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Return to Rhea
After a couple of years in high-inclination orbits that limited its ability to encounter Saturn's moons, NASA's Cassini spacecraft returned to Saturn's equatorial plane in March 2015.
As a prelude to its return to the realm of the icy satellites, the spacecraft had its first relatively close flyby of an icy moon (apart from Titan) in almost two years on Feb. 9. During this encounter Cassini's cameras captured images of the icy moon Rhea, as shown in these in two image mosaics. The views were taken about an hour and a half apart as Cassini drew closer to Rhea.
Images taken using clear, green, infrared and ultraviolet spectral filters were combined to create these enhanced color views, which offer an expanded range of the colors visible to human eyes in order to highlight subtle color differences across Rhea's surface. The moon's surface is fairly uniform in natural color.
The image at right represents one of the highest resolution color views of Rhea released to date. A larger, monochrome mosaic is available in PIA07763.
more
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=pia19