Hat-tip Becca of DelphiForums.

NASA needs a goal, a destination and objective upon which to focus, else it is going nowhere. That's effectively what US Sentators told the space agency on Wednesday. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden disagreed.

...Bolden said after the hearing that critics were confusing the lack of a specific destination or timetable with the lack of a goal.

NASA has a goal, a big one, Bolden said. It's going to Mars. But Bolden added that getting astronauts to Mars is more than a decade away and NASA needs to upgrade its technology or else it never will get there.

"We want to go to Mars," Bolden said. "We can't get there right now because we don't have the technology to do it."

That is why he said the new NASA plan invests in developing in-orbit fuel depots, inflatable spaceship parts, new types of propulsion and other technology.

Bolden would not even guess when NASA would try to send astronauts to Mars, but said the technology NASA is studying could cut the trip to the Red Planet from three months to a matter of days if it works.

"We're oh-so-close, but we've got to invest in that technology," Bolden testified.

Bolden is correct; the amount of technological, economic and industrial growth that resulted from our push to the Moon resulted in many of the marvelous advances in science that have revolutionized many areas in the public and private sectors.

Another goal -- one that has been "out there" for a while and constantly revived -- is the desire to bring back samples of Martian life for study on Earth:

"At this particular time, I can't provide a date certain for the first human mission to Mars," Bolden told the Senate's science and space subcommittee. However, Bolden recently told the Houston Chronicle's editorial board it was his "personal vision" to put NASA on a path toward a human Mars landing sometime in the 2030s.

That's the kind of talk that could energize further robotic exploration of Mars, including two-way trips. "Non-human sample return would feed very directly into the technology for human exploration," Conley told me.

If Bolden's vision holds true, a lot of questions will have to be answered in the next 20 years. Conley said one biggie is how safe astronauts would be on the Red Planet. A report from the National Research Council, titled "Safe on Mars," outlined a whole list of potential nasties ranging from alien microbes to toxic hexavalent chromium. Some of those risks can be assessed only by up-close analysis of Martian samples, Conley said.

Of course, bringing back samples of extra-terrestrial life has its own inherent risks, as speculated in science fiction fare such The Andromeda Strain, Alien and -- perhaps most appropriate of the three -- Species. From the article cited above by Alan Boyles on MSNBC,

When fresh Martian material is brought back - either by astronauts or by special-delivery robots - it'll have to be contained much more tightly than the Apollo moonwalkers were 40 years ago. The way Rummel sees it, our planet was lucky that the moon was most sincerely dead. "If there had been anything alive on the moon at that time, it would be alive here now," he said. (On the flip side, we may have left something alive on the moon.)

NASA's plans call for Martian samples to be handled as if they were top-priority biohazards, in a containment facility equivalent to a Biosafety Level 4 lab.

Ideally, such a lab would also have the contact numbers for Michael Madsen and Sigourney Weaver.

This is an Open Thread.

Hat-tip to Lordrag of DelphiForums for finding this.

Ever wonder about your relative place in the Universe? Well, someone did. And that someone -- or group of "someones" -- put this together. From the YouTube information:

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The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.

For more information visit http://www.amnh.org
__________

Video posted to YouTube by AMNHorg.

This is an Open Thread.

Here's a video clip of the recent landing of the Space Shuttle Atlantis as it returned from its latest mission.

Some other fun stuff on the science and technology front -- specifically historical in nature, can be found here:

"Trailblazing" website reveals 350 years of science
Sun Nov 29, 2009 8:49pm EST

By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - A gruesome account of a 1666 blood transfusion and amusing notes about how an 8-year-old Mozart responded to tests of his genius were published on Monday as part of an online history of scientific endeavor.

The "Trailblazing" website was created by Britain's influential science academy the Royal Society, and includes handwritten papers on some of the most important scientific discoveries of the past three and a half centuries.

Neat stuff, eh?

This is an Open Thread.

Cute -- and with a variety of implications:

Sleep well. :)

Hat-tip Neon Vincent.

A little back round. There once was a Huge Linen Factory, called Cannon than Pillow Tex {sp?}, than something else after I moved here of which the name eludes me. Well they closed it down a few years ago with thousands of job loses not only within but the supporting small companies. It was one of the biggest, if not thee biggest, collective job loss numbers in North Carolina.

