Pleiades sent in some interesting links.
The firs is about the suface of one of Saturrn's moons, Encaledus.
There seem to be strange boulders on Saturn's largest moon.
On 14 July, Cassini swooped in for an unprecedented close-up view of the wrinkled moon. Its Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) camera has since returned pictures of a boulder-strewn landscape that is currently beyond explanation. The "boulders" appear to range between 10 and 20 metres in diameter in the highest-resolution images, which can resolve features just 4 m across.
“That’s a surface texture I have never seen anywhere else in the solar system,” says David Rothery, a planetary geologist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK.
Cracks crisscross Enceladus's surface - possibly as a result of the moon being repeatedly squeezed and stretched by the gravity of Saturn and other moons nearby. But Rothery points out the boulders avoid - rather than fill - the cracks. This might indicate that the fracturing took place after the boulders had already formed.
Alien landscape
John Spencer, a Cassini team member at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, US, agrees that the images are puzzling. “You would expect to see small craters or a smooth, snow-covered landscape at this resolution," he told New Scientist. "This is just strange. In fact, I have a really hard time understanding what I’m seeing.”
NASA scientists have been locked in discussions since 15 July and are expected to pass judgment on what they think this peculiar surface might be later on Tuesday.
But Elizabeth Turtle, a Cassini imaging team member at the University of Arizona in Tucson, US, warns there will be no quick answers. “Trying to figure out what is going on is going to take a lot longer than a weekend of swapped emails,” she says.
If that's not interesting enough, here's another article from New Scientist on the Huygens probe:
IF LIFE exists on Titan, Saturn's biggest moon, we could soon know about it - as long as it's the methane-spewing variety. The chemical signature of microbial life could be hidden in readings taken by the European Space Agency's Huygens probe when it landed on Titan in January.
Titan's atmosphere is about 5 per cent methane, and Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffet Field, California, thinks that some of it could be coming from methanogens, or methane-producing microbes. Now he and Heather Smith of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, have worked out the likely diet of such organisms on Titan.
They think the microbes would breathe hydrogen rather than oxygen, and eat organic molecules drifting down from the upper atmosphere. They considered three available substances: acetylene, ethane and more complex organic gunk known as tholins. Ethane and tholins turn out to provide little more than the minimum energy requirements of methanogenic bacteria on Earth. The more tempting high-calorie option is acetylene, yielding six times as much energy per mole as either ethane or tholins.
McKay and Smith calculate that if methanogens are thriving on Titan, their breathing would deplete hydrogen levels near the surface to one-thousandth that of the rest of the atmosphere. Detecting this difference would be striking evidence for life, because no known non-biological process on Titan could affect hydrogen concentrations as much.
One hope for testing their idea rests with the data from an instrument on Huygens called the GCMS, which recorded Titan's chemical make-up as the probe descended. It will take time to analyse the raw data, partly because hydrogen's signal will have to be separated from those of other molecules. "Eventually, I hope, we will have numbers for at least upper limits for hydrogen," says Hasso Niemann of Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, principal investigator of the GCMS.
So the Huygens Probe is doing its 'thang' nicely.
Also from Pleiades is this article from Rense.com about the dropping of the A-Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But this is disputed by Kuznick and Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US. They are presenting their evidence at a meeting in London on Thursday organised by Greenpeace and others to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the bombings. Looking for peace
New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman's main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says.
According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was "looking for peace". Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb.
"Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan," says Selden. Truman was also worried that he would be accused of wasting money on the Manhattan Project to build the first nuclear bombs, if the bomb was not used, he adds.
Most of you know my opinion so I won't go into it here; sufffice to say I'm glad somebody on the Allied side noticed the inconsistencies to the claim it ended WWII. Not that textbooks will change.
So here's the hypothetical. "What happenes if the government of japan organises mass demonstrations on the streeets of Tokyo over this and the US Embassy gets ddamaged; and the japanese say, "Well, it's your fault for hurting the sentiments of our people..."
Shuttle launch Update
The Shuttle Launch is in crisis again. It's scheduled for a tuesday launch, but fuel gauge problems that have not been locked down and fixed still hangs over the craft. Will they, won't they? The suspense is killing them, so to speak.
