Who Knew?

"I think the Mullers are just thoroughly enjoying being here and I think also they are keen to spread the word about Bell's legacy. To let people know he was responsible for so much more than just the telephone."
Mary Tulle, chief executive, Destination Cape Breton

Beinn Bhreagh (pronounced, ‘ban vreeagh’), is the historic estate of inventor Dr. Alexandre Graham Bell, and his wife, Mabel. The estate is situated near the town of Baddeck in Nova Scotia, on a beautiful peninsula that juts out into the Bras d’Or Lake and which forms the southern shore of Baddeck Bay. The Bras d’Or Preservation Nature Trust holds an easement on part of the estate, protecting both the land and the facade of the historic building, so as to maintain the natural beauty and cultural values of the estate.

A technological genius of fairly modern vintage is buried on a Cape Breton estate beside the Bras d'Or Lake fed by Atlantic waters, on 400 acres of prime real estate called Beinn Bhreagh. Alexander Graham Bell  named it in memory of his native Scotland. He spent his teen years in Brantford, Ontario, but selected Cape Breton in 1889 because of its scenery, its Scottish heritage, and its proximity to Boston and Washington, D.C., where work often called him.

That vast estate is now owned by the Bell family, descendants of the man whose amazing intellect and radical experiments helped bring the world into the modern era. One of his great grandsons, Hugh Muller, now in his 80s, lives on the estate with his wife in a remodelled house, once a workshop where his world-famous ancestor used to experiment with tetrahedron kites. Not just any kites, these were used in Canada's first airplane.

The 1,000-square-foot Kite House is now home to Hugh and Jeanne Muller. The complex within the 500-acre Beinn Bhreagh on Cape Breton holds 14 homes; the Mullers the only descendants to live there now year-round. Now long retired, Mr. Muller worked as a member of the U.S. National Park Service in Florida, and later became an adjunct professor at University of Michigan.

"Bell was easily distracted. So he had different stations where he would force himself to focus on just one thing. In the Kite House, he would just work on the kites and the aviation projects he was interested in. Then there was an area up the hill on the estate with the sheep and chickens where he worked on genetics. Another area near the water was where he worked on the hydrofoil."
Hugh Muller

The hydrofoil was an watercraft built with a Renault engine. It set a speed record of 114 kilometres per hour in 1919, a record unmatched for the next two decades. The watercraft was away head of its time, a project that Bell worked on with his business partner, Casey Baldwin. They also worked on a plane they named the Silver Dart, rivalling the Wright brothers' accomplishment in Kitty Hawk, N.C.

The Silver Dart made over 200 flights along with an 800-metre flight at 65 kilometres per hour on its first day of operation in Baddeck, Nova Scotia on February 23, 1909. It flipped on a trial show run in Petawawa, where Bell and Baldwin were attempting to convince the Canadian military that airplanes represented an advanced component of the nation's future armed forces.

"But Canada didn't think airplanes would be used in war. Then World War I happens and of course airplanes are part of the weaponry, but by then he had moved on to the hydrofoil." And it is worthwhile noting that Alexander Graham Bell was indebted to his wife Mabel, because she piloted the watercraft occasionally, driving it on the lake between the estate and the town of Baddeck.

Time-Lapse: Everest

By Phil Plait

SLATE

Posted Sunday, June 30, 2013, at 8:00 AM

View from a height.
Photo by Mike Saikaly, from the video.

I’ve been poking around the web lately looking at one time-lapse video after another, and I swear, the list of amazing work grows as fast as I can watch them. As I mentioned before, it’s getting to the point where the viewpoint taken by the photographer needs to be unique—we’re not wowed by just stars rising and setting anymore. The location, the angles, the lighting, the subject, the music: It all plays in to the experience.

Given all that, you must watch this: “Everest”. Yes, as in Mt. Everest. This is extraordinary.

Breath-taking! [Haha!] I live at an elevation of 1700 meters, and I’ve been up as high as 3700, where the air is thin enough (about 2/3 pressure as at sea level) that just moving around for some people is difficult. Photographer Elia Saikaly went up to 8000 meters to shoot that video, staying awake into the night while other, more sane climbers, were sleeping. At that height, air pressure is a mere one-third what it is at sea level, and climbers, not surprisingly, call it the “death zone”.

Read Saikaly’s account of his travels to scale Everest. It’s harrowing, and amazing, and wonderful. Climbing such mountains is incredibly dangerous, and some people undertake it foolishly. But the ones who prepare, study, practice, and understand what they are doing: I salute them. The spirit it takes to explore is an astonishing thing, and I’m glad so many possess it.

NASA launches satellite on a two-year mission to ‘zoom in’ on the sun

Associated Press | 13/06/28 12:57 PM ET

AP Photo/NASA    In this image provided by NASA the Iris satellite heads into Earth orbit on a egasus rocket, which was dropped from an airplane flying over the Pacific some 100 miles off Californiaís central coast Thursday June 27, 2013.

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — NASA launched a satellite late Thursday on a mission to explore a little-studied region of the sun and to better forecast space weather that can disrupt communications systems on Earth.

Unlike a traditional liftoff, the Iris satellite rode into Earth orbit on a Pegasus rocket dropped from an airplane that took off around sunset from the Vandenberg Air Force Base on California’s central coast. About 100 miles off the coast and at an altitude of 39,000 feet, the airplane released the rocket, which ignited its engine for the 13-minute climb to space.

