Category: Points of Information

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

New TSA Scanner Procedure Is Dumb in a New Way

2:38 pm

The new TSA scanner procedure: Dumb in a new way. The quote below actually isn’t the point of the article (which notes other idiotic things about TSA procedures), but I found it telling nonetheless:

For the most part, it has been possible to avoid the scanners just by picking the right line to stand in, which I assume means that the government has determined that terrorists have poor line-picking skills.

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Penguin tracking bands do harm

4:12 pm

The bands that scientists attach to penguins to track them actually do harm. The data also suggests that certain climate research might also be skewed because of this. Key quote:

Overall, the team found, bands were bad for penguins. Banded penguins had a 16% lower survival rate than unbanded birds over the 10 years, the researchers report online today in Nature. Banded birds also arrived later at the breeding grounds and took longer trips to forage for food. As a result, they produced 39% fewer chicks. . . . [The researcher noted] that his team’s results suggest that research using banded penguins may be biased. For example, he says, several high-profile studies have used banded penguins to investigate the impact of climate change on the birds. The findings of those studies aren’t necessarily wrong, but the numbers need to be reconsidered, he says.

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A new deal to fly tourists to ISS using Russian Soyuz capsules

4:06 pm

A new deal has been announced to fly tourists to ISS using Russian Soyuz capsules. According the arrangement between Space Adventures and the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation (FSA) and Rocket Space Corporation Energia (RSC Energia), three seats will be made available on Soyuz spacecraft bound for the International Space Station (ISS), beginning in 2013.

These seats will be made available through the increase of Soyuz production, from four to five spacecraft per year. Each flight will be short duration, approximately 10 days, and will contribute to the increase of launch capacity to the ISS.

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NASA submits its Heavy Lift rocket proposal to Congress

1:10 am

NASA has submitted its Heavy Lift rocket proposal to Congress. However, NASA also noted bluntly that:

“Neither Reference Vehicle Design currently fits the projected budget profiles nor schedule goals outlined in the Authorization Act.”

In other words, they can’t build it for the money or in the timeframe they’ve been given by Congress.

Didn’t someone say this already? Several times?

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Fermi detects beams of antimatter produced above thunderstorms on Earth

8:45 pm

More from the AAS meeting: The Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope has detected beams of antimatter produced above Earth’s thunderstorms. Key quote:

Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash, a brief burst produced inside thunderstorms and shown to be associated with lightning. It is estimated that about 500 such flashes occur daily worldwide, but most go undetected. . . . The spacecraft was located immediately above a thunderstorm for most of the observed terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. But, in four cases, storms were far from Fermi. In addition, lightning-generated radio signals detected by a global monitoring network indicated the only lightning at the time was hundreds or more miles away. During one flash, which occurred on Dec. 14, 2009, Fermi was located over Egypt. But the active storm was in Zambia, some 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles) to the south.

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