Twenty lost vials of Apollo 11 moon dust have been found in storage at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory after forty years.
Not surprisingly, NASA is demanding them back.
To the horror of global warming alarmists, the climate refuses to warm.
For those who are regular readers here at Behind the Black, none of the data described by Peter Ferrara in this article will be a surprise. I have been reporting these facts for years. However, the article provides a nice outline of what we know, and includes this sentence near the end that sums up the true problem we face:
Has there ever in history been such an almighty disconnect between observable reality and the delusions of a political class that is quite impervious to any rational discussion?
Meteorologist Joe Bastardi: Blaming turbulent weather on global warming is extreme nonsense.
Be sure to read the interview all the way through. The second half is especially devastating in its educated attack on the global warming crowd.
Who are the real climate deniers?
I very much dislike the use of the term “deniers”, no matter who it is applied to, since it lowers the civility of the discussion. Nonetheless, the article is a nice thumbnail summary of the climate field, both in terms of the players as well as the areas of uncertainty and confusion. It also provides a clear illustration of the contrast between the two sides and how they tend to discuss these issues, best summarized by this quote:
It is also telling that in a radio debate between Harris [the skeptic] and Rhynas [the global warming advocate] that took place following Rhynas’s initial presentation, the former agreed to take questions from the public but the latter refused.
Sunjammer, NASA’s next solar sail experiment.
Though the article headline focuses on the addition of space weather instruments to this solar sail, the article says very little about those instruments. One, Swan, is described as a “wind instrument”, which probably means it would study the solar wind. The other instrument would study the Earth’s magnetic field. Both instruments are needed to track the effect of the Sun on local space weather, since the one satellite we have to do this, Ace, is now more than a decade past its expiration date.
The Wow! signal: An intercepted alien transmission?
Detected in 1977, this short signal has puzzled SETI investigators for decades. The article gives a good overview of the mystery.
The top ten new species discovered in 2012.
The accumulating dents and dings on Curiosity’s wheels.
The journal Science struggles to find the harm done to NIH from sequestration’s 5% cut.
Given that sequestration lopped off a staggering $1.55 billion from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) budget this year, it shouldn’t be hard to find examples of how the cut is harming research labs. Although sequestration “has already dealt a devastating blow,” said NIH Director Francis Collins at a Senate hearing last week, it turns out it’s not that easy to spell out the damage.
First of all, this cut was hardly “staggering.” All it did was bring NIH’s budget down to $29.15 billion, which is almost exactly the budget the agency had in 2008. Somehow, NIH managed quite well with this amount of money in 2008, and in fact probably wasted quite a bit of cash even then.
Second, this fact — that the cut wasn’t really that “devastating” — might explain why Science can’t find any obvious damage to any program. In its budget articles the journal routinely makes it a point to lobby for more money for scientists. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised when it tries to spin any cut — or even a small reduction in the rate of growth — as a disaster. The fact that Science still has trouble making that spin seem believable in this case is solid evidence that sequestration was a good idea, and that there was a great deal of fat that could be trimmed from the budget.
The uncertainty of science: Climate scientists have been forced to revise their climate models due to the unexpected refusal of the climate to warm since the late 1990s.
In related news, the certainty of some ignorant politicians: A Democratic senator used the Oklahoma tornado to rant against Republicans who have expressed skepticism about human-caused global warming. Update: Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California) followed up by blaming the tornado on global warming while pushing her carbon tax bill today.
The first story attempts very hard to keep the narrative alive that we are all going to die from global warming, even though the gist is that the warming has stopped and all the predictions of global warming scientists have been wrong. The second story illustrates the typically close-minded attitude of liberal politicians. The senator not only refuses to recognize the new data showing that warming has stopped, he has accepted the global warming narrative completely, including the entirely false claim that extreme weather is rising because of global warming.
A Russian Bion-M spacecraft, filled with mice, lizards and other animals, returned to Earth after 30 days in space with about half its mice and all its gerbils dead.
The Bion-M experiment, launched from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, on April 19, carried 45 mice, 15 geckos, 18 Mongolian gerbils, 20 snails and a number of different plants, seeds and microorganisms, according to a Russian state news site. About half of the mice died, but the lizards reportedly survived. The Mongolian gerbils all expired, apparently due to an equipment failure, said Vladimir Sychev of the Russian Academy of Sciences, according to AFP.
It is unclear at this moment whether it was the harsh environment of weightlessness or equipment failure that caused the mortalities.
Dark matter, WIMPS, and NASA’s Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer
This very nicely written article describing the scientific goals of AMS is even better in that it emphasizes strongly the uncertainties of the data and the theories behind it.
Scientists have released the first topo map of Titan.
Whereas Earth’s tallest mountain towers nearly 9 kilometers above sea level, Titan’s topographic variations are mild: Its highest point is just half a kilometer above the mean and its lowest just 1.7 kilometers below.
Overall the detail here is not very great. None of the instruments on Cassini can see anything smaller than a half kilometer, about 1,500 feet, so the data doesn’t really show us the rough details. Moreover, the best data is spotty, as it has been accumulated by about a hundred Cassini fly-bys, rather than systematically by an orbiting spacecraft.
Earth under fire from the Sun!
The Sun’s sunspot production might be down, but we are still in the solar maximum, weak as it is, and this last week the Sun has been producing the strongest flares in years. The sunspot producing these flares is now rotating into a position where any further flares will be aimed at the Earth. Should be interesting.
