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(Disclaimer: I work for NOAA)

I am not sure about the mode by which Bill P raised the alarm on the upcoming loss of weather satellites. I do think his message was correct though - to raise the profile on what he sees as a critical issue - the issue of proper funding for NOAA and satellite capabilities. NOAA does so much, with so little... We are stretched incredibly thin compared to other agencies.... I don't believe Dr. Jeff Masters had access to the all the data Bill P used in his decision to go public. People disagree with how he did it and it made more work for the NWS PR people.

Jeff Masters is also advocating the replacement of QuickSCAT with a "next-generation" scatterometer, one that has greatly improved capabilities to help tackle the structure and intensity problem"..... I hope Dr. Masters isn't trying to recreate the NPOESS problem by linking a satellite needed now to a high-risk/experimental sensor because it sure sounds like it.

I never stated that failure was imminent; in fact Bigelow's first test craft remains in space to this day: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/060721_bigelo w_genesis-1.html as referenced by TFA. So far, they have been successful on both of your points. My original post was intended to point out the dangers inherent to all spacecraft, and raise discussion of the potential merits of an inflatable structure. I see obvious benefits to the inflatables. While they do not decrease launch mass, the volume can be reduced, making it possible to send up more equipment on a certain launch vehicle, provided the mass envelope is not exceeded.

Silt specimens from Lake Chekoand the lake in the bend of the River in the west morass were collected for subsequent stratigraphic study (P.N. Paley et al.) with a grab dredge and a swamp drill designed by N.I. P'yavchenko.

The various samplings from the bottom of Lake Cheko (P'yavchenko, Kozlovskaya) revealed extensive development of silt up to 7 meters deep, indicating an ancient origin for the lake (tentatively estimated at 5000 to 10,000 years), thus completely contradicting the hypothesis of the formation of the lake as a result of the Tunguska meteorite fall (V. Koshelev, 1960).

"Expeditions in the 1960s concluded the lake was not an impact crater, but their technologies were limited," Longo said.

• The Artemis Project - The project is a private venture to establish a permanent, self-supporting community on the Moon. Brief overview of the Artemis project.
• The Mars Society - To further the goal of the exploration and settlement of the Red Planet.
• The Moon Society - An international nonprofit educational and scientific foundation formed to further the creation of communities on the Moon involving large-scale industrialization and private enterprise.
• National Space Society - grassroots organization dedicated to the creation of a spacefaring civilization. Magazine.
• Stanford on the Moon (by 2015?) And yes, Stanford as in the university.
• Space Frontier Foundation - seems to have projects for space colonization, missions to the Earth's moon, and so on. Looks like a large scale organization.
• The Space Settlement Initiative
• Space Access Society - activism for getting out of the NASA-only paradigm/reality.
• Students for the Exploration and Development of Space - `... is dedicated to expanding the role of human exploration and development of space. We also seek to educate the public in such a way as to attain this goal. `
• Space Studies Institute - `SSI's stated mission is: Opening the energy and material resources of space for human benefit by completing the missing technological links to make possible the productive use of the abundant resources in space.`
• International Space University - `The International Space University provides graduate-level training to the future leaders of the emerging global space community at its Central Campus in Strasbourg, France, and at locations around the world. ` (mentions 'systems engineering' on the About page)
• Space Settlement Institute - `The Space Settlement Institute is a non-profit association founded to help promote the human colonization and settlement of outer space. `
• Cygo's Space Initiative - plan and conduct exploration missions to minor planets, build and mass produce (while in space) a multi-purpose interconnectable module, and to offer products and services using space and the materials therefrom.
• Freeluna - `Freeluna.com is dedicated to the proposition that the colonization of outer space is critical for the long term survival of the human species, and that colonization of the moon and the exploitation of the moon's natural resources is one of the very best first steps in that incredible journey off planet.` ... and when I first visited this page, I was visitor #3371. Yikes. Contact: Bill Clawson, wclawson@freeluna.com
• Island One Society - associated with the Artemis society, seems to be mostly a resource-help site.
• The Living Universe Foundation - `The Living Universe Foundation seeks to bring the galaxy alive with life from Earth, while healing the damage that humanity has already inflicted upon the Earth. We believe that expansion into space in the immediate future is a step towards accomplishing this aim.` turmith@yahoo.com --- This organization was inspired by the publication of a certain book. This is heavily related to Project Atlantis or Oceania (artifical floatin

Re, oxygen, perspiration, etc: Not an issue. Astronauts have to spend long periods on exercise equipment already in order to limit atrophy. On average, ISS astronauts consume 3000 calories per day.

