A new venture, the International Mars Foundation, got itself in the news bigtime over the last week. It has been carefully rolling out its plans to send a married couple on slingshot second honeymoon-Deimos-Phobos-too flyby ride around Mars and back. This is an event savvy enough to have its...
Charlie Petit's Tracker
A new venture, the International Mars Foundation, got itself in the news bigtime over the last week. It has been carefully rolling out its plans to send a married couple on slingshot second honeymoon-Deimos-Phobos-too flyby ride around Mars and back. This is an event savvy enough to have its announcement emceed by the handsome and poised newsman Miles O'Brien at the National Press Club in DC. It has a twitter handle, @inspirationMars, not that it's had much to say via that, so far. It was hard to track down the venture's website but as seen down there in Grist, we got a boost by the prolific p.r.-aggregator SpaceRef.com
The news: New York City-born space engineer and millionaire investor Dennis Tito and some of his close friends, employees, and co-investors of the kind he'll need more of, confirmed yesterday that they have set up the Inspiration Mars Foundation. Its express first purpose is a sort-of fast but still long, bare-bones...
Hankering for more prominent coverage of climate change policy paralysis and need a quick fix? A clever column on Time Magazine's Ecocentric site by veteran enviro reporter ...
Hankering for more prominent coverage of climate change policy paralysis and need a quick fix? A clever column on Time Magazine's Ecocentric site by veteran enviro reporter Bryan Walsh makes one think one should read stories on the political impasse over easing the US national debt immediately (conservatives) or after the economy perks up (liberals). Only instead of reading words such as deficit and debt, swap in global warming. Surprising, but it sort of works.
In both cases, he explains, the argument features a camp that brooks no compromise or other deal-making that delays immediate, forceful action. The stakes are so high that, these rigid sorts believe, politics as usual must be cast aside. The very existence of civilization and the American way is at stake. Denialists (who either think the federal budget...
In the last week discovery by the Dept. of Energy - and an immediate outcry from Washington Governore Jay Inslee - that several tanks of radioactive sludge at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington Statehave slow but significant leaks stirred up a brief news alarm squall in the region. This is of...
In the last week discovery by the Dept. of Energy - and an immediate outcry from Washington Governore Jay Inslee - that several tanks of radioactive sludge at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington Statehave slow but significant leaks stirred up a brief news alarm squall in the region. This is of course a recurring sort of story. The old tank farm holding leftovers from bomb production early in the Cold War is well-past its intended lifetime. It has a history of leaks and is the focus of the costliest nuclear clean-up in US history. Environmental watchdogs and the public in general do not like to hear its subsurface plume might contaminate, however slightly and damn the dilution, groundwater wells and the bordering Columbia River.
Over the weekend, frequent Forbes.com columnist James Conca...
The second shoe dropped Monday on the saga of the New York Times environmental writer John Broder's road test, over an icy two days, of the Tesla Model S electric sedan. Our...
The second shoe dropped Monday on the saga of the New York Times environmental writer John Broder's road test, over an icy two days, of the Tesla Model S electric sedan. Our prior post took things through a promise by the Times's public editor, or ombudsman internal-critic, Margaret Sullivan's promise to look into vehement charges from Tesla and its chairman Elon Musk that Broder did not drive the way that he said he did in his review, and that his sloppy and perhaps malicious treatment of the car is why it wound up with a flat battery and a trip on a flattbad tow vehicle to rescue at a charging station. The review, along with a report of slightly higher losses in the fourth quarter of 2012, contributed to a dip in the company's stock this week.
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Media are not sure if it is merely hundreds or at least 1000 people injured in western Siberia by sonic boom or maybe blast wave, but a meteor that blew apart in the sky early this morning sent a lot of people to the hospital. Most injuries are, reports say, due to broken glass with no fatalities yet noted.
...Media are not sure if it is merely hundreds or at least 1000 people injured in western Siberia by sonic boom or maybe blast wave, but a meteor that blew apart in the sky early this morning sent a lot of people to the hospital. Most injuries are, reports say, due to broken glass with no fatalities yet noted.
This would be news in any case. Videos are pretty spectacular. Some calculate this is the largest such event in at least 100 years, or at least that anybody noticed. That many people hurt by a bolide's destruction in the sky is a big story. Ditto for it being in Siberia where in 1908 a larger asteroid (more like an asteroidette, but pretty big) blew up as it flattened out from atmospheric drag and turned its kinetic energy into kaboom. That one, the Tunguska fireball, in turn flattened a huge stretch of forest in a nearly uninhabited wilderness. On top of all that, this one today came as...