So just for kicks and giggles, have you ever wondered what a self-fulfilling prophecy was or wanted to see a self-perpetuating feedback mechanism in action? Or, even more simply and direct, find out why it's not good to break things before you at least learn more about what they do?

Sometimes, it's smart to learn more about the big picture before taking action on incomplete assumptions.

Attribution: xkcd.¹

From the site Discovery.com comes this AP Report that Fish Poop helps balance ocean acidity:

Jan. 15, 2009 -- The ocean's delicate acid balance may be getting help from an unexpected source, fish poop.

The increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere not only drives global warming, but also raises the amount of CO2 dissolved in ocean water, tending to make it more acid, potentially a threat to sea life.

Who knew?

There's some excellent information exploring this discovery out there among the vast intertubes network, but one really interesting discussion has been taking place on the science blog The Questionable Authority. In particular, check out the comments where you can run across nuggets ranging from a great link to How to talk to a climate skeptic to an interesting comment regarding anthropogenic vs non-anthropogenic carbon cycles. After reading all of the above, I began to wonder if the "common wisdom" explored here was, in light of the latest scoop on fish poop and the oceanic carbon cycle, now a bit too presumptuous.

Anywho, that's the latest scoop. Below the fold, a selection of semi-related (maybe -- kinda-sorta) past Open Threads.

Which reminds me -- this is an Open Thread, too.

The end of the year approaches, and with it comes the promise that we will be yet another year wiser; those who have survived the turbulent ups and downs of the year have also achieved the milestone of becoming yet another year older.

That need not sound as ominous or regretful as it appears.

I'd like to recommend an article that appeared in this past Tuesday's Science Times. Carl Zimmer has written a four page review of new advances in genetics research, Now - The Rest of the Genome, in which he discusses the flexibility which which genes express themselves depending upon circumstances within a given cell or cells. Particular genes apparently are not programmed to produce a specific protein.

Dear Sarah,

As a former fundamentalist, I'd like to call you on what you are doing.

Sometimes, it's hard to start the day off with a bit of sunshine.

Typhoon Fengshen Sinks Princess of Stars,
700-plus Missing, Presumed Dead

Bad news from the Philippines, via Reuters:

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Philippine ferry sinks; 700-plus passengers missing
By Manny Mogato and Rosemarie Francisco, Sun Jun 22, 2008 5:41am EDT

MANILA, June 22 (Reuters) - Rescuers braved rough seas on Sunday searching for survivors of a Philippine ferry that capsized with more than 700 passengers and crew during a typhoon that has killed scores and left a trail of destruction.

So far, only four people are known to have survived and they said many passengers did not make it off the MV Princess of Stars in time.

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Click the link before the excerpt for the full story.

"Though the weather outside is frightful..."

The news of the disaster in the Philippines comes right on the back of this piece, which in and of itself isn't exactly full of warmth and promise:

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Extreme floods, storms seen increasing in North America
Reporting by Timothy Gardner, editing by Chris Wilson

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Floods, droughts and severe storms are likely to ravage North America more frequently as emissions of planet-warming gases rise, according to a U.S. government study.

Extreme weather events, "could seriously affect" human health, agricultural production, and the availability and quality of water in the future, according to the report, issued by the Climate Change Science Program on Thursday.

_____

Click the link before the excerpt for the full story.

Looking Back At Prior Dire Predictions and Misconstrued News

With all this hullabaloo, it calls to mind an interesting story from the 2004 timeframe -- two stories, in fact.

1. From The Observer:

   Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us
   by Mark Townsend and Paul Harris in New York, The Observer, Sunday February 22, 2004

   The piece tells of a March 2003 report commissioned by the Pentagon to study to worst-case potentials of Climate Change / global warming, and created quite a stir when news of the report got out. But the news may have been misconstrued.