Show me the money trail. How do you know this?

All I can find because everything else wants you to buy a subscription to view their articles says the budget for science is set to triple over the next ten years

They also go on to say the funds are handed over to the national science foundation who then doles it out to whatever it determines necessary. As far as I know, there hasn't been any budget that goes specifically to physics or particle physics. It has been done this way for the last 25 years that I have payed attention with the exception of earmarking for things like Aids, cancer and global warming research.

Now, the current funding is being spent on global warming and not physics because the doom and gloom is proving more interesting to the NSF then physics is at the moment. This is why whenever someone says Exxon has everything to lose and the global warming scientist have nothing to lose, the counter answer is alway they could lose their funding. If you think the president or congress should provide money singled out for physics research, then suggest that. But don't blame the president for doing something that is a direct result of the researchers now being as creative in making their projects as interesting as the doom and gloom the global warming crowd has. I suggest that instead of requesting funding to monitor the interactions of elements of atoms, you ask for funding to monitor the interactions of elements of atoms in hopes to find a way to fix global warming.

It is like that game "in the bed" were you end every sentence with in the bed. Look at tom run a race "in the bed". Tom was the first to finish "in the bed". Except change the "in the bed" to "for global warming" and you will get all the funding you need. And this isn't the evil politicking of one man causing this. It is the pressures from everyone preaching the end of the world with global warming that is causing the interest to be focused in those areas "in the bed". Man that is a fun game.

Now, keep this in mind, This article describes a situation were some in congress had their priorities in the wrong places on both sides of the isle. But it also describes members of both sides coming around to more sound thinking at the last minute. It also provided an 8% increase in funding which is in line with the presidents stated initiatives he made us aware of in 2006. And again, no one has cut funding to physic research. It is only that the funding is being used differently. You cannot claim a funding was cut when there wasn't a specific allotment by law (entitlement) to them.

Now, if you are confused about NASA funding and the physics research they do, it is two different things. Here is an article describing the problems with funding NASA and come to the exact opposite conclusion you have about Bush not funding anything. It was a republican senator who stood his ground and made sure NASA got all it's funding.

Again, show me the money trail, What beside a few ranting from people who won't verify the misconstrued facts presented to them makes you believe that Bush has it in for physic? I have went above what I would consider necessary to show this isn't the picture. Now show me that I am wrong. Show me that this is more then some political posturing because someone has a stiffy for Bush and thinks everyone will jump on the bashing bandwagon too. I want to see your proof.

I work at NOAA, in the satellite group National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/

The US government regularly under-funds satellites & space systems. You can see this with the huge cost overruns on NPOESS http://www.space.com/spacenews/archive05/NPOESS_11 2105.html Why did NPOESS cost overruns happen? "Hey, lets do a contract on some incredibly experimental sensors involving high risk research and make sure they are on a fixed budget". Not smart.

I am off on a tangent though - Quickscat is a different story. Quickscat was a NASA R&D bird . See http://winds.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/quikscat/index. cfm I'm not clear whether it was initially launched as NASA only and handed off to us, or if they "owned" the satellite while we did the ground systems for it.

NASA does R&D type of satellites - proof of concepts, risk reduction, etc. We in NESDIS-NOAA often take over running them, or we run their sensors on our satellites. Well, these proof of concept satellites were never intended to be part of a series providing a continual new functionality.

NESDIS/NOAA has two major satellite series that will always (in the future) have spares for:
GOES series http://osd.goes.noaa.gov/
POES series http://www.oso.noaa.gov/poes/ (although the newest will be NPOESS via a joint program with DoD replacing our POES and DoD's DMSP)

There is another satellite that is likely to fall soon too - Windsat/Coriolis http://www.ipo.noaa.gov/Projects/windsat.html While Windsat is technically a Navy satellite, we run that one too, and it has no replacement either. Fortunately, Windsat is more about Navy stuff than it is about Hurricane tracking...

Bill Proenza, as a consumer of NESDIS' satellite data, sees NOAA efforts on the publicity side as being detrimental to the funding of the NOAA-NWS-National Hurricane center funding. Well, for the sake of accuracy, a few million dollars isn't going to fix our funding shortfalls...

