I finally have an hour free here in Nevada.
For the past three days we have been intensely hiking up mountains over a vast area of Nevada. The goal has been to locate and map caves for the Forest Service in some of the most remote areas of the state. So far we have focused on mapping known caves, putting the possible discoveries aside for later work.
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It is late and I have to up at 5 am to head to another cave tomorrow, so there is no time to give a detailed update of what happened today
However, here is a quick summary. Our goal was to find and map a rarely visited and difficult to find cave. After four miles of hiking and a lot of wandering across some pretty spectacular mountainsides, we failed to find the cave. However, we did locate two other small caves, which we surveyed, and then, on the way back to the vehicles, discovered a previously unknown cave of some size with significant formations. This was quite exciting, as the cave was clearly virgin, never seen by humans before.
We hope to return to explore and map it later in the week. Once again, I will get to go where no one has ever gone before!
Tomorrow will probably be as long a day as today, so I probably will not be able to post a more detailed report until Saturday. Stay tuned.
The image on the left will give you a good idea of what my day was like: Twelve hours of driving across Arizona and Nevada. Tomorrow the cave work begins.
Solar Dynamic Observatory successfully imaged Venus’s atmosphere during yesterday’s transit. Cool images too.
Watch the Venus transit live:
From space, from Solar Dynamics Observatory.
From Universe Today, on Youtube.
Watching the transit of Venus – from Saturn.
Due to cost overruns, NASA has cancelled the GEM X-ray telescope.
Astronomers think they have discovered a distant supermassive black hole that is being ejected from its galaxy at a speed of several million miles per hour.
Although the ejection of a supermassive black hole from a galaxy by recoil because more gravitational waves are being emitted in one direction than another is likely to be rare, it nevertheless could mean that there are many giant black holes roaming undetected out in the vast spaces between galaxies. “These black holes would be invisible to us,” said co-author Laura Blecha, also of CfA, “because they have consumed all of the gas surrounding them after being thrown out of their home galaxy.”
This conclusion however is not final. The data could also be explained by the spiraling in of two supermassive black holes.
Big news: The military has given NASA two Cold War era spy space telescopes with mirrors comparable to Hubble’s.
They have 2.4-meter (7.9 feet) mirrors, just like the Hubble. They also have an additional feature that the civilian space telescopes lack: A maneuverable secondary mirror that makes it possible to obtain more focused images. These telescopes will have 100 times the field of view of the Hubble, according to David Spergel, a Princeton astrophysicist and co-chair of the National Academies advisory panel on astronomy and astrophysics.
Since astronomers have over the past dozen years been remarkably uninterested in launching a replacement for Hubble, they now find themselves in a situation where they might have no optical capabilities at all in space. Hubble is slowing dying from age, and NASA doesn’t have the money to build a new optical space telescope, especially since with any new space telescope proposal the astronomical community has had the annoying habit of demanding more sophistication than NASA can afford.
This announcement however might just save astronomy from becoming blind. Because these spy telescopes are already half built, it will be difficult to add too many bells and whistles. Hire a launch rocket, build the cameras and spectrographs based on the instruments already on Hubble, and get the things in orbit quickly.
Something caused the Earth to bombarded with cosmic rays in 775 AD but scientists have no idea what.
Radio silence: A targeted SETI observation of Gliese 581, the nearest star with exoplanets in the habitable zone, has found no evidence of alien communications.
This was a proof of concept experiment, and though they detected nothing, they also did not rule out the possibility of alien life, as their radio telescope wasn’t sensitive enough to do so. You can download the actual paper here.
Images from Messenger now appear to support past radio telescope observations that suggested there was water-ice in the permanently shadowed craters of Mercury.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have determined that the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are on a collision course, and will meet head on in 4 billion years.
You can download the science paper describing these results in detail here [pdf].
Corruption in Big Science: A U.S. senator is demanding the NIH explain how it could give a $2 million grant to a researcher previously punished for not reporting financial conflicts of interest who is also under investigation by the Department of Justice.
How scientists can author as many as 700 papers without even reading what they have written.
This is why we should all be skeptical about any peer-reviewed paper. There is a lot of fraud going on, sometimes for political reasons but mostly for reasons of status and financial reward. Science and the love of discovery often has nothing to do with it.
Modern intellectualism: At a Harvard conference, a scientist has proposed that the government should require people to exercise in order to control their weight.
At a “Harvard Thinks Big” confab earlier this year, evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman offered his own bright idea for tackling the nation’s obesity epidemic. Merely medicating it won’t do, he said, and education is well-meaning but ineffective. His answer? “Coercion. … We should start telling corporations what to do.” But not just corporations. He also advocated – “to hearty applause,” the Harvard Gazette noted – “requiring people to exercise.” [emphasis mine]
I emphasis the applause to illustrate that this tyrannical attitude is not unusual in academic circles. The modern elite community is very arrogant, and believes it has the right to tell everyone else what to do.