"We have had a great many challenges preparing the space shuttle Discovery and her crew to get ready for this historic return-to-flight mission. Certainly, that's the cost of creating the safest shuttle to date," said NASA test director Jeff Spaulding.
The latest challenge involves the hydrogen fuel gauges in Discovery's giant external tank.
Mission managers had yet to settle on a strategy for how best to manage the fuel gauges, which forced a launch delay the first time around. One option would be to proceed with liftoff if just three of the four gauges work, which would mean bending a launch rule that was implemented in the wake of the 1986 Challenger disaster.
A decision on whether to relax the rule for this first space shuttle flight in 2 1/2 years was expected by Sunday evening.
Despite exhaustive effort, NASA still does not know exactly why one of the fuel gauges in Discovery's external tank failed a prelaunch test on July 13.
Workers last week repaired faulty electrical grounding inside Discovery in hopes that would solve the problem, and swapped the wiring between the troublesome fuel sensor and another one to better understand the issue if it reappears.
The same type of problem occurred back in April during a fueling test, and was written off then as an "unexplained anomaly."
The fuel gauges are needed to prevent the main engines from shutting down too soon or too late during liftoff. The first scenario could result in a risky, never-attempted emergency landing; the second could cause the engine turbines to rupture and, quite possibly, destroy the spacecraft.
Only two fuel gauges are needed to avoid such dangerous situations, but NASA requires all four to be working at liftoff for redundancy.
NASA has just one week to launch Discovery and its crew of seven to the international space station, before putting off the mission until September.
Well, so much for that if it gets put off to September again.
Getting Prank'd Upon
Over the weekend, as some of you may know, I was at the receiving end of a pretty silly prank from one David Ball. The prank consisted of setting up a false ID here on Blogger, posing as somebody from Louisiana USA and tricking me nto a dialogue whereby he solicited a negative comment out of me about him; and then posting my damning remark up at his blog. Then, on Saturday night around 11pm, I received a creepy phone call which featured a recorded 'evil laugh' at the other end followed by a hang-up. You know, the sort of creepy behaviour you get in some kind of bad movies, which in turn tells you about the paucity of his imagination, but whatever. More bluntly, it's harrassment. It'ss even a little scary when you know his obsessive-compulsive behaviour.
As a result, I've had to re-post some of the entries of the previous days's posts just to get rid of his comments. If you're wondering what happened to your comments, well, I exercised editorial censorship (which does compromise my principles greatly) because I don't think David Ball's behaviour is acceptable in any way shape or form. So dear readers if you feel put out by this, you are welcome to complain, but please understand, my hand was forced by the downright sneaky, petty behaviour of David Ball who operates under many cyber-aliases.
Then I find that David has gone to a couple of my songs on iComposition and posted 1-star ratings with sarcastic remarks, which is fine if:
a) the acts were unrelated to the other obvious cyber-attacks; and
b) they were his genuine considered musical opinion;
c) and if his musical opinion actually carried some weight or credibility
- but clearly they are part of the 'harrassment strategy'. he is undertaking. This is getting seriously petty and infantile. I have no control over his actions so all I can do is tell him to stop. As in 'No', means 'NO'
So, David, stop.
I don't like you any more. It should be no surprise to you that I don't; and I don't know how you expect me to like you or trust you as a friend when you behave like such a fuckturd. There is no case to be gleaned by drawing out negative commments about you from me because it's no secret that I no longer respect you, feel that you are trustworthy; are a friend in anyway shape or form or are worth spending time talking to. I don't like your self-pity and insistence we all fall in line with it; and all the blame you throw around for who your are and what you are today. It's not my fault.
So if you don't want to set the ship right, then stop fooling around and leave me alone. I've been blocking your e-mail since 6th January this year (when you publicly wrote you wished me dead); I certainly don't interfere in your life; I avoid making comments about you even when provoked (which indeed you told Big W you liked doing); I make an effort not to contact you or get into your social circles. So kindly please leave my life, get some counselling help and stay the hell away.
- Art Neuro
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