“The answer is absolutely. In fact, it’s likely to be a woman, the first next person on the Moon,” Bridenstine said. “It’s also true that the first person on Mars is likely to be a woman.”
If there was a practical reason for this, fine. Like if women are substantially better adapted to low/no gravity, or if the astronaut corps was predominantly female, or if they already know who they plan on lobbing at the Moon and Mars because they’ve held the trails and it turned out that the clearly best candidates were women… sure, fine. But as it is, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. This is likely to be either “International Soviet Women’s Day” pandering or signs that NASA is being overrun with SJWs at the highest levels.
The administrator said that “NASA is committed to making sure that we have a broad … on the Moon.”
Strategizing lawsuits is not my schtick, but it would seem to be important to first sue someone that you are pretty certain you have a good, winnable case against. The purpose of a lot of lawsuits is, I suppose, to force a settlement rather that go to the bother of holding an actual trial. But *if* you hold a trial, you want to win it.
Either winning a trial or forcing a settlement will, it seems, aid your cause in further lawsuits down the road; it will inspire your future targets to settle ASAP. So far the Sandmann family have sued CNN and the Washington post for a combined total of more than half a billion dollars; I’ve seen conflicting opinions on just how winnable the suits are, but I would assume the lawyer knows what he’s doing.
The headline, shockingly enough, is a tad overblown. The cells weren’t brought back to life, but “showed signs of biological activity” after nuclei were transferred into mouse cells. The DNA, as might be expected, was chopped to bits by freezing and the passage of time, but cells can continue to survive- at least for a while – even if the DNA is trashed. However, trashed DNA does not replicate, so more work will need to be done before a living mammoth can be cloned.
The 28,000-year-old remains of a woolly mammoth, named ‘Yuka’, were found in Siberian permafrost. Here we recovered the less-damaged nucleus-like structures from the remains and visualised their dynamics in living mouse oocytes after nuclear transfer. Proteomic analyses demonstrated the presence of nuclear components in the remains. Nucleus-like structures found in the tissue homogenate were histone- and lamin-positive by immunostaining. In the reconstructed oocytes, the mammoth nuclei showed the spindle assembly, histone incorporation and partial nuclear formation; however, the full activation of nuclei for cleavage was not confirmed. DNA damage levels, which varied among the nuclei, were comparable to those of frozen-thawed mouse sperm and were reduced in some reconstructed oocytes. Our work provides a platform to evaluate the biological activities of nuclei in extinct animal species.
The NASA budget proposal is about half billion dollars less, but a lot of that would be made up for in going with cheaper options. For instance, by switching from SLS to a commercial launcher (presumably the Falcon 9 Heavy), $700 million would be saved. In this proposed budget most areas of NASA would get some amount of cuts, but an interesting bump up is in “Exploration R&D.” Given that NASA works best as an R&D organization, that’s very likely a good thing.
Human intelligence is a spectrum, from people lacking in the most basic functionality on up to people so smart that they are virtually incomprehensible to regular smart folk. And there is precisely zero morality attached to any level of that spectrum… it’s neither “right” nor “wrong” to be either dumb or smart. It is, of course, generally more *useful* to be smart than to be dumb. There is also evidence of statistically measurable differences in that spectrum between different populations; one of the more interesting (to me, anyway) variations is the much argued about “variability hypothesis.” This holds that the *average* IQ of men is 100… and the average IQ of women is *also* 100. The difference, though is that women *tend* to cluster around the mean, while mens scores are more spread out. This means that there are more very smart men than very smart women… and more very dumb men than very dumb women. Like so:
This is one of those things that just *sounds* right… when you think of someone doing something profoundly stupid, chances are good you’ll think of some drunk guy saying “hold my beer” just before he sets himself on fire and blows himself to bits.
But it doesn’t say that there are *no* very dumb women. And just to prove the point…
It takes a special kind of stupid to climb over zoo barriers to go take a selfie with a predator that can shred you. I have little to no sympathy for the woman here, but I do feel bad for both the zoo (likely to get hit with lawsuits and other legal issues) and the jaguar. Unfortunately, animals that attack humans often are made to suffer for it, even though what they did was *entirely* predictable.
