Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
A precursor for 2012? Canada’s Conservatives scored a massive election win yesterday.
New Space: Sierra Nevada plans to drop test its Dream Chaser spaceplane in 2012 using Scaled Composites’ WhiteKnightTwo.
Endeavour’s last launch has slipped to at least May 10, possibly later.
Did a microbe survive 2.5 years attached to Surveyor 3 on the Moon, and then come home on Apollo 12? New research says no.
An evening pause: Let’s go for a drive! Jeff Zwart in a Porsche runs Pikes Peak, setting a record for the fastest time.
More information on the asteroid “flyby” of Earth this coming November 8.
“On November 8, asteroid 2005 YU55 will fly past Earth and at its closest approach point will be about 325,000 kilometers [201,700 miles] away,” said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “This asteroid is about 400 meters [1,300 feet] wide – the largest space rock we have identified that will come this close until 2028.”
Justice: The U.S. military finally tracked down and killed Osama bin Laden yesterday.
Some additional information and analysis:
Scaled Composites is ramping up the test rate for SpaceShipTwo.
The launch of space shuttle Endeavour has now been delayed by NASA until May 8 at the earliest.
This from someone who believes in climate change: “The solutions are a joke.”
Technical problems have delayed the last launch of the shuttle Endeavour at least 48 hours.
The world’s ten creepiest abandoned cities.
Putin sacks the head of the Russian space agency.
Space telescopes Hubble and Swift have proven that the debris that suddenly surrounded asteroid Scheila last year was caused by a collision.
If only this was true: Budget crisis forces Detroit to cancel half its murders.
Gee, you’d think he would have noticed this a long time ago: The Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke went on record today to warn that the US deficit “is not sustainable.”
Sixty years late: A North Sea oil pipeline is threatened by a World War II Nazi bomb.
Islam tolerance: A Muslim actress posed for Playboy and is now threatened with death.
More details, including images, of China’s proposed space station.
The countdown for Endeavour’s last launch has begun.
Confirmed: one of two tickets for a lunar flyby on a Soyuz has been sold. More here.
Technology marches on: The last typewriter factory in the world has shut down.
China is asking the public to name its space station.
In Turkey: A hotel carved out of a mountain.
One of the largest statues of an Egyptian pharaoh ever found has been unearthed in Luxor.
Out of funds, SETI has suspended operations while it looks for new investors.
Japan’s tsunami in March produced the largest waves in history.
Some waves grew to more than 100 feet high, breaking historic records, as they squeezed between fingers of land surrounding port towns.
To me, however, this is the biggest takeaway:
Although terrible, the preliminary estimate also finds a better-than 92% survival rate for people living in coastal towns hit by the waves, Bourgeois says. “In that sense, given the magnitude of the unexpectedly large earthquake, things could have been even worse,” she says.
Modern educational theory: Good grammar equals white oppression.
