Archive for December, 2009
NASA Launches WISE To Spot Near Earth Objects
In her book 2012: Science or Superstition, Alexandra Bruce writes:
We’ve been told since childhood that an asteroid extinguished the mighty dinosaurs in a single day. When we look out at our pockmarked celestial neighbors, we know that something similar could happen here again. Recent discoveries at the bottom of the seas seem to bear this out and the “Planet X” rumors probably stem from these new scientific observations. “In 1980, only 86 Near Earth Asteroids and comets were known to exist…[today] NASA estimates that there are perhaps 20,000 potentially hazardous asteroids and comets in the general vicinity of Earth.” So far, the technology to adequately view and track these potential threats simply didn’t exist. With the November 2009 launch of NASA’s “WISE”: Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, it is hoped that we’ll be able to see any hazards that we’ve missed.
NASA was a little late, but on December 14, 2009 at 14:09 GMT WISE was successfully launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The rocket deposited WISE into a polar orbit 326 miles above Earth.
In a cheap but cute video, NASA scientist Dr. Amy Mainzer describes how the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) will provide a map to the universe’s hidden treasures, not to mention warning us of impending impact with Near Earth Objects:
[cross posted from 2012SOS.com]
Anais Nin on LSD’s value
via Arthur
[Huxley] reminded me that drugs are beneficial if they provide the only access to our nightlife. I realized that the expression “blow my mind” was born of the fact that America had cemented access to imagination and fantasy and that it would take dynamite to remove this block! I believed Leary’s emphasis on the fact we use only one percent of our mind or potential, that everything in our education conspires to restrict and constrict us. I only wished people had had time to study drugs as they studied religion or philosophy and to adapt to this chemical alteration of our bodies.
[LSD's] value is in being a shortcut to the unconscious, so that one enters the realm of intuition unhampered, pure as it is in children, of direct emotional reaction to nature, to other human beings. In a sense it is the return to the spontaneity and freshness of…
Waterworld Planet Discovered
Scientists are intrigued by a newly-noticed, watery, Earth-like planet, spotted orbiting a small star 40 light years from us. From the Telegraph:
The planet is believed to be too hot to sustain Earth-type life, but could consist of 75 per cent water. Evidence suggests it has an atmosphere, and astronomers believe it to be more Earth-like than any ”exoplanet” found outside the Solar System so far. [Named] GJ1214b, it is thought to be three quarters composed of water and ice and about one quarter rock.
Some of the planet’s water should be in the form of exotic materials such as Ice Seven – a crystalline form of water that exists at pressures greater than 20,000 times the Earth’s sea-level atmosphere.
Scientists believe something besides the planet’s surface must be blocking light from the parent star – probably a surrounding atmosphere that may contain hydrogen and helium.
Terrible Inventions Of The 1950s and ’60s
America today may resemble a turtle retreating into its shell, but the mid-twentieth century was a bolder, better time, when the U.S. was on top of the world. Life has a series of 30 misguided, disturbing, and just plain dumb inventions from this era, gadgets and gizmos which foretold a future that never came. Why didn’t the portable sauna ever catch on?
Ancient Tablets Decoded; Shed Light on Assyrian Empire
from National Geographic
Meticulous ancient notetakers have given archaeologists a glimpse of what life was like 3,000 years ago in the Assyrian Empire, which controlled much of the region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf.
Clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform, an ancient script once common in the Middle East, were unearthed in summer 2009 in an ancient palace in present-day southeastern Turkey.
Palace scribes jotted down seemingly mundane state affairs on the tablets during the Late Iron Age—which lasted from roughly the end of the ninth century B.C. until the mid-seventh century B.C.
But these everyday details, now in the early stages of decoding, may open up some of the inner workings of the Assyrian government—and the people who toiled in the empire, experts say.
Congressman Reads ‘Rethink Afghanistan’ Petition Against Escalation
Congressman Alan Grayson reads the “Rethink Afghanistan” petition in the United States House of Representatives on December 15, 2009. The petition from Brave New Foundation, Credo Mobile and True Majority calling on Congress to vote against any bill to fund troop escalation in Afghanistan was signed by over 100,000 people.
The Rethink Afghanistan DVD is available here now, and in good video stores nationwide.
Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones
You knew this was coming – how long before the hackers work out how to turn them back around and aim them at us? As reported in the Wall Street Journal:
Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.
Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.