Until Congress starts funding new satellite development properly (not like NPOESS) this problem won't go away.

The Great Global Warming Swindle is a BBC Documentary (notorious right wing Oil loving company there) featuring many people whom I consider credible people within the scientific community, including the Co-Founder of Greenepeace Patrick Moore who show that the Global Warming movement is primarily political in nature, and is more about being anti-corporate than pro-environment. This is largely the reason why Patric Moore resigned from the organization he confounded in disgust. Regarding the so called consensus, regarding global warming, they have an interview in there with a scientist who was on a list of 2500 climate scientists who contributed to a paper regarding the human origin of global warming who had to sue to get his name removed from the paper. They told him he'd contributed, so his name would be listed, but he told them they didn't listen to anything he was trying to tell them. If you don't thing people get anything out of believing in global warming, that is just flat wrong. If you try to do science suggesting global warming is caused by anything other than man, your funding tends to get pulled real quick. Now I'm not saying global warming is not occurring. You're right, the data clearly shows that. The degree to which it is human caused is widely debated, however. It seems obvious to me that anyone with even a cursory training in science should see that climate is an unbelievably complex field, and we aren't even close to understanding how it works. Occam's Razor tells us that variations in solar output are of far greater importance that anything man is doing. Currently, global warming is also occurring on mars as well as Jupiter. Now before you set out to write your flaming response that I am a shill for the Oil Companies, or I am just selfish, or have my head up my ass, thing to yourself, "Is that a scientific response?". After doing thorough research, I have come to several informed conclusions:
1) Global warming is occurring.
2) Humans are contributing to global warming (how could we not be, again, Occam's Razor)
3) The amount by which we are contributing to global warming is vastly overstated by the Global Warming Movement.
4) The Global Warming movement is primarily an anti corporate movement which uses the scare of global warming to motivate change which is ultimately good, but when taken too far, can cripple economies not only here in the first world, but with even more tragic consequences in the third world.
5) The Global Warming scare is like telling someone that for every Big Mac they eat, they will lose one day off of their life. It may motivate people to make changes which would be good for them, but it does so by telling a lie which may have drastic consequences for third parties.
6) The illusion that environmentalism doesn't hurt anyone, and therefore we should do anything possible to that goal is plain wrong. There is no sense of balance in the debate over what to do about it, and people who don't mouth the party line are branded a heretics.

Most of this is covered quite well in the first link I provided. Watch it, it may just change your mind. Assuming your mind is open to change.

Anthropomorphic? Lets wait until this sunspot cycle dies down to find out

Sunspot activity peaked several years ago.

Reference: here

I gues by citing my source I am engaging in consensus science too.

Here is a link to a story with a little more content and pictures of the new unfurled solar panels.

"yea gravity propagates at the speed of light.
"
which brings a lot of questions up. So gravity is made out of what? If it take time to travel that means it take time for space to 'flatten'. So what is holding the curved parts in place for 8.3 minutes?
Gravitons?

Of course the proof that it moves at the speed of light is derived from 1 experiment. 2002, I believe... or did they? http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/gravity_spee d_030116.html

I know the evidence was overwhelming that it will be at the speed of light, but nature has a tendency to throw a real cool twist at us once in a while.

Exactly what I was thinking, but in a different context. The (#6 on the list) exoplanet Upsilon Andromeda B is tidally locked with its sun - so, one side is burning hot while the other is freezing cold. There must exist a ring zone that is temperate, since the temperature gradient cannot be discretely sharp. Couple that with unlimited supply of geothermal energy, and we got one cheap earth.

The link to Space.com for the 'most interesting extra-solar planets' has a top 10 list with all the new updated data. The article from the summary said that the fastest planet's orbit around its sun is 1.2 days, where instead the top-10 list shows a recently discovered planet with an orbit of just 10 hours! There is a link that leads to this page http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/061004_fast_ planets.html that talks about 'fast planets' and shows the new data.

I recommend going to the top-10 list found at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/extrasolar_p lanets.html just click at the bottom link where it says "Number 10: The First" and off you go! It's actually a really nifty countdown :)

Enjoy!

The link to Space.com for the 'most interesting extra-solar planets' has a top 10 list with all the new updated data. The article from the summary said that the fastest planet's orbit around its sun is 1.2 days, where instead the top-10 list shows a recently discovered planet with an orbit of just 10 hours! There is a link that leads to this page http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/061004_fast_ planets.html that talks about 'fast planets' and shows the new data.

