Category: Points of Information

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

Senate approves a flat budget for the Department of Energy

5:10 pm

The Senate has approved a flat budget for the Department of Energy.

On Wednesday the Senate Appropriations Committee approved $4.843 billion for DOE’s Office of Science in 2012. That’s the same level as this year, and a slight bump over the $4.8 billion approved in July on a largely partisan vote by the House of Representatives covering the entire department. Although the funding is a far cry from the $5.416 billion that the Obama Administration had requested in February for the next fiscal year, which begins on 1 October, officials at the Office of Science’s 10 national labs say they’re not complaining. “Even staying flat when a lot of other programs are getting cut is relatively good news,” says Thom Mason, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. In budgets, “flat is the new good,” quips Eric Isaacs, director of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. [emphasis mine]

That a government official is now happy that the budget is flat is a good sign that we might finally be making some cultural progress in terms of bringing the federal budget under some control. In the past the very thought of no increase would have sent these people into spasms of outrage. Now they realize how pointless such a tantrum would be, and might actually do their budget negotiations harm.

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Senators lambast Administration for SLS budget numbers

9:12 am

The space war heats up: Two senators have issued a statement lambasting the Obama Administration for its budget numbers for building the program-formerly-called-Constellation.

All of this is fantasy and foolishness. These senators might succeed in forcing NASA to spend money on the heavy-lift rocket that Congress has mandated, but there is no way the space agency will ever get enough funding or time to finish it. Even if the lower estimates are right, the cost is exorbitant, many times that of what the private companies have spent for their rockets and ships. And if construction does begin in earnest, it cannot be finished before the arrival of a new President in 2016 (at the latest), who, like all new Presidents, will have his own plans and will not want to build something started by the previous administration.

Much better to end this farce and save the money, especially considering the debt of federal government.

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More Progress freighter crash investigation results

7:31 pm

More Progress freighter crash investigation results: it appears there was something that blocked the fuel supply.

“The exposed production defect was accidental,” [the investigation] said, adding the reason may be qualified as an isolated case only after checking all available engines.

This suggests that the problem was an isolated error and that, once they have cleared the available engines, they can start flying relatively quickly.

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ATK test fires the five segment solid rocket for Ares 1

6:12 pm

ATK today successfully test fired the five segment solid rocket originally intended for the Ares 1 rocket. More here.

This solid rocket motor has value, but ATK’s hope that NASA will use it as part of the Congressionally designed Space Launch System, what I call the program-formerly-called-Constellation, is probably a false hope. They might get a few years of funding from Congress, but the whole thing will die stillborn when the funding runs out.

Better that they packaged the motor as part of a private launch system and tried to get some commercial business with it.

Regardless, the video is fun to watch. Check it out.

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The seven ton climate satellite, UARS, is set to fall to earth sometime in the next month

10:47 pm

A defunct seven-ton NASA climate satellite is about to fall to Earth.

The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS, is expected to come down in late September or early October, the space agency said today in an advisory. “Although the spacecraft will break into pieces during re-entry, not all of it will burn up in the atmosphere,” NASA said.

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Virgin Galactic hosts an industry day at New Mexico spaceport

10:43 pm

Virgin Galactic announced today that it will co-host an industry day at Spaceport America in New Mexico on October 18 in order to locate suppliers for its space tourism business.

“This is a fantastic opportunity for companies ranging from local New Mexico firms to national corporations to understand our unique needs for goods and services, including our requirements in building and servicing multiple commercial spaceships as the market further develops,” said Virgin Galactic’s President and CEO George Whitesides. “Our intention is to establish these relationships and emphasize our desire to hire locally as much as possible.”

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A Dutch university fires social psychologist over faked data

10:35 pm

A Dutch university has fired a noted social psychologist who has admitted his science research was based on faked data.

[Diederik] Stapel has worked at the university, located in southern Netherlands, since 2006. He is known as a prolific researcher and a successful fundraiser. His studies appeared to offer new insights into the workings of the human mind; for instance, a Science paper published in April showed that people are more likely to stereotype or discriminate in messy environments.

In the TV interview, [university rector Philip] Eijlander says he was first contacted on 27 August by “junior researchers” in Stapel’s lab who alleged that his conduct was fraudulent. Stapel immediately admitted that there was “something strange” in his papers, Eijlander says, and “yesterday, he told me that there are faked data.” The university has asked Willem Levelt, a psycholinguist and former president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, to lead a panel investigating the extent of the alleged fraud. Eijlander says that all “tainted papers” will be retracted. [emphasis mine]

I purposely emphasis the publication of this faked research in the peer review journal Science to illustrate how this story once again demonstrates that just because a science paper is peer reviewed, that is absolutely no guarantee that it is either correct, or even legitimate. The field of science (with a small “s”) always requires everyone to exercise a strong sense of skepticism. Appeals to authority (“It was published in Science!”) should carry no weight.

