X-37 Part of a SinoAmerican MilSpace Race?

It was a space launch to change the world. On January 11, 2007, a solid-fuelled rocket lifted off from Xichang Space Center in central China, a non-explosive ‘kill vehicle’ fitted to its tip. Five hundred miles above the earth, the now-separated kill vehicle struck an 8-year-old Chinese weather satellite, pulverizing it and leaving behind a cloud of some 1,000 large pieces of debris.

The unannounced Chinese launch was the first full-scale test of an anti-satellite system since the US Air Force's 1985 demonstration of a satellite-killing missile launched by an F-15 fighter. And the global response to China’s move was swift and vociferous, with Australia, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States condemning the intercept.

‘China's development and testing of such weapons is inconsistent with the spirit of cooperation that both countries aspire to in the civil space area,’ said Gordon Johndroe from the US National Security Council at the time.

A year later, the launch reverberated in the most important US election in a generation, when presidential candidate Barack Obama made opposition to such weaponry part of his platform. ‘Obama opposes the stationing of weapons in space and the development of anti-satellite weapons,’ his campaign asserted. ‘He believes the United States must show leadership by engaging other nations in discussions of how best to stop the slow slide towards a new battlefield.’

Yet just two years into the Obama presidency and it’s clear that these noble sentiments aren’t being matched by US deeds.

On April 22, the US Air Force launched into orbit the world's most sophisticated robotic spacecraft, one whose design counters China's anti-satellite capability—and goes a step further. The X-37B, built by Boeing, could also be used to spy on and even disable other nations’ satellites, all without them necessarily knowing that it’s even happening. With the X-37, the US raised the stakes in the phase of the space race that China began three years ago.

hmmm. I wish I had more time, but we've blown our power substation twice now. ...and we're only working with megawatts here. What will happen when we get our 1.1 gigawatts in?! (ref! ref!)

PZ Tel: A G Dwarf with a Brown Dwarf Directly Imaged

Astronomers have imaged a very young brown dwarf, or failed star, in a tight orbit around a young nearby sun-like star.

An international team led by University of Hawaii astronomers Beth Biller and Michael Liu with help from University of Arizona astronomer Laird Close and UA graduate students Eric Nielsen, Jared Males and Andy Skemer made the rare find using the Near-Infrared Coronagraphic Imager, or NICI, on the international 8-meter Gemini-South Telescope in Chile.

What makes this discovery special is the proximity between the 36 Jupiter-mass brown dwarf companion, dubbed PZ Tel B, and its primary star, named PZ Tel A. They are separated by only 18 Astronomical Units, or AUs, similar to the distance between Uranus and the sun.

Most young brown dwarf and planetary companions found by direct imaging are at orbital separations greater than 50 AUs – larger than the orbit of Pluto, at 40 AUs.

In addition to its small separation, in just the past year the researchers observed PZ Tel B moving quickly outward from its parent star.

An older image, taken seven years ago and reanalyzed by Laird Close, a professor at UA's Steward Observatory and the department of astronomy, showed PZ Tel B was obscured by the glare from its parent star as recently as 2003, indicating its orbit is more elliptical than circular.

"Because PZ Tel A is a rare star being both close and very young, it had been imaged several times in the past," said Close. "So we were quite surprised to see a new companion around what was thought to be a single star."

Lead author and UA graduate Beth Biller said, "PZ Tel B travels on a particularly eccentric orbit – in the last 10 years, we have literally watched it careen through its inner solar system. This can best be explained by a highly eccentric, or oval-shaped, orbit."

The host star, PZ Tel A, is a younger version of the sun, having a similar mass but a very young age of only 12 million years (about 400 times younger than the sun). In fact, the PZ Tel system is young enough to still possess significant amounts of cold circumstellar dust, which may have been sculpted by the gravitational interaction with the young brown dwarf companion.

This makes the PZ Tel system an important laboratory for studying the early stages of solar system formation. With an estimated mass of 36 times that of Jupiter, PZ Tel B's orbital motion has significant implications for what type of planets can form (and whether planets can form at all) in the PZ Tel system.

[...]

The discovery of PZ Tel B is described in a paper being published by Astrophysical Journal Letters.

no time.

More Questions Raised Over Younger Dryas Impact

Some scientists have thought that the Earth's Ice Age conditions 12,900 years ago were triggered by a meteor or comet. But a recent study suggests that the evidence pointing to the ancient impact is nothing more than fungus and other matter.

According to the impact theory, the event could have caused the extinction of North American mammoths and other species, and killed the early human hunters that occupied North America at the time. Yet the new study concludes that sediment samples taken as evidence of the impact are nothing more than common fossilized balls of fungus and fecal matter - not exactly signs of a space rock crashing into Earth.

