Oh look, Elon’s bombing the moon.

photo of full moon

This headline certainly caught my attention (via AP):

A discarded SpaceX rocket is on a high-speed collision course with the moon

WHAT.

The moon is not your trash dump, Elon.

The rocket’s upper stage will unintentionally slam into the moon on Wednesday, carving out a crater and sending up a plume of dust and rubble that scientists — and skygazers — are eager to observe.

These people are @$$holes. I am equally eager to observe the moon in a tranquil, undisturbed state, without any plumes of dust and rubble blasting out of it.

Nevertheless, Elon’s 40-foot, 10,000 pound chunk of junk will be smashing into the moon at 5,400 mph, leaving an impact crater almost 90 feet across and 16 feet deep.

That’s just what the moon needs: another impact crater.

It was never SpaceX’s intent to hit the moon. But space experts said the crash could have been avoided if the upper stage had been nudged into orbit around the sun.

Yeah, Elon. You were supposed to bomb the sun.

Benjamin Fernando of Los Alamos National Laboratory told the AP, “Part of the reason for our interest in this event is to figure out how much of a hazard debris impacts pose to future astronauts.”

Then I would suggest keeping Elon and his malfunctioning space toys far away from the moon.

Perhaps more alarming than that, someone at the Associated Press actually wrote this sentence:

With the moon as the new travel hot spot, scientists said it’s crucial to improve debris monitoring and traffic control before packs of robots and astronauts arrive.

I… just… the moon is “the new travel hot spot?” THE MOON. Are AP writers now shooting up ketamine with Elon? And apparently we’re gonna need space junk traffic controllers to be on the lookout, before the marauding “packs of robots and astronauts arrive.”

Holy shit. Am I in a k-hole?

“This impact will not be a problem,” retired astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell said in an email. “But in a future where there are long-term bases on the moon, similar impacts would be an issue and we need not to leave rocket stages in chaotic orbits of this kind.”

Gosh ya think, Jonathan? Maybe the moon can get a restraining order against Elon.

NASA hurled rocket sections and lunar modules into the moon during the Apollo era for seismic measurements. Decades later, in 2009, NASA intentionally crashed its LCROSS spacecraft and upper stage in search of ice near the lunar south pole.

Oh. So I guess the moon is NASA’s trash dump.

Then let me be crystal clear: Elon needs to fuck all the way off, far away from NASA’s moon trash dump.

Space is full of sugar!

I just thought you guys should know.

(via AP)

Astronomers have detected a type of sugar in space that’s also found in raspberries and self-tanners. The sugar, called erythrulose, lurks in what’s called the interstellar medium: thin clouds of gas and dust littered between stars.

…

Using two dish-shaped radio telescopes in Spain, researchers collected data from a large gas cloud near the center of the Milky Way.

And what a prescient name for our galaxy “Milky Way” has turned out to be!

They identified the sugar in gas form by comparing telescope signals to samples in the lab. It’s the latest kind of sugar detected in space — in a region crossed by NASA’s twin Voyager, the farthest spacecraft to ever travel from Earth.

The results were published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Alas, I don’t have a subscription to Nature Astronomy (and wouldn’t understand a word of it if I did). However, I was deeply moved and inspired to create my latest masterpiece depicting what these astronomers surely saw:

A field of white stars against a black background covered with floating emojis depicting candy, cake, and ice cream.

SPACE IS FULL OF SUGAR!
(artist rendering)
Iris Vander Pluym
$1 million

 

 

 

LadyBoss Macaque: Long May She Reign!

 

Photo of face of Japanese macaque monkey Yakei, a rare alpha female.Empress Yakei, Alpha Japanese Macaque
(Macaca fuscata a.k.a. Snow Monkey)
(image: Takasakiyama Natural Zoological Garden)

(via New York Times email briefing):

Yakei, a female Japanese snow monkey who lives in a nature reserve, violently overthrew a trio of high-ranking males (and her own mother) to move up the ranks and become the first female leader in the reserve’s 70-year history. Yakei’s ascent to alpha status surprised both scientists and reserve workers, who are now closely observing her reign.

[Read more…]

What’s up, doc? The ills of race-based medicine.

I know you’ll all be mightily impressed to learn that I read The Lancet [although I hardly understand any of it]. I even have a subscription – actually several subscriptions: to The Lancet, The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology and The Lancet Oncology [I have “email subscriptions” to these journals, which are free and contain lots of links to paywalled content I can’t afford to read and probably wouldn’t understand anyway]. Despite being imprisoned by the Evil Elsevier Empire, there is actually plenty of open access Lancet content available to anyone with a web browser [and delusions of scientific literacy in multiple areas of cutting-edge medical research]. Some of that content is accessible in every sense of the word, and so outstanding that you might consider becoming a regular reader of The Lancet yourself. Exhibit A comes from the current issue: a “Viewpoint” titled From race-based to race-conscious medicine: how anti-racist uprisings call us to act.*

While I would encourage you to go read the whole thing [perhaps with another browser tab open to a medical dictionary?], I just want to highlight a few…uh…highlights.

