Category: Science

Mere low Earth orbit in a space station? It’s too bad we haven’t taken up asteroid mining yet

What’s it like to be 70 years old in space? “All those little aches and pains heal up.”

Not many people celebrate their birthday by burning a fiery arc through the atmosphere, pulling 4.4gs in freefall back to planet Earth, thudding into the ground, and emptying their stomach on the steppes of Kazakhstan.

No one has ever done it on their 70th birthday.

Perhaps this is appropriate because NASA astronaut Don Pettit is a singular individual. His birthday is April 20, and when the Soyuz spacecraft carrying him landed at dawn in Kazakhstan, the calendar had turned over to that date. John Glenn, then 77, was older when he went to space. But no one as old as Pettit had spent as long as he had in orbit, 220 days, on a mission.

On Monday, a little more than a week after returning from orbit, Pettit met with reporters at Johnson Space Center. “It’s good to be back on planet Earth,” he said. “As much as I love exploring space, going into the frontier, and making observations, you do reach a time when it’s time to come home.”

Flying in space at 70 years old

Pettit first went into space at the age of 47 for his first of three long-duration missions to the International Space Station. Since then, he has flown a shorter shuttle mission and two more space station increments. All told, he has lived in space for 590 days, the third-most all-time among NASA astronauts.

“I’ve got a few creaks and groans in my body, but basically I feel the same as I did 20 years ago, and coming back to gravity is provocative,” he said.

After every one of his missions, Pettit said the readjustment to gravity for him has been a challenge. He added that the surprising thing about spaceflight is that it’s not so much your large muscles that ache, but the smaller ones.

“A week ago, I was on station, and I was doing really heavy squats, I was doing dead lifts, I could float around with the greatest of ease, even though I had no trapeze,” he said. “I was at the peak of my game. And then you come back to Earth, and it’s like, God, I can’t even get up from the floor anymore. It’s humbling. But it isn’t about the large muscle groups. It’s about the little, tiny muscles that everybody forgets about because they’re just there and they work. When you’re in weightlessness, these muscles don’t work anymore. And they take a six-month vacation until you come back to Earth. And now, all of a sudden, they start groaning and talking to you, and it takes a while to get all these little muscles tuned back up to being an Earthling.”

In terms of aging, Pettit said, like a lot of older people, he wakes up after a night sleeping on Earth with a sore shoulder or a stiff neck. That’s just part of the process. But microgravity took some of those aches and pains away.

“I love being in space,” he said. “When you’re sleeping, you’re just floating, and your body, all those little aches and pains heal up. You feel like you’re 30 years old again and free of pain, free of everything. So I love being on orbit. It’s a great place to be for me and my physiology.”

The space station isn’t old, either

Pettit has visited the space station on all four of his spaceflights. He lived there, near the beginning of the station’s lifetime, as part of Expedition 6 in 2002. More than two decades later he said the station is operating at full capacity, delivering on its promise of robust scientific research, studies of long-duration spaceflight, and much more. Asked if he felt nostalgic about the station coming to an end in 2030—NASA plans to de-orbit the facility at that time—Pettit said the laboratory should live on.

“I’m a firm believer we don’t need to dump the space station in the ocean at 2030 if we don’t want to,” he said. “If we as a society decided to keep [the] space station, we could keep it like a B-52. I mean, how many years is it they’ve been flying? It’ll be flying close to 100 years by the time the Air Force finally retires the B-52, and it’s basically the same airframe with the same aerodynamics, but everything else is new. There’s no limit to what we can do to [the] space station, except for our will to keep refurbishing it and having the funding necessary.”

And maybe that’s because he wants to go back. Pettit did not rule out flying into space again. For now, he wants to take a few weeks to allow his body time to re-adjust to gravity. He wants to enjoy some time with his family. But soon, he knows, space will start to call to him again.

“I call it the explorer’s paradox,” he said. “When you’re back in civilization, you want to be out there wherever your wilderness happens to be; and then when you’re in your wilderness, it’s like, wow, I need to be back with my family. I think it’s probably gone on for as long as humanity has had people who go off into the wilderness. When the flight docs say I’m ready to go back, I’m ready to do it. And I know John Glenn flew at age 76, something like that, and I’m only 70, so I’ve got a few more good years left. I could see getting another flight or two in before I’m ready to hang up my rocket nozzles.”