Mission controllers clapped after receiving word that Iris separated from the rocket as planned, ready to begin its two-year mission.
“We’re thrilled,” NASA launch director Tim Dunn said in a NASA TV interview.

The launch went smoothly, but there were some tense moments when communications signals were temporarily lost. Ground controllers were able to track Iris by relying on other satellites orbiting Earth. It also took longer-than-expected for Iris to unfurl its solar panels.

AP Photo/NASA,VAFB, Randy Beaudoin,File    This undated image provided by NASA shows technicians preparing at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. for the launch of NASA's latest satellite, Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), that will study the sun.

 

In a statement, NASA said it received confirmation that the satellite deployed its solar panels and was generating power.
Previous sun-observing spacecraft have yielded a wealth of information about our nearest star and beamed back brilliant pictures of solar flares.

The 7-foot-long Iris, weighing 400 pounds, carries an ultraviolet telescope that can take high-resolution images every few seconds.

Unlike NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which observes the entire sun, Iris will focus on a little-explored region that lies between the surface and the corona, the glowing white ring that’s visible during eclipses.

The goal is to learn more about how this mysterious region drives solar wind — a stream of charged particles spewing from the sun — and to better predict space weather that can disrupt communications signals on Earth.

“This is a very difficult region to understand and observe. We haven’t had the technical capabilities before now to really zoom in” and peer at it up close, NASA program scientist Jeffrey Newmark said before the launch.

RANDY BEAUDOIN/AFP/Getty Images    The Vandenberg Air Force Base shows engineers working with the IRIS spacecraft

 

The mission is cheap by NASA standards, costing $182 million, and is managed by the space agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Engineers will spend a month making sure Iris is in perfect health before powering on the telescope to begin observations.

The launch was delayed by a day so that technicians at the Air Force base could restore power to launch range equipment after a weekend outage cut electricity to a swath of the central coast.

The Pegasus, from Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., is a winged rocket designed for launching small satellites. First flown in 1990, Pegasus rockets have also been used to accelerate vehicles in hypersonic flight programs.

Voyager 1 discovers strange, unexpected region of space at solar system’s edge

Kenneth Chang, The New York Times | 13/06/28 | Last Updated: 13/06/28 4:00 PM ET
More from The New York Times

NASA/JPL/JHUAPL   2009 data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft showed Voyager's path out of the solar system.

At the edge of the solar system, there are no signs that proclaim, “You are now entering interstellar space.”

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched more than 35 years ago and now 11.5 billion miles from where it started, is closing in on this boundary. In recent years scientists have been waiting eagerly for it to become the first artificial object to leave the solar system and enter the wider reaches of the Milky Way, which they expect it to do. But there has been at least one false alarm.

On Thursday, scientists reported that, no, Voyager 1 still had not reached interstellar space, but it had entered a region that no one expected and no one can yet explain, a curious zone that is almost certainly the last layer of our Sun’s empire — technically speaking, the heliosphere. Three papers published in the journal Science describe in detail the sudden and unpredicted changes encountered in the surroundings of Voyager 1, which left Earth about three months after the original “Star Wars” movie was released and is heading for the cosmos at 38,000 mph.

Scientists had expected that Voyager 1 would detect two telltale signs as it passed through the heliosheath, the solar system’s outermost neighbourhood, which is thought to abut the heliopause, the actual boundary. The key instruments on Voyager 1, as well as those on its twin, Voyager 2, are still working, and its nuclear power source will last until at least 2020.

Last summer, one of the two events occurred, but not the other, leaving scientists perplexed. Scientists had predicted that at the boundary between solar system and interstellar space, the solar wind — a stream of charged particles blown out by the Sun — would fade away, and that Voyager 1 would no longer detect it. That happened.

They also expected that the direction of the magnetic field would change as Voyager 1 emerged from the Sun’s magnetic bubble. That did not.

“Nature is far more imaginative than we are,” said Stamatios M. Krimigis, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory who is the principal investigator of an instrument that records charged particles hitting Voyager 1.

Krimigis is an author of one of the papers in Science.

AFP PHOTO / NASA    This NASA file image obtained September 4, 2012 shows an artist's rendition of the Voyager spacecraft.

 

In July, the spacecraft – which is roughly 1,600 pounds and would fit inside a cube about 13 feet on each side, according to NASA – observed a momentary dip in the intensity of the solar wind.

“It was exciting,” said Edward C. Stone, the project scientist for the two Voyagers. “We had never seen such a drop before. It happened in less than a day. Then five days later, it was back up.”
In mid-August, there was a deeper momentary dip.

Then, on Aug. 25, the solar wind dropped by a factor of more than a thousand, vanishing to imperceptible levels, and it has remained at essentially zero since. At the same time, the number of cosmic rays from outside the solar system jumped by 9.3 percent.
“It looked like we were outside,” Stone said.

But the magnetic field has steadily pointed in the same direction, indicating that Voyager 1 is still ensconced within the Sun’s magnetic field. Scientists guess that in this region the magnetic fields of the solar system partly connect to those of the surrounding interstellar space, allowing the solar particles to escape. (Charged particles travel along magnetic field lines.) They have named the zone through which Voyager 1 is hurtling the heliosheath depletion region.

