On Thursday Japan successfully launched the NASA-built Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory (GPM), designed to track the climate’s rain and snowfall.
This Earth observation satellite will supplement TRMM, which has been tracking rainfall in the tropics since 1997.
An image of North Korea taken from ISS illustrates starkly the failure of a state-run top-down dictatorial society.
As is typical for today’s leftwing political correct journalism, this reality is attributed not to communism but to vague generalities. North Korea is a “rogue state” or “North Korea stands alone as an unusually isolated nation, where residents live under a familial dictatorship,” statements that embarrassingly avoid the truth. The rulers of North Korea, like Cuba, refused to reject communist when the Soviet bloc fell in 1991 and have thus left their countries and the people trapped within them poor and bankrupt.
Aren’t you glad that today’s Democratic Party here in the United States considers leftwing dogma the height of progress and a goal worthy of emulation?
Using archived Kepler data combined with statistical modeling, scientists have proposed the discovery of another 715 exoplanets.
This announcement is neat, but despite the many news stories about it today, it should be taken with a grain of salt. What the scientists have really done is pinpoint 715 stars where further research is likely to produce good exoplanet results. It is not guaranteed, however, that a scientist looking at these stars will actually see an exoplanet.
Layers and layers of peer-review: Two publishers of scientific journals have withdrawn 120 papers which they have discovered were nothing more than computer-generated gibberish.
Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers. …
Labbé developed a way to automatically detect manuscripts composed by a piece of software called SCIgen, which randomly combines strings of words to produce fake computer-science papers. SCIgen was invented in 2005 by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge to prove that conferences would accept meaningless papers — and, as they put it, “to maximize amusement” (see ‘Computer conference welcomes gobbledegook paper’). A related program generates random physics manuscript titles on the satirical website arXiv vs. snarXiv. SCIgen is free to download and use, and it is unclear how many people have done so, or for what purposes. SCIgen’s output has occasionally popped up at conferences, when researchers have submitted nonsense papers and then revealed the trick.
The real story here is that many of these gibberish papers were peer-reviewed by actual scientists who are supposedly experts in their fields and should have spotted the fakery immediately. That they didn’t suggests another level of corruption. Either they don’t really bother to peer review the papers they are asked to peer review, or they knew what was going on and were part of the game.
That this kind of stuff happens repeatedly in many fields of science should make us all very skeptical of any controversial scientific claim that carries with it any political component. This doesn’t mean that all published material is fake, only that we must not take anything on faith. Controversial results had better be bomb-proof before we accept them willingly.
Modern American intellectualism: Harry Reid insists in a speech on the Senate floor that the Obamacare horror stories being reported daily “are all untrue.”
He then attacks the sick patients themselves for telling these stories, calling them liars.
I call this modern American intellectualism because it jibs with the typical level of open-mindedness seen in modern intellectuals when it comes to climate science and any data that throws doubt on the theory of global warming.
You can’t make this stuff up: Global warming activists organize a petition to ban a column by Charles Krauthammer that criticized global warming science and the activists who try to stuff it down our throats.
These activists don’t seem capable of addressing any of the actual facts that Krauthammer mentions in his column, facts that readers of this webpage already know in great detail. No, the debate tactic of today’s global warming fascists is simply to tell their opponents to “Shut up!” Who needs facts when you can silence your opponents?
In related news, CNN and at least one of its anchors have declared that the debate over global warming is over and that they no longer consider the skeptical view worth covering.
Debate is such an inconvenient thing.
A zircon crystal found in western Australia has been dated as the oldest known piece of the Earth’s crust.
The competition heats up: A close look at the environmental assessment that Blue Origin submitted to the FAA to get approval for an expanded test operations reveals their intention to do numerous launch abort tests of an orbital crew capsule.
At least, this is how I interpret the paperwork.
Several massive countersuits have now been filed against global warming scientist Michael Mann after he failed to pursue his own lawsuit againsts Canadian climate scientist Timothy Ball.