DARPA requests proposals for water-prospecting lunar orbiter.

WASHINGTON — DARPA is seeking proposals for a small lunar orbiter that could be used to test operations in very low orbits while prospecting for water ice.

DARPA issued a program solicitation April 14 for a mission concept called Lunar Assay via Small Satellite Orbiter (LASSO). The agency is seeking proposals for design studies that could lead to construction of a spacecraft.

In its solicitation, DARPA said its interest in LASSO is two-fold. One is to test navigation and propulsion technologies needed for operating in very low orbits around the moon, at altitudes as low as 10 kilometers. At those low altitudes, irregularities in the moon’s gravitational field caused by mass concentrations make it challenging to maintain a safe orbit, requiring frequent maneuvers.

The technologies needed for operating in those low orbits could have applications more generally in cislunar space, DARPA argues, citing the Space Force’s interest in cislunar space situational awareness (SSA). “Sustained and advanced maneuverability for spacecraft is key to enabling further improvements of SSA in cislunar space,” the solicitation states.

Besides testing operations in low orbits, LASSO would also map the lunar surface for concentrations of water ice “that are large enough and with a high enough confidence to justify the expense and energy required to retrieve it,” the solicitation states. The goal would be to cover the entire lunar surface in no more than four years, identifying all regions where subsurface water ice concentrations are at least 5%.

“LASSO will benefit DARPA, and eventually [the U.S. Space Force], by establishing new technologies that can offer increased maneuverability and SSA while also supporting commercial space capabilities and NASA missions by identifying the existence of proven reserves of water,” DARPA concluded in the solicitation.

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We actually have one of, if not the, largest known deposits of these strategic minerals right here in the U.S. We’ve just been too politically lazy, letting the foreign controlled econutz and business owners overly motivated by the bottom line to develop the mining

China’s New Weapon Isn’t a Missile. It’s a Magnet.

On April 4, the Chinese government issued sweeping new export controls on critical rare earth elements in response to the Trump Administration’s reciprocal trade plan. And while the categories of rare earths included — samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium — are unknown to most Americans, they are embedded in everything from smartphones to stealth bombers.

These new restrictions are not just a new volley in the ongoing back-and-forth between Washington and Beijing. For those paying attention, this is a strategic maneuver that puts pressure directly on the backbone of U.S. national defense and the broader high-tech economy.

While the move is couched in the language of national security and non-proliferation compliance, its timing and scope are not accidental. China is leveraging its near-total dominance over the global rare earth supply chain to shape geopolitical outcomes and force the U.S. to respond.

To better understand the government’s options, it’s helpful to know more about what these rare earth elements do. Dysprosium and terbium are used to produce high-temperature-resistant magnets essential for electric motors in guided missiles, aircraft, drones, and naval propulsion systems. Samarium-cobalt magnets power everything from F-35 jet actuators to targeting systems. Gadolinium is a key component in military-grade sonar. Scandium-aluminum alloys reduce weight while maintaining strength in aerospace structures. Lutetium is increasingly used in advanced radiation detection and positron emission tomography (PET) systems.

These are not luxury materials. They are irreplaceable components in mission-critical systems. It is impossible to build an advanced hypersonic glide vehicle, a submarine-launched cruise missile, or a battlefield drone swarm without them.

China dominates the pipeline for these materials entering the rest of the world, controlling approximately 70 – 85% of their global production and processing capacity. In many cases, such as with dysprosium and terbium, China is not just the dominant supplier, it is the only economically viable one.

The implications of the new restrictions extend far beyond defense. These same elements are foundational to industries that define modern civilization: consumer electronics, factory automation and robotics, health care, electric and hybrid vehicles, wind turbines, medical imaging, semiconductors, appliances, and more. Now Beijing is threatening to block them from those it considers its adversaries.

China has a history of leveraging their advantage in this sector. In 2010, China restricted rare earth exports during a territorial dispute with Japan. In 2023, it imposed curbs on gallium, germanium, and graphite (important in semiconductor production) in response to U.S. chip export bans. Last year, it strengthened restrictions on gallium and germanium and added antinomy and superhard materials.

This latest move is most expansive yet. It targets a broader array of elements, and the regulatory language is sweeping, covering metals, oxides, alloys, compounds, magnets, and even mixed-material targets used in thin-film manufacturing. China is proving that it is willing to endure economic blowback to assert long-term strategic control, and as tensions with the U.S. rise, the boundaries of a new materials Cold War are being drawn.

