http://www.youtube.com/v/1aXRYZpFKfw?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata Original post: Video: China launches manned Shenzhou-10 craft to experimental space station
Federal officials leery of ‘increasingly warm’ coastal waters near Northeast U.S.
Waters off Northeast US coast unusually warm, says NOAA (via The Christian Science Monitor) Copyright ImageClick to View A lobsterman returns an undersized lobster while checking traps in Mount Desert, Maine, in May 2012.(Robert F. Bukaty/AP/File) From North Carolina to Maine, the waters have been…
Russians to simulate Mars colonization in US desert
The Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in the canyons of Utah resembles the Martian landscape. It’s here the team will experiment with the skills needed to create domestic life on Mars. MDRS was opened in 2002 and has hosted 128 teams from around the globe. In a few days it will for the first time become the temporary home for Russian researchers. Like other crews before them, they’ll make believe they are Mars colonizers, carrying out medical, geological and astronomical research.“The biggest challenge for the crew, as we see it now, is carrying out effective work in complete isolation. Six people will be living in small accommodation and will have to wear spacesuits to go out into the Mars-like desert. Two weeks is not too long, but psychological compatibility is always a challenge” Nikolay Dzis-Voinarovsky, the leader of Team Russia told RT.The most serious obstacle to Team Russia’s mission in Utah so far has been bureaucratic. Two days before the flight to the US, two of the crew members still didn’t have their visas. Dzis-Voinarovsky said they might have to join in later.He also compared MDRS to the international Mars-500 experiment, which was carried out in Moscow in 2010-2011. A crew of five stayed locked in an imitation spacecraft for 17 months, simulating a flight to the red planet and back.MDRS is about what happens once flights are a reality, simulating the daily routine of Mars pioneers. The missions are very short, but at the same time more flexible with teams from around the world being able to learn from each other’s experience.Team Russia was formed in the summer of 2012. Almost all of the crew members are space industry professionals.“It’s a pity, that Russia has recently been witnessing a colossal decline in interest towards space exploration – something the general public is not yet aware of. Too few enthusiasts, too little money in the industry,” Dzis-Voinarovsky says.Russia’s space industry has definitely seen better times, with the USSR sparing no money in its cosmic program. The post-Soviet 1990’s saw space exploration being erased from the government’s priority list. Russia has now been trying to retrieve what it lost with ambitious projects announced by the country’s space agency Roscosmos, construction of the new Vostochny cosmodrome and President Putin promising to inject around $52 billion into the industry up to 2020.The team of space-fans led by Dzis-Voinarovsky is making its own contribution to reviving Russia’s space exploration zeal. Apart from enrolling in the Mars society and going to MDRS, the crew is also creating their own lunar rover. It’s named Selenokhod and is a contestant in the international Google Lunar X PRIZE.According to the contest rules, participants have to assemble a privately financed unmanned spacecraft able to reach the moon by the end of 2015, move at least 500 meters along its surface sending videos and photos back to Earth.Team Russia thinks the Mars-like Utah desert will be the right place to test to their moon robot’s capabilities. … Read More
California prisons punish inmates by racial bloc, not offense
According to a number of documents, including a state response, collected by the ProPublica investigation, some California prison facilities separate and label prisoner blocks by ethnicity in order to “provide visual cues that allow prison officials to prevent race-based victimization, reduce race-based violence, and prevent thefts and assaults.”Though few would argue that maintaining a prison population as large as California’s is an easy task, organizations like the ACLU and the Prison Law Office are fighting the practice, arguing that besides being an uncomfortable reminder of the days of racial segregation, it is an ultimately ineffective way to maintain order.One document collected by ProPublica describes color signs placed above cell doors at men’s prisons across the state: blue for black inmates; white for white; red, green or pink for Latino; and yellow for everyone else.“Rather than targeting actual gang members, they assume every person is a gang member based on the color of their skin,” said Rebekah Evenson, an attorney with the Prison Law Office.According to an analysis conducted by Evenson’s group, nearly half of the 1,445 security lockdowns enacted between January 2010 and November 2012 impacted specific racial or ethnic groups. The report showed that Hispanics were the most habitual target, while inmates categorized as “other” were least likely to be restricted.Though correctional officials with the state of California deny racial targeting, some inmates have come forward with complaints, and in 2011 filed a class action lawsuit claiming racial discrimination.Robert Mitchell, an inmate at High Desert State Prison, testified that he had been swept up into recurring lockdowns because he is black, and had suffered muscular atrophy and pain as he was prevented from exercising a leg injury.Hanif Abdullah, another black inmate suing the state, says he was placed on “modified programming” multiple times, and was kept from attending religious services as well as receiving adequate health care. Modified programming refers to security situations requiring that inmates be prohibited from seeing visitors, visiting the prison yard, or even from attending classes and drug rehabilitation meetings.Though the state’s total prison population recently dropped, with nearly 200,000 inmates the system is still at 150 per cent of its maximum capacity.In 2005, the US Supreme Court ruled that racial classifications must be limited to a narrowly defined and compelling “state interest.” In its opinion brief, which pertained to racially segregating prisoners prior to entering a new correctional facility, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote, “When government officials are permitted to use race as a proxy for gang membership and violence … society as a whole suffers.”Currently, California is the only state in the country known to employ race-based lockdowns, according to the ACLU National Prison Project. … Read More
Rocket fired into Israel from Gaza
A rocket fired from Gaza crashed into southern Israel on Sunday, without causing casualties or damage, shortly after the arrival of US Secretary of State John Kerry on a peace bid, police said. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP the rocket landed in an uninhabited sector of the Negev desert,…
Archeological dig in remote Turkmenistan reveals rare advanced civilization and Bronze Age treasures
Over four millennia ago, the fortress town of Gonur-Tepe might have been a rare advanced civilisation before it was buried for centuries under the dust of the Kara Kum desert in remote western Turkmenistan. After being uncovered by Soviet archaeologists in the last century, Gonur-Tepe, once home to…
Phoenix may not survive climate change
If cities were stocks, you’d want to short Phoenix.Of course, it’s an easy city to pick on. The nation’s 13th largest metropolitan area (nudging out Detroit) crams 4.3 million people into a low bowl in a hot desert, where horrific heat waves and windstorms visit it regularly. It snuggles next to the nation’s largest nuclear plant and, having exhausted local sources, it depends on an improbable infrastructure to suck water from the distant (and dwindling) Colorado River.In Phoenix, you don’t ask: What could go wrong? You ask: What couldn’t? And that’s the point, really. Phoenix’s multiple vulnerabilities, which are plenty daunting taken one by one, have the capacity to magnify one another, like compounding illnesses. In this regard, it’s a quintessentially modern city, a pyramid of complexities requiring large energy inputs to keep the whole apparatus humming. The urban disasters of our time — New Orleans hit by Katrina, New York City swamped by Sandy — may arise from single storms, but the damage they do is the result of a chain reaction of failures — grids going down, levees failing, back-up systems not backing up. As you might expect, academics have come up with a name for such breakdowns: infrastructure failure interdependencies. You wouldn’t want to use it in a poem, but it does catch an emerging theme of our time.Continue Reading… … Read More
