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mpicpp writes:
A Chinese spacecraft service module has entered orbit around the moon, months after being used in the country's landmark test flight that sent a prototype sample-return capsule on a flight around the moon and returned it to Earth.
The service module from China's circumlunar test flight arrived in orbit around the moon this week, according to Chinese state media reports. The spacecraft is currently flying in an eight-hour orbit that carries it within 125 miles (200 kilometers) of the lunar surface at its closest point, and out to a range of 3,293 miles (5,300 km) at its highest point.
According to chief engineer Zhou Jianlian of the Beijing Aerospace Control Center the module will make its second and third braking in the early hours of today (Jan. 12) and tomorrow, Beijing time. Doing so will enable the module to enter a 127-minute orbit around the moon, Zhou said. [China's 1st Round-trip Moon Shot in Pictures]
Earlier reports noted that a camera system is onboard the service module, designed to assist in identifying future landing spots for the Chang'e 5 mission that will return lunar samples back to Earth in the 2017 time frame.
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romanval writes:
In a move that shows how the last election is turning the U.S. into a bizzaro state, Senator Ted Cruz (R- Tx); a man who claims there isn't enough evidence to prove climate change is occurring, is to chair the Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, where he will oversee NASA and U.S. science programs. Fellow climate change denier Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) will also chair the Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and the Coast Guard upon his confirmation.
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HughPickens.com writes:
The LA Times reports that Los Alamos National Security, the contractor managing the nuclear weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, NM has been slapped with a $57-million reduction in its fees for 2014, largely due to a costly nuclear waste accident in which a 55-gallon drum packaged with plutonium waste from bomb production erupted after being placed in a 2,150-foot underground dump in the eastern New Mexico desert. Casks filled with 3.2 million cubic feet of deadly radioactive wastes remain buried at the crippled plant and the huge facility was rendered useless. The exact causes of the chemical reaction are still under investigation, but Energy Department officials say a packaging error at Los Alamos caused a reaction inside the drum. The radioactive material went airborne, contaminating a ventilation shaft that went to the surface giving low-level doses of radiation to 21 workers. According to a DOE report, the disaster at WIPP is rooted in careless contractors and lack of DOE oversight (PDF). "The accident was a horrific comedy of errors," says James Conca, a scientific advisor and expert on the WIPP. "This was the flagship of the Energy Department, the most successful program it had. The ramifications of this are going to be huge. Heads will roll."
The accident is likely to cause at least an 18-month shutdown and possibly a closure that could last several years. Waste shipments have already backed up at nuclear cleanup projects across the country, which even before the accident were years behind schedule. According to the Times, the cost of the accident, including likely delays in cleanup projects across the nation, will approach $1 billion. But some nuclear weapons scientists say the fine is an overreaction. "It was a mistake by an individual — a terrible mistake — and Washington now wants to punish a lot of people," says Conca. "The amount of radiation that was released was trivial. As long as you don't lick the walls, you can't get any radiation down there. Why are we treating this like Fukushima?"
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drkim writes:
A home-made PlayStation 3 supercomputer is 3,000 times more powerful than any desktop processor, and is being used to study black holes.
Guarav Khanna, a black hole physicist at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in the US, has managed to build a powerful and extremely cheap supercomputer using old PlayStation 3s (PS3s), and he’s used it to publish several papers on black holes.
His research focusses on finding gravitational waves, which are curvatures in space-time that ripple out from a violent astrophysical event, such as two black holes colliding. They were first predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, but no one has been able to observe them.
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Lasrick writes:
Michael Mann writes about the ad hominem attacks on scientists, especially climate scientists, that have become much more frequent over the last few decades. Mann should know: his work as a postdoc on the famed "hockey stick" graph led him to be vilified by Fox News and in the Wall Street Journal. Wealthy interests such as the Scaife Foundation and Koch Industries pressured Penn State University to fire him (they didn't). Right-wing elected officials attempted to have Mann's personal records and emails (and those of other climate scientists) subpoenaed and tried to have the "hockey stick" discredited in the media, despite the fact that the National Academy of Sciences reaffirmed the work, and that subsequent reports of the IPCC and the most recent peerreviewed research corroborates it. Even worse, Mann and his family were targets of death threats. Despite (or perhaps because of) the well-funded and ubiquitous attacks, Mann believes that flat-out climate change denialism is losing favor with the public, and he lays out how and why scientists should engage and not retreat to their labs to conduct research far from the public eye. 'We scientists must hold ourselves to a higher standard than the deniers-for-hire. We must be honest as we convey the threat posed by climate change to the public. But we must also be effective. The stakes are simply too great for us to fail to communicate the risks of inaction. The good news is that scientists have truth on their side, and truth will ultimately win out.'
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mpicpp writes:
Anonymous declared war on Islamic extremists Friday and promised to take revenge for the attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hedbo.
In a video posted on YouTube, the group of hackers said they would track down websites and social media networks linked to terrorists, and take them down.
"We, Anonymous around the world, have decided to declare war on you the terrorists," it said.
The video is described as a message for "al Qaeda, the Islamic State and other terrorists," and promises to avenge the killing of 12 people in Wednesday's attack.
"We intend to take revenge in their name, we are going to survey your activities on the net, we are going to shut down your accounts on all social networks," Anonymous said.
