WISE Captures a Nebula on Fire
Sunday July 8, 2012
The Flame Nebula sits on the eastern hip of Orion the Hunter, a constellation most easily visible in the northern hemisphere during winter evenings. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
(Phys.org) — A new image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, shows the candle-like Flame nebula lighting up a cavern of dust. The Flame nebula is part of the Orion complex, a turbulent star-forming area located near the constellation’s star-studded belt.
The image is being released today along with a new batch of data from the mission. Last March, WISE released its all-sky catalog and atlas containing infrared images and data on more than a half billion objects, including everything from asteroids to stars and galaxies. Now, the mission is offering up additional data from its second scan of the sky.
“If you’re an astronomer, then you’ll probably be in hog heaven when it comes toinfrared data,” said Edward (Ned) Wright of UCLA, the principal investigator of the WISE mission. “Data from the second sky scan are useful for studying stars that vary or move over time, and for improving and checking data from the first scan.”
Read more: http://phys.org/news/2012-07-flame-bright-wise-image.html
Another US Warship Arrives in Persian Gulf to Join Fifth Fleet
Sunday, 08 July 2012
‘The USS Ponce – previously slated for decommissioning – arrived at the base on Thursday, a fleet spokesman in Manama said, Reuters reported.
“Ponce’s primary mission is to support mine countermeasures operations and other missions, such as the ability to provide repair service to other deployed units,” added the spokesman, whose name was not mentioned in the report. This is the fifth US navy ship that has joined the US base in Bahrain since late June.’
Read more: Another US Warship Arrives in Persian Gulf to Join Fifth Fleet
New Instrument Sifts Through Starlight to Reveal New Worlds
ScienceDaily (July 5, 2012) — An advanced telescope imaging system that started taking data last month is the first of its kind capable of spotting planets orbiting suns outside of our solar system. The collaborative set of high-tech instrumentation and software, called Project 1640, is now operating on the Hale telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California after more than six years of development by researchers and engineers at the American Museum of Natural History, the California Institute of Technology, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
The project’s first images demonstrating a new technique that creates extremely precise “dark holes” around stars of interest were presented July 5 at the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation meeting in Amsterdam by Ben R. Oppenheimer, a curator in the Museum’s Department of Astrophysics and principal investigator for Project 1640.
Although hundreds of planets are known from indirect detection methods to orbit other stars, it’s extremely difficult to see them directly in an image. This is largely because the light that stars emit is tens of millions to billions of times brighter than the light given off by planets.
Read more: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120705161252.htm
In a Cosmology Breakthrough, Astronomers Measure a Filament of Dark Matter
By Rebecca Boyle 07.05.2012
Invisible, cold dark matter plays a major role in the evolution of galaxies, according to modern cosmological theory. The most advanced simulations of cosmic evolution show stringy tendrils of mass — dark matter — connecting giant clusters of galaxies via a vast cosmic web. Now for the first time, astronomers have been able to detect one of these filaments, sussing out its location by watching it warp light.
The IMF
Thursday, 05 July 2012
Terrorists
Thursday, 05 July 2012
The Bank of England Told Us to Do It, Claims Barclays
Thursday, 05 July 2012
‘A memo published by Barclays suggested that Paul Tucker gave a hint to Bob Diamond, the bank’s chief executive, in 2008 that the rate it was claiming to be paying to borrow money from other banks could be lowered.
His suggestion followed questions from “senior figures within Whitehall” about why Barclays was having to pay so much interest on its borrowings, the memo states.
Barclays and other banks have been accused of artificially manipulating the Libor rate, which is used to set the borrowing costs for millions of consumers, businesses and investors, by falsely stating how much they were paying to borrow money.’
Read more: The Bank of England Told Us to Do It, Claims Barclays
Zombie apocalypse ;)
Government-Sponsored Study Destroys DEA’s Classification of Marijuana as ‘Medically Useless’
Thursday, 05 July 2012
‘A government-sponsored study published this month in The Open Neurology Journal concludes that marijuana provides much-needed relief to some chronic pain sufferers and that more clinical trials are desperately needed, utterly destroying the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) classification of the drug as having no medical uses.
While numerous prior studies have shown marijuana’s usefulness for a host of medical conditions, none have ever gone directly at the DEA’s placement of marijuana atop the schedule of controlled substances. This study, sponsored by the State of California and conducted at the University of California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research, does precisely that, driving a stake into the heart of America’s continued war on marijuana users by calling the Schedule I placement simply “not accurate” and “not tenable.”’
Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Incident ‘Man-Made’: Parliament
Thursday, 05 July 2012
‘Japanese parliamentary panel has found that the incident at Fukushima nuclear plant has been a “man-made disaster” and not only due to the tsunami that hit the country last year.
“It is clear that this accident was a man-made disaster,” the panel said in a report released on Thursday. It also criticized “governments, regulatory authorities and Tokyo Electric Power” for lacking “a sense of responsibility to protect people’s lives and society.”‘
Read more: Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Incident ‘Man-Made’: Parliament
Believe nothing 