The Trump Administration is watching this carefully and has already begun taking aggressive steps toward putting the U.S. in a greater position of rare earth and critical mineral self-sufficiency. But American progress in this area over the past 20 years has been sluggish. Building rare earth processing plants is capital-intensive and geopolitically challenging.

Fortunately, the U.S. can access its own rare earth resources within its borders. The Mountain Pass deposit in California is now scaling up production, although it still sends a substantial amount of its mined ore to China for processing. It also largely lacks the heavy rare earths dysprosium and terbium. Another very large resource, located in Nebraska, can produce these defense-critical rare earths in additional to establishing global U.S. dominance in production of the rare earth scandium. That project could move to construction immediately, given adequate financing.

But China’s dominance in midstream processing, the chemical separation and purification that turns mined rock into usable materials, remains unrivaled.

To address this challenge, the U.S. must treat rare earth independence not as an industrial policy footnote but as a core national security imperative. That means accelerated investment in mining, extraction, refining, and recycling capacity, all backed by government dollars, loans and loan guarantees, and streamlined permitting. Importantly, as President Trump’s recent Critical Minerals Executive Order proposes, the Defense Production Act should be fully leveraged to jumpstart rare earth projects on U.S. soil.

Further, any domestic investment must be met with greater cooperation between Washington and allied nations that can counter China’s monopoly. Japan, South Korea, Canada, and Australia should be part of a coordinated, supply-secure bloc for critical materials.

The wars of the future may not start with missiles, but with minerals. And unless the U.S. invests in securing access to the elements that power our technologies, we may soon find ourselves on the wrong side of a digital and defense divide.

SpaceX launches first-of-its-kind human spaceflight mission around Earth’s poles.

Mission commander and cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang and his three crewmates — Jannicke Mikkelsen, Rabea Rogge and Eric Philips — are now safely in orbit, tucked inside their 13-food-wide SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.

The group is expected to handle more than 20 science experiments and research studies during their time in space, most of which focus on their health and response to the disorienting environment of microgravity.

All told, the Fram2 crew will spend three to five days in space. They’ll try to capture unique footage from their windows as they lap the planet end-to-end, passing over Earth’s poles for the first time in human spaceflight history.

And I for one, would really like the math and engineering to work!

30 years after warp drives were proposed, we still can’t make the math work.

In 1994, Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre decided to figure out if the “warp drive” from his favorite science fiction shows was possible. Amazingly, he found a way to make it feasible, but it’s still unclear if it could ever actually work.

Although it’s impossible to travel faster than light, the restriction applies only to local measurements. It’s possible to manipulate space-time in such a way that superluminal motion is achievable. For example, the expansion of the universe drives apart galaxies faster than the speed of light, but because every galaxy is at rest in its local patch of space, it’s all good.

In the meantime, we can only skirt around the edges, poking at various aspects of the warp drive and seeing what might happen to the quantum fields in that highly strange gravitational environment. This process of poking around has led to some interesting — and sometimes contradictory — insights about the nature of warp drives in the three decades since Alcubierre’s original discovery.

For example, one set of calculations suggests that quantum fields at the edge of the warp bubble that sort of straddle the boundary between the inside bits and the outside essentially blow up to infinity as soon as you turn the thing on, which would be … bad.

But other calculations say that applies only in limited cases and that if you ramp up the warp engine slowly enough, you’ll be fine.

Yet more calculations sidestep all of this and just look at how much negative energy you actually need to construct your warp drive. And the answer is, for a single macroscopic bubble — say, 30 feet (100 meters) across — you would need 10 times more negative energy than all of the positive energy contained in the entire universe, which isn’t very promising.

However, still other calculations show that this immense amount applies only to the traditional warp bubble as defined by Alcubierre. It might be possible to reshape the bubble so there’s a tiny “neck” in the front that’s doing the work of compressing space and then it balloons out to an envelope to contain the warp bubble. This minimizes any quantum weirdness so that you need only about a star’s worth of negative energy to shape the drive.