A post earlier this week related the rapid and angry rebuke from the Tesla Motors Company, led by its CEO Elon Musk, to a scathing New York Times review of the range of its new sedan when driven in cold...
A post earlier this week related the rapid and angry rebuke from the Tesla Motors Company, led by its CEO Elon Musk, to a scathing New York Times review of the range of its new sedan when driven in cold weather. Reporter John Broder told readers that his effort to check the performance of the company's new supercharging stations along major roadways - where owners of the sedan can get their batteries topped up free and fairly quickly and thus drive long distances without "range anxiety" - was a disaster. The car barely made it part way through his itinerary, via charging stations in Delaware and Connecticut. Eventually, he wrote, it flat ran out of juice. Tesla had to call him a flat bed truck to haul the car back to an intensive care unit (a...
Former Congressman Bob Inglis of South Carolina is 'former' at least in part because he told his red-state constituents he accepts global warming as real, and important. So today he heads a private enterprise-oriented outfit called the Energy & Enterprise Initiative that tries to convince...
Former Congressman Bob Inglis of South Carolina is 'former' at least in part because he told his red-state constituents he accepts global warming as real, and important. So today he heads a private enterprise-oriented outfit called the Energy & Enterprise Initiative that tries to convince conservatives that they ought to be leading the fight against climate change. It's an idea that could use a little boost via probing by conservation-minded journalists dismayed over the curiously rigid partisan divide over global warming in US politics and in other nations as well.
At the climate-focusssed non-profit Yale e360, a magazine and a website, its executive editor Roger Cohn this month has a probing Q&A with Inglis, covering his...
When a powerful media company smacks into an up and coming (and powerful) CEO, things can get interesting. It sure did today, Monday. This is a long post - so let's start by backing into it.
About ten months ago engineers for the new Made-in-USA electric supercar, the Tesla Model S, took it to Baudette,...
When a powerful media company smacks into an up and coming (and powerful) CEO, things can get interesting. It sure did today, Monday. This is a long post - so let's start by backing into it.
About ten months ago engineers for the new Made-in-USA electric supercar, the Tesla Model S, took it to Baudette, Minnesota, for tests in brutally cold weather. They say it did just fine. Their tester is in that picture and I doubt that it's driving through leftover Xmas tree flocking. A report at Green Car Journal by David Noland, filed last July, says Tesla's super-entrepreneur and rocket man chief executive Elon Musk himself estimates that if it's really really cold a Model S might lose a fifth of its range due to a cranky battery spending a lot of its energy just keeping its electrolytes from locking up. That's a lot of...
The Philadelphia Inquirer's science writer Tom Avril has out today a thoroughly enjoyable and well-written story on, of all things, calculus. We learn soon...
The Philadelphia Inquirer's science writer Tom Avril has out today a thoroughly enjoyable and well-written story on, of all things, calculus. We learn soon enough in this account that there is at least one good reason Avril is fully in his comfort level writing it. He is a former math teacher and, while he didn't teach calculus he did complete a course in it as an engineering student in his pre-journalism days.
The news is that a Univ. of Pennsylvania math professor has 48,000 students in 62 countries taking his online calculus course, and that it just recently received accreditation. So, it can count just like the courses that Penn undergrads take while sitting in a classroom on campus and while they, their parents, or a scholarship program pays a pretty tuition price.
One gets...
What is it they say? One man's meat is another man's poison? One's trash is another's treasure? Something like that, or something about lemons and lemonade, must fit a Forbes...
What is it they say? One man's meat is another man's poison? One's trash is another's treasure? Something like that, or something about lemons and lemonade, must fit a Forbes report from Ottawa this week by Theophilos Argitis. The reporter interviewed the premier of the Northwest Territories that abuts the top of Alberta, which in turn is churning out buckets by the millions of heavy bitumen crude liberated from its famed oil sands (or tar sands, take your pick). Export pipelines came up in the interview. The NWT leader says that if his southern neighbors cannot find a good export pipeline route to the west, east, or south into the US (think Keystone XL), they are welcome to lay pipe north past Yellowknife to port terminals sure to be buildable soon along the Beaufort Sea and its seasonally thawing Arctic...