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The Moral High Ground

2:53 pm

The moral high ground.

The Left has fought the spread of genetically modified (GM) foods with every weapon in its arsenal. Leftists did this in the name of combating a long list of “potential risks” that never materialized. They have been permitted to overlook the fact that their assaults on GM food were not cost free. For instance, they have greatly delayed and in some places stopped cold the use of rice modified to increase vitamin A content. For the Left this is cause for celebration. In fact, widespread use of this “golden rice” would have prevented a half-million cases of child blindness a year. So the next time someone talks to you about the evils of genetically modified foods, remind him of the millions of poor children this crusade has condemned to a lifetime of blindness. How do folks prepared to allow millions to needlessly go blind still command the respect of any truly moral person?

And that’s only the start. Read the whole thing.

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Israel security forces foil multiple terrorist attacks in Jerusalem, arrest dozens of Hamas militants

2:36 pm

Explain to me again why the Palestinians deserve a nation? Last month Israel security forces foiled a terrorist attack planned by Hamas in Jerusalem.

The main cell charged with carrying out the attack was based in Hebron [in the West Bank]. The cell was in touch with the Hamas headquarters in Syria, and the date of the attack was set for August 21. The planned attack involved a fire extinguisher which contained six kilograms of explosives. The device was supposed to be carried by a suicide bomber in a bus or a mall in the Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood in Jerusalem.

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Obscure editor resigns from minor journal: why you should care

9:54 am

Obscure editor resigns from minor journal: why you should care.

We have sadly reached that stage in the climate debate where the Alarmist establishment isn’t even going to bother trying to make its case through force of argument. And the scary part is that it senses – probably correctly – that it doesn’t need to. The junk-science establishment – from the UEA to the Royal Society to NASA GISS to the National Academy of Sciences – has done so well out of its whitewash enquiries, its FOI breaches, its appeals to authority, its craven, unquestioning support from the MSM and the political class, its silencing of critics, that it has lost all sense of shame. It is out of control, unaccountable, yet directly responsible for a large chunk of the costly regulation, taxation and environmentally disastrous schemes from biofuels to wind farms which are helping to destroy the global economy. The great global warming scam is the biggest scandal of our age. It is time someone took it seriously.

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Baby Star Found on Earth’s Doorstep

6:16 pm

A baby star has been found only 27 light years away.

AP Columbae lies in the constellation Columba the Dove, south of the brilliant constellation Orion. “AP Columbae is still contracting under gravity towards the main sequence,” says astronomer Adric Riedel of Georgia State University in Atlanta, whose team measured the star’s parallax—an indication of its distance—and discovered that the star is abnormally luminous. Although the star is dim and red, it’s four times as bright as it should be, because it’s twice the diameter of a main-sequence star of the same color.

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Republican in the lead in special congressional election in New York

3:25 pm

Oh my: A new poll shows the Republican is in the lead in the special election in New York to replace disgraced Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner.

If the Republican wins this election, in what has always been a Democratically-entrenched district in Brooklyn-Queens, it will send a clear signal to all that the 2012 election is going to be a very very very unusual election.

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Kepler team pushes for mission extension

12:55 pm

The Kepler team pushes for a mission extension in order to find Earth-sized planets.

The Kepler spacecraft has hit an unexpected obstacle as it patiently watches the heavens for exoplanets: too many rowdy young stars. The orbiting probe detects small dips in the brightness of a star that occur when a planet crosses its face. But an analysis of some 2,500 of the tens of thousands of Sun-like stars detected in Kepler’s field of view has found that the stars themselves flicker more than predicted, with the largest number varying twice as much as the Sun. That makes it harder to detect Earth-sized bodies. As a result, the analysis suggests that Kepler will need more than double its planned mission life of three-and-a-half years to achieve its main goal of determining how common Earth-like planets are in the Milky Way.

While it is important to find those Earth-sized planets, to me the important discovery here is that Kepler is confirming what previous research has suggested: Stars like our Sun are generally far more active and variable than the Sun itself. Which means that either the Sun is unusual, or has been unusually inactive during recorded human history.

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New images of Apollo landing sites on the Moon

12:45 pm

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team have released new images of the Apollo 12, 14, and 17 landing sites on the Moon. Below is a cropped image of the Apollo 12 site, showing the trails left by astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean when they walked from their lunar module to Surveyor 3, an unmanned lunar lander that had soft landed there two years earlier. The full image shows some incredible detail.

Apollo 12 landing site

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