But even more calculations show that even if you get ahold of some negative energy or negative mass, as soon as you start moving, you’re going to run into problems — namely, that the negative mass will immediately start flowing out of the edge of the bubble (which is bad) at a speed faster than light (which is really bad). What ends up happening is that the exotic matter constructing the warp bubble can’t keep pace with the bubble itself, so it just tears itself apart.

So, although warp drive seems implausible, the final verdict is uncertain. But it’s still a fun thought experiment that allows us to explore some interesting and surprising connections between general relativity and quantum mechanics. And, of course, it makes our sci-fi shows more fun to watch — we don’t have to wait millions of years for our favorite spaceship crew to reach their destination.

The Trillionaires of Mars

The first entity to establish a Mars colony will be the universe’s first trillionaire.

Lately, we’ve had a lot of puddlefish whining about how “we” shouldn’t go to Mars. Some of them actually think they get a vote, based on economic illiteracy and the delusion that SpaceX is somehow part of the US federal government. [Closed caption for the hard-of-thinking: it isn’t.]

But others just think they are giving good investment advice… SpaceX investors can do what they want, but Mars is a frozen wasteland full of nothing but near-vacuum and rocks.

So why would anyone want to go there?

Source: @cb_doge

Elon Musk likes to answer this question by pointing out that it’s not a good idea to store all humanity’s eggs in one basket. He’s right, but this kind of argument isn’t comprehensible to everyone, nor is it the full picture.

So now it’s the SF writer’s turn.

And therefore I present to you…

An Economic Roadmap for the Future of Humanity.

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Researchers at Duke University release new study on gun violence

RALEIGH, N.C. (WTVD) — Duke University’s recent study on gun violence showed that not even restrictive gun laws are having a significant impact among gun deaths among children.

Since 2020, guns have ranked as the leading cause of death among people between the ages of one to 18.

The study identified 36 firearm laws including expansive background checks, mandatory waiting periods, safe storage provisions and laws that limit access for people at risk of harming themselves or others.

Surprisingly, there were no notable distinctions between states with and without firearm laws when it comes to firearm deaths among children.

There were also no significant reductions in suicide death rates in states with laws setting minimum ages for possession or purchase of firearms.

February 29, 2024

Leap Day of a Leap Year

What Is a Leap Year?

The Short Answer:
It takes approximately 365.25 days for Earth to orbit the Sun — a solar year. We usually round the days in a calendar year to 365. To make up for the missing partial day, we add one day to our calendar approximately every four years. That is a leap year.

In an ordinary year, if you were to count all the days in a calendar from January to December, you’d count 365 days. But approximately every four years, February has 29 days instead of 28. So, there are 366 days in the year. This is called a leap year.

Illustration of a February calendar in a leap year.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Why do we have leap years?

A year is the amount of time it takes a planet to orbit its star one time. A day is the amount of time it takes a planet to finish one rotation on its axis.

Animation of Earth rotating once, indicating a day, and Earth orbiting the Sun, indicating a year.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

It takes Earth approximately 365 days and 6 hours to orbit the Sun. It takes Earth approximately 24 hours — 1 day — to rotate on its axis. So, our year is not an exact number of days.

Because of that, most years, we round the days in a year down to 365. However, that leftover piece of a day doesn’t disappear. To make sure we count that extra part of a day, we add one day to the calendar approximately every four years. Here’s a table to show how it works:


Year Days in Year Leap Year?
2017 365 No
2018 365 No
2019 365 No
2020 366 Yes


Because we’ve subtracted approximately 6 hours — or ¼ of a day — from 2017, 2018 and 2019, we have to make up that time in 2020. That’s why we have leap day!

Are leap years really that important?

Leap years are important so that our calendar year matches the solar year — the amount of time it takes for Earth to make a trip around the Sun. Subtracting 5 hours, 46 minutes and 48 seconds off of a year maybe doesn’t seem like a big deal. But, if you keep subtracting almost 6 hours every year for many years, things can really get messed up.

For example, say that July is a warm, summer month where you live. If we never had leap years, all those missing hours would add up into days, weeks and even months. Eventually, in a few hundred years, July would actually take place in the cold winter months!

Illustration of two snowmen on the 4th of July with fireworks and snow in the background.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

 

The Likely Lab Leak and the Covid Cassandra.

I thought I was done with writing about Covid-19. But Covid-19 isn’t done with me—or with any of us.

