Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
A Bronze Age burial site has been uncovered at the planned location of supermarket and gas station in Scotland.
Defund them! NPR’s firing of Juan Williams yesterday is another demonstration that this leftwing news organization has no tolerance for free speech. One of the first things the new Congress should do is end all funding to this corrupt propaganda machine.
Sorry I have been late in posting about this story. I would like to say more, but I have an article for Sky & Telescope that must be finished by tomorrow.
If Congress does end up appropriating money for that last extra shuttle mission, NASA managers are considering delaying it as long as possible, until the fall of 2011. Key quote:
[Shuttle Program Manager John] Shannon said if the shuttle is retired prematurely, the ISS will not be properly supplied.
In other words, Congress and the President should never have retired the shuttle in the first place, at least not until a replacement was ready to go.
Next week will mark the tenth anniversary of what is now the continuous human presence in space, since the first crew occupied ISS on November 2, 2000.
New results from the LCROSS impact on the Moon’s south pole: It’s cold and wet at the Moon’s south pole.
Update: Other elements detected in the impact plume included silver and mercury.
Steny Hoyer must really be worried: a attendee at the Hoyer-Lollar debate last week saw Hoyer “knuckle-punch” Lollar in the back, something that Lollar also attests to. This took place shortly after Hoyer was reported to have threatened Lollar by saying to him “I’m coming after you.”
It appears that while he was president, Bill Clinton misplaced the pocket electronic component, called a biscuit, that holds the codes used to activate America’s nuclear forces. And he didn’t tell anyone for months! As Ed Morrissey notes,
“Did they look under the sofa cushions? That’s where my remote usually winds up.”
Talk about stupid: New Zealand might lose $700 million in movie production business due to a boycott by an Australian-based actors union. Fun quote:
Fifteen hundred workers, including directors, technicians and crew who [oppose the actors union], met at . . . Miramar Studios at 5pm for an emergency meeting this evening. By 7pm, they were storming the Actors Equity meeting in the city.
The Moon stinks of gunpowder.
Not all space business news today is bad: Orbital Sciences, one of the companies building cargo ferrying services for ISS, posted good third quarter results today.
The Canadian company that makes the shuttle robot arm and other space robotics might be for sale. The company has vaguely denied this report, however.
As expected, the satellite company TerreStar has filed for bankruptcy.
Expensive and therefore not as competitive for market share as it could be, Arianespace is now facing a second year of losses and further competition from a variety of other rocket companies.
Using a deep field image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers at the European Southern Observatory have identified one galaxy in that image as the most distant ever seen, with a record-setting redshift of 8.6 and thus an rough distance of about 13 billion light years, only about 600 million years after the Big Bang.
Whoops! Last sentence corrected, thanks to my readers.
Benoit Mandelbrot, the mathematician who discovered fractals, has died at 85.
Unsure of the cause of yesterday’s fuel line leak on the space shuttle Discovery, engineers plan to replace a set of seals this week. Whether this will delay the November 1 launch remains unknown at this time.
The private space station company, Bigelow Aerospace, has signed agreements with six different nations — Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, Australia and the United Kingdom — to provide them space on its next orbiting station.
Because of damage sustained during the railroad trip from Russia to Kazakhstan, the Russians are flying in a replacement descent module for the Soyuz capsule scheduled for launch to ISS on December 13.
China is expanding its embargo on exporting rare earth minerals, blocking shipments to Japan, Europe and the United States. Key quote:
China mines 95 percent of the world’s rare earth elements, which have broad commercial and military applications, and are vital to the manufacture of products as diverse as cellphones, large wind turbines and guided missiles. Any curtailment of Chinese supplies of rare earths is likely to be greeted with alarm in Western capitals, particularly because Western companies are believed to keep much smaller stockpiles of rare earths than Japanese companies.
It appears that the fuel leak on the space shuttle Discovery has stopped.
The custodian of the Dead Sea Scrolls is working with Google to put them on line for all to view.
The private space station company Bigelow is beginning the testing of its station life support systems, using human subjects.
It ain’t just the government in financial trouble: With $1 billion in debt, the satellite wireless company TerreStar is rumored to be considering bankruptcy.
The New Horizons space probe has now passed the halfway mark on its journey to Pluto.
Engineers are trouble-shooting a fuel leak on the space shuttle Discovery. At the moment NASA does not expect this to delay the planned November 1 launch.
Swiss engineers broke through the last stretch of rock on Friday to create the world’s longest tunnel, 35.4 miles long!
Here’s some European Union madness: Because the Union banned light bulbs of more than 60 watts, a German entrepreneur is legally marketing his 75 and 100 watt bulbs by having them made in China and then importing them as “small heating devices” dubbed “heatballs.”
This is only the beginning. The political careers of almost all of the bluedog Democrats who voted for Obamacare appear to be ending with this upcoming election.
