Two Russians have completed a spacewalk today at ISS. They not only prepared the station for future Russian upgrades, they released an amateur radio microsat.
Cost issues might force Europe to downsize its 2016 Mars mission.
Did the Earth once have two moons?
Both satellites would have formed from debris that was ejected when a Mars-size protoplanet smacked into Earth late in its formation period. Whereas traditional theory states that the infant Moon rapidly swept up any rivals or gravitationally ejected them into interstellar space, the new theory suggests that one body survived, parked in a gravitationally stable point in the Earth–Moon system.
This new model also posits that the two moons eventually collided, producing the moon we have today.
The future of American medicine: Israeli doctors protested their socialized working conditions last week, closing clinics and delaying treatment in emergency rooms.