A most strange train of thought blew through my cranium this morning upon reading a tidy, sensible story in the San Francisco Chronicle by the singular Dave Perlman....
A most strange train of thought blew through my cranium this morning upon reading a tidy, sensible story in the San Francisco Chronicle by the singular Dave Perlman.
On its face the story concerns merely another small, melancholy step toward a planet neither we nor any of our known ancestors would recognize. It's a short account, well-reported and with several sources, of discovery by geologists that a well-known glacier in Yosemite National Park has stopped moving, appears to be thinning, may well be disappearing. It has that nice map, filched and above, on the page with it. Perlman has, as have many of the remaining newspaper science writers, little room in which to work and is under instruction to please keep it local. Yosemite is local. The theme is big: climate change. But there also is little room in it...
One might think the tale has been told and done to death on the famous, speculative paper asserting that microbes in Mono Lake, CA, have adapted to their low-phosphorus and high-arsenic environment by swapping the latter atoms into their DNA and other molecules of life for the former ones. But at USA Today...
One might think the tale has been told and done to death on the famous, speculative paper asserting that microbes in Mono Lake, CA, have adapted to their low-phosphorus and high-arsenic environment by swapping the latter atoms into their DNA and other molecules of life for the former ones. But at USA Today Dan Vergano this week published a story that adds a genuinely illuminating end note. It pertains to a great deal more than this one well-meant and earnestly presented (if almost certainly wrong in primary thrust) paper and its publication two-plus years ago in the illustrious magazine Science.
What his investigation does is to zero in on the opinions the journal's editors received from the outside experts they consulted. Vergano does not report how he got his hands on them. Such reviews are generally kept...
Yesterday I noticed a burble of news coverage on the NASA Mars Rover Curiosity as it prepares to drill for the first time into a rock to see what it's made of - roundup below but not quite yet.
Drilling was supposed to have begun as early as today but so far not much...
Yesterday I noticed a burble of news coverage on the NASA Mars Rover Curiosity as it prepares to drill for the first time into a rock to see what it's made of - roundup below but not quite yet.
Drilling was supposed to have begun as early as today but so far not much coverage of the actual event. NASA says any day now. But the event prompts thought of an issue in Mars news. It does seem - without checking, an important qualification of the oncoming opinion - that media coverage for Curiosity has been far short of what the smaller, twin Rovers Spirit and Opportunity received after their arrival on Mars nine years ago. Specialty outlets such as space.com pay steady attention to the newer, better, and atomic energy powered machine, but not so much the big wire services, big newspapers, BBC and Wired and Grist and Scientific American and other general-purpose science news outlets.
I've queried the Jet Propulsion Lab news...
About a week ago the Research Council of Norway issued a press release with the headline "Global warming less extreme than feared?" (see Grist below for the link). Its second graf is a quote from a researcher in Stockholm, not an author of the study, saying the results are sensational. A...
About a week ago the Research Council of Norway issued a press release with the headline "Global warming less extreme than feared?" (see Grist below for the link). Its second graf is a quote from a researcher in Stockholm, not an author of the study, saying the results are sensational. A few news outlets pretty much ripped that from the digital wire and ran with it. More recently, media report that the paper is not even refereed and is in essence a new researcher's doctoral thesis. Others say it is just another of a class of studies that tend to be less alarming than is the field's overall consensus. At the same time already be assuming bedrock stature in contrarian literature. Oh my. The back and forth, and continuing reverberations, are an instructive display of how breaking science can be manhandled when it lands in the middle of what is in important ways an ideological struggle.
Also illustrated: the ability of a press...
David Roberts is among the more prolific columnists at Grist's on line operation, where he covers energy policy and suchlike. Quite solid, thoughtful, and innovative is he. So I sat up on reading a...
David Roberts is among the more prolific columnists at Grist's on line operation, where he covers energy policy and suchlike. Quite solid, thoughtful, and innovative is he. So I sat up on reading a piece he had out a few days ago on a novel solar power idea, the spin cell from a company called V3Solar.
(By the way, I immediately wondered while reading it whether he is the same David Roberts who has a new book out on an epic survival trek by Sir Douglas Mawson back in the heroic days of Antarctic exploration. No he is not. Most important discovery I made while name-checking is a site devoted to the huge pile of Dave Robertses making their marks in the world. Very amusing. Grist's Dave Roberts is high on list).
The...
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