Hawaii and Pacific islands brace for killer tsunami waves to strike across thousands of miles of ocean.
More here about the situation in Japan.
Video:
Putting ISS to use. Key quote:
Under consideration is using the entire station and its six-person crew as an analog for a deep-space human exploration vehicle en route to Mars. An internal team is studying the feasibility and value of such an exercise in the summer of 2012. “We might start with a small window, like a 30-day window, with actual time delays with what we’d expect with a Martian communications system,” Gerstenmaier says. “We may freeze our consumables on station, in the sense of saying that we’ve started our voyage to Mars, and see how well we do in our predictions.”
What the academic community must do to bring tolerance of ideas back to colleges: First, recognize the problem.
Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano erupts.
Earlier this week NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center published its monthly update of the Sun’s sunspot cycle. As I do every month, I’ve posted the newest graph below, showing the continuing slow rise in sunspots (blue/black lines) in comparison with the consensis prediction made by the solar science community in May 2009 (red line).
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Astronomers from the University of Hawaii have taken new images of the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis in an effort to refine their understanding of its orbital path.
Got a few hundred thousand you can spare? Why not build a doomsday bomb shelter?
It’s not the crime it’s the cover-up: According to Science, Michael Mann of the climategate scandal did not advocate the illegal deletion of emails that had been requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), as reported earlier by the Daily Caller. All he did was forward an email by Phil Jones, also part of the climategate scandal, that requested that emails should be deleted. He is therefore innocent.
This is getting absurd. That a journal like Science would try to justify this idiotic argument puts a serious stain on almost everything they publish. Michael Mann was requested by Phil Jones to contact Eugene Wahl and ask him to delete emails illegally. Mann took the easiest approach, and simply forwarded Jones’s email. Without question he was complicit in this illegal act.
If the scientific community doesn’t wake up soon and honestly deal with this scandal, they are going to destroy a four hundred year track record of honesty. Worse, they are going to find it increasingly difficult to get funds from anyone for their research.
A mature galaxy cluster has been found by astronomers at a time when the universe is thought to be only a quarter of its present age.
This discovery could be very significant, since astronomers think mature galaxy clusters need time to form, and shouldn’t exist in the early universe. “If further observations find many more [of these clusters] then this may mean that our understanding of the early Universe needs to be revised.”
NASA scientists have published a paper warning that there is growing evidence that the melting at the polar caps is accelerating. From the press release:
The pace at which the polar ice sheets are losing mass was found to be accelerating rapidly. Each year over the course of the study, the two ice sheets lost a combined average of 36.3 gigatonnes more than they did the year before. In comparison, the 2006 study of mountain glaciers and ice caps estimated their loss at 402 gigatonnes a year on average, with a year-over-year acceleration rate three times smaller than that of the ice sheets.
Several things to note after reading the actual paper:
There was a hearing in Congress today on climate science, though it apparently changed nothing: the Republican leadership in the committee is going to proceed with legislation to try to roll back the EPA regulations relating to carbon dioxide imposed by the Obama administration.
The most interesting detail I gleaned from the above article however was this quote, written by the Science journalist himself, Eli Kintisch:
The hearing barely touched on the underlying issue, namely, is it appropriate for Congress to involve itself so deeply into the working of a regulatory agency? Are there precedents? And what are the legal and governance implications of curtailing an agency’s authority in this way?
What a strange thing to write. If I remember correctly, we are a democracy, and the people we elect to Congress are given the ultimate responsibility and authority to legislate. There are no “legal or governance implications.” If they want to rein in a regulatory agency, that is their absolute Constitutional right. That Kintisch and his editors at Science don’t seem to understand this basic fact about American governance is most astonishing.
Here’s some detailed analysis by scientists of the meteorite fossil paper.
Once again, there is a great deal of skepticism, most of which appears reasonably and justified. Though a number of scientists have applauded his work, it really looks like Hoover does not have sufficient evidence to claim his samples are alien biology. However, this quote stands out:
It appears likely that Hoover’s study may soon be ignored by the majority of the scientific community, instead of enjoying a healthy debate such as that raised by McKay’s 1996 paper on the Mars meteorite. Redfield says that a microbiologist that she knows refused to read it. [emphasis mine]
That hardly seems the right response from an open-minded scientist.
More evidence that Penn State’s investigation of IPCC climate researcher Michael Mann was a whitewash.
The key point is that the Penn State investigators never interviewed a principal who was able to confirm or deny a key charge against “Hockey Stick” lead author of “Hide the Decline” infamy Michael Mann. This individual has now been interviewed, and what he told federal investigators has indicted Mann and Penn State.
I have noted this already, the very week the Penn State report was issued, but it is nice to see there is further evidence to confirm my conclusions.
The tiger stripe fissures on Saturn’s moon Enceladus have turned out to be far hotter than predicted.
The scientific battle over the meteorite fossil paper continues.
Planetary scientists make their recommendations for the kinds of planetary missions they think the United States should do for the next decade. And it looks like a lean future, as the scientists also note that their primary recommendations, missions to Mars and Europa, should only be built if their budgets can be trimmed significantly:
NASA’s top priority, according to the survey’s recommendations, should be the Mars Astrobiology Explorer Cacher, or MAX-C, which could help determine whether Mars ever supported life and offer insight on its geologic and climate history. It would also be the first step in an effort to get samples from Mars back to Earth. However, the report said this mission should only be undertaken if NASA’s cost is about $2.5 billion, which is $1 billion less than independent estimates provided to the panel. The mission would be run jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency, according to the survey.