Further, the samples -- spherules of carbon used by impact proponents to justify a meteor -- appear thousands of years before and after the Ice Age in sediment records, suggesting they have nothing to do with the impact, scientists said in a statement.

"People get very excited about the idea of a major impact causing a catastrophic fire and the abrupt climate change in that period, but there just isn't the evidence to support it," said lead researcher Andrew C. Scott at the University of London in the UK.

Still, proponents of an impact theory are not backing down.

According to theory, a comet impact or airburst in the atmosphere produced an enormous fire that raged from California to Europe. Melting volumes of ice in the North American ice sheet, the fire sent cold water surging into the world's oceans and knocked off balance the circulation of currents responsible for global heat transport.

Known as the Younger Dryas period or "Big Freeze," the 1,300 years of glacial conditions that followed is well documented in ocean cores and ancient soil samples.

Organic matter normal, not melted

Collected from the same locations in California and Arizona used by proponents of the meteor theory, sediment cores dating back to the inception of the cooling era were compared to samples of modern soil that had been subjected to wildfires. They were also largely identified as compact balls and tendrils of fungal matter known as sclerotia, which are produced by fungi naturally during challenging conditions—hardly unique byproducts of an impact-ignited fire.

Neither the charcoal nor the fossilized balls had been exposed to heat above 450 degrees Celsius (842 F), researchers said in a statement. Further, radiocarbon dating of the spherules, which were sampled from many layers of the sediment cores, found that their ages ranged from 16,821 to 11,467 years old: too wide a berth to count as meaningful trigger for the Younger Dryas period.

Experimental charring tests have shown that this organic matter was subjected to, at most, regular low intensity fire, researcher Nicholas Pinter of Southern Illinois University told SPACE.com. Also, such globules would have been destroyed in any mega fire described by impact proponents, Pinter added.

"After the carbon spherules, only one credible piece of supporting evidence remains -- the so-called nanodiamonds purportedly found in 12,900-year-old deposits," Pinter said. "Impact proponents are putting all of their remaining eggs in the nanodiamond basket."

hmmm. Nanodiamonds? hmmm.

Night of the Living Wonks (had to be made for Noel)

here are many sources of fear in world politics -- terrorist attacks, natural disasters, climate change, financial panic, nuclear proliferation, ethnic conflict, and so forth. Surveying the cultural zeitgeist, however, it is striking how an unnatural problem has become one of the fastest-growing concerns in international relations. I speak, of course, of zombies.

For our purposes, a zombie is defined as a reanimated being occupying a human corpse, with a strong desire to eat human flesh -- the kind of ghoul that first appeared in George Romero's 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead, and which has been rapidly proliferating in popular culture in recent years (far upstaging its more passive cousins, the reanimated corpses of traditional West African and Haitian voodoo rituals). Because they can spread across borders and threaten states and civilizations, these zombies should command the attention of scholars and policymakers.

here are many sources of fear in world politics -- terrorist attacks, natural disasters, climate change, financial panic, nuclear proliferation, ethnic conflict, and so forth. Surveying the cultural zeitgeist, however, it is striking how an unnatural problem has become one of the fastest-growing concerns in international relations. I speak, of course, of zombies.

For our purposes, a zombie is defined as a reanimated being occupying a human corpse, with a strong desire to eat human flesh -- the kind of ghoul that first appeared in George Romero's 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead, and which has been rapidly proliferating in popular culture in recent years (far upstaging its more passive cousins, the reanimated corpses of traditional West African and Haitian voodoo rituals). Because they can spread across borders and threaten states and civilizations, these zombies should command the attention of scholars and policymakers.

That had to be for Noel...just had to be.

;)

Part of the New Bay Bridge Tower Goes Up

I missed putting this up yesterday because I was at work in the machine room pretty much for 17 hours straight. That was after being at work for 12 hours the day before. Today? Probably 9. I hope. My wife is pretty pissed as it is...

USGS Publishes Updated Geological Divisions

Patchy Week

We're doing a massive power upgrade at work. Network connectivity will be almost zilch and we're running around like maniacs: adding a multi megawatt substation for the landing of a new supercomputer on the floor in a few days is a nontrivial thing.

If its possible I'll write some, but it may be on Thursday or Friday.

Maybe earlier, but I doubt it.

PS. My son has started walking.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"What happens is Earth is 70% water," Liebesman said in the press conference. "The aliens in our movie use water for many different things so it's for those natural resources."

Why, yes, my desk is shaped that way due to excessive expectations of the media. Why do you ask?

Every time Hollywood does a SF movie, bab asimov cries.

Sasselov: Hundreds of Earth Like Planets?

The drake equation gets some parameters better filled in?