I’m writing this precisely four years after Chinese health officials first announced the emergence of a mysterious new form of pneumonia in the city of Wuhan. “No obvious human-to-human transmission has been observed,” the officials added in that December 30, 2019, release. (Already, the Chinese were lying.) Today, Covid cases are ticking up for the umpteenth time. And documents keep coming to light that expose how American officials and scientists similarly suppressed unsettling facts about the pandemic’s origins.

While the death rate from each new wave of Covid keeps dropping, the disturbing revelations about our public health leaders keep getting worse. In December 2023, a new disclosure revealed how leading U.S. virus experts lobbied to conduct dangerous gain-of-function research at the substandard Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory. The latest leak provides yet more evidence that the pandemic likely emerged from a lab experiment gone awry, and that U.S. scientists actively covered up their possible role in that world-historical catastrophe.

After both the 1986 Challenger explosion and the 9/11 attacks, bipartisan commissions were convened to investigate the disasters. Covid has killed more than a million Americans and has cost our economy at least $14 trillion. And yet we see no great urgency to investigate the pandemic’s murky origins or prevent a recurrence. Republicans in Congress continue to hold productive hearings. But, according to the New York Times, the Biden administration is “privately resisting” pressure to create a 9/11-style commission on the pandemic. The press has largely moved on. And the public health officials most deeply involved in the debacle—including Anthony Fauci and his National Institutes of Health (NIH) colleague Francis Collins—continue to tap-dance around the truth, even after leaving their posts.

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Note The New Madrid Fault, right smack on the Mississippi

New map shows where damaging earthquakes are most likely to occur in US.

New USGS map shows where damaging earthquakes are most likely to occur in US 

Nearly 75% of the U.S. could experience damaging earthquake shaking, according to a recent U.S. Geological Survey-led team of more than 50 scientists and engineers.

This was one of several key findings from the latest USGS National Seismic Hazard Model (NSHM). The model was used to create a color-coded map that pinpoints where damaging earthquakes are most likely to occur based on insights from , historical geologic data, and the latest data-collection technologies.

The research is published in the journal Earthquake Spectra.

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Updated information on Mass Public Shootings from 1998 through October 2023

Between January 1st, 1998, and October 25th, 2023, 52.5% of attacks used solely handguns, and 16.8% used only rifles of any type—thirty-five percent of attacks used solely rifles or rifles in conjunction with another type of gun. Given the debate over pistol-stabilizing braces, the Excel file we provide lists the guns used in each attack, and two of the attacks used AR-15-type handguns with a pistol-stabilizing brace.

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When astronauts become farmers: Harvesting food on the moon and Mars.

With renewed interest in sending people back to the moon and on to Mars, thanks to NASA’s Artemis missions, thoughts have naturally turned to how to feed astronauts traveling to those deep space destinations. Simply shipping food to future lunar bases and Mars colonies would be impractically expensive.

Astronauts will, on top of everything else, have to become farmers.

Of course, since neither the moon nor Mars has a proper atmosphere, running surface water, moderate temperatures or even proper soil, farming on those two celestial bodies will be more difficult than on Earth. Fortunately, a lot of smart, imaginative people are working on the problem.

NASA has been studying how to grow plants in space on the International Space Station for years. The idea is to supplement astronauts’ diets with fresh fruits and vegetables grown in microgravity using artificial lighting. Future space stations and long-duration space missions will carry gardens with them.

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A New Report Throws Cold Water on Man-Made Global Warming Pseudoscience

“To what extent are temperature levels changing due to greenhouse gas emissions?” may prove to be the most important scientific paper in the last 10 years.

Climate Discussion Nexus offers an introduction to why this paper is so important:

Well, this is awkward. Statistics Norway, aka Statistisk sentralbyrå or “the national statistical institute of Norway and the main producer of official statistics”, has just published a paper “To what extent are temperature levels changing due to greenhouse gas emissions?”

The awkward part isn’t trying to grasp the subtleties of Norwegian since it’s also available in English. It’s that the Abstract bluntly declares that “standard climate models are rejected by time series data on global temperatures” while the conclusions state “the results imply that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be sufficiently strong to cause systematic changes in the pattern of the temperature fluctuations.”

But the really awkward part is that a paper from a government agency dares to address openly so many questions the alarmist establishment has spent decades declaring taboo, from the historical record on climate to the existence of massive uncertainty among scientists on it.