[Read more…]

Erasure: Women in STEM and Your Liberal Media.

One of these things is not like the other:

Two news feed headlines. 1- New York Times: "Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded to 2 Scientists for Work on Genome Editing" and 2- Washington Post: "Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded to two women who developed CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing tool"The difference is equally apparent in the summary blurbs from NYT and WaPo:

From this morning’s New York Times email briefing:

Two scientists, one from France and one from the U.S., were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They discovered a tool that allows researchers to change the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms with high precision.

From The Washington Post breaking news alert:

University of California at Berkeley biochemist Jennifer A. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, a French scientist, were awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for their work developing CRISPR, which is contributing to new cancer therapies and helping to cure inherited diseases.

Listen up, motherfucking New York Times. Feminism does not mean erasing gender. Just like equality in the broader sense does not mean erasing human diversity. Erasure is not a neutral act in a world where women are systematically denied opportunities to advance their careers, particularly in STEM, and face institutional bias (and worse) as they try.

It would be different if people of all genders enjoyed full equality across the board. But until that happy day comes when women (and minorities!) in roles and professions historically and visibly dominated by (white! cis! able-bodied! het!) men are equally commonplace and visible, their representation in these contexts is vitally important for everyone to see.

And yes, for those keeping score at home, this is reason number 6,858,945 I hate The New York Times. But not to worry! I ain’t goin’ soft on ya! I still hate The Washington Post, too! Both of them get it right a lot of the time, which only makes this all the more infuriating because it proves they are perfectly capable of doing so. And getting it right sometimes hardly exonerates them for all the times they get it very, very wrong.

Bad news day.

[CONTENT NOTE: racist police violence, f-bombs.]

I awoke today, as many did, to news of more widespread protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a black man, by white police, and the murder of Breonna Taylor, a black woman, by white police, and the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man, by white racist thugs, and, and, and, and…

I want to say this here as unequivocally as I can (and have said before): I stand in solidarity with communities of color around the country and around the world, in opposition to state violence and murder, militarized policing, unprecedented mass imprisonment and surveillance, social and economic and environmental injustice, and imperial wars.

“Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”
–Emma Lazarus

I also want to cosign Jacob Frey, the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, who said this:

[Read more…]

Behold my magnificent and selfless sacrifice FOR SCIENCE: posting a survey link on my blog.

Full disclosure: I don’t have anything close to a scientific background. I majored in Theatre ferchrissakes, and graduated with my B.A. a few credits shy of a minor in Philosophy. Unfortunately I had crappy science teachers in high school, and as an undergrad I managed to dodge rigorous science classes by meeting my degree requirements with shit like Meteorology 101 and whatnot.

Years later however, I fell deeply and madly in love with the sciences in general, and with evolutionary biology in particular. (In the credit-where-credit-is-due department, that doucheweasel Dawkins’ books contributed in no small part to my intoxicating enlightenment; also, Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish remains one of my favorites reads of all time. Mind: blown.) So although I can spot a cumulonimbus cloud along with the best of ’em, during my formal education I missed out on so much cool science stuff (OMG astronomy! Geology! Marine biology!!!).

My worst regret about all of this is that I have contributed nothing of any significance to the truly amazing troves of knowledge humans have acquired via the scientific method.

Until now.

I am thrilled to announce that the Atheist Research Collaborative is conducting a survey study on how and why people become atheists. FreethoughtBlogs has been encouraged to publicize the survey to our readers, so I am posting about it in case participating in this research might be of interest to you godless heathens out there. From the researchers:

The study is open to those who are at least 18 years of age, and those who once believed in god(s) but do not now; this means you are not eligible to participate if you have always been an atheist/nonbeliever. The survey is a maximum of 76 questions, and a minimum of 64 questions.  On average, the survey should take 20 to 30 minutes to complete, although individuals may find that it takes them more or less time than this, depending on their answers. The survey can be found here.

Joseph Langston ARC Affiliate/Web Admin

Phew! Wow. Doing this science stuff sure is exhilarating – and exhausting! I had no idea.

Well I’m sure we can all agree that I’ve stepped up in a REALLY BIG WAY and done my part for SCIENCE. And that obviously I deserve at least a co-author credit on any published research that comes from this survey data. And of course the best part is this: “make major Nobel Prize-worthy scientific contribution” is now crossed off my bucket list.

What a great day.

:D