A Prank From Years Ago

When I started working at the supercomputing center, I encountered the above. When a conference came and given my awful history with seaborg (ie 'hugging it' and whatnot), I decided that I needed to get some vengeance.

The funny part was...some time after, the Blue Gene cabinet config was announced:



Coincidence? Or Not?

Antillothrix bernensis Fossil Found via Scuba Diving

Scientists have examined fossilised remains of a tiny, extinct monkey that were retrieved from an underwater cave in the Dominican Republic.

The researchers believe the fossil to be around 3,000 years old, but say the species itself could be very ancient.

This reveals clues about the origin of primates in the region.

It also suggests that many ecologically valuable treasures could be discovered by the unusual field of "underwater palaeontology".

Dr Alfred Rosenberger from Brooklyn College in New York, US, led the examination of the creature's bones, the results of which were published in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B.

[...]



Dr Rosenberger said the monkey - only the second specimen of the species Antillothrix bernensis ever found - probably measured about 30cm (12in) from head to toe.

The divers packed the fragile little skeleton into tupperware boxes

But the shape of the legs came as a surprise.

"Its femur or thigh bone was very thick. So it had sort of stout legs, which is something we didn't expect.

"We don't really have any living examples of New World monkeys that have stout legs like that."
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

It's now possible to reconstruct what this mysterious animal looked like and how it evolved”

End Quote Dr Sam Turvey Zoological Society of London

Dr Rosenberger thinks the creature went extinct relatively recently.

He said that it may have behaved similarly to a koala - clinging to the trunks of trees, rather than leaping from branch to branch.

"That's a very rough analogy, he said.

"But there's something very interesting about the ecological niche it inhabited."

The fossil also adds to evidence that there were several lineages of primates in the Caribbean, instead of one ancestor that moved into the region millions of years ago from which all modern species evolved.

Dr Rosenberger said it was likely that several species travelled "over the water" to inhabit the island of Hispaniola.

"And even though these particular bones might be relatively young, we're pretty sure that the arrival of these animals occurred well over 10 million years ago.

"That's an exciting part of the story - if you compare the dental remains of our monkey to other fossils that we know of, we see strong similarities with Patagonian fossils that are around 15 million years old."

no time.

WISE Completes a Sky Map

The recently completed WISE survey also observed 100,000 asteroids in our solar system, many of which had never been seen before. 90 of the newly discovered asteroids are near-earth objects, whose orbits cross our own, making them potentially dangerous but also potential targets for future mission.

That's in the first pass. Looking for changes is crucial for new asteroids.

Most Hits EV-AH

Yesterday, Metafilter linked to my dicynodont and gorgonopsid posts. The most hits in a day I've had ever before was about 1300. Yesterday, it leapt past 3,800.

Now if only we'd get that hit rate for Team Phoenicia!

Boeing Building "Commercial" Space Capsule

Boeing will use the commercial crew capsule it is developing under an agreement with NASA to provide transportation to the private space station that Bigelow Aerospace intends to have in service by 2015, the two companies announced here July 19.

Dubbed the CST-100, for Crew Transportation System, the partially reusable capsule will be able to fly unmanned or with as many as seven astronauts to the Bigelow Aerospace Orbital Space Complex. The commercial facility is to be built with inflatable modules and have a volume about two-thirds that of the International Space Station (ISS).

Boeing is maturing its design for the vehicle under an $18 million Commercial Crew Development Space Act agreement with NASA.

Brewster Shaw, a former astronaut who leads Boeing’s space exploration efforts, says the ultimate goal is for the CST-100 to be the seed from which Boeing will grow a space business analogous to its vast commercial airplanes segment.

While Boeing says it would be difficult to develop the CST-100 without NASA’s commitment to go forward with a commercial crew vehicle, company officials also say servicing the ISS alone would probably not support the business case for the vehicle.

Bigelow, for its part, needs a provider of reliable, safe transportation to its facility in low Earth orbit, but it also wants the station to be capable of being serviced by unmanned vehicles such as Europe’s ATV, Japan’s HTV and Russia’s Progress, as well as crewed vehicles such as the commercial Dragon being developed by Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) or Russia’s venerable Soyuz spacecraft.

Bigelow anticipates a customer base among countries without a current manned space program and, eventually, corporations. The focus has been on nation states so far, founder Bob Bigelow indicated.

The CST-100 vehicle, which would be larger than an Apollo but smaller than NASA’s Orion, is being designed to be flown on any of three launch vehicles: Delta IV, Atlas V and Falcon 9. An abort system would involve a “pusher” system, rather than the traditional arrangement of small rockets that pull a manned vehicle away from a launcher in distress, Boeing officials say. The advantage is that if the abort system is not used, the fuel would then be available for maneuvering in orbit.