A mission to Europa and its subsurface ocean — which might support life — should be the second priority mission, the experts said. But its estimated price tag of $4.7 billion may make it too expensive without an increase in NASA’s planetary science budget or a paring of the mission’s costs. [emphasis mine]
Richard Kerr of Science is attending the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas, and has written a short article describing the reaction of planetary scientists to the meteorite fossil paper by NASA scientist Richard Hoover. Their reaction, hostile and disinterested, isn’t pretty. These two quotes will give you the flavor:
Whether they have closely examined the paper by astrobiologist Richard Hoover of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center or only heard about it in the hallways, the reaction is the same: not again.
Rather than taking a look themselves, researchers have other things in mind. One leading scientist half-jokingly suggested hanging Hoover in effigy in the conference center lobby.
In an unusual move, NASA has issued a statement on the alien fossil paper written by Richard Hoover. Key quote:
While we value the free exchange of ideas, data, and information as part of scientific and technical inquiry, NASA cannot stand behind or support a scientific claim unless it has been peer-reviewed or thoroughly examined by other qualified experts. This paper was submitted in 2007 to the International Journal of Astrobiology. However, the peer review process was not completed for that submission. NASA also was unaware of the recent submission of the paper to the Journal of Cosmology or of the paper’s subsequent publication.
This suggests that Hoover was having trouble getting published in one journal, and did an end-around to get published in a journal more agreeable to his conclusions.
Though this does raise questions about the validity of the research, it is always the research itself that matters. In this case I remain skeptical, but intrigued. I really would like to know why the peer-review process on Hoover’s paper was taking so long at the International Journal of Astrobiology. I would also love to read a critique of Hoover’s papers from scientists in the field.
Progress! The Senate’s science budget proposals are higher than the House’s, but actually do include real cuts.
How the head of Los Angeles’s community college construction program wasted millions on green energy construction. This quote sums up the absurdity of this environmental wet dream:
As head of a $5.7-billion, taxpayer-funded program to rebuild the college campuses, Eisenberg commanded attention. But his plan for energy independence was seriously flawed. He overestimated how much power the colleges could generate. He underestimated the cost. And he poured millions of dollars into designs for projects that proved so impractical or unpopular they were never built. These and other blunders cost nearly $10 million that could have paid for new classrooms, laboratories and other college facilities, a Times investigation found.
The problems with Eisenberg’s energy vision were fundamental. For starters, there simply wasn’t room on the campuses for all the generating equipment required to become self-sufficient. Some of the colleges wouldn’t come close to that goal even if solar panels, wind turbines and other devices were wedged into every available space.
Going off the grid did not make economic sense either. Given the cost of alternative energy technology, it would be more expensive for the district to generate all its own electricity than to continue paying utilities for power.
Weather and geology also refused to cooperate. Three solar power arrays had to be scrapped because the intended locations were atop seismic faults. Plans for large-scale wind power collided with the reality that prevailing winds at nearly all the campuses are too weak to generate much electricity. To date, a single wind turbine has been installed, as a demonstration project. It spins too slowly in average winds to power a 60-watt light bulb. [emphasis mine]
Worse, the man who forced this idiocy on the colleges still sees nothing wrong with it. And his justification illustrates how completely uneducated he is.
He cast himself as an environmental visionary and predicted that the college system would eventually achieve energy independence. “Somebody needs to be first,” he said. “If the great explorers really had a map and knew where they were going, maybe we wouldn’t have the result we have today.
The fact is that the great explorers always had a map, and worked carefully from real data. Granted, the horizon was unknown, but the explorers who succeeded all ground their exploration on reality, not fantasy.
With foolish leadership like this, it is no surprise California is about to go bankrupt.
Shackleton’s Antarctica, in color in 1915.
More questions about today’s alien fossil story.
The questions this article raises jive well with my own doubts. However I find the level of hatred expressed in the comments to be quite disgusting and vile.
Two drill companies will temporarily cease work in Arkansas to see if this action will cause the recent swarms of earthquakes there to ease.
Very very intriguing: A NASA scientist has claimed in a peer reviewed paper the discovery of alien fossils in several meteorites recovered on Earth. From the paper’s last paragraph:
The absence of nitrogen in the cyanobacterial filaments detected in the CI1 carbonaceous meteorites indicates that the filaments represent the remains of extraterrestrial life forms that grew on the parent bodies of the meteorites when liquid water was present, long before the meteorites entered the Earth’s atmosphere.
The news article describing this discovery is a bit more breathless in style than I would like, and makes me suspicious about these results. Moreover, that NASA held no press release or press conference for a result of this significance gives me pause. (Though NASA might have felt burned from the reactions they got from the arsenic-based-biology press conference and decided therefore to take a low profile here.)
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Due to the budget situation, it appears that planetary scientists have scaled back their plans for future NASA missions to other planets.
We will know more on Monday, when the planetary community releases its much awaited decadal survey, outlining their recommendations for the next decade.
More science cheating: A former MIT researcher has been convicted of fraud.
A research anesthesiologist has been stripped of his professorship, fired from a German hospital, and is under criminal investigation for forging the medical research for more than 90 papers. Key paragraph:
German medical authorities are examining 92 of Boldt’s published papers amid allegations he forged documents, tested drugs on patients without their consent and fraudulently claimed payments for operations he never performed. Twenty-nine of the 92 papers have been identified as “highly suspected” of containing forged or distorted data, authorities said.
One third or more of his peer-reviewed papers are now suspect? Isn’t it the claim of peer-review science journals that this kind of fraud is impossible because the work will be carefully reviewed by the best people, most qualified to spot any fraud in their field? Yet, in this case this system failed at least one third of the time, if not more so, and did so frequently.
To me, this is further evidence that the best method for finding fraud is not review, but independent competition. Let others challenge the result or try to duplicate it. That way, we find out very quickly whether it is real or not.
The Glory climate satellite has crashed in the Pacific when its rocket failed during launch today.