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Lucas123 writes:
Driven largely by oil price weakness, 2015 could be the best year to date for investments in renewable energy technology, according to several new reports. According to Bloomberg Energy Finance, new funding for wind, solar, biofuels and other low-carbon energy technologies grew 16% to $310 billion last year. It was the first growth since 2011, erasing the impact of lower solar-panel prices and falling subsides in the U.S. and Europe that hurt the industry in previous years. Demand for solar power grew 16% year-over-year in 2014, representing 44 billion watts (gigawatts) of capacity purchased during the year. Worldwide solar demand in 2015 is projected to be 51.4GW, compared with 39GW in 2014. Government policies will continue to improve for renewables — solar, in particular — given that anti-dumping duties imposed on Chinese modules by the U.S. last year are expected to be removed this year, Deutsche Bank said.
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Lasrick writes:
Brian Merchant covers the Climate Engineering Conference in Berlin, the first major international conference for geoengineering. His coverage of it is just fascinating. 'Talk of climate engineering swirled around us, and it was impossible not to eavesdrop. Richard Branson had sent an emissary to check out carbon-removal projects for the Virgin Earth Challenge. Someone else rattled off the ins and outs of launching a giant mirror into space. There were crazier ideas, too.' Just a great read.
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Lasrick writes:
Sig Hecker is director emeritus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he served as director from 1986 to 1997 and as senior fellow until July 2005. He has traveled to North Korea seven times over the last decade, and is one of the only scientists to have seen their nuclear facilities first-hand. He describes the trajectory of North Korea's nuclear program since the Reagan administration, and points out that the real threat from DPRK remains its nuclear arsenal: 'The absurdities in The Interview, North Korea’s alleged retaliatory cyber-attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, and US counter-threats and sanctions may be worthy of analysis, but when it comes to the real threat that Pyongyang poses to the world, they amount to no more than a giant distraction.' Terrific read.
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Lasrick writes:
Dawn Stover describes the radioactive dirt behind the creation of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, from its inclusion in the National Defense Authorization Act (the park legislation wouldn't pass otherwise) and lack of funding for national parks in general to the lack of funding for cleanup at Superfund nuclear sites like Hanford. And then there is how the Parks Service is presenting exhibits: at least some of them are described in the past tense, as if nuclear weapons were a thing of the past. Here's the description of the MInuteman Missile National Historic Site in South Dakota: 'Nuclear war loomed as an apocalyptic shadow that could possibly have brought human history to an end.' Can the National Park Service be ignorant of the fact that missiles remain on station, nuclear weapons are still being stockpiled, and saber rattling did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall?' Sobering read on commemorating our nuclear history.
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Lasrick writes:
This special issue of the subscription Journal of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is free access in celebration of the Bulletin's 70th anniversary. 'Scientists in the Public Interest' is a must-read, with articles from Frank von Hippel, Lawrence Krauss, Michael Oppenheimer, Gavin Schmidt, and many more. From the introduction: 'Since a group of scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project founded it in 1945, the Bulletin has aimed to present the analyses of top scientific and policy experts in language that is accessible to high government leaders and everyday citizens alike, with the rather ambitious goal of saving humanity from itself. The list of those whose work has graced the Bulletin’s pages gives heft to the term “expert”: Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Mikhail Gorbachev populate only a tiny portion of that roster of great minds. And the brilliance behind the Bulletin is by no means confined to its past. Its Board of Sponsors now includes 17 Nobel laureates, along with Freeman Dyson, Stephen Hawking, and other luminaries.1 The magazine’s Science and Security Board, which sets the now-ubiquitous Doomsday Clock each January, is home to a revolving cast of leading scientific and public policy lights who provide the magazine’s readers with expertise on nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, climate change, synthetic biology, and other potentially catastrophic threats to the future of humanity.'
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BarbaraHudson writes:
The CBC is running a pair of stories debunking chocolate's benefits to the average consumer:
Scientists have zeroed in on a family of fragile molecules known as cocoa flavanols. Research suggests they can relax blood vessels, improve blood flow and, as Small found in his study, even increase activity in a part of the brain involved with age related memory loss. But those flavanols largely disappear once the cocoa bean is heated, fermented and processed into chocolate. In other words, making chocolate destroys the very ingredient that is supposed to make it healthy.
There are lots of foods that contain potentially healthy flavanols, along with other bioactive compounds in complex combinations. So the question is: Would academic scientists in publicly funded institutions be so interested in the cocoa bean if the chocolate industry wasn’t supporting so much of the research?
Link to the second story
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Lasrick writes:
Excellent, excellent read by James Fallows: The American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure America into endless wars it can’t win.
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Lasrick writes:
A terrific look back through the last few decades at all the things that went wrong in the US-Cuba relationship, starting with the 1959 revolution that saw Fidel Castro come to power.The section on the CIA's internal review of the Bay of Pigs debacle is rather comical, in a sad way: 'The 150-page document, written by CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick, found fault with nearly all aspects of the endeavor, which included few personnel who even spoke Spanish; the report “was so offensive to agency officials that Director John McCone ordered all but one copy destroyed.'" It's difficult to learn from one's mistakes with that attitude.
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schwit1 writes:
The Office of Personnel Management is alerting more than 48,000 federal employees their personal information may have been exposed following a breach at KeyPoint Government Solutions, which conducts background investigations of federal employees seeking security clearances.
"As we examine the potential impact on DHS employees, we are committed to ensuring the privacy of our workforce and will take all appropriate measures to safeguard it,"
Was the PII encrypted?
Is there a DHS requirement that all PII be encrypted?