I am slightly unsure I trust this particular story, but decided to post it anyway as it is quite intriguing if true. If true, it suggests the tide has definitely turned in the battle over climate science — between honest scientists and the political activists who claim to be scientists (by which I am referring to Michael Mann).
Posted from Rome, Italy.
The uncertainty of science: A renowned astronomer reminds everyone — the public, the astronomy community, and most importantly, the press — that the data collected on most exoplanets so far are far more uncertain than is often claimed.
A planet’s atmosphere is the gateway to its identity, including how it was formed, how it developed and whether it can sustain life, stated Adam Burrows, author of the review and a Princeton University professor of astrophysical sciences. But the dominant methods for studying exoplanet atmospheres are not intended for objects as distant, dim and complex as planets trillions of miles from Earth, Burrows said. They were instead designed to study much closer or brighter objects, such as planets in Earth’s solar system and stars.
Nonetheless, scientific reports and the popular media brim with excited depictions of Earth-like planets ripe for hosting life and other conclusions that are based on vague and incomplete data, Burrows wrote in the first in a planned series of essays that examine the current and future study of exoplanets. Despite many trumpeted results, few “hard facts” about exoplanet atmospheres have been collected since the first planet was detected in 1992, and most of these data are of “marginal utility.”
The good news is that the past 20 years of study have brought a new generation of exoplanet researchers to the fore that is establishing new techniques, technologies and theories. As with any relatively new field of study, fully understanding exoplanets will require a lot of time, resources and patience, Burrows said. “Exoplanet research is in a period of productive fermentation that implies we’re doing something new that will indeed mature,” Burrows said. “Our observations just aren’t yet of a quality that is good enough to draw the conclusions we want to draw. “There’s a lot of hype in this subject, a lot of irrational exuberance. Popular media have characterized our understanding as better than it actually is,” he said. “They’ve been able to generate excitement that creates a positive connection between the astrophysics community and the public at large, but it’s important not to hype conclusions too much at this point.” [emphasis mine]
Burrows’ point is absolutely right. Every single story describing the atmosphere or make-up of any particular exoplanet at this point in time is essentially fantasy. The data are too weak or vague, and hardly robust enough to come to any solid conclusions. In fact, this research repeatedly reminds me of the conclusions many scientists drew from the flimsy spectrographic data that was gathered before the space age about the solar system’s planets. When we finally got spacecraft to those planets, we found those conclusions were routinely wrong.
This is not to say that our new knowledge of exoplanets is not exciting or significant. It is both. We just shouldn’t put too much faith in it at this time.
Orbital images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have confirmed that the mysterious rock that appeared near Opportunity was not ejecta from a nearby meteorite impact.
The scientists theorized that there was a very remote chance that a nearby impact has thrown the rock into place, but the images show nothing nearby. Moreover, if there had been an impact we probably would have seen more rocks raining down all around. The images are further confirmation that the rock was kicked up by the rover itself as it rolled along.
Europe approves its own more advanced version of Kepler to launch in 2024 and hunt for exoplanets across half the sky.
During its six year long planned mission, PLATO will observe one million stars, leading to the likely discovery and characterisation of thousands of new planets circling other stars. PLATO will scan and observe about half the sky, including the brightest and nearest stars.
PLATO consists of an array of 34 individual telescopes mounted on an observing platform in the space probe. The satellite will be positioned at one of the so-called Lagrangian Points , where the gravitational pull of the Sun and the Earth cancel each other out so the satellite will stay at a fixed position in space. Each of the 34 telescopes has an aperture of 12 centimeters. The individual telescopes can be combined in many different modes and bundled together, leading to unprecedented capabilities to simultaneously observe both bright and dim objects. PLATO will be equipped with the largest camera-system sensor ever flown in space, comprising 136 charge-coupled devices (CCDs) that have a combined area of 0.9 square metres.
What I like about this is that this project is essentially putting another optical telescope in space. The more of these we have the more discoveries we will make, as even a tiny optical telescope in the vacuum of space is more productive than a giant ground-based telescope looking through the foggy atmosphere of Earth.
