As y’all probably know by now, Dubya — so eager to exploit and enlargen executive power in other arenas — vetoed his first bill in five years yesterday, when he decided to capitulate to the sad remnants of his base, set back medical science a few more years, and nip stem cell research in the bud once again. While Dubya said the bill would have forced “American taxpayers…for the first time in our history…to fund the deliberate destruction of human embryos,” he made no argument for criminalizing fertility clinics, where similar embryos get tossed away unused every day. “‘If that’s murder, how come the president allows that to continue?’ asked Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). ‘Where is his outrage?’ Harkin called the veto ‘a shameful display of cruelty, hypocrisy and ignorance.‘”
Tag: Science
Voyage of Discovery.
“‘This is the cleanest orbiter than anyone ever remembers seeing,” Griffin said in a post-landing news conference. He added that with Discovery’s successful completion of all its on-orbit tasks, it had finished ‘as good a mission as we have ever flown.'” Congrats to the crew of Discovery on a safe and successful landing.
Origin Story.
“Blue Origin proposes to launch its reusable launch vehicles (RLVs) on suborbital, ballistic trajectories to altitudes in excess of 325,000 feet (99,060 meters) from a privately-owned space launch site in Culberson County, Texas.” Some details emerge about the New Shepard Reusable Launch System, currently being developed by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, where — full disclosure — one of my best and smartest friends from college is currently employed. “Also on the group’s to do list at the site is putting in place a vehicle processing facility, a launch complex and vehicle landing and recovery area, as well as an astronaut training facility, and other minor support amenities.”
Seed Capital.
Authors of postapocalyptic sci-fi yarns, take note: Norway has announced it will host a post-Doomsday seed bank on the Svalbard archipelago. “While the facility will be fenced in and guarded, Svalbard’s free-roaming polar bears, known for their ferocity, could also act as natural guardians, according to the Global Diversity Trust.“
Hawking Colonies.
“‘It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species,’ Hawking said. ‘Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.‘” Stephen Hawking makes the case for colonies in space. And Stephen Hawking is a very smart man (and, of course, not a bad MC.)
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
“This is certainly not the first time that politics has trumped science at the FDA. Another recent example: the agency’s decision to block over-the-counter availability for emergency contraceptives in the face of overwhelming evidence that the treatment is safe and effective…From my standpoint as a doctor, the question is this: What do you do when federal agencies become so politicized that their recommendations can’t necessarily be trusted?” In Slate, pediatrician Sydney Spiesel begins to doubt the FDA’s credibility these days, particularly after their recent and apparently blatantly political decision against medicinal marijuana. “Marijuana as a medicine — whatever its risk and benefits are eventually determined to be — may turn out to be much less important than the question of whether we can count on agencies like the FDA to be honest in their dealings.”
Great Eye in the Karoo.
The WP takes a gander at the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), which “can see 13 billion years back in time, nearly to the big bang. With its 10-by-11-foot hexagonal mirror — the largest of its type in the world — SALT concentrates the faintest, most distant light in the universe. If a candle were to flicker on the moon, SALT could detect it.“
Quake II.
“‘In 1906, San Francisco was the largest city west of the Rockies. We had 400,000 people in the city,’ Eisner said. ‘Today we have 7 million in the Bay Area. And the consequences of a disaster of this magnitude in an urban area are significant.’” On the eve of tomorrow’s centennial of the great San Francisco earthquake, a new study suggests another Big One would mean a Katrina-level disaster for the Bay Area. “Seismologists generally agree that a repeat of a 1906-size earthquake is inevitable, though when and where along the fault are unknown. In 2002, the U.S. Geological Survey reported a 62 percent chance of a magnitude-6.7 earthquake or greater hitting the Bay Area within 30 years.” And, in a related story, historians look for lessons for post-Katrina New Orleans amid the rubble of 1906.
Burning like a Silver Flame.
The European Space Agency releases the first new pics from their recent “Express” mission to Venus. The Venus Express probe entered Venusian orbit on Tuesday.
Climate Control.
The WP files another dispatch regarding Dubya’s war on science: “Employees and contractors working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at an NOAA lab, said in interviews that over the past year administration officials have chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether. Their accounts indicate that the ideological battle over climate-change research, which first came to light at NASA, is being fought in other federal science agencies as well.”