“I think it’s clear we do not have a model which explains all of this,” Stone said.
Voyager 2, which is moving slightly more slowly, has not yet encountered this region.
Stone noted that, when the two Voyagers launched in 1977 on a tour of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, there was no way to know that NASA had built something that would last 35 years, long after it passed the planets. The designers of the mission, however, were prescient to be prepared if they lasted that long.

“It turns out that in fact we designed the cosmic ray instrument specifically for this phase of this mission,” Stone said. “We were planning, and it really paid off. We’ve begun to see what’s outside even though the magnetic field says you’re not outside.”

As for actually reaching the outside of the solar system, Stone said, “it could be a few months, or it could be several more years.”

A Lifeline, Not a Lifetime

It would have to be the stuff of fearfully grisly science fiction. An unfortunate accident, to begin with, that would have the result of destroying someone's face. A death sentence, surely. If means could be found to surgically restore some function to whatever remained of a face which contains someone's vital features, organs allowing one to breathe, to see, to hear, to consume liquid and food, then survival, albeit awkward, could be achieved.

Means found, through medical-surgical intervention to reconstruct vital organs allowing someone to breathe on their own, to eat, ensure survival. If sight and hearing are impaired, an individual can still learn to use alternative means of replacing those senses to inform him/herself and be capable of living a public life. That public life becomes complicated, however, with the reality of that disastrous accident resulting in a monstrous distortion of facial features.

Pat Semansky, The Associated Press

Enough so that to the public coming face to face with a victim of a personally cataclysmic accident, the immediate, reaction is shock and revulsion. It is a vicarious human reaction. With some people adding their own particular brand of cruelty in offhand comments measured to inform the individual whose face has become monstrously contorted that they should be confined to an interior where no one would have to see them.

This is what happened to Richard Norris, 38, of rural Virginia, who fifteen years ago was the victim of a shotgun blast that utterly and savagely ravaged the lower half of his face. "I've heard all kinds of remarks. A lot of them were really horrible", he said. The result of that accident was a face absent a nose, teeth, and leaving him with a partial tongue, and no sense of smell.

Dozens of surgeries later he was still left using a hat and face mask, going out into the public arena only at night. "You can create a semblance of something, but I can guarantee you it's not normal by any means", explained Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez, head of plastic surgery at the University of Maryland Medical Centre, R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center.

A relative handful of facial transplants have been attempted worldwide, under 30 in total. Four recipients died. Survivors can anticipate a lifetime of being reliant upon immunosuppressant drugs to ensure their facial transplant is not rejected by their own body's immune system. The drugs themselves take a toll on people's health; they suppress the immune system, after all.

Face transplants are optional. Like cosmetic surgery. Richard Norris, like others who have suffered catastrophic accidents that have robbed them of their birthright facial characteristics that make them physically uniquely themselves, would have been capable of continuing to live with the face he was left with after reconstructive surgery which did not restore his former face, but did allow him to use whatever was left of it.

The surgery involved is complex. Face transplant patients are informed forthrightly that when they make the decision to proceed with their transplants they risk death. "If you talk to these patients, they will tell you it is worth the risk", says Dr. Rodriguez. He informed Richard Norris's mother that her son faced a 50-50 chance he would not survive surgery.

"We looked at Richard and we told him we loved him the way he was and it didn't matter to us, but it was his life. That was what he wanted to do and we supported him", his mother explained.

Richard Norris, now living with a transplant gift he received when a 21-year-old died after he was hit by a minivan crossing a street, contacts the family of the young man part of whose face he wears, to keep them informed about his progress. His transplant surgery took 36 hours to complete. It included teeth transplantation, upper and lower jaw, part of the tongue and all the tissue from scalp to base of the neck.

Immunosuppressant medications come complete with patient risks. Patients know in addition that it is an unknown how long the transplant itself may survive. If all proceeds according to optimistic expectations, says Dr. Rodriguez, a transplanted face may last 20 to 30 years.

It is a lifeline, but it is not a lifetime.

Meteoreidolia

By Phil Plait

SLATE

Posted Saturday, June 29, 2013, at 12:30 PM

50,000 years ago, a chunk of iron 30 or more meters across slammed into the Arizona desert at a speed dozens of times faster than a rifle bullet. The ensuing explosion was equivalent to the detonation of million of tons of TNT, and in seconds it carved out a hole in the ground 1200 meters (3900 feet) across and 170 meters (560 feet) deep.

We now call that impact site Meteor Crater, or more formally Barringer Crater, and it’s a tourist attraction located about 25 km west of Winslow, Arizona^*. I visited there many years ago, and stood there on the rim, slack-jawed, in awe of the formation I was seeing, visualizing the enormous impact event in my mind.

Since then I’ve seen countless pictures of the crater, but in none of them have I ever seen this:

At least he's facing Vegas...
Photo by Tomas Vorobjov, used by permission

Do you see it? The shadow of the crater rim looks like a face in profile, looking left. The top of an old, closed mine shaft even looks like an eye!

The photographer, Tomas Vorobjov, alerted me to it, even noting how much it looks like the King of Diamonds. I have to agree; a little Photoshop should make it obvious.

A pair of kings.
Card photo by Shutterstock/Christopher David Howells (modified by Phil Plait)

Ha! I love pareidolia: the psychological effect of seeing faces in unrelated patterns. This is a great one, and by great I mean huge. That shadow is a thousand meters long!

