Solar sail completes first crucial test – NewScientist.com
A lightweight solar sail that could one day allow spacecraft to be propelled by the power of the Sun has passed its first crucial test.
The sail, made by NASA and Alliant Techsystems (ATK), was successfully deployed and its orientation controlled in the world’s largest vacuum chamber – which mimics the space environment – it was announced on Tuesday.
Science News online – Life on the scales
I was just now made aware of this ground breaking theory that is coming out of metabolic ecology. This is really fascinating stuff.
“Scientists have long known that most biological rates appear to bear a simple mathematical relationship to an animal’s size: They are proportional to the animal’s mass raised to a power that is a multiple of 1/4. These relationships are known as quarter-power scaling laws. For instance, an animal’s metabolic rate appears to be proportional to mass to the 3/4 power, and its heart rate is proportional to mass to the –1/4 power.
In subsequent decades, biologists have found that the 3/4-power law appears to hold sway from microbes to whales, creatures of sizes ranging over a mind-boggling 21 orders of magnitude.
“We’ve found that despite the incredible diversity of life, from a tomato plant to an amoeba to a salmon, once you correct for size and temperature, many of these rates and times are remarkably similar,” says Gillooly.
“Metabolic rate is, in our view, the fundamental biological rate,” Gillooly says. There is a universal biological clock, he says, “but it ticks in units of energy, not units of time.
Cred to Roland who has a nice summary of the two articles linked to here.
How would you like the U.S. government to send you a check that would pay for five years’ worth of gasoline?
Well, it can be arranged.
Not everyone is eligible, of course. But if you use a vehicle 100% for business and purchase it, new or used, from a select list of big-time gas-guzzlers, Uncle Sam is ready to help you out.
ASA officials have loosened the standards for what constitutes an acceptable risk of damage from the kind of debris that led to the disintegration of the shuttle Columbia as it was returning from space two years ago, internal documents show.
The move has set off a debate within the agency about whether the changes are a reasonable reassessment of the hazards of flight or whether they jettison long-established rules to justify getting back to space quickly.
Experts who have seen the documents say they do not suggest that the shuttle Discovery – scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on May 22 – is unsafe, but a small but forceful minority say they worry that NASA is repeating a practice that contributed to the Columbia disaster: playing down risks to continue sending humans into space.
The documents were given to The New York Times by several NASA employees, who asked not to be named, saying they feared retribution.
Documents that had been revealed earlier showed that NASA was struggling to meet safety goals set by the independent board that investigated the Columbia accident. The new documents suggest that the agency is looking for ways to justify returning to flight even if it cannot fully meet those recommendations.
Interesting piece in today%u2019s New York Times reports that Michael Dell and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contributed “at least” $350,000 to the DeLay Foundation for Kids. Much ado about nothing? All depends on your view of corporate largesse.
This could be nothing more than simple acts of kindness by rich philanthropists. But as the Times’ piece notes, DeLay’s foundation lets fat cats curry favor with a very powerful member of Congress “in a way that skirts campaign finance laws.”
Meanwhile, DeLay is in hot water for possible ethics violations and a couple of his political intimates were indicted for illegal fund-raising.
NOOO Bill, say it isn’t. You corporate fat cat pricks. But it’s for the children, right.
A complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.
Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a “new view”) makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.
Nvu is being written by Daniel Glazman, former Netscape Communications Corporation
employee and currently of the Mozilla Foundation and Disruptive
Innovations. The project is sponsored by Linspire (formerly Lindows).
Let’s build some awareness and get some more support for this very worthy project. The extensions page.
The Seattle Times: Politics: DeLay blasts Justice Kennedy
The House has no power over which judges receive lifetime appointments, but DeLay has called repeatedly for the House to find a way to hold the federal judiciary accountable for its decisions.
“The judiciary has become so activist and so isolated from the American people that it’s our job to do that,” he said.
Sheese, Tom Delay really doesn’t understand checks and balances does he? Moreover, wasn’t he the one who spearheaded the Schiavo debacle. Talk about out of touch with the American people.
An aspiring physicist was sentenced Monday to more than eight years in prison and ordered to pay $3.5 million for his role in a spree of arson and vandalism that targeted gas-guzzling Hummers and other sports utility vehicles.
Rejecting pleas for clemency from William Cottrell, a 24-year-old doctoral candidate in physics at the California Institute of Technology, U.S. District Judge Gary Klausner added more time to the sentence after finding that Cottrell was trying to sway consumers with his anti-SUV message.
The slogans Cottrell spray-painted onto vehicles included “Fat Lazy Americans,” “No Respect for Earth” and “SUV Terrorism.”
Nobody harmed, yet a PhD candidate in Physics gets a sentence equivalent to that of a Rapist or Child Molester. EIGHT YEARS!! WTF is this shit!
A Texas businesswoman has written to the Senate foreign relations committee that John R. Bolton is unfit to serve as UN ambassador because he threatened, berated and harassed her in a dispute over an overseas contract.
The face of evil, or the face of tasty fried chicken?
Aaron Fulkerson 