Cleaning Windows with Newspapers

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I have heard that newspapers are really good for cleaning windows. Most people say it is because the paper it is printed on is very soft and leaves behind no lint, but I have heard that it is really because of the ink in the paper. Some say that the ink can "absorb" dirt and finger prints. Does an

Baby Fat May Not Be So Cute After All – New York Times

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New York Times (blog)
Baby Fat May Not Be So Cute After All
New York Times
... was too stigmatizing,” said Dr. Elsie M. Taveras of Harvard Medical School, lead author of a recent paper on racial disparities in early risk factors. ...
Baby Fat or Early Obesity?New York Times (blog)
East Africa: A Growing Childhood Obesity in RegionAllAfrica.com
How to Kick Childhood Obesity in the Tush ... One Household at a TimeHuffington Post (blog)

all 21 news articles »

Space Policy Snapshot

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Workers Prep For Final NASA Missions At Michoud, WDSU

"Two sets of astronauts will visit NASA's Michoud facility this week, even as the facility's future remains in question. Hundreds of workers have been laid off over the past two years. Lockheed Martin was contracted between 1973 and 2008 to do $10.7 billion in work for the federal government. With federal funding for NASA in question, the 1,426 people who still work there wonder what is next for the agency and for themselves."

Fla. Senator Says Obama 'Restructuring' NASA Plans, WESH

"Florida's senior senator, after talking to the president, said U.S. astronauts could wind up launching in an American-built spacecraft after all. It would mean developing a giant rocket based on space shuttle engines, tanks and boosters to go with a new spacecraft, Billow said, perhaps the very one NASA was designing anyway."

NASA's down-to-earth problem, op ed, Lou Friedman, LA Times

"However the budget proposal is acted on in Congress, it is clear that the nation is not going to go ahead with the Constellation project, which had a primary goal of returning humans to the moon by 2020 -- neither its Ares I rocket, which was to replace the space shuttle in delivering humans into Earth orbit, nor its moon mission. The 2004 Vision for Space Exploration may have been farsighted, but its implementation plan for Constellation was shortsighted: an inadequate goal and inadequate funds to achieve it."

Our Opinion: Saving Constellation is a noble mission, editorial, Tallahassee Democrat

"We salute Florida's temporary U.S. Sen. George LeMieux for working mightily in Washington to stop the de-escalation of America's space programs, most specifically termination of the Constellation Program as submitted in a budget proposal by the president. Mr. LeMieux, offering an amendment to the FAA Reauthorization bill regarding NASA, knows the importance of space missions to Florida. If diminished, hundreds of jobs will be lost along the Space Coast, but the loss of science, research, technology and space travel aspirations will create a negative ripple effect in myriad ways well beyond our state."

Can commercial space win over Congress?, Space Review

"At last week's Senate hearing ULA president and CEO Michael Gass said his company was interested in and capable of serving the human spaceflight market. "The EELV rockets provide the quickest and safest approach for closing the gap following the retirement of the space shuttle," he said. "We will be working with multiple companies that will compete for crew services, and we plan to provide launch services in support of their proposals."

NASA spies on USSR hardware | Bad Astronomy

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I freely admit my headline is misleading, but I had to throw in a little Cold War propaganda given the pictures below. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted Soviet lunar robots on the Moon, relics from the original Space Race.

LRO_USSR_landers

On the left is the LRO image of the Luna 17 lander, which touched down on the Moon’s surface in late 1970, delivering the Lunakhod 1 rover (which eventually traveled over 10 km (6 miles) across the Moon’s surface). The image on the right is of Luna 21, which set the Lunakhod 2 rover down in 1973. Note the higher scale, which clearly shows the tracks of the rover as it moved around its base station.

That is so cool! And if you go to those links, there are closeups from the Soviet landers showing what the view looked like from the surface of the Moon all those decades ago.

And for an added bit of coolness, Universe Today’s Nancy Atkinson dug up the story that both rovers were used by the Soviets to celebrate International Women’s Day. I’m old enough to remember how the Soviets were vilified by the American government… and while some of it may have been deserved, they were not the monsters they were portrayed as. I think Nancy’s story is an important one. We may have been opponents in the race to the Moon, and deadly enemies back on Earth, but we’re also all humans. At least in that respect, nothing has changed.


Fact Checking In Houston

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Mitchel: 'You give up space, you lose', The Bay Area Citizen

"[BAHEP President Bob Mitchell] Think about this: It was no coincidence that it took seven months to appoint a NASA administrator because the transition team of Lori Garver and her three people from OMB put this plan together, and at the end of seven months when we were all wondering what the heck is going on, they were busy hatching their plan to take NASA dollars and spend them with entrepreneurs of commercial space."

Keith's note: Hilarious. Hey Bob: please name the "three people from OMB" on the transition team at NASA. Remember - you claim that they are (were) from "OMB".

SpaceShipTwo flies, on schedule

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WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo take off Monday morning from Mojave (credit: Mark Greenberg)

WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo take off Monday morning from Mojave (credit: Mark Greenberg)

Yesterday morning WhiteKnightTwo took off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California with a special payload attached to it: SpaceShipTwo, making its first, albeit captive carry, flight. The flight lasted two hours and 54 minutes and achieved an altitude of about 13,700 meters (45,000 feet). The flight went well, according to all accounts, and Burt Rutan said in a Virgin statement, “The captive carry flight signifies the start of what we believe will be extremely exciting and successful spaceship flight test program.”

The flight also took place roughly on schedule. As Virgin Galactic’s Stephen Attenborough said last month at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Boulder, Colorado, the first captive carry test would take place by the end of the first quarter of this year (which it achieved with a little over a week to spare). Captive carry tests would continue through the second quarter with the first glide test some time in the third quarter; the first powered test flight would, he hoped, take place by the end of the year.

WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo in flight (credit: Mark Greenberg)

WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo in flight (credit: Mark Greenberg)

One minor thing I noted. As you can see in the picture above, SpaceShipTwo flew without an engine, or, apparently, an engine nozzle: just a black plug of some kind where the engine would go. See the closeup below:

ss2engineplug

Compare that to an image I took of the vehicle during the rollout ceremony last December, when there was at least a replica engine nozzle in place:

ss2nozzle

The Future of Memory

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Some day ago, in a tv show there were a debate about nanotechnologies , and when they get to the future of digital memory (due to the physical restrains) some suggested that a eventual development would be to control the spin of electrons of ones and zeros.

I am not a genius of physic ,