And Here We Go Again

The first U.S. bird flu death has been reported — a person in Louisiana who had been hospitalized with severe respiratory symptoms.

State health officials announced the death on Monday, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed it was the nation’s first due to bird flu.

Good old Brainworm Bobby will have a plan to protect everyone, amirite?

Fascinating Science

A fox's skull has evolved to allow foxes to dive into the snow without injury.

Meanwhile, the recently-launched Europa probe to Jupiter is almost guaranteed to fail. About a thousand transistors in the probe are nowhere near as radiation-resistant as they were supposed to be, which is a big deal as Jupiter's radiation belts make ours look puny.

NASA is supposedly "betting on success", which is babblespeak for "we're hoping the goddamned thing doesn't break".

No Dark Matter?

A study, published today in The Astrophysical Journal, challenges the current model of the universe by showing that, in fact, it has no room for dark matter.

I'm not a physicist. But I have been skeptical of the hypothesis of dark matter/energy ever since I first read an article on the subject.

("Read" is a bit of an overstatement. I usually couldn't get past six paragraphs in Scientific American before they might as well have printed the rest of the article in Swedish, for all that I could understand it. But I digress.)

Dark matter/energy always struck me as being a massive fudge factor. But, since I couldn't get through the articles on it, it made little sense to write the science magazines and suggest that this particular emperorer has no clothes.

Still, this is what science does: Look at the data, the observations, and try to come up with a hypothesis as to how things work. More data, better observational tools and then the hypothesis changes to accomodate that.

The Longest Eclipse, Ever

Fifty-one years ago, observed from a Concorde.

Odysseus Lands At Motel 6

A private U.S. lunar lander touched down on the moon Thursday, but contact with the craft was weak, company officials said.

There were no immediate updates on the lander’s condition from the company, Intuitive Machines.

Tension mounted in the company’s command center in Houston, as controllers awaited a signal from the spacecraft some 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) away, which arrived about 10 minutes later.

“We’re evaluating how we can refine that signal,” said mission director Tim Crain. “But we can confirm, without a doubt, that our equipment is on the surface of the moon.”

The lander, Odysseus, descended from a moon-skimming orbit and guided itself toward the surface, searching for a relatively flat spot among all the cliffs and craters near the south pole.

The old joke is that the south pole of the Moon is like Motel 6: Free ice, no atmosphere.

I don't quite get the enthusiam that people have for the Moon's potential as a base. Yes, it has 1/6th the gravity of Earth. But everything needed, except maybe water, has to be flung up to the Moon from Earth and nobody is really sure that there will be enough water to be usefu.

And even if there is, every swinging-dick of a lunar-capable nation will want a piece of it. We know how that goes here when there is a scarce resource everyone wants-- sooner or later, the guns come out.

Stand By on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts

Accuweather is forecasting an active hurricaine season.

Part of the reason for that is that the oceans are getting warmer. For reasons that the batshit-Trumpist-right refuses to acknowledge.

Uranus is Glowing

And it's a mystery.

We might get around to sending a probe to Uranus (and Neptune) before a century has passed since the Voyager-2 flyby. Or maybe not.

Two Hundred Years Ago

Arguably the greatest scientist of all time was born on this day in 1822 in Dole, France. Louis Pasteur developed microbiology, bacteriology and the germ theory of disease. Thanks to him, beer, wine and milk are safe for consumption by billions of people. Pasteur transformed the art of variolation into the science of vaccination. the elimination of smallpox and the near-elimination of polio are due to the principles and methods developed by Pasteur. He proved that spontaneous generation was a myth.

Pasteur was, above all, an experimenter. He believed in testing and retesting, to ensure that any bias on the part of the experimenter was removed. If he got the result he anticipated, he checked to ensure that he was seeing the truth, not just what he wanted to see.

It is not an exaggeration to say that hundreds of millions of people, if not billions, owe their chance to live full lives to Dr. Pasteur.

Iron Batteries

A company named Form Energy is working on rechargable batteries that don't use rare-earth metals. Instead of lithium ions, they use iron ions. In other words, the batteries produce power by rusting. When they are recharged, the reaction works in the other direction.