I recommend going to the top-10 list found at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/extrasolar_p lanets.html just click at the bottom link where it says "Number 10: The First" and off you go! It's actually a really nifty countdown :)

Enjoy!

Fine print: Earthly parachute. Note that most Mars probes decellerate by parachute in the upper atmosphere, then use either rocket braking or air bags for touchdown, including the rovers (http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/spirit_lands _040103.html). There is a sound reason for this: a parachute of a given size on Mars has only 7/1000ths the drag of the same sized canopy on Earth, so they have little to no effect below a few hundred miles per hour.

At least three previous space probes used ion engines. JAXA launched Hayabusa, now returning a sample of a asteroid to earth, The European Space Agency launched SMART-1, a lunar orbiter and NASA built Deep Space One.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/smart-1_orbit _041116.html

...the Cassini-Huygens spaceprobe made a descent over two years ago onto Titan, the only moon in the solar system known to have an atmosphere.

Using weasel words like "most likely" when you're referring to a six-orders-of-magnitude difference in 'opinion' is, well, weaseling. And I'm calling you on it.

But the theologies that claim that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that the scientific evidence supports this - those are just flat wrong.

Hello. I'm a creationist, and I read Slashdot. My field of expertise is computing, but I also have a graduate degree in philosophy which included "philosophy of science", and I like a good argument. I would like to address point #3 briefly.

In your first paragraph (of point #3) you point out a strong correlation between belief in intelligent design and certain religious views. You are appealing to the prevailing Slashdot bias against organised religion when you do this: the correlation says absolutely nothing in and of itself as to whether the idea is true or false. C. S. Lewis described that form of argument as "Bulverism": dismiss the argument on the basis that the person raising it has particular motives for doing so. "You just say that because you hold religious view X." I can't argue against this, because it isn't an argument.

I will point out, however, that Intelligent Design and Creationism are not the exclusive property of theists. Sir Fred Hoyle and the "panspermia" proposal are an example of a prominent scientific atheist and a naturalistic intelligent design theory (limited to chemical evolution in scope). His ideas were not accepted, of course, and I wonder whether his audacity in questioning such sacred cows (and providing quotable material to the infidel creationists) didn't cost him Nobel Prize recognition in the end. Still, he started a meme that may yet bloom and grow: "seeds of life".

I don't mean to imply that such contrary ideas are common among practicing scientists: they are not. But is that because the ideas are profoundly and obviously wrongheaded, or simply because it's professional suicide for anyone less renowned than Sir Fred Hoyle to confess public doubt in evolution? Science is an old boys' club: break the social taboos and you'll be shunned -- a process otherwise known as peer review. If you think that science is a dry, dispassionate, truth-finding machine (rather than a thoroughly human, political, and perception-driven process) then I can only assume you've never submitted a research paper through a review process. Just about anyone who has (regardless of field, I'm sure) will have had the experience of getting back reviewer comments and thinking, "FFS, did you even read what I wrote?" If you have an argument that seems sympathetic to creationism, you won't get published in a bastion of evolutionary thought no matter how damn good your argument is: it will be dismissed as "creationist rubbish" on the first skim-read.

Moving on, you spend considerable time talking about "Naturalism". I have a really big problem with science being synonymous with philosophical naturalism, and I can summarise that problem very easily. Assume, for the sake of argument, that some sort of supernatural being did, in fact, create the natural world using a supernatural process (by which I mean that it flagrantly violated known laws of physics, such as mass/energy conservation). Does this not leave the whole process of naturalistic science as one of pursuing falsehoods? The true explanation (a supernatural creator) is ruled out a priori by the method of investigation. Naturalistic science (as it relates to origins) would be the process of finding the most credible falsehood about the origin of things.

Perhaps you can address that issue for me: if science is necessarily naturalistic, then how do we know that a naturalistic explanation like "big bang + evolution" is true, as opposed to a credible falsehood? Why do scientists such as yourself disparage supernatural proposals as though they were false, when you are yourself not in honest pursuit of truth, but of credible naturalistic explanations?