I’m rather glad that when I stood there, all those years ago, I wasn’t standing where Vorobjov did, and the Sun was at a different angle in the sky. I would’ve ruined the moment laughing out loud had I seen that. Of course, it would’ve been pretty cool to see it with my own eyes, too.

But there’s no use regretting it. We all have to face the cards we’re dealt.

28 June 2013 -- News In Brief

• The United States plans to start supplying arms directly to Syrian rebels within a month, American officials said Thursday, as it emerged that the CIA has begun shipping weapons to a secret network of warehouses in Syria's neighbour, Jordan. Leaked CIA plans disclose that Washington will dispatch arms from Jordan to specially vetted groups in the Free Syrian Army in co-ordination with European and Arab allies. The arms supplies are intended to be in the hands of the rebels before an offensive against Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime is launched in early August, according to the Wall Street Journal.
•  
• Readings by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft confirm it is in unfamiliar territory, but it is still inside our solar system. Voyager 1 is about 18.5 billion kilometres from the sun and is poised to become the first spacecraft to break out of the solar system into the space between stars. Scientists do not know how far this region extends.
•  
• Police in Tennessee say a puppy was killed when a man put it in a dishwasher and ran the machine. Police charged 27-year-old Marcus Curry with aggravated abuse to animals. He is being held on a $40,000 bond. Police were called Wednesday by an apartment maintenance man who found a dead puppy in a trash bin.
•  
• The UN is raising the alarm about the recent rape of nine young girls in conflict-ridden eastern Congo, the youngest 18 months old. Two girls died, though their ages weren't released. Two officials say the girls were admitted to Panzi Hospital in South Kivu province over the past two months with serious internal wounds. UN special representative to Congo, Roger Meece, and UNICEF representative Barbara Bentein released their statement through UN deputy spokesman Eduardo del Buey on Thursday. Officials said two suspects have been arrested.
•  
•  Civilians in hospitals, schools, churches and mosques are increasingly put in harm's way in armed conflicts around the world, including in Syria, Red Cross head Peter Maurer said Thursday. "Weaponization of medical facilities" and similar misuse of schools, churches and mosques is a worrisome trend, he said.
•  
• An autopsy confirms that a 2-year-old found dead in a car west of Toronto had been exposed to searing temperatures while left alone in the vehicle, police say. Investigators say the boy was found Wednesday outside a Milton, Ontario home. They say the boy was in the care of his grandmother, who is in her 50s. Police say they are awaiting further toxicology tests for an exact cause of death. The homicide squad is investigating.
•  
• Matteo Renzi, Florence's mayor has denied his city is a hotbed of "bunga bunga" amid a growing scandal involving prostitutes being paid for sex by council officials and local worthies. Goings-on in the Tuscan city have invited comparisons with parties organized by Silvio Berlusconi, who was this week sentenced to seven years' jail after being found guilty of paying for sex with an underage prostitutes. Prosecutors are investigating a network of 142 prostitutes, many of them from Eastern Europe, who were allegedly paid for sex by council officials and businessmen. Fourteen people are being investigated for procuring prostitutes based on 4,000 pages of transcripts of telephone calls.
•  
• Pope Francis told the Vatican's ambassadors they risked "ridicule" if they lived overly comfortable lives, in the latest expression of his desire for a more austere Roman Catholic Church. The Argentinian Pope said the apostolic nuncios (ambassadors) should eschew a "bourgeois" style of life and reject the pursuit of worldly goods. He said they had a vital role in the countries they represent by recommending who should be made bishops. But they should avoid candidates who were overly ambitious or showed "a princely psychology". "There is always a risk ... of giving in to that sort of "bourgeoisie of the spirit and life' which drives one to recline, to seek out a comfortable and tranquil life", he said.

The Flaming Skull Nebula. Seriously.

By Phil Plait

SLATE

Posted Friday, June 28, 2013, at 8:00 AM

AAAAAAAIIIIIIIiiiiiiiieeeeeeee!
Photo by T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage) and H. Schweiker (WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF)

Planetary nebulae are among my favorite objects in the sky. When a star a bit more massive than the Sun starts to die, it blows off a super solar wind of gas. As it ages more, this wind it blows speeds up, slamming into the stuff previously ejected, carving it into weird and amazing shapes. Eventually, the entire outer layers of the star blow off, exposing the star’s hot, dense core. This floods the surrounding gas with ultraviolet light, causing it to glow.

Once it starts to emit light, the gas cloud becomes visible to us on Earth, and we can see the weird forms it can take. This structure can be quite fantastic, depending on how exactly the star was spinning as it blew off those winds, what angle we see this at, and the chemical composition of the gas.

In the case of the planetary nebula Sh2-68, though, we have an added factor: motion. The star at the heart of this nebula is moving rapidly through space, and it happens to be in a location in our galaxy where there is more gas and dust between stars than usual. So as it moves, the gas it blows off is itself blown back, like a dog’s hair is blown back when it sticks its head out of a car window.

The image above, taken by my friend Travis Rector using the KPNO 4-meter telescope, shows this in detail. The blue gas is oxygen (which is slightly false-color here; this flavor of oxygen is actually more greenish), and the red is hydrogen. The star itself is the blue one right in the center of the blue gas.