Will it scale up? It would be nice if it did. For those installing off-grid systems powered by wind or solar, a bank of iron-seawater batteries would probably be safer to have than a bank of lead-acid batteries.

Fusion Power is Only a Few Decades Away

The Department of Energy plans to announce Tuesday that scientists have been able for the first time to produce a fusion reaction that creates a net energy gain — a major milestone in the decades-long, multibillion-dollar quest to develop a technology that provides unlimited, cheap, clean power.

Fusion power has been "a few decades away" for a half-century. I have little doubt that an operational fusion power reactor will be put into service, but I also have little doubt that most people who are reading this post on the day that I upload it will live long enough to see it. In that way, fusion power is the technological equivalent of building a cathedral.

No First Stage to Orbit

The idea is to fling a small rocket out of it at hypersonic speeds, which will require the thing to spin up to 10,000rpm. So just a teeny error in releasing the launch vehicle could be a bit of a problem. Setting up the launch centrifuge at as high an elevation as possible (not at a coastal site, as shown in the video) and as close to the equator as possible would seem to be a good thing. But there are all sort of geopolitical issues in that, too. And the sonic boom of a hypersonic craft at ground level might be epic.

It's an intriguing concept.

The Russian Flu

That was a pandemic that happened 130 years ago. Since a number of the reported symptoms and effects were similar to that of COVID-19, researchers are scrambling to see if they can find any tissue samples from back then.

This could be interesting.

JWST First Light (sort of)

That's one star, as seen by 18 unaligned mirror segments. Now, they will move one segment, a little, and see which dot moves. Once they know which segment produced which dot, they can begin aligning them.

Which will take some time to do.

JWST On Station

The Webb Telescope is in its L2 orbit and the mirror segments are fully deployed. It's cooling down.

This is an amazing achievement. There was so much that could have gone wrong and, as far as we know, none of it happened.

An Amazing Achievement in Space Science

The James Webb Space Telescope is fully deployed as of early this afternoon (EST). All of the big pieces are now in place. Hundreds of single-point failure steps were successful.

That success was not easy. It took a shitload of engineering and testing to ensure that the telescope was able to be erected.

Now comes the work of getting the telescope into position, tuning, calibrating and all of that.

Congratulations to NASA, the ESA, the CSA, JPL and everyone else involved.

James Webb Space Telescope

Launch is in a half-hour:

ETA: Successful launch!

The launch site was overcast, so after the initial boost, there wasn't much to see.

ETA: The JWST Blog is now in one of the blogrolls.

Five Point Four Degrees Fahrenheit

Or three degrees Celsius.

This is what that much global warming will look like. As Ten Bears pointed out, this was done by that pinko magazine The Economist. {/sarc}

News Only For Those Not Interested in Dying of COVID-19 (all you horse-paste addicts can move along)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday endorsed booster shots for millions of older or otherwise vulnerable Americans, opening a major new phase in the U.S vaccination drive against COVID-19.

I have little doubt that, as the data comes in, that booster shots will be expanded to cover all of those who have received any of the currently-authorized vaccines.

This one came in via email and seems appropriate for this post:

(And yes, I'll be in line for my booster shot.)

Catching Up on Things (Including Bozo Rudy)

Hubble is OOC:

On June 13, the Hubble Space Telescope's payload computer stopped working, bringing the great instrument's operations to a halt. Several attempts have been made to restart – so far without success – and astronomers are bracing themselves for the possibility this is the end for the telescope that changed our view of the universe.

If they can't get Hubble to go back on line, it's not as though we have the capability to fly up there and fix it.
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The Disgraced Asshole of Orange wanted to use the Feds to stop comedians from making fun of him.

“It’s truly incredible that shows like Saturday Night Live, not funny/no talent, can spend all of their time knocking the same person (me), over & over, without so much of a mention of ‘the other side,’” Trump tweeted, long before he was banned from Twitter for inspiring a violent mob. “Like an advertisement without consequences. Same with Late Night Shows. Should Federal Election Commission and/or FCC look into this?”