The last point you cover is that of falsification. This is a subject dear to my heart in my capacity as a lover of philosophy. Rather than attempt to refute your argument or point out deficiencies in "falsification" itself, however, I think I have a better question. I

The link for mir-eating fungi goes to an old slashdot story which itself points to a dead link. A usable link to the original story is here: http://www.space.com/news/spacestation/space_fungu s_000727.html

Problem being, they have to do these experiments to get us off of the planet in the first place...
That's Bezos. He said Bozos. I had to read it twice myself.

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/050701_bezos_ plans.html

One method of propulsion for spacecraft is to push them with lasers.
The advantages include not having to carry fuel with you.
I don't have enough of a handle on this new state of matter thingy to know if it's useful for that, but worth looking into further.

Is tfa claiming a 7th state of matter, where currently we have solid liquid gas plasma and two other kinds of rarely seen plasmas (earth water air fire thing 1 and thing 2)?

Obligatory: sharks....

Would be difficult to not be more clever than us. Hell, only now is the Military is considering orbital solar energy production and this idea's been around at least since the 60's. Had to wait until our back's against the wall before they'll consider something new.

President Bush declares 'Globulars' (we think he meant globules) and mold living in islamofacist micro-ecologies to be 'enemy combatants determined to subvert US interests in space'. The status of grapfruit and dirty water is still thought to be under consideration.

After all, obscenely noisey, light emitting shrimp bubbles have been jamming their sonar.. Someone finally went hmmmm...

Oh yeah, something similar proposed to kick off supernovae and detected in solar reactions

Anyhow, seems like sound waves might make a plasma confinement field and also pump energy into it, rather than using magnets and lasers etc. Some other thread Definition of Sonoluminescence
PS If the universe is electrical and acoustic, it must be a giant stereo!

The image links to a SPACE.com article with more images and info.

Here's another article about the glove that actually features pictures of the gloves and contestants.

Try Space.com on the same story (http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070502_mars _ice.html). for a slightly more meaty version. Evidently using data from a new bird with higher resolution combined with assumptions on effectiveness of soil insulation.

Check out the asteroid belt, next time you're in the vicinity. It's a gold mine, in every sense. The amount of wealth out there is "beyond imagination".

Just one moderate-sized asteroid (Eros) is estimated to contain $1,000 billion in gold alone - more than has been mined (or indeed could ever be mined ) from Earth's crust in recorded history. Then there's the platinum and the other metals, minerals and rare earths, roughly $20,000 billion in total. And there's millions of asteroids in the belt.

It's not just the mineral wealth that has people interested. It's estimated that maybe half of the asteroids are carbonaceous, containing 20% water and a further 10% oxygen extractable from other sources (good fuel source stuff). Additionally, there are significant amounts of carbon and nitrogen - in total, enough basic resources to support human life on a huge scale. It's likely going to be easier to colonise the asteroids than to colonise Mars.

The link in the blog seems to be broken. There is some more information about the planet (Gliese 581 c) on Wikipedia, MSN, and Space.com.

RTFA dude. You objections are all addressed in the section "Galactic bow shock".

In short, our galaxy isn't the problem. It's that the sun moves to the front of the direction in which our galaxy is travelling, becoming part of the leading edge.

regolith's patchy distribution is the result of shaking, which causes the finest and lightest materials to accumulate in dips on the asteroid's surface, where the local gravity is lowest.

"It's sort of like if you poured water over Itokawa, all the water would tend to pool in these [low] regions," said study team member Daniel Scheeres of the University of Michigan. "The water would flow downhill until it couldn't go downhill anymore."

A shaky asteroid

The new findings suggest seismic activity of some kind is occurring on Itokawa, a small asteroid only 1,600 feet (500 meters) in diameter.

"Even though it's this tiny little guy, it is in some sense geologically active," Scheeres told SPACE.com. "Things are happening on the surface. Stuff moves from one point to the other."

The regolith distribution suggests Itokawa has been shaken up in the past, but what might have rattled it is still an open question.

One hypothesis is that smaller asteroids occasionally strike Itokawa and shake the space rock up. Because of its diminutive size, even tiny impacts could send Itokawa into a tremor. Another idea is that Itokawa might occasionally fly close enough to the Earth, where our planet's gravity could jostle it.

Jostled by sunlight

Perhaps the most intriguing hypothesis, however, is one recently put forth by Scheeres. In a study to be published in the scientific journal Icarus, Scheeres ties Itokawa's periodic shaking to the YORP effect, in which sunlight provides a small nudge that can speed up or slow down an asteroid's rotation.