What the Norwegians did was conduct statistical analyses of observed and reconstructed temperature series and test whether the recent fluctuation in temperatures differs systematically from previous temperature cycles potentially due to the emission of greenhouse gases. For example, the researchers gathered all the data from various sources, including those related to the four previous glacial and inter-glacial periods, and did a statistical analysis to see how more recent Global Climate Models (GCMs) compare.

In the global climate models (GCMs) most of the warming that has taken place since 1950 is attributed to human activity. Historically, however, there have been large climatic variations. Temperature reconstructions indicate that there is a ‘warming’ trend that seems to have been going on for as long as approximately 400 years. Prior to the last 250 years or so, such a trend could only be due to natural causes.

The length of the observed time series is consequently of crucial importance for analyzing empirically the pattern of temperature fluctuations and to have any hope of distinguishing natural variations in temperatures from man-made ones. Fortunately, many observed temperature series are significantly longer than 100 years and in addition, as mentioned above, there are reconstructed temperature series that are much longer.

I was recently discussing the fact that Earth is warming from its last glaciation period. The Norwegian statisticians’ comprehensive temperature review takes the long view into account by looking at the last 420,000 years.

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Judge Benitez destroys the 2.2 rounds per DGU lie once and for all

Over two years ago, I read through some court filings in Duncan v. Bonta, the lawsuit against California’s “large capacity” magazine ban. I was left scratching my head at a claim from the State of California in support of their magazine ban, that the average Defensive Gun Use (DGU) incident involves discharging only 2.2 rounds. The more I looked into it, the more obvious it became that this was unsubstantiated.

Since then, Duncan v. Bonta made a trip to the Supreme Court, got GVR’d after NYSRPA v. Bruen, and sent back down the judicial hierarchy to the US District Court for the Southern District of California. The district court published its decision last Friday, in which Judge Roger Benitez completely took apart the 2.2 rounds per DGU canard (PDF pages 26-33):

C. The Invention of the 2.2 Shot Average

…the State’s statistic is suspect. California relies entirely on the opinion of its statistician for the hypothesis that defenders fire an average of only 2.2 shots in cases of confrontation.

Where does the 2.2 shot average originate? There is no national or state government data report on shots fired in self-defense events. There is no public government database. One would expect to see investigatory police reports as the most likely source to accurately capture data on shots fired or number of shell casings found, although not every use of a gun in self-defense is reported to the police. As between the two sides, while in the better position to collect and produce such reports, the State’s Attorney General has not provided a single police report to the Court or to his own expert. 

Without investigatory reports, the State’s expert turns to anecdotal statements, often from bystanders, reported in news media, and selectively studied. She indicates she conducted two studies. Based on these two studies of newspaper stories, she opines that it is statistically rare for a person to fire more than 10 rounds in self-defense and that only 2.2 shots are fired on average. Unfortunately, her opinion lacks classic indicia of reliability and her two studies cannot be reproduced and are not peer-reviewed.

“Reliability and validity are two aspects of accuracy in measurement. In statistics, reliability refers to reproducibility of results.” Her studies cannot be tested because she has not disclosed her data. Her studies have not been replicated. In fact, the formula used to select 200 news stories for the Factiva study is incomprehensible. […]

For one study, Allen says she conducted a search of stories published in the NRA Institute for Legislative Action magazine (known as the Armed Citizen Database) between 2011 and 2017. There is no explanation for the choice to use 2011 for the beginning. After all, the collection of news stories goes back to 1958. Elsewhere in her declaration she studies mass shooting events but for that chooses a much longer time period reaching back to 1982. Likewise, there is no explanation for not updating the study after 2017.

[…] details are completely absent. Allen does not list the 736 stories. Nor does she reveal how she assigned the number of shots fired in self-defense when the news accounts use phrases like “the intruder was shot” but no number of shots was reported, or “there was an exchange of gunfire,” or “multiple rounds were fired.” She includes in her 2.2 average of defensive shots fired, incidents where no shots were fired. […] She does not reveal the imputed number substitute value that she used where the exact number of shots fired was not specified, so her result cannot be reproduced. […] For example, this Court randomly selected two pages from Allen’s mass shooting table: pages 10 and 14. From looking at these two pages (assuming that the sources for the reports were accurate and unbiased) the Court is able to make statistical observations, including the observation that the number of shots fired were unknown 69.04% of the time.

