This is Stupid...

...and they call it science.

Nearly 50% of participants in ‘Monkeypox in women’ study were biological men.

FMTT.

Can You Trust the Science?

Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

H/T to Samizdata via Borepatch.

It Works

NASA says so.

After months of speculation and leaked documents, NASA's long-awaited EM Drive paper has finally been peer-reviewed and published. And it shows that the 'impossible' propulsion system really does appear to work.

They don't know why, but it does.

Floating Along the Milky Way

Earth Abides

To celebrate Earth Day I present the prologue to Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. Listen to Charlton Heston read it here.

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There’s been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land.

Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away — all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years.

Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety.

Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It’s powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that’s happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive gas, like fluorine.

When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time.

A hundred years ago we didn’t have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try. We’ve been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we’re gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

Shamelessly swiped from the Oracle.

This is neat.

Hubble discovers carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star, an important step along the trail of finding the chemical biotracers of extraterrestrial life as we know it. The Jupiter-sized planet, called HD 189733b, is too hot for life. But the Hubble observations are a proof-of-concept demonstration that the basic chemistry for life can be measured on planets orbiting other stars. Organic compounds can also be a by-product of life processes, and their detection on an Earth-like planet may someday provide the first evidence of life beyond Earth.
Credits: NASA, ESA, and M. Swain (Jet Propulsion Lab/Caltech)

Is death streaming it's way...

...toward us at this very moment? Definitely, but whether it's gonna be an exploding star, some goblin with a piece of shit 9mm, or a falling tree limb is open to question. As some wit once said the only thing sure about life is none of us get out of it alive. Now I plan to as much a fate will allow to go on my own terms but hey that too is a crap shoot.

And with those depressing thoughts I yield the floor.

H/T to Dick

Apocalyptic Solar Flares?

The Cajun looks at what might happen if we had a massive solar flare sufficient to shut down the electric grid. Would it be Dies the Fire or Lucifer's Hammer?


Apocalyptic Solar Flares?

Near Miss

Surprise Asteroid Makes Near-Miss of Earth

A small asteroid buzzed by Earth Monday, though only real astronomy geeks in the Pacific would have noticed.

The rock, estimated to be no more than 200 feet wide, zoomed past our planet at an altitude of 40,000 miles at 1:44 p.m. universal time — or 8:44 EST.

Ok, get off my ass, buy rifle and ammo, hunker down, Lucifer's Hammer is coming.