I could go into great detail about the overall shape of the gas, the cavities in it, the actually quite interesting physics of how the gas interacts with the interstellar gas … but c’mon. Seriously.

The nebula looks like a giant screaming head with its hair aflame streaking across the galaxy!

That is just way too cool. I used to read the Ghost Rider comic books when I was a kid, and when I look at Sh2-68, it’s hard to shake the image of Johnny Blaze on his motorcycle, his flaming skull grinning maniacally as he wreaks vengeance upon evildoers.

Or maybe that’s just me. Either way, this is no illusion; we are seeing the gas blowing back due to what is essentially wind, with the parallel tendrils and streamers of gas flowing downwind adding to the effect. The red color Travis used doesn’t hurt, either.

'Nuff said.

The World's Second Largest Hole

By Atlas Obscura

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Posted Friday, June 28, 2013, at 10:15 AM

Atlas Obscura on Slate is a new travel blog. Like us on Facebook, Tumblr, or follow us on Twitter @atlasobscura.

The second-largest man-made hole in the world (surpassed only by the Bingham Copper Mine in Utah) is a diamond mine located on the outskirts of Mirny, a small town in eastern Siberia. Begun in 1955, the pit is now 1,722 feet deep and 0.78 miles in diameter. Stalin initially ordered construction of the mine to satisfy the Soviet Union's need for industrial-grade diamonds.

The harsh, frozen Siberian landscape made working on the mine a difficult proposition at best. Jet engines were turned on the unyielding permafrost in order to melt it; when that failed, explosives were used. During its peak years of operation, the Mirny mine produced over 10 million carats of diamonds annually, a good percentage of which were gem-quality.

Operations ceased in 2001, but the site didn’t lie dormant for long. Diamond mining now takes place in great volumes at the Mir Underground Mine, which lies just underneath the original open pit. To get to the base of the pit, massive 20-foot tall rock-hauling trucks travel along a road that spirals down from the lip of the hole to its basin. The round-trip travel time is two hours.

More on the Mirny Diamond Mine can be found on Atlas Obscura.

Huge holes:

• The Great Blue Hole is a massive underwater sinkhole made famous by Jacques Cousteau
• The Morning Glory Spillway is the largest drain hole in the world
• The Kola Superdeep Borehole is the deepest hole ever drilled in the name of science

Photo by jeande

View Mir Diamond Mine in a larger map

More on the Mirny Diamond Mine can be found on Atlas Obscura.

Orthodox Jews pledge to guard London mosque

June 28, 2013 7:42amn -- JTA

(JTA) — An Orthodox Jewish patrol group in London said it would protect a mosque after a rise in hate crimes against Muslims.

The Shomrim patrol group accepted a request for protection by the North London Community Centre in Cazenove Road, an Islamic institution situated in the heavily-Jewish Borough of Hackney in northern London.

The deal was brokered at a recent meeting coordinated by Ian Sharer, a member of the local council, the Hackney Gazette reported this week.

It came following a rise in anti-Muslim attacks after the slaying of a British soldier on May 22 in London. The suspect, a 22-year-old Muslim extremist, was filmed holding a large knife over the soldier’s decapitated body. A second suspect was charged with attempted murder and is believed to have acted as an accomplice.

Tell Mama, a watchdog on hate crime, recorded 212 incidents in the nine days that followed the murder, including 120 online. In 2012, the same group documented 12 anti-Muslim incidents per week on average and 624 in total.

Sharer, who is Jewish, told the Gazette that he was asked by “Muslim friends to chair the meeting. The meeting was a great success. The Shomrim patrols have agreed to include the local mosques and other buildings as part of their routine patrols.”

The local Shomrim group, numbering 22, was set up in 2008 in part as a reaction to anti-Semitic incidents, the Gazette reported. Members of the 24-hour patrol group have been trained by Hackney police and have neighborhood patrol badges and uniforms.

Chaim Hochhauser, 33, one of two Shomrim supervisors said the request from protection came from the Muslim community through Sharer. “We told them what we could do. We are pleased the Jewish community wanted to help.”

Read more: http://www.jta.org/2013/06/28/news-opinion/world/orthodox-jews-pledge-to-guard-london-mosque#ixzz2XXzBS1UI

Oil Pipelines and Other Energy Distractions

Reuters

"The national interest will be served only if it does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution. The net effect on climate will be critical to determining if this project goes forward."
Keystone XL pipeline: "...Only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution"
U.S. President Barack Obama

Tellingly, and catering to the American environmental pressure lobby, it was Alberta "tarsands", not Alberta-based oilsands to which President Obama referred. Concern for the environment, particularly in the face of overwhelming and coincidental threats making their sinister presence increasingly known through the rising prevalence of catastrophic natural disasters in the form of geologic and atmospheric incidents costing lives and property in the extreme, insists the issue be addressed.

On the other hand, the science relating to global warming is confused and has more than its logical share of critics from within the scientific community. Yet it is unmistakable that, global warming which has mysteriously slowed, if anything, now plays second fiddle to the inexorable changes that have taken place on this planet as a result of climate change. For the climate is changing. And we don't quite know how to react.

