respublica

Super Moon This Weekend

Tonight at 10:35 CST, a super moon, the biggest and brightest full moon of the year will begin to rise climb to its highest point.  It will be 31,000 miles closer to the earth than any other full moon this year which will make for some spectacular viewing as it reaches its closest point at around 11 tonight, CST. 

It will be 16 percent brighter than normal and cause some dramatic high and low tides along the coasts. Not only that, but it may interfer with a meteor shower from Haley's comet.

What a night to be outside and watching the sky. The moon will begin its rise in east at around 6:45 CST, being closest to the horizon and providing the most astounding view.

Inventive Founding Fathers

The five best inventions by our country's founders.

Coronal Mass Ejection heading right at us today

That's right.

On Sunday NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory observed a complex magnetic eruption on the sun which unleashed a large coronal mass ejection (CME) blasting in the direction of Earth.

Today some huge magnetic eruption is headed right at us.

Sounds like a movie made for those 3-D glasses. 

Eclipse

Tomorrow morning, we'll see a lunar eclipse beginning at 5:17 and at its greatest at 6:30.

The sun coming up at around those same times might make it a bit difficult to see the entire eclipse.

The question is, do you want to get up at 5:15 on a Saturday morning?

The hottest place in the world

Believe it or not, the hottest place is inside a Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider housed in the Department of Energy's Brookhaven Laboratory in New York state.

What are scientists doing with this Collider?  They hope to gain insight into what occurred in the first microseconds after the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago.

Oh no.  Please tell us our tax money isn't being used to support this work.

News you'll probably like

A study, yes another study, by the American Journal of Hypertension, found that there are blood pressure lowering properties in cocoa products like dark chocolate and cocoa drinks.

Hurray.  Pass the Fanny May chocolate bar.  And, open up another pint can of Sheer Bliss Chocolate.  Happy New Year!

Didn't we all secretly hope chocolate was good for us?

How relevant are political science studies?

Senator Tom Coburn wants the National Science Foundation to stop wasting the federal research dollars it receives from the government on political science studies.  Not surprisingly, many political scientists are vehemently opposed to this cut off in funding, pointing to current Nobel Prize winner, Elinor Ostrom as a case in point.  Ostrom frequently received federal funds through the National Science Foundation.

However, others in the field agree that a lot of studies being done and federally funded have little public benefit and are, just plain junk food political science.  Easy to take in, but of little import.

Senator Coburn believes money given to the National Science Foundation should not be used for things like "What impact does YouTube have on elections, but rather be used for cancer research and other hard science, the very things for which the NSF was created.   

We are living in an age when there are way too many studies, most just plain silly, paid for through federal grant monies or commercial/special interests looking for a way to sell their product or point of view.  Too many end up with conclusions that most of us would consider "obvious".  Take this one for example.

 Or how about this one?

What would we do without studies?   

One shocking morning

A few news items which shocked me awake this morning.

Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize

We bombed the moon.

The Cardinals lost a game they should have won in an inexplicable manner.

Mizzou lost to Nebraska.  They were ahead 12-0 in the 4th quarter.  We went to bed.  How did Nebraska score 27 points in 13 minutes?

New thoughts on losing weight

Brown fat.  Scientists have taken a look brown fat and weight loss. 

Brown fat can consume huge numbers of calories when activated by cold temperatures.  If you want to lose weight, stay cold, shiver, keep your rooms set between 61 and 66 degrees.  Brown fat seems to go dormant when a person, or a mouse, is in a comfortably heated room.

Sounds like misery, but then, all weight loss processes are miserable in one way or the other.

What would we do without scientists?

Another new study:

Old age begins at 27.