Working for the Democratic Party: After waiting fifteen months for IRS approval of its tax-exempt status and getting no response, a conservative group reapplied using a liberal-sounding name and got its approval in three weeks.
There are certainly a lot of caveats to this story, but the circumstances are quite interesting, considering all we now know about the IRS’s efforts to harass conservatives.
The Kepler mission has lost its second gyroscope, ending the ability of the telescope to aim precisely. More details here.
The telescope’s primary mission, to stare continuously at one section of sky, looking for exoplanet transits, is over, though it might still be re-purposed for other astronomical research.
The myth of the scientific liberal.
The core trait of a scientific mind is that when its commitments clash with evidence, evidence rules. On that count, what grade do liberals deserve? Fail, given their reaction to the latest evidence on universal health care, global warming, and universal preschool.
The author then delves into each of these topics and shows how the liberal community refuses to deal with the evidence.
In a science fair project that came in third, a fourteen year old has discovered that the magnets inside IPADs can interfere with heart devices like implanted defibrillators.
It is that time again, buckos! Yesterday NOAA released its monthly update of the Sun’s sunspot cycle, covering the period of April 2013. As I have done every month for the past three years, I have posted this latest graph, with annotations to give it context, below the fold.
For the second month in a row the Sun’s sunspot output increased. The result is that April 2013 saw the most sunspot activity in more than a year, since December 2011.
A solar-powered airplane landed safely in Phoenix today on its first leg of an attempt to fly across the United States.
I totally support this effort to develop new technology, but must note that the capabilities of this solar-powered plane, as described in this article, are woefully limited. Nonetheless, I can see many applications where these liabilities will not be an issue, so all power to them. I hope they succeed.
The uncertainty of science: The high peak in tornado in 2011, the most in fifty years, was quickly attributed to global warming. Eric Berger asks: How does this explain this year’s low number, the fewest in fifty years?
If you click on the first link, you will see that the global warming scientists quoted, Kevin Trenberth, Michael Mann, and Gavin Schmidt, were all involved in the climategate emails, where they came off very badly. Moreover, there have been significant questions about the work of Michael Mann himself. I also wonder if these guys will have anything to say about the dearth of tornadoes today.
The lingering echo of Comet Shoemaker-Levy in the atmosphere of Jupiter.
The Herschel observations, together with heat maps provided by NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility on Mauna Kea, showed the researchers that the Jovian stratosphere was 20° to 30°F (10° to 15°C) warmer than it would be if completely dry. One question is whether the stratospheric warming results from the gentle, continuous infall of interplanetary dust particles, which would be warmed by sunlight as they linger high up. Cavalié and his colleagues believe IDPs create some of the infrared emission but cannot explain it all. Further, a continuously supplied source would migrate to lower depths, yet most of the emission is too high up, at pressures less than 2 millibars. And while the amount of water is roughly constant across the southern hemisphere, the emission gradually weakens northward until it’s less than half as strong. It’s not simply that Jupiter’s bottom half is hotter — there’s just more water down there. As the researchers note, “At least 95% of the observed water comes from the SL9 comet and subsequent (photo)-chemistry in Jupiter’s stratosphere according to our models, as of today.
Taken together, they conclude, these observations offer “clear evidence that a recent comet … is the principal source of water in Jupiter. What we observe today is a remnant of the oxygen delivery by the comet at 44°S in July 1994.”
The Chinese national who had been arrested at Dulles airport as he left for China with a NASA laptop has been released after pleading guilty to one charge, having porn on the laptop.
Investigators found no classified information on the computer. As part of the release agreement, however, the man must leave the U.S.
Though the man, Bo Jiang, was very careful to bring nothing secret with him when he tried to flee to China in March, the circumstantial evidence suggests that he should not have had access to this information in the first place, and that in the past he might have illegally funneled classified information to China.
A new high resolution image from Mars Express illustrates the violent landslides and lava flows off the eastern flank of Olympus Mons, the solar system’s largest volcano.
NASA revealed Tuesday that last April the Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope barely avoided a collision with an abandoned Russian satellite.
Fermi mission scientists first learned of the space collision threat on March 29, 2012 when they received a notice that the space telescope and Cosmos 1805 would miss each other by just 700 feet (213.4 meters). The mission team monitored the situation over the next day and it became clear that the two spacecraft, traveling in different orbits, would zip through the same point in space within 30 milliseconds of one another, NASA officials said.
They used Fermi’s thrusters to shift its orbit enough so the two spacecraft missed each other by 6 miles.
Astronomers have discovered a previously unknown neighbor galaxy to the Milky Way.
Schools from Puerto Rico dominated the competition at this past weekend’s Great Moonbuggy Race.
Smithsonian researchers have recovered a short recording of Alexander Graham Bell’s voice, made in 1885.
Opportunity went into safe mode during the communications pause in April when the Sun was between Mars and the Earth.
Mission controllers for Opportunity, which landed on Mars in January 2004, first learned of the issue on Saturday (April 27). On that day, the rover got back in touch after a nearly three-week communication moratorium caused by an unfavorable planetary alignment called a Mars solar conjunction, in which Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of the sun. The Opportunity rover apparently put itself into standby on April 22 after sensing a problem during a routine camera check, mission managers said.
It sounds like this is a recoverable problem and the rover will be back in operation momentarily. Stay tuned.