Cutting back on coal generated power stations accounting for 40% of greenhouse gases produced in the United States is a start. Particularly since no limits exist in law regarding how much carbon dioxide power plants are permitted to emit: "It's not right, not safe and it needs to stop", President Obama intoned. To do that, to halt the use of coal-generated American electricity, whose use has, as it happens, been slowly diminished in favour of gas-generated power, would impact jobs and cut GDP significantly.

The American public, when polled about their most immediate concerns, cite in the majority, their worries about the economy and quite specifically, the lack of jobs from a slow recovery. Concern over the environment appears way down on the list of problems they feel should be addressed. Addressing the environment in fact, places the economy under greater stress through increased costs and decreased financial benefits, leading to greater unemployment.

These are difficult matters to unravel in a country that is continuing to struggle to haul itself out of a depressing economic slowdown, with an enormous deficit and even more disastrous-for-future-generations debt. Coal-fired furnaces are dirty, they spew carbon into the atmosphere far more than any other mode of energy-provision. And if President Obama turns his disfavour on gas as well, and fracking in particular, the cost to the U.S. economy will swell.

But there's always Alberta oil. Whether or not the president blocks the route to the Gulf of Mexico, Alberta crude will be shipped out somewhere. It will go by rail, by ship, to China and anywhere else Canada can find customers for its product. It is an energy source that is proven and vital to the economy in the United States. The pipeline itself will generate thousands of jobs in a depressed industry, it will guarantee a secure source of energy.

From a country that is a neighbour, a stable democracy, the largest trading partner that the U.S. has, in fact, and from which it already obtains far more of that energy extracted from natural resources, than anywhere else in the world. And which, in the larger scheme of environmental pollution on a global scale, adds relatively little to the carbon burden.

Astrophoto: Bungling the Milky Way

By Phil Plait

SLATE

Posted Thursday, June 27, 2013, at 10:45 AM

Mike Salway is an Australian photographer with a passion for the night sky. I’ve featured his beautiful photos on the blog before (like here and here); he has an excellent eye for scenery, setup, and post-processing to maximize the artistry and information in a photograph.

He’s writing a series of articles he calls “Nightscape Photography 101”, giving instructions for how to take beautiful shots of the heavens above. I read through them, and if you have some experience taking pictures and using basic software. they’re easy to follow and should produce great results.

It’s hard to argue when you see a phenomenal shot like this, showing the Milky Way over the Bungle Bungle Range in Australia:

Ancient rocks, and ancienter galaxy. Click to galactinate.
Photo by Mike Salway, used by permission

Yegads. I had to crop and shrink it to fit it here, so you really want to click to embiggen it. The full-size picture is gorgeous. And he tells you just how he made it, too.

A single Bungle Bungle.
Photo by Mike Salway, used by permission.

I love geology, and as mesmerizing as the galaxy is arching over the ground in that picture, my eyes were drawn to the rock formations. I could tell right away in general what I was seeing: ancient sedimentary layers of a sea bed laid down long ago, then later eroded away by wind and water. I’ve seen similar formations (though not as spectacular) in Colorado and Wyoming. The Bungle Bungle Range is over 300 million years old.

Of course, the galaxy stretched out above it is about 10 billion years old, to give you a sense of scale. When it comes to age, there’s old, and then there’s old.

A last note of irony: I don’t know if the word is used this way in Oz, but “bungle” in America means to make a mistake due to incompetence, to really screw something up. Clearly, that’s not the case here! Through careful planning, execution, and follow-up, Salway has created a magical portrait of our planet and galaxy. If you follow his instructions, you can too.

Love and the Marriage Sacrament

Wedding photo of Donna Jones, Mark Hutt taken in September 2007. Mark Hutt has been convicted of first degree murder in Donna Jones's death. He has been sentenced to life imprisonment, with no chance of parole.

 "I'm sure people are going to say 'We don't believe this, we don't believe that', but what they got to remember is, people do change. It can happen. A bad person can become a good person, just like a good person can become a bad person. I've changed for the better.
"What's done is done. You can't go back."
Mark Peter Hutt, 37, Ottawa

He has, he insists, turned his life around. He is no longer the person he was. He admits to having been guilty of criminal negligence causing death. He heeded his wife Donna's assurances that she was just fine. She just needed a little time to get better, and soon enough would. Then everything would most certainly return to 'normal'. So he listened to her, instead of doing what he said he really wanted to do: call for medical help.

His wife of just over two years died on December 6, 2009, just a few weeks shy of her 33rd birthday. She was morbidly septic as a result of infected wounds resulting from deep second- and third-degree burns covering half her body. She had two black eyes, her nose was broken. Post-death medical examination discovered twenty-nine bullets from an air gun lodged in her body. She had nine broken ribs, a fractured finger, cuts and bruises all over her body.

Her husband, however, had her calm assurance that she would be just fine. Do not, please, call a doctor, do not think of calling an ambulance, she had no wish to be professionally examined by a medical practitioner, and certainly did not want to be taken to hospital. She was kept, for eleven agonizing days, in the basement of the house she owned where she and her husband, Mark Hutt lived. A makeshift mattress-bed had been arranged for her comfort on the concrete floor.

She had possession of a cellphone and spoke on a number of occasions during that eleven-day period with her mother, with some of her friends and colleagues at work. All was fine, she assured them. She would soon return to work. And please, banish all thoughts of casually dropping by. She and Mark were simply too busy, too engaged with their recreational life, to spare time just at this particular juncture.