Every single one of these propositions are defied by common sense. However, the electrical view follows from the laboratory (and even the manufacturing industry that was used to create the computer you're using right now). From http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/0602 17deepimpact3.htm:

Cathode sputtering has an effect that is simply "beyond the reach" of evaporating volatiles. It can create an exceedingly fine dust down to 1 micrometer or even finer. (One micrometer is just 40 millionths of an inch). This unique capability of cathode sputtering is why the process is used in the manufacture of highly reflective mirrors for modern telescopes. So again, a comparison of practical electrical technology with the discoveries of Deep Impact is only reasonable.

This line of investigation introduces another surprise: Astronomers could not understand what occurred when the 800-pound projectile hit the comet nucleus. An enormous volume of an extraordinarily fine dust was thrown into space at high speed, creating an extremely bright cloud due to the dust's remarkable reflectivity. NASA scientists estimated that the dust particles were only .5 to 1 micrometer in diameter.

But was the surprise justified? Almost twenty years earlier the visit to Halley had investigators wondering how "sublimating ices" could produce such fine comet dust. But that surprise, like so many others, seems to have been quickly

regolith's patchy distribution is the result of shaking, which causes the finest and lightest materials to accumulate in dips on the asteroid's surface, where the local gravity is lowest.

"It's sort of like if you poured water over Itokawa, all the water would tend to pool in these [low] regions," said study team member Daniel Scheeres of the University of Michigan. "The water would flow downhill until it couldn't go downhill anymore."

A shaky asteroid

The new findings suggest seismic activity of some kind is occurring on Itokawa, a small asteroid only 1,600 feet (500 meters) in diameter.

"Even though it's this tiny little guy, it is in some sense geologically active," Scheeres told SPACE.com. "Things are happening on the surface. Stuff moves from one point to the other."

The regolith distribution suggests Itokawa has been shaken up in the past, but what might have rattled it is still an open question.

One hypothesis is that smaller asteroids occasionally strike Itokawa and shake the space rock up. Because of its diminutive size, even tiny impacts could send Itokawa into a tremor. Another idea is that Itokawa might occasionally fly close enough to the Earth, where our planet's gravity could jostle it.

Jostled by sunlight

Perhaps the most intriguing hypothesis, however, is one recently put forth by Scheeres. In a study to be published in the scientific journal Icarus, Scheeres ties Itokawa's periodic shaking to the YORP effect, in which sunlight provides a small nudge that can speed up or slow down an asteroid's rotation.

Every single one of these propositions are defied by common sense. However, the electrical view follows from the laboratory (and even the manufacturing industry that was used to create the computer you're using right now). From http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/0602 17deepimpact3.htm:

Cathode sputtering has an effect that is simply "beyond the reach" of evaporating volatiles. It can create an exceedingly fine dust down to 1 micrometer or even finer. (One micrometer is just 40 millionths of an inch). This unique capability of cathode sputtering is why the process is used in the manufacture of highly reflective mirrors for modern telescopes. So again, a comparison of practical electrical technology with the discoveries of Deep Impact is only reasonable.

This line of investigation introduces another surprise: Astronomers could not understand what occurred when the 800-pound projectile hit the comet nucleus. An enormous volume of an extraordinarily fine dust was thrown into space at high speed, creating an extremely bright cloud due to the dust's remarkable reflectivity. NASA scientists estimated that the dust particles were only .5 to 1 micrometer in diameter.

But was the surprise justified? Almost twenty years earlier the visit to Halley had investigators wondering how "sublimating ices" could produce such fine comet dust. But that surprise, like so many others, seems to have been quickly

What you're talking about is exactly the kind of stuff discussed in the space.com article linked to from the 2004 slashdot article. They discuss a certain electric quadrupole configuration. This article talks about magnetic shielding. Here is a web page that gives references to a whole bunch of papers on this topic (mostly powerpoints, but look at the pdf links).

If any of them would design a repeatable experiment that conflicts with existing theories, they'd become instantly famous.

Wallace Thornhill accurately predicted *all* of the anomalous results from the Deep Impact Mission to Comet Tempel 1. Results that remain anomalous to NASA to this day were all natural byproducts of EU Theory. Did it make him famous? No, not really. People still blew him off. It is a fact, actually, that pretty much all of the anomalies in the space sciences today have an electrical explanation. Nobody really cares, to tell you the truth. We live in "interesting" times, I suppose.