The foundation of the claim was not real data but “anecdata,” which don’t cover nearly as many incidents as actual police reports do. (Not every incident is reported, so even police data is incomplete.)

Second, the sampled news reports were randomly selected. It isn’t clear if there were any process safeguards to prevent cherry picking, and there is no transparency about the included incidents.

Third, the selected timeframes look arbitrary.

Fourth, as Judge Benitez points out, including zero-shot incidents will obviously bring the average down, so it’s questionable.

The most devastating critique is that the expert assigned an arbitrary number of shots fired when news stories didn’t include that crucial detail.

The Court is aware of its obligation to act as a gatekeeper to keep out junk science where it does not meet the reliability standard of Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. […] while questionable expert testimony was admitted, it has now been weighed in light of all of the evidence.

Using interest-balancing, the en banc 9th Circuit shamelessly rubber-stamped California’s infringement using this pathetic junk science. It’s gratifying to see interest-balancing tossed into the garbage alongside this junk science under the new Bruen standard.

Okay, so when do we start sending mining missions?

In A First, NASA Returns Asteroid Samples to Earth.

A capsule containing precious samples from an asteroid landed safely on Earth on Sunday, the culmination of a roughly 4-billion-mile journey over the past seven years.

The asteroid samples were collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which flew by Earth early Sunday morning and jettisoned the capsule over a designated landing zone in the Utah desert. The unofficial touchdown time was 8:52 a.m. MT, 3 minutes ahead of the predicted landing time.

The dramatic event — which the NASA livestream narrator described as “opening a time capsule to our ancient solar system” — marked a major milestone for the United States: The collected rocks and soil were NASA’s first samples brought back to Earth from an asteroid. Experts have said the bounty could help scientists unlock secrets about the solar system and how it came to be, including how life emerged on this planet.

Bruce Betts, chief scientist at The Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization that conducts research, advocacy and outreach to promote space exploration, congratulated the NASA team on what he called an “impressive and very complicated mission,” adding that the asteroid samples are the start of a thrilling new chapter in space history.

“It’s exciting because this mission launched in 2016 and so there’s a feeling of, ‘Wow, this day has finally come,’” he said. “But scientifically, it’s exciting because this is an amazing opportunity to study a very complex story that goes way back to the dawn of the solar system.”

The sample return capsule from NASA's Osiris-Rex mission in Utah on Sept. 24, 2023.
The sample return capsule from NASA’s Osiris-Rex mission in Utah on Sunday.Keegan Barber / NASA via AP

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Earth’s atmosphere can clean itself, breakthrough study finds.

Scientists have made a groundbreaking discovery that could change the way we think about air pollution. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have found that a strong electric field between airborne water droplets and surrounding air can create a molecule called hydroxide (OH) by a previously unknown mechanism.

This molecule is crucial in helping to clear the air of pollutants, including greenhouse gases and other chemicals.

The discovery is outlined in a new paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which suggests that the traditional thinking around the formation of OH in the atmosphere is incomplete. Until now, it was thought that sunlight was the primary driver of OH formation, but this new research shows that OH can be created spontaneously by the special conditions on the surface of water droplets.

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The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.
— Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet

A study of language in Science articles from 1997 through 2021 raises concerns about exaggerated claims.

Careful scientists know to acknowledge uncertainty in the findings and conclusions of their papers. But in one leading journal, the frequency of hedging words such as “might” and “probably” has fallen by about 40% over the past 2 decades, a study finds.

If this trend holds across the scientific literature, it suggests a worrisome rise of unreliable, exaggerated claims, some observers say. Hedging and avoiding overconfidence “are vital to communicating what one’s data can actually say and what it merely implies,” says Melissa Wheeler, a social psychologist at the Swinburne University of Technology who was not involved in the study. “If academic writing becomes more about the rhetoric … it will become more difficult for readers to decipher what is groundbreaking and truly novel.”

The new analysis, one of the largest of its kind, examined more than 2600 research articles published from 1997 to 2021 in Science, which the team chose because it publishes articles from multiple disciplines. (Science’s news team is independent from the editorial side.) The team searched the papers for about 50 terms such as “could,” “appear to,” “approximately,” and “seem.” The frequency of these hedging words dropped from 115.8 instances per 10,000 words in 1997 to 67.42 per 10,000 words in 2021.

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