The thing of it was, her friends and colleagues at work saw through the smooth practised veneer of Donna Jones's assurances. They had seen the evidence of physical brutality she had been tormented with, had themselves heard her loving husband viciously berate and threaten, demean and diminish her constantly, his voice loud and shrill enough to penetrate over the phone lines. They had, in very fact, remonstrated with her for years.

Now that she is dead, and her husband held guilty for her excruciating death in which she seemed to hold him blameless -- he assures the judge and jury sitting in judgement of his loving kindnesses to his vulnerable wife caught in the unspeakable web of her fixation on his emotional needs, and his hidden but deep-seated love and concern for her -- that he is not now who he was then, when he chose not to recognize the morbidly dire straits his wife was in.

True, it was he who had, entirely by accident, thrown boiling water over most of her body, and it was he who had inflicted all those wounds on her suffering body, but he was really a nice fellow under it all. He had suffered as a child. "I had learning disorders, ADHD, I was constantly in trouble, out in the hallway doing my school work", getting picked up "regularly" by police because he broke windows, climbed on the school roof, "stupid things like that."

"I was in a special class for people who couldn't learn as fast as the others, couldn't pay attention and stuff like that." Pity the poor neglected soul. A previous girlfriend had testified of her experience with Mark Hutt, his threats and his violence. How she had left him on a few occasions, but would always return when he apologized, promised he intended to "try hard" not to repeat his offences. Donna, however, agreed to marry him, even while he tormented her pre-marriage, despite the protests of those who saw that dysfunctional relationship and were appalled.

"I wasn't really that abusive to Donna. I'd call her names and stuff like that. She'd be scared of me because when I got mad I would get loud. She would try her best to make my day, but I was just too angry at that point." But still, he said, he's not a "monster man". True, he verbally and even at times physically abused her but not like what people thought. "A lot of that [the condition of her battered body] was misinterpreted as being abuse."

But, people change, he insists, and he has most certainly changed, not the same person at all, not at all. He was baptized in October 2011. He reads his Bible daily. He sees a psychiatrist. He took part in an anger management class. And a photograph of his wife, Donna Jones, sits right beside his bed.

Baby Stars Blast Gas out of Both Ends

By Phil Plait

SLATE

Posted Wednesday, June 26, 2013, at 8:00 AM

Spitzer Space Telescope is one of NASA’s flagship astronomical observatories, peering into the Universe in the infrared. It ran out of coolant in 2009, losing some of its infrared capabilities, but it still takes wonderful data in two other colors of IR that are useful for mapping the galaxy.

Our Milky Way galaxy is a vast, flat disk, and astronomers are using Spitzer to take images of that disk in a 360-degree panoramic survey to be released later this year (in the clearly artificially acronymed Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire—Glimpse 360). However, they just released pictures of a few small regions that show the telescope is still doing a great job.

Looking toward the constellation of Canis Majoris, near Orion, they spotted an area where stars are being born, and it’s lovely:

Stars are born in a cloud of gas and dust in the constellation of Canis Major. Click to cromulently embiggen.
All photos by NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Wisconsin

In these images, the green and blue colors are from Spitzer, and red is from observation by WISE, another IR mission that ended in 2011. The red comes mostly from long, complex chains of organic (carbon-based) molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. They are formed when stars are born and when they die. Green is gas, and blue is from older stars. Young stars appear more reddish-yellow, because they’re still encased in the thick shroud of dust in which they were born.

Not only is that pretty, but when you look at it in detail, you see that several of the stars have jets of matter blasting away from them, like in this part:

Human babies do this too.

Some of the stars have gas blowing away from them in opposite directions. The detailed physics of this is complex, but young stars blast away gas as they form. A swirling disk of material around a young star can focus that outflow from an expanding sphere into two conical beams going out from the poles of the disk. In the images you can see these beams as short, stubby green fingers pointing in opposite directions away from the star. (I’ve marked a couple with arrows. Don’t confuse them with the sharp spikes every star has; that has to do with the internal optics of the telescopes.)

Here is another part of the image:

Chaos and beauty in star birth.

They’re not easy to spot, but if you look closely, you can see a few. The curved backward-comma one in the upper left is the most obvious.

This may be a young star beginning to shed its cocoon of gas and dust.

I was also intrigued by the object inset here; the gas around it appears to be fuzzy, unlike the jets, but still on opposite ends of the star. I’m not clear what this is, but I suspect it’s a slightly older (though still infant) star, breaking free of its cocoon. Such bipolar structures are sometimes seen in these situations.

More images and descriptions are available in the Spitzer release about the Glimpse survey. These are clearly just a taste of what’s to come in the survey later this year. As an astronomer I’m delighted at the science that will come out of this, and as a human I am awed by the beauty. It’s the best of both—of all—worlds.

Mercury’s Limb

By Phil Plait

SLATE

Posted Wednesday, June 26, 2013, at 10:30 AM

The crater-laden surface of Mercury, as seen by the Sun-blasted Messenger spacecraft. Click to hermesenate.
Photo by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

I haven’t posted a dramatic picture of Mercury from the Messenger (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) spacecraft in a long time—not since I moved to Slate, certainly—and I really like this new one, shown above. This is the limb, or apparent edge, of the planet seen near the planet’s south pole from the orbiting spacecraft.