It may seem to people who have not read the Electric Universe materials that Tim Thompson puts the issue to rest. This is far from the case.

Although I can certainly see major problems with some of his analysis (like the notion that neutrino flavors change in only one direction), I do not personally have the capability to evaluate all of Tim Thompson's arguments. Few people do. Does that mean that he is the only person capable of formulating an opinion on the universe? No, it does not. Does it mean that he is more qualified to evaluate the situation? No, not even. It is oftentimes worse to know something wrong than to not know anything at all. It is a fact that astrophysicists are unanimously taught in school that electricity plays no important role in space. Those people were educated before it became apparent that space is filled with plasma, and these educational programs persist in spite of the fact that Hannes Alfven, the father of plasma physics, tried in vain to convince the astrophysicists that electricity does flow through space. We know from the laboratory that plasma is electrical in nature. It is a gas that consists of a certain percentage of charged particles. Plasma is in fact *highly* conductive in our laboratory experiments. Astrophysicists are taught that they can ignore this fact in school in a class called magnetohydrodynamics. In that class, they are taught that plasmas can "instantly neutralize" and that plasmas have frozen-in-place magnetic fields (look it up on wiki "if you care" ...). These simplifications are useful for doing math because it allows them to avoid using Maxwell's Equations and model plasma as a superconductor -- even when the plasma stretches light years in distance. Contemplate the concept of a plasma that's light years across instantly neutralizing. It's silly. Now, if you remove that assumption and permit the plasma in space to act as plasma in the laboratory does, then you are effectively giving resistance to the plasma. With resistance, plasma conducts electricity. It's not space that deprives plasma of its conductivity. It's the astrophysicists.

Plasma is unique in that we know from the lab that its physical interactions induce electric current, and vice-versa. If you accept, as astrophysicists do, that plasma pervades 99.999% of all space, then out of necessity, it's inevitable that electrical currents will result from violent physical interactions in space.

Astrophysicists are oftentimes taught in class that it would require more energy than exists within the universe to completely strip the electrons from all of the atoms in a teaspoon of salt. Some education there! That assumes that the plasma universe started in a neutral state. We know no such thing.

One could then argue, well, if plasma in space was electrical like the stuff in the lab, then we'd see evidence of this in our observations. And in fact, we do. Every single week that goes by, in fact, there are images of z-pinches that we observe within the laboratory in NASA press releases. This week, in fact, we saw two such images:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070406_red_r ectangle.html
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~

This discovery only reinforces the possibility of life outside our solar system; we've only discovered a few extra-solar planets, and at least one among those we've seen has life. So:

How many people now think that ETs of some form do exist?

Why did the submitter have to phrase the title that way?! This is some really cool stuff. Yet as it is, I think I saw about three posts that did not in some way allude to sex.... *sigh* What are you to expect from the Slashdot crowd?

Automated Rendezvous and Docking is an exciting field right now. Success of the Orbital Express mission is going to be a huge step forward (trying to be optimistic). The linked article looks pretty good. Space.com also has a good story on it.

Mod parent down. Calling ideas "stupid" without supporting data is not "insightful".

In fact, decreasing the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth is not an idea that anyone should dismiss offhand as "stupid". Using a lens at the Lagrange point is an idea that has been seriously considered by the US government. Considering the probable repercussions of global warming discussed in the new report, dismissing good but quirky ideas as you have here could negatively impact billions of people. Luckily, the people seriously trying to solve such problems do not share your knee-jerk, short-sighted attitude.

I thought the moon is ours forever, until the sun goes crazy. According to this at that point the moon and earth will be locked facing each other. The moon will be much further away from the earth, and earth's day will be 47 current days long.

Was there some development I missed? I tried goobling for it.

How fucking hard is it to read the article?

Bloody karmawhores.

Under the agreement, Virgin Galactic pledged to lease about 83,000 square feet of hanger and terminal space. The company will pay $1 million per year for the first five years of the lease and $1.5 million per year for the remainder of the term. It also will pay user fees and ground rent.

Gee. Fucktard.

The curious thing, though, is that the south pole is very different -- almost looks like a human eye. I wonder what sort of rotational effect could cause such an asymmetry between north and south poles?

Does anyone know how they handled rising CO2 levels in apollo 13?