“Did something dangerously stupid” immediately makes me think it was a guy. “Did something dangerously stupid while taking a selfie,” makes me think it was a gal.
The weird thing is that it often seems to me that lower-IQ people who *know* they’re not that smart generally don’t behave stupidly. If you want truly stupid behavior, look to people who really aught to know better.
This is an entertaining story, well told. In short: a South Carolina mayor tried to Smollett by claiming that pollen landing on her car was a hate crime.
The next time you hear someone screaming about having been hate crimed, ask yourself: is it more likely that could bees have done this? Is springtime to blame? Would race relations be more improved by accepting the story at face value, or by cutting down all the trees and spraying Agent Orange on all the flowers?
“I’m not saying it was Hate Crime, but it was Bees.”
In short: modern US Navy supercarriers are marvels of technology and engineering, and they are fantastically useful in peacetime. in wartime? Giant easily-sunk targets. F-22s and F-35s sweep the skies clean of enemy fighters, then get erased when they land back at the base.
The US goes for quality over quantity. The likes of Russia and China go for quantity over quality. But when it comes to offensive missiles, at a certain point “Chinese quality” is “good enough.” A relatively cheap ballistic missile can be produced in substantial numbers by the likes of China, and even without a nuclear warhead such a missile would be perfectly capable of holing a carrier or trashing an airbase. And the US has done fark-all about building up the sort of anti-missile capability that we need.
And then there’s the easily smashed command and control system, which the Chinese can likely turn into a vast field of blue screens of death with relative ease.
The Russians and the Chinese cannot conquer the US. But they could conquer, say, the South China Sea or Eastern Europe by taking America’s terribly expensive and terribly undefended local resources out of the fight in short order. If this is demonstrated *anywhere,* it is probably safe to assume that the whole world order will collapse overnight.
We all have heard the lie that “nobody wants to take your guns,” just before some authoritarian gun-grabber proposes a law that would make you an insta-felon simply for owning the stuff you currently own. To get an idea what things would look like in a future where the gun-grabbers get their way, take a look at this BS:
A guy has stage four pancreatic cancer and uses marijuana-derived capsules to relieve the pain. Missouri has voted to make medical marijuana legal, but the la has not yet taken effect. And so thus the cops got a call that someone smelled pot, and they came to roust a guy who looks about as harmless as a squirrel.
As one of the commenters on the news site said:
If you are dying of cancer and are counting down the few remaining weeks or days, I do not care if you smoke heroin and snort oxy. I mean what harm could it do. As for the police, yeah they need to be smacked hard on the back of their heads with a Gideons Bible, but I want to know who made the call for them to roust the dying guy. Whoever called them in needs a swift kick to the “mummy and daddy parts” with steel toed boots.
No matter what arguments are made for prohibition laws, the end result is always nonsense like this.
And why do so many cops have such ridiculous haircuts? Hard to take them seriously looking like that.
I’ve been running my PC a lot recently, doing some fairly processor-intensive graphics work (see HERE). Yesterday, I didn’t go tot he computer room. Today, I took a bunch of reports and books to it to do some scanning… and couldn’t gt the friggen’ thing to really come on. The fan ran, the lights on the tower came on, a USB drive would light up… but the speakers remained silent and two different monitors claimed to have no input. I tried hard reboots several times with no changes. There was a small, somewhat rapid (2 to 4 hz) clicking coming from inside.
I finally decided that something was trashed and that I’d have to run it to a computer repair place tomorrow. At the very least this would mean a buck of cash down the drain; worse, the possibility that months of scanning of documents would vanish. So I started unplugging everything. I unplugged the power cord before the monitor cord, and noticed that the “I can’t see sh!t” notice on the monitor screen had changed. Shoved the power cord back in and the PC popped right back to life like nothing had happened; the programs that were running and files open two days ago were still right there on the screen. The ticking vanished. Everything seems perfectly fine now.
Right now 170 gigabytes is being copied from the hard drive to a portable. So… what the frigg happened here? Any ideas? Is the PC boned, just getting a short second wind before going kaput? Or is it just one of them nothing to worry about things?
