Not the chair, that's Ralph Hall. Broun is though the chair of the Science Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight.

At least 17, from a quick Wikipedia search: KH-11, and Misty

People make gold in particle accelerators (including mine) all the time. It's just a question of quantity.

Yeah. There were also come claims with Cl-36, but multiple measurements have the effect in opposite directions and different magnitudes (http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.4357, so they seem more likely to be due to instrumentation effects than real differences

This is one of those "extraordinary evidence" things, and we aren't there yet. Annual variation is always suspect because experimental conditions can change subtly with the weather.

Not sure if trolling. There is a difference between "nothing valuable" and "nothing monetizable within 6 months".

FRIB is being mismanaged into the ground, and in my opinion shouldn't be built anyway. Nuclear physics is turning into an expensive brain drain that steers bright students away from doing actual science. These days nuclear physics is basically alchemy. IAANP

It's probably a very poor attempt at stating that their orbits are coplanar, in dumbspeak. I think these three planets separately transited the same starspot as viewed from Earth, which tells us something about their orbital planes.

That's a bit of an overstatement. Early in the solar system's evolution after the sun ignited but before the planets formed, the sun's heat and intense solar wind caused significant differentiation in which elements were located where in the solar system. Most of the light stuff was driven out, which goes a long way to explaining why the inner planets and other bodies are primarily rocky, and the outer ones primarily gassy and icy.

What happened to Orion? When I visited Lockheed in December they were all gung-ho building a spacecraft. Not that I'm pushing for it, just wondering why it is apparently no longer a factor.

I recall the Republic of China participating in the Olympics under the name "Chinese Taipei" to appease the PRC

Thorium reactors are well and good and may be the future of nuclear energy, but they are just as susceptible to a Fukushima-style meltdown as any other modern reactor. The Fukushima reactors were successfully shut down the moment the earthquake was registered, the problem was the decay heat. About 7% of a reactor's output is from the beta-decay of the fission fragments, so even after you stop fission you have to wait for these to decay away, which means weeks of continued heat removal. Thorium does not solve this problem. That said, any modern reactor design is much better at removing decay heat in an emergency than the antiquated design used at Fukushima.

assuming a single image encompasses the entire sky

That assumption is quite false: it takes an exposure every 20 seconds and takes days to form an all-sky survey. The pixel size is 0.2", so Jupiter at its closest would be 250 pixels wide, not 4.

High resolution mass specs measure down to 0.0001 amu

My mass spectrometer (a Penning trap) routinely measures 1E-8 amu (10^-32 grams), and the best traps are pushing 1E-12 amu. They're getting to the point where they can see the chemical binding (mass-)energy between atoms in a molecule.

The method in the article is neat, but they've chosen a peculiar definition of "scale" in order to classify this as the most sensitive one.

The ELF frequencies we use to talk to submerged subs can have wavelengths much much longer than these objects. Broadband ELF antenna was my first thought, but it seems like it would be buried.

Sorry, error. The spontaneous fission branch isn't 10^-5, it's 10^-5%, so decrease my result by a factor of 100.