1.) Apparently, the Earth magnetic field has decreased by 10% in the last 150 years (source: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/earth_magnet ic_031212.html). I'm an electrical engineer and during my studies in particle physics, I learned that a particles velocity can be affected by magnetic fields. I believe it's possible that more of the Sun's radiation is penetrating the Earth's magnetosphere ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_magnetic_fiel d ) due to it being weaker. If more radiation hits the Earth, shouldn't that also increase the overall temperature of the Earth and can global warming be attributed to this?

No. The total energy of charged particles impacting the upper atmosphere is tiny compared with the solar light energy Compare for example, the intensity of the aurora with the intensity of sunlight. Now add in the fact that the aurora covers a tiny fraction of the earths surface while sunlight blankets half of the earth at any time.

Even if it were a significant amount of energy, this energy is entirely absorbed by the atmosphere at altitudes above 60km. You would need to come up with a plausible mechanism for transporting this radiation down into the lower atmosphere without increasing the temperature of the stratosphere.

2.) Jupitor is experiencing the same climate change that Earth is.

No, it isn't. The change on Jupiter is regional, not global. There is no indication that it is related to any solar phenomenon.

3.) Mars is experiencing the same climate change that Earth is.

4.) The United Nations found that there is more Methane produced from livestock, which raises global temperature greater than CO2 by a factor of approx. 20

[5.) What about the ice ages. We didn't cause them!]

But wait officer, people can die without being murdered. Therefore it doesn't matter whether my fingerprints are on the gun.

[A pile of other pointless crap designed to confuse the issues deleted.]

3.) Mars is experiencing the same climate change that Earth is. (source: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/ [space.com] mars_snow_011206-1.html and http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/new s/news.html?in_article_id=410901&in_page_id=1770 [dailymail.co.uk]) How can you explain the recent same climate changes on different planets? I doubt it's all those cars being driven there.

1.) Apparently, the Earth magnetic field has decreased by 10% in the last 150 years. I'm an electrical engineer and during my studies in particle physics, I learned that a particles velocity can be affected by magnetic fields. I believe it's possible that more of the Sun's radiation is penetrating the Earth's magnetosphere due to it being weaker. If more radiation hits the Earth, shouldn't that also increase the overall temperature of the Earth and can global warming be attributed to this?

Another theory postulates that cosmic rays are at least partly responsible for cloud formation. When the solar wind picks up, inbound cosmic rays are deflected away from us, fewer clouds form, and things get warmer. When solar output falls off, more cosmic rays get through, more clouds form, and things get cooler. "Evidence from ice cores show this [lower solar activity, high cosmic rays, and lower temperatures] happening long into the past. We have the highest solar activity we have had in at least 1,000 years."

Man is this idea played out - 5000+ years. Both the Hindu and Mayan calendars started at about the same time and both point to a time close to 2012 when a new cycle for the Earth begins - not the end of the world (EOTW)! http://hinduism.about.com/od/basics/a/goldenage.ht m

Sure the power grid may be overloaded and transformers fried if this is what you mean by the EOTW then yes the current system is very fragile. "During the last maximum in 1989, a power surge triggered by solar energy damaged transformers of the Hydro-Quebec power system, leaving 6 million people in Canada and the northeast United States without power for more than nine hours. The event also knocked satellites out of orbit and disrupted radio communications." - http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/ solar_max_sidebar_000131.html

What this actually may do is again wake people up to suppling their own basic electrical needs via wind and solar and to use the grid power less and less. "Among the innovations that could have the greatest impact in the next decade: a new generation of lightweight, quiet electric cars that can be re-fueled at home; the conversion of coal plants to efficient gas turbines; mass-produced wind and solar generators that are cost-competitive with the most advanced fossil plants; tiny fuel cells and rooftop solar panels that allow people to generate their own electricity." - http://www.worldwatch.org/node/1073

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_mond ay_031027.html

To the naysayers:

These solar storms could very well disrupt communications. Do a little research and understand that if certain conditions are met:

-intesity and speed of particles from sun
-the way they actually hit the Earth's magnetic poles

We could really be in for some trouble! If you think that there is no possible way for a solar storm to screw up our entire way of life, think again.

In 1859 there was a massive solar storm like no other which caused telegraph lines to ignite!

Imagine that one! You wake up, No TV, No Internets, no power, and everything is on fire from the fried telephone wires.