U.S. officials say there is no evidence that militants were able to take control of the drones or otherwise interfere with their flights. Still, the intercepts…
Nanotech Breakthrough: Nanotube Woven Into Commercially-Viable Yarn
Here’s a cool photograph of “the first macroscopic, commercially usable boron nitride nanotubes”, spun into a piece of BNNT “yarn”.
Visible to the naked eye, these nanotubes are now long enough to be woven into fibers, “and thus capable of being used for a vast number of commercial applications.” While it’s small in size, it’s being hailed as a significant sign of “the coming of the one technology that can definitively (in theory) bring about abundance…within a decade or less from the time when we get a complete grasp on its use as a production technology.”
The Menhaden Disaster
You might think that menhaden aren’t important to you, but you’d be wrong. Paul Greenberg starts out writing about fish oil and Omega-3s, which may or may not interest you, but when he gets to the part about where those supplements come from, it gets serious. In the New York Times:
…The deal with fish oil, I found out, is that a considerable portion of it comes from a creature upon which the entire Atlantic coastal ecosystem relies, a big-headed, smelly, foot-long member of the herring family called menhaden, which a recent book identifies in its title as “The Most Important Fish in the Sea.”
The book’s author, H. Bruce Franklin, compares menhaden to the passenger pigeon and related to me recently how his research uncovered that populations were once so large that “the vanguard of the fish’s annual migration would reach Cape Cod while the rearguard was still in Maine.” Menhaden…
Scientists Unlock Genetic Code In Major Cancer Breakthrough
By Phil Han, CNN:
London, England (CNN) — The entire genetic codes of two common types of cancer have been cracked, according to scientists, who say the breakthrough could unlock a new era in the treatment of deadly diseases.
Scientists at the UK-based Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute catalogued the genetic maps of skin and lung cancer and have pinpointed the specific mutations within DNA that can lead to dangerous tumors.
Researchers predict these maps will offer patients a personalized treatment option that ranges from earlier detection to the types of medication used to treat cancer.
The genetic maps will also allow cancer researchers to study cells with defective DNA and produce more powerful drugs to fight the errors, according to the the study’s scientists.
“The knowledge we extract over the next few years will have major implications for treatment,” Peter Campbell from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute said.
“By identifying all the cancer genes we will…
Hugo Chavez Rocks Climate Talks In Copenhagen
Andrew Bolt goes ballistic, writing about the shenanigans of the some of the more colorful players on the climate change stage in Copenhagen, for the HeraldSun:
These maniacs in Copenhagen are voting on your future:
President Chavez brought the house down.
When he said the process in Copenhagen was “not democratic, it is not inclusive, but isn’t that the reality of our world, the world is really and imperial dictatorship…down with imperial dictatorships” he got a rousing round of applause.
When he said there was a “silent and terrible ghost in the room” and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening.
But then he wound up to his grand conclusion – 20 minutes after his 5 minute speaking time was supposed to have ended and after quoting everyone from Karl Marx to Jesus Christ – “our revolution seeks to help all people…socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s…
Mapping the God of Sperm
Rachel Lehmann-Haupt writes in Newsweek:
It’s a crisp fall day in Northville, Mich., a small suburb of Ann Arbor, and Kirk Maxey, a soft-spoken, graying baby boomer with a classic square jaw, is watching his 12-year-old son chase a soccer ball toward the goal. Maxey is doing what he does every Saturday, along with hundreds of other family men and women across the country, but he’s not your average soccer dad.
Maxey, 51, happens to be one of the most prolific sperm donors in the country.
Between 1980 and 1994, he donated at a Michigan clinic twice a week. He’s looked at the records of his donations, multiplied by the number of individual vials each donation produced, and estimated the success of each vial resulting in a pregnancy. By his own calculations, he concluded that he is the biological father of nearly 400 children, spread across the state and possibly the country.woman ovulating…
How Come No One Makes Rocket-Powered Car Jumps Anymore?
This is why:
Looks like Mr. Powers took the Lincoln “Continental” thing a bit too literally…
U.S. National Debt Tops Debt Limit
Mark Knoller writes at CBSNews.com:
The latest calculation of the National Debt as posted by the Treasury Department has – at least numerically – exceeded the statutory Debt Limit approved by Congress last February as part of the Recovery Act stimulus bill.
The ceiling was set at $12.104 trillion dollars. The latest posting by Treasury shows the National Debt at nearly $12.135 trillion.