It was, on its face, a ridiculous question and threat, as SNL is obviously satire, and therefore a form of protected speech in America that pissed-off commanders-in-chief have no authority to directly subvert. However, then-President Trump went further than simply tweeting his displeasure with the late-night comedians and SNL writers’ room. The internal discussions that followed, between the former leader of the free world and some of his political and legal advisers, once again underscored just how much Trump wanted to use the full weight and power of the U.S. government to punish his personal enemies.

According to two people familiar with the matter, Trump asked advisers and lawyers in early 2019 about what the Federal Communications Commission, the court system, and—most confusingly to some Trump lieutenants—the Department of Justice could do to probe or mitigate SNL, Jimmy Kimmel, and other late-night comedy mischief-makers.

Autocrats, and wannabee autocrats, are notoriously thin-skinned. They know that their weapon of fear doesn't work very well if people are laughing at them. That applied, in spaces, to The Mangolorian.
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Republicans are still pushing Jim Crow 2.0 voting laws and the party members in the Senate are going to do everything possible to ensure that those people have a harder time voting.

Every objective study of the 2020 election has found it to be a free and fair election, including, most recently, in Michigan:

State Senate Republicans who investigated Michigan’s 2020 presidential election for months concluded there was no widespread or systemic fraud and urged the state attorney general to consider probing people who have made baseless allegations about the results in Antrim County to raise money or publicity “for their own ends.”

None of that will tamp down the Big Lie of the Scrfer of Hamberders or those who are too afraid to do anything other than parrot his lies (which includes every Republican senator). They know that they can't win in a battle of ideas, that a majority of Americans doen't buy their schtick. So their sole road to power is to tilt the playing field, to keep as many of those who won't vote for them from voting.

It really is a modern version of Jim Crow.
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Speaking of the purveyors of The Big Lie:

An appeals court suspended Rudy Giuliani from practicing law in New York because he made false statements while trying to get courts to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the presidential race.

An attorney disciplinary committee said in its motion to suspend Giuliani’s license that there was “uncontroverted evidence” that Giuliani had made false statements to the courts, the public and lawmakers as he pushed theories that the election was stolen through fraud.

You can read the 33-page motion to suspend Rudy's law license here.

There are four appellate courts in New York State, called "Departments". Each Department administers the discipline for the attorneys who practice within that Department.

Lying to judges is one of those things that can get arttorneys in real trouble. (Snacking on the client's own money is a big no-no.) Attorney discipline is sort of a universally-reciprocal thing, in that if an attorney is admitted in more than one state, or to Federal courts, being suspended or disbarred in one state is effective in all of them.

I don't think Rudy's likely to be standing on the side of the road with a cardboard sign anytime soon. But Rudy now is feeling the full force of working for Individual-1: He got stiffed on his fees and his reputation is in tatters. Melania's Future Ex-Husband throws people to the side like used Kleenexes, and that's what's happening to Rudy.
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Welcome to the 1970s:

The U.S. Navy has swapped more than 1,600 parts among its new Virginia-class submarines since 2013 to ease maintenance bottlenecks as components that are supposed to last 33 years wear out decades sooner.

Parts are being shuttled regularly among the nuclear-powered fast-attack submarines so that vessels in the $166 billion class built by General Dynamics Corp. and Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc. can return to operations, according to data from the Naval Sea Systems Command and the Congressional Budget Office.

This isn't quite as bad in the 1970s, when the primary task of shipboard security watches was to stop the theft of parts and equipment by the sailors of other ships.[1] But the under-funding of spare parts and maintenance is a perennial problem. Building ships, tanks and airplanes is sexy. Congresscritters like that, because it's splashy and the jobs created can be pointed at. But buying repair parts isn't as sexy, so it gets underfunded.
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[1] I'm not saying that I once told a lieutenant from another ship that if he didn't get off my quarterdeck, that I was going to shoot him. But I'm not saying that I didn't say that, either.

Yet Another Force?

There is evidence that there may be an additional force in physics besides gravity, electromagetism, the strong force and the weak force.

I don't pretend to understand any of it. Reading about the sub-sub atomic particles and quantum mechanics hurts my head. But the thing that has always disquieted me about "dark matter" and "dark energy" is that they hae always seemed to me to be fudge factors-- things thrown in to make the math come out to match the observations. This new force may be the answer to part of what makes the math come out right.