The CST-100 could stay on orbit as long as seven months. After returning to Earth via ballistic re-entry while protected by an ablative shield, it would be slowed by parachutes to settle on dry land. The capsule could then receive a new heat shield and be refurbished to fly again. The CST-100 is being designed for a life of up to 10 missions for each vehicle.

I wonder how this compares to the Dragon capsule from SpaceX.

China Uses More Energy Than the US?

China on Tuesday rejected an assessment from the International Energy Agency that it had surpassed the United States to become the world's top energy consumer, calling the data "unreliable".

The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal cited a top IEA official as saying the Asian giant had taken over the top spot in 2009, earlier than expected.

According to the IEA, China consumed 2.252 billion tons of oil equivalent of energy in 2009, from sources that included coal, nuclear power, natural gas and hydroelectric power -- about four percent more than the United States.

But an official with China's National Energy Administration told reporters the report was flawed.

"The IEA's data on China's energy use is unreliable," the official, Zhou Xian, was quoted by Xinhua news agency as saying.

The Financial Times quoted IEA chief economist Fatih Birol as saying: "In the year 2000, the US consumed twice as much energy as China; now, China consumes more than the US."

The United States still uses far more energy than China on a per capita basis, but China is less energy-efficient, the report said.

The IEA, the energy strategy branch of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, said the data was still preliminary but that the trend was clear, the newspaper reported.

China has embarked in recent years on an aggressive campaign to secure overseas energy supplies and satisfy sky-rocketing demand fuelled by its fast-expanding economy and citizens' increasing consumerism.

Late last year, Beijing announced ahead of the Copenhagen climate change summit that it would embark on a major energy efficiency drive to curb growth in its world-leading greenhouse gas emissions.

It has set a goal of generating 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources -- mainly wind and water -- by 2020.

no time. However, Global Warming is Inevitable.

Laser Used in a Naval Enviroment to Down UAV

Oddity

I've had thousands and thousands of hits on the Dicynodont link to the right. For some reason, this looks like an attempted DDOS. There's no way that that many people all want to look at it. It's not working as a DDOS, but...

weird.

This Day is Cursed

This really, truly sucks.

It started bad and got worse.

ugh

This is a very stressful day already.

Holocene Mass Extinction Disaster Taxon IDed

Jellyfish moved into the oceans off the coast of southwest Africa when the sardine population crashed. Now another small fish is living in the oxygen-depleted zone part-time and turning the once ecologically dead-end jellyfish into dinner, according to an international team of scientists.

"Originally there were sardines in the area but over fishing caused the sardine population to collapse in the 1960s and 1970s," said Victoria A. Braithwaite, professor of fisheries and biology, Penn State. "The sardines never recovered and jellyfish became a huge and serious problem, eating what the sardines had eaten."

Jellyfish are considered a dead end food source because, while they eat lots of small fish and other sea creatures, they have few predators. However, the research team found that the bearded goby, Sufflogobius bibarbatus, a 4-to-6-inch long, 1.5 inch-wide fish, eats jellyfish. Larger fish like hake and mackerel, sea mammals like sea lions and porpoises, and sea birds, like gannets and gulls, eat gobies, putting jellyfish back into the food cycle.

"We don't know if they are eating dead jellyfish from the bottom, or if they are coming up to oxygen-filled layers to eat jellyfish, but they are eating jellyfish," said Braithwaite.

Even stranger than a jellyfish diet is the gobies' use of the dead zone in the area. One reason there were so many sardines and now so many jellyfish is a large area of up-welling water off the southwest coast of Africa from Namibia to South Africa. This deep cold water brings with it large amounts of nutrients. When plankton voraciously eat the nutrients, their populations increase massively. Excess nutrients and dead plankton then fall to the ocean floor.

"A horrible toxic sludge forms, and very few things can live in it except for some bacteria and nematodes," said Braithwaite. "Somehow the gobies can withstand the toxic environment, but we don't know exactly how they are doing it."

Remarkably, the gobies cope without oxygen for hours at a time while they rest on the muddy seabed but remain alert.

"When we touch them with a rod, they show rapid escape responses," said Braithwaite.

Gobies can stay in the anoxic or oxygen-depleted area for at least 10 to 12 hours at a time. The researchers suggest they may be able to remain there even longer. The mud is not just lacking oxygen, but the bacteria that live there use sulfur for energy and produce high levels of hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas. The researchers report the results of their study in today's (July) 16 issue of Science.

"Normally, other animals cope with anoxia by anaerobic respiration, which causes a build up in lactate," said Braithwaite. "But something else is going on in these gobies as the lactate build up declines after an hour or so without oxygen. Our next step is to look to see what they are doing to cope with anoxia."

hmmm.