The Dead Sea is getting a bounce.
The uncertainty of science: Rediscovered photos of Greenland reveal that the ice retreat in the 1930s was as drastic as today.
A graveyard of ships — in the desert.
This environmental disaster in the Soviet Union was caused more by that failed country’s centralized state-run command society than the technological society they were trying to create. Though technology in any kind of society can certainly do harm to the environment, when all decisions are controlled by a single entity — in this case the communist Soviet government — it is practically impossible to adapt and adjust when things start going wrong.
In a free democracy, however, you have many safety valves. No project is ever so big that it effects everything, and if things start to go wrong the chaos of freedom will allow people to choose differently, correcting the problem more quickly.
Two Democrats joined Republicans yesterday on a Senate committee to block the U.S. military from increasing its use of alternatives fossil fuels.
What stood out to me in this article was the following quote:
As part of this support, in December the Navy agreed to spend $12 million for 450,000 gallons of “advanced biofuels,” which can be blended with petroleum in a 50:50 mixture and burned in conventional engines. The Navy and Air Force have both set a goal of using advanced biofuels for 50% of their fuel use by the end of this decade. But the current $26-a-gallon price tag angered congressional Republicans, who accuse the Obama Administration of using the military to support its green agenda. [emphasis mine]
$26 per gallon for biofuels? I find it astonishing that anyone voted for this program.
Of course the military wants options. And of course we want to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, if only to reduce the money pouring into the hands of the radical Islamists of the Middle East. But at that price, these alternative fuels are simply not competitive or affordable.
The scientists building a space probe to go to asteroid 1999 RQ36 have better pinpointed its orbit.
Knowing this asteroid’s orbit is not only important for planning the mission. 1999 RQ36 has a 1in a 1000 chance of hitting the Earth in 2182.
The television as envisioned by dreamers — before it existed.
The article describes more evidence that the tree ring data used by global warming scientists was fraudulently manipulated to suggest a warming in the past half century when the full data set showed no such thing.
Until the climate field cleans house and admits to this wrong-doing, no one is going to trust anything they say.
NOAA today announced its prediction for the upcoming Atlantic Ocean hurricane season, calling for between 9 and 15 tropical storms in 2012, with 4 to 8 becoming full blown hurricanes. The NOAA release can be seen here.
To me, the range of the prediction is so wide it really doesn’t mean anything. Moreover, I wonder about the reliability of these predictions.
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Reboot: The Lunar Orbiter image of Copernicus Crater, taken forty-six years ago, has been re-released after significant refurbishing.
By adding modern computer interfaces and data handling techniques, the LOIRP was able to scan and record the data in ways that simply could not have been accomplished in the 1960s. As a result the images that were obtained had a much higher resolution and dynamic range than had been seen to date. Indeed, in many cases, these images often rival or exceed images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter which is currently surveying the Moon.
You should definitely check it out, as it is a breathtaking image. Historic too, as it was the first image from the Moon that truly made the place understandable.
No more banging that ketchup bottle: Engineers at MIT have developed a coating for the insides of food containers that will allow all the food to flow out.
The work is good if you can get it: Four Princeton physicists received over $1.5 million in lodging subsidies from the Department of Energy while on “temporary” assignment to other labs, even after living at that assignment for as much as 14 years.
The above story, from Science, takes a more sympathic view of this misuse of government funds. The Washington Post is more blunt:
Four high-ranking federal lab workers found a way to turn “per diem” funds for a temporary assignment into a steady flow of extra income — at taxpayers’ expense. The overpayments, discovered in an inspector general’s audit, boosted the annual pay of some of the employees by as much as $64,000.
The Department of Energy paid the four scientists roughly $1.8 million for daily lodging and “inconvenience” during assignments away from home. But these scientists were paid as if they were on temporary duty for up to 14 years — long after most had permanently relocated to job sites.
The problem with this story is that it isn’t an exception but the rule. Right now the wolves are guarding the chicken house, and they are raiding it routinely for as much cash as they can get. Consider for example last week’s story about the NIH study that has spent a billion dollars without even getting off the ground.
You give someone the equivalent of a blank check, and they will make no effort to do things efficiently, or even to do what you hired them for.
Never mind! Scientists who published a study last month that said they could find no evidence of dark matter in nearby interstellar space have re-analyzed their data and found that the dark matter is apparently there.
Based on new calculations, an astronomer has proposed the existence of an unseen planet four times the size of Earth lurking in the outer reaches of the solar system.
Killer microbes from the edge of space? One organization wants to know.
