Perhaps this helps justify the cost.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Magnetic_Spectrometer

It's basic physics, maybe not quite on the scale of the LHC, maybe not quite as useful as the HST has been, but still worthwhile. Yes, $100 billion is a lot to spend if this was the sole reason for its existence, but the $100 billion is a sunk cost at this point and the AMS certainly helps with the return on that investment.

On the other hand, $100 billion is a lot of investment that could have been put into other science projects. I've begun to question the point of NASA. Ideally, they would be the forefront of technological demonstrations. They would take risks, some of which wouldn't work but would lead the way for private industries to succeed. They would fund basic science probes such as Cassini or the Mars rovers, which no private company is going to fund at this point but which produce significant returns. The NASA I envision is far from reality and I don't know how it can get from here to there.

Is $100 billion worth an orbiting apartment? Not really. Is it worth a $1 trillion space tourism/commerce industry 10 to 15 years from now? Definitely. Let's just hope that comes to fruition.

Exploiting a hole of some sort is exactly what the author mentioned a number of times.

A lot of my ancestors were from England. Don't I deserve a cut of England's national heritage?

I think this just illustrates the elegance of the universe. For many different scales, the same mathematics get reused, whether it's a theoretical white hole or a hydraulic jump in a kitchen sink. Another example which may be similar is the edge of our solar system, the heliopause. In a very similar way, high-speed solar wind particles prevent a lot of particles from outside from entering the inner solar system. Like the hydraulic jump in a kitchen sink, the heliopause is where the speed of the outgoing particles reaches the speed of sound of the medium in which it is traveling.

I could have sworn that was Buzz Aldrin....

Space.com gives a better summary:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/earth-like-exoplanet-possibly-habitable-100929.html

However, I think the 20% to 50% number comes from the size of the star, Gliese 581. The mass of the star is 20% to 50% of the sun's mass.

Thus far, the lowest-massed planet discovered by the radial velocity method was about 150% to 200% the mass of Earth. Discovering one as small as 20% to 50% is currently beyond the capabilities of the RV method, so the 300% to 400% figure makes a lot more sense.

Besides being old, the article is inaccurate. What we consider a diamond consists of a lattice of carbon atoms linked by covalent bonds. This, quite simply, would not support itself against its own gravity. White dwarfs are made up of electron degenerate matter, supported by the Pauli exclusion principle. Electrons can only withstand being compressed to a certain point under this principle and that pressure offsets the inward pressure due to gravity. Covalent bonds as in a diamond would break down long before that. Yes, the star may be 100% carbon, but that doesn't make it a diamond. It's akin to saying graphite is the same as diamond since they're both 100% carbon. A carbon white dwarf is a completely different state of matter than a diamond.

"In most urban markets, only two wireline providers supply the vast majority of homes, and the remainder are served by a range of wireless Internet providers."

Yes, it's a little redundant, but it bears noting again...

a valid, non-religious reason not to experiment with embryonic stem cells? Hey, I'm just asking questions here...

What piques my suspicion is the claimed link between a solar flare and an observed drop in decay rate. If indeed this is a real effect and it has something to do with nuclear processes in the core of the sun as they suspect, then a solar flare should have NO bearing whatsoever on the decay rate. It stems from the simple fact that a solar flare is the release of pent-up energy from twisted magnetic field lines. Effects in the core have no effect on solar flares. It's akin to saying the subduction of a tectonic plate on Earth is a cause for a hurricane. They're very different processes.

Needless to say, there MAY be some new physics here and it definitely needs to be investigated.

I've read numerous articles in the past dealing with supermassive stars and as often as not, the largest stars turn out to be binaries, i.e. what they thought was a 300 solar mass star was simply two 150 solar mass stars. However, I read the paper on arxiv (http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1007/1007.3284v1.pdf) and it appears that the scientists have ruled that out. The thinking is that if it was actually two unresolved stars revolving around each other, their stellar winds would collide and produce x-rays, which are not evident.

However, they do rely heavily on models to come up with the theoretical mass. Without an orbiting companion, it's currently impossible to measure the mass reliably except for depending on those models. Refined models may result in different masses.

Another thing to consider is this. The Eddington limit refers to a star in equilibrium. However, such a large star is not in equilibrium. In the paper, they estimate its original mass to be about 320 solar masses, with 265 being the current mass. Obviously, since the star exceeds the Eddington limit, it is shedding its outer layers as expected. In this case, it has shed a whopping 55 solar massses since its birth...

I find it interesting that the airlines have unbundled services so that they can "lower air fares", yet they still can't seem to make profits the way they used to. This article in the NYT (see link below) points out that while passenger and freight volumes are back up to pre-recession levels, the airlines are still not making pre-recession profits. Another point that I found interesting is that passenger load factors are also significantly higher in the past. So from a cost-accounting perspective, the airlines have reduced or shifted several large factors in their cost bases: underutilized aircraft, "fees" for things that used to cost the airlines extra, and industry consolidation that should also reduce employee costs (two merged airlines don't need as many mechanics, pilots, or flight attendants). A couple more points should also give some food for thought. The aforementioned industry consolidation gives the airlines more power to raise ticket prices because of reduced competition (and fewer routes). Also, oil prices are not nearly what they were in 2008/2009, so that's another large expense that has been reduced.

The point I'm trying to make is that the airline industry has seen major shifts that should in theory increase revenues while decreasing expenses. Something else must be going on and I don't have the whole story, but it makes me wonder if there is some serious mismanagement going on. Or maybe unbundling combined with all the other hassles of air travel are starting to make customers change their behaviors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/business/global/19iht-ravover.html?_r=1&ref=business

My guess is there's actually a positive correlation between pirate activity and a movie's gross revenues. These guys are trying to suggest the opposite.

Think about it. What are you more likely to find on a torrent site? Avatar or BloodRayne? Titanic or some indie art-house film?

There has been video made in the past of shuttle reentry. In fact, there is a lot of video of the failed reentry of Columbia back in 2003. I know there is also video of various satellites that have reentered the atmosphere. All of it pretty much looks like this video, though the Columbia disaster is pretty heartbreaking.

Mr. Plait makes a good point. People tend to have this view of asteroids being solid rocks, probably because the Earth and other large rocky bodies are solid and the meteorites that make it to the Earth's surface are solid. However, that's not a valid assumption to make and recent science is showing this to be the case. Scientists are finding that some asteroids and various satellites of the outer planets are less dense than expected, suggesting that they're somewhat porous (i.e. masses of rubble instead of solid bodies). Science from the Cassini probe is showing that small bodies in orbit around Saturn are constantly being assembled and destroyed.

Personally, this view of asteroids being porous masses of loosely assembled rubble makes sense, especially from a planetary formation perspective. It's only when you get bodies more than a few hundreds of km in diameter that gravity starts to force the rubble to fuse into solid masses. The implication of all this that Mr. Plait points out is that nuking an asteroid will be akin to bombing a cloud. It's not going to move the asteroid at all, only disrupt it, causing not one impact but several. On the other hand, maybe it would make disrupting asteroids easier. Instead of one large impact, you have thousands of smaller bodies that have a greater chance of simply burning up on reentry.

One other thing that isn't touched on, but is of keen interest to the astronomical community is that the meteorites that we have here have spectra that are very different from the spectra of the asteroids we see in space. The current theory is that the surfaces of asteroids undergo some sort of weathering, which changes the spectra. By gaining physical samples of the surface of an asteroid, this theory can be tested by direct chemical analysis. Very exciting, if it was successful.