A senior Treasury official told CBS News that the department has some “extraordinary accounting tools” it can use to give the government breathing room in the range of $150-billion when the Debt exceeds the Debt Ceiling.
Were it not for those “tools,” the U.S. Government would not have the statutory authority to borrow any more money. It might block issuance of Social Security checks and require a shutdown of some parts of the federal government…
[continues at CBSNews.com]
Veterans Group Calls On Soldiers to Refuse Orders to Deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq
From Truthout:
In response to President Barack Obama’s announcement on December 1 to deploy 30,000 additional troops to the occupation of Afghanistan, the organization March Forward!, comprising both veterans and active-duty members of the US military, has called on all soldiers to refuse their orders to deploy.
“March Forward! calls on all service members to refuse orders to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq,” reads a press release from the group from December 3. “We offer our unconditional support and solidarity. Join us in the fight to ensure that no more soldiers or civilians lose their lives in these criminal wars.”
Michael Prysner, a former corporal in the Army who served from 2001-2005 and a veteran of the occupation of Iraq, co-founded the group with another Iraq war veteran, James Circello.
Truthout asked Prysner how he responds to those who believe a soldier should always follow orders, no matter what.
[Read more at Truthout]
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Effort to Remove Atheist From City Council
From CBS News:
Asheville City Councilman Cecil Bothwell believes in ending the death penalty, conserving water and reforming government – but he doesn’t believe in God. His political opponents say that’s a sin that makes him unworthy of serving in office, and they’ve got the North Carolina Constitution on their side.
Bothwell’s detractors are threatening to take the city to court for swearing him in, even though the state’s antiquated requirement that officeholders believe in God is unenforceable because it violates the U.S. Consititution.
“The question of whether or not God exists is not particularly interesting to me and it’s certainly not relevant to public office,” the recently elected 59-year-old said.
Bothwell ran this fall on a platform that also included limiting the height of downtown buildings and saving trees in the city’s core, views that appealed to voters in the liberal-leaning community at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains. When Bothwell was sworn…
Can Science Resurrect God? New Scenario Says ‘Yes’
From Huffington Post:
According to Nicholas Wade, veteran New York Times science reporter, and author of the new book The Faith Instinct, religious fervor has dwindled of late because religions have failed to keep pace with human knowledge. For faith to thrive, our concepts of God must adapt to our evolving scientific knowledge.
What happens if we project our current scientific knowledge into the future? A new scenario suggests the evolution of a new concept of God.
Imagine 100 years ago, looking up into the sky and seeing a pinhead in the stratosphere, and someone telling you the dot contained 400 people whizzing off to China faster than the chariots of the Greek gods. Or consider the progress with cloning; we now have the ability to resurrect species that no longer exist, such as the Bucardo mountain goat – and using chromosome transfer, we can create a mate for it just like God…
Ben Bernanke As Time’s “Person Of The Year”
Is Time Magazine really so out of touch with the hatred and revulsion many Americans feel for Ben Bernanke and his Wall Street cronies? Apparently so, as reported in the Atlantic:
It’s always fun to see who Time magazine names its “Person of the Year.” 2009’s pick was neither obvious nor shocking: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. I have a few thoughts about the pick.
My first observation is that Bernanke wasn’t really the most important figure for just 2009. Don’t get me wrong: I think he’s had a huge impact in the U.S. and global economies this year. I just think he’d be more aptly described as the “Person of the Last 18 to 24 Months.” Much of the most important work he did to stabilize the economy was done in 2008, not 2009. This year he had more of a stay-the-course philosophy.
Clearly, there are those who probably aren’t pleased…
Why Do Rappers Hold Their Guns Sideways?
From Slate:
As police chased Raymond “Ready” Martinez through Times Square on Thursday, the street hustler and aspiring rapper fired two shots, holding the gun sideways “like a character out of a rap video.” According to the New York Post, Martinez’s side grip caused the gun to jam, enabling police to shoot and kill the suspect. What’s the point of holding a gun sideways?To look Hollywood, of course. Journalists and gun experts point to the 1993 Hughes brothers film Menace II Society, which depicts the side grip in its opening scene, as the movie that popularized the style. Although the directors claim to have witnessed a side grip robbery in Detroit in 1987, there are few reports of street gangs using the technique until after the movie came out. The Hughes brothers didn’t invent the grip, though. In 1961’s One-Eyed Jacks, Marlon Brando used it, as did Eli Wallach in 1966’s The Good,…