Funny how much it superficially looks like the Moon. Both are airless and rocky, so the color and cratering are similar. But even if you woke me out of a cold sleep, I could tell you that’s not the Moon. I don’t know why, exactly: I’m familiar enough with the Moon’s surface but not so much that I could recognize any random spot.

But even so, these features are just different. The contrast is different than on the Moon, and the crater sizes don’t seem to have the same distribution. Ignoring the craters, the surface also seems flatter than the Moon's, which is littered with hills and mountain chains and hummocks.

This shot of Mercury does show some neat features. The crater with rays, those liner streaks, is probably the most obvious. That’s Han Kan, a 50-kilometer (30-mile) wide impact crater. Rays are formed when plumes of material shoot out from the impact site and settle onto the surface. They wear away with time (erosion from micrometeorites, impact from the solar wind, and even the thermal stress of the extreme temperature difference between day and night contributes to that), so seeing a rayed crater indicates relative youth.

You can also see a couple of double-walled craters, like a crater in a crater. That sometimes forms in larger impacts, though the exact physics isn’t completely understood. (It’s hard to model a gigantic hypervelocity impact when you’re not exactly sure what all the physical processes going on happen to be.) The one just below center is Bach—here’s a shot of it looking straight down—and a little to the north is Cervantes. You can spot more of them, too, if you look around. It helps to have an atlas.

Mercury is a very hard planet to observe from Earth; its orbit around the Sun is smaller, so it never gets very far from the star. That means it’s only up at dawn and dusk, so you don’t get much time to view it before either it sets or the Sun rises. You’re also always looking near our horizon, through our thick air, distorting and dimming the view. In other words, there’s nothing like being there.

We’ve sent probes to the smallest planet in the past, but they were all “fly-by” missions; Messenger was the first to orbit. It’s been an amazing beast, withstanding the heat and radiation of the Sun for years—it went into orbit around Mercury in March 2011 after several years of travel to get there. The primary mission ended in 2012, but it was extended a year, and hopefully it will be extended again; we’re still awaiting word if it will get more time.

Obviously, I hope it does. Mercury is a fascinating little world, so familiar yet so strange. It’s certainly worth taking more time to get a closer look.

• Vatican no-show: Pope Francis skips gala concert, shocking cardinals

The day before the concert, Pope Francis said bishops should be 'close to the people' and not have 'the mentality of a prince.' 

By Philip Pullella, Reuters / June 25, 2013

• 

Archbishop Rino Fisichella (r.) faces the empty papal throne as he reads a message from Pope Francis before a RAI National Symphony Orchestra concert, directed by conductor Juraj Valcuha of Slovakia, in Paul VI hall at the Vatican, on June 22, 2013.   Giampiero Sposito / Reuters

VATICAN CITY

A last-minute no-show by Pope Francis at a concert where he was to have been the guest of honor has sent another clear signal that he is going to do things his way and does not like the Vatican high life.

The gala classical concert on Saturday was scheduled before his election in March. But the white papal armchair set up in the presumption that he would be there remained empty.

Minutes before the concert was due to start, an archbishop told the crowd of cardinals and Italian dignitaries that an "urgent commitment that cannot be postponed" would prevent Francis from attending.

The prelates, assured that health was not the reason for the no-show, looked disoriented, realizing that the message he wanted to send was that, with the Church in crisis, he - and perhaps they - had too much pastoral work to do to attend social events.

"It took us by surprise," said one Vatican source on Monday. "We are still in a period of growing pains. He is still learning how to be pope and we are still learning how he wants to do it."
"In Argentina, they probably knew not to arrange social events like concerts for him because he probably wouldn't go," said the source, who spoke anonymously because he is not authorized to discuss the issue.

The picture of the empty chair was used in many Italian papers, with Monday's Corriere della Sera newspaper calling his decision "a show of force" to illustrate the simple style he wants Church officials to embrace.

Since his election on March 13, Francis, the former cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina, has not spent a single night in the opulent and spacious papal apartments.

He has preferred to live in a small suite in a busy Vatican guest house, where he takes most meals in a communal dining room and says Mass every morning in the house chapel rather than the private papal chapel in the Apostolic Palace.

The day before the concert, Francis said bishops should be "close to the people" and not have "the mentality of a prince."

On Saturday, while the concert was in progress in an auditorium just meters (yards) away, Francis was believed to be working on new appointments for the Curia, the Vatican's troubled central administration.

The administration was held responsible for some of the mishaps and scandals that plagued the eight-year reign of Pope Benedict before he resigned in February.

Francis inherited a Church struggling to deal with priests' sexual abuse of children, the alleged corruption and infighting in the Curia, and conflict over the running of the Vatican's scandal-ridden bank.

Benedict left a secret report for Francis on the problems in the administration, which came to light when sensitive documents were stolen from the pope's desk and leaked by his butler in what became known as the "Vatileaks" scandal.

The Vatican source said he expected Francis to make major changes to Curia personnel by the end of the summer.

Anger at the mostly Italian prelates who run the Curia was one of the reasons why cardinals chose the first non-European pope for 1,300 years.

The key appointment will be the next secretary of state, sometimes referred to as the Vatican's prime minister, to succeed the Italian Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who has been widely blamed for the failings of the Curia.

(Reporting By Philip Pullella; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)