Good call Buzz. From The Tech Herald:
Legendary Moon walker and NASA spaceman Buzz Aldrin has said the race to establish a permanent Moon base should be the result of international cooperation with the real focus on a manned mission to Mars.
Speaking in a lengthy interview with Popular Mechanics magazine, Aldrin said the next race to be the first to host a manned presence on the Moon should not be a financially damaging “space race” but an international effort combining the resources of China, Europe, India, Japan and Russia.
“By renouncing our goal of being first on the Moon (again), we would call off Space Race II with the Chinese and encourage them to channel their ambitious lunar efforts into the consortium,” Aldrin said.
He added that the Mark II mission to the Moon is, in fact, a “damaging” detour from what should be NASA’s principal objective — namely, the preparation for a manned mission to Mars.
“The agency’s current Vision for Space Exploration will waste decades and hundreds of billions of dollars trying to reach the moon by 2020 — a glorified rehash of what we did 40 years ago,” he said. “Instead of a steppingstone to Mars, NASA’s current lunar plan is a detour.”
Approaching his 80th birthday, Aldrin was in no mood to hold back on criticism of the American space administration’s plan. In its place, Aldrin proposed a radical program he named the “Unified Space Vision,” which, controversially, calls for a permanently manned presence on Mars by 2035.
“Here’s my plan, which I call the Unified Space Vision,” he told the magazine. “It’s a blueprint that will maintain U.S. leadership in human spaceflight, avoid a counterproductive space race with China to be second back to the moon, and lead to a permanent American-led presence on Mars by 2035 at the latest.”
“That date happens to be 66 years after Neil Armstrong and I first landed on the moon — just as our landing was 66 years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight,” Aldrin said.
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Spam has a carbon footprint. The time and energy wasted by spam email uses the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion gallons of gas. The majority of the energy consumed is due to spam maintenance, a study has found. “If spam filters were used universally, the energy saved would be equivalent to taking 2.3 million cars off the road, the report said.“ Read more…
Apropos of nothing, but worth a read, is Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s tale of one of the most unusual things he saw during his 1969 mission to the moon. Aldrin was on a TCA panel for National Geographic Channel’s Expedition Week.
Here’s a lightly edited version of Aldrin’s story:
I guess the discovery that really baffled me started the first night en route to the moon beyond the Van Allen Belts. We closed the windows and turned out the lights and Mike Collins had the headset on to listen to Houston and Neil [Armstrong] and I were under the couch.
All of a sudden I saw a flash, and then another flash. And before I could move my eye to see what it was, it was gone. And then maybe a streak. And I kept seeing these, until I decided I wanted to go to sleep.
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Although modern science has been able to come up with a couple of theories, they can not answer the question to why people bite their nails.
Some theories include that people bite their nails because of stress, another suggests that that the desire to bite nails is an analogue of masturbation.
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“Scientists in California say they’re trying to replicate the power of the sun by firing laser beams at a tiny pellet of hydrogen.
Physicists at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore say the nuclear fusion experiments may offer the world a clean source of energy, The Times of London reported Sunday.
The hydrogen pellet will be hit with 192 laser beams capable of generating 500 trillion watts — 1,000 times the power of the U.S. national grid, said the scientists.”
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British aeronautical engineer was playing around with the new Google Earth 5.0, which includes undersea data, and noticed something funny off the coast of Africa, about 600 miles west of the Canary Islands, that resembled a pattern of a street grid.
Google, however, is officially denying the widespread Internet rumors. A statement in Google read, “in this case, however, what users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process. Bathymetric (or sea floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor. The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data.”
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According to Professor Deane Aikins’ findings based on research with the military, found that some individuals did not panic because their body naturally protected them.
Unlike the majority of people who were flooded with a stress hormone, they had much lower levels and also showed signs of another hormone that actually calmed them down.
Professor Aikins, who outlined his findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting, studied hormone stress levels during extreme training exercises like mock survival or combat swimming.
He said that while there was no such thing as a “man without fear” certain people were better equipped to deal with it.
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Can’t help being the life of the party? Maybe you were just born that way. Researchers from Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego have found that our place in a social network is influenced in part by our genes, according to new findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Research shows certain facial characteristics inspire trust, while others prove untrustworthy. Read more…