2. From the The San Francisco Chronicle:

   Pentagon-sponsored climate report sparks hullabaloo in Europe
   But new ice age unlikely, Bay Area authors of study say
   by Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer, Wednesday, February 25, 2004

   _____

   All that Schwartz and Randall did was to investigate the "worst-case" possible events, those that are highly unlikely to happen but, if they did happen, would be catastrophic, especially in their impacts on U.S. military operations -- "low probability, high impact" events, as they are known in the futurological world.

   [...snip...]

   It isn't even a Pentagon report in the strict sense of the word. It does not constitute an official DOD position paper or policy statement, conducted by scientists and military experts. Rather, all the work was done by Schwartz and Randall -- neither of whom is an atmospheric scientist -- based on their review of what real atmospheric scientists have done.

   _____

Well, it's good thing we got all that settled. We wouldn't want to leave people thinking that things could get much worse.

This is an Open Thread.

Last Friday, on a whim, I created an open thread called Winds of Change, Comfortably Numb. Like the song from the video, the winds of change are blowing -- quite literally, too: the climate is changing, in social & political ways as well as ecological terms.¹

_____

The future's in the air
I can feel it everywhere
Blowing with the wind of change
_____

New studies were published over the weekend that serve to reinforce some previous data about the issue of global climate change. In his piece Warming and Storms, Uncertainty and Ethics, Andrew C. Revkin writes about how those studies may impact our approach to human-induced global warming:

_____

Over the weekend, a pair of very different climate studies — one physical, one social — illustrated two uncomfortable, and related, realities confronting society as it grapples with possible responses to human-driven global warming.
_____

Revkin is right: both studies, particularly when combined, leave us with some disturbing things to mull over.

So the multitude marveled when they saw the mute speaking, the maimed made whole, the lame walking, and the blind seeing; and they glorified the God of Israel.¹

It is a tale at least as old as the New Testament within the Christian faiths -- the restoral of speech to those who could no longer talk, the return of sight to those who had gone blind, the repair of limbs for those who have been maimed, the recovery of mobility for the lame, the healing of disease for the afflicted, the casting out of demons for the possessed and insane, and ultimately the resurrection of the dead.

All accomplished with but a simple touch, a gesture, a sign or a spoken word.

That is the essence of the miraculous within the realm of legends, lore, philosophy, religion and mythology. Tomes as diverse as the Bible² and tales from folklore and fantasy dealing with stories of creation, magic, the battle between good and evil and the end of the world abound, but the boundaries dividing the worlds of reality and fantasy, myth and legend, faith and fact are blurring now.

Once the sole provenance of magick and fantasy, the pursuit of miracles and our meager attempts to understand life, the universe and everything has jumped the rails: it is no longer constrained to a world where myth and fantasy play a significant role. Such answers are no longer found only in folklore and religion. Now, the search of these answers is also the baileywick of science.

When I was in grade school, one of the many reading assignments given to students included a book titled Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.¹

The novel relates the plight of a widowed field mouse, Mrs. Frisby, whose family must travel every year to a summer home to avoid being mowed by the farmer who owns the land she and her family live on. When Mrs. Frisby's son, Timothy, becomes ill, Mrs. Frisby must venture for help. [...snip...] ...from a nest of rats which lives nearby under a rose bush.

She discovers that the nest is a community of long-lived, super-intelligent rats, [...snip...]

The rats had been captured and experimented upon by people from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

Part of the series of experiments at NIMH involved an acceleration of their intelligence. They were able to learn to read, write, and operate complicated machines. Their new intelligence was much more developed than their captors realised, because they were able to escape from the NIMH laboratories and migrate to their present location. She learns, too, that her husband had been part of a group of mice who had been at NIMH with the rats...

[Emphasis mine.]

It was an interesting book, and the tale has been popularized through reprintings and made into a movie. Although the technology for breeding "super-" anything has been dreamt of for years,² but it wasn't one I gave much additional thought to until I ran across a curious article just the other day...

A story in ABC News from early June of 2007 appears to indicate that science is now -- finally -- taking a look at the possibility that animals can have personalities. The article Do Pets Really Have Personality? didn't suggest anything that would come as a surprise to pet owners, of course. Regardless of pet size, shape, make or model, humans have been attributing them with personalities for years.

Of course, humans who don't own pets usually thought pet owners were crazy.

(Smoky doesn't look too impressed by the news, either.)