Science, Technology & Health: August 2006 Archives
The winner of contract to build the next lunar spacecraft will be announced this afternoon. The project is now called Orion, but many in the industry still know it as the Crew Exploration Vehicle, or CEV. Regarding the contract:
Aug. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Northrop Grumman Corp., maker of the vehicle that landed a man on the moon 37 years ago, may beat out Lockheed Martin Corp. for a $4.5 billion contract to build the next lunar spacecraft.The new vehicle, called Orion, is the centerpiece of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's $122 billion effort to return to the moon as early as 2018. Northrop is the leading contender for the award to be announced today, analysts including J.P. Morgan Securities Inc.'s Joseph Nadol said.
Not only is the contract worth a lot of money, but the project itself should be very exciting. One of the most interesting features of the announcement is that NASA has been so good at keeping the secret, after telling Congress who they selected over a month ago.
It's easy to predict the weather in Los Angeles: it's pretty much the same every day. I never realized how bad meteorologists were at predicting the weather until I moved here to St. Louis. They're commonly off by 10 degrees or more, and they can't even say if it's going to rain or not. For instance, yesterday was supposed to have a high of 78, but by late morning the temp was already 86 and the weathermen didn't even bother to update their forecasts! Today is forecast to be "8 degrees warmer than yesterday" but it's definitely not going to be 94... which means that it will probably be 86 again, and that the weathermen didn't even notice how far off their predictions were yesterday!
The International Astronomical Union has decreed that Pluto is not a "planet" by (re)defining the word. I put "re" in parentheses because it's not clear that "planet" was ever really defined other than as a list with nine members. So now there's a new definition that results in Pluto being stripped of its status, much to everyone's dismay except (some) astronomers.
So what is Pluto now? A "dwarf planet". But apparently "dwarf" isn't an adjective describing Pluto's size, it's part of a whole new term: "dwarf planets" aren't "planets". So what have we got?
The decision establishes three main categories of objects in our solar system.* Planets: The eight worlds from Mercury to Neptune.
* Dwarf Planets: Pluto and any other round object that "has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit, and is not a satellite."
* Small Solar System Bodies: All other objects orbiting the Sun.
The problem with the old definition of "planet" is that it included Pluto but had no specific criteria that would have prevented hundreds of other bodies (some, like 2003 UB313, larger than Pluto) from logically falling to the same category. Despite everyone's affection for Pluto, no one really wanted to expand the list of planets to that length... and scientists tend to dislike arbitrary classifications.
Unfortunately, the new definition appears to be based on the idea that a planet must "clear the neighborhood around its orbit", which is somewhat ambiguous. Says an astronomer in charge of exploring Pluto:
"I'm embarassed for astornomy," said Alan Stern, leader of NASA's New Horizon's mission to Pluto and a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. "Less than 5 percent of the world's astronomers voted." ...Stern, in charge of the robotic probe on its way to Pluto, said the language of the resolution is flawed. It requires that a planet "has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit." But Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune all have asteroids as neighbors.
"It's patently clear that Earth's zone is not cleared," Stern told SPACE.com. "Jupiter has 50,000 trojan asteroids," which orbit in lockstep with the planet.
So, again, we seem to be stuck with an unclear definition that, though more aesthetically pleasing to some, doesn't add up to more than "I know it when I see it".
Last night I bought a Stinger 40 Watt Electronic Bug Killer from Lowe's to help control the insect population around my new house. Unfortunately, it looks like ultraviolet lights don't attract mosquitos very well, and those are the bugs I hate the most. The reviews of the product on the Home Depot site indicate that it works well, but How Stuff Works says that although it kills lots of bugs, most of them won't be mosquitos. Still, the device comes with an Octenol cartridge that's supposed to attract biting insects, so we'll see how it goes.
If it doesn't work, I'll just return it in a couple of weeks. I may end up having to spend real money on a mosquito magnet.
Does anyone have any recommendations for home security systems? We're considering getting Brinks or ADT, but as I'm perusing the internet I see all sorts of do-it-yourself alternatives like this SecureLinc web-enabled home security kit that comes with motion detectors (etc.) and sends out alerts over the phone or via the web. Has anyone used any of these systems?
Kevin Perrott sent me a link to the Technology Review's announcement that no one won the SENS Challenge by demonstrating that Aubrey de Gray's "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" proposals were so fantastic as to be unworthy of scientific discussion. (Granted, that's not a very high standard.)
In the end, the judges felt that no submission met the criterion of the challenge and disproved SENS, although they unanimously agreed that one submission, by Preston W. Estep and his colleagues, was the most eloquent. The judges also noted, however, that de Grey had not convincingly defended SENS and that many of his ideas seemed somewhat fanciful.
The judges of the challenge wrote:
SENS has many unsupported claims and is certainly not scientifically proven. I personally would be surprised if de Grey is correct in the majority of his claims. However, I don't think Estep et al. have proved that SENS is false; that would require more research. In some cases, SENS makes claims that run parallel to existing research (while being more sensational). Future investigation into those areas will almost certainly illuminate the controversy. Until that time, people like Estep et al. are free to doubt SENS. I share many of those doubts, but it would be overstating the case to assert that Estep et al. have proved their point.
Here's a press release by The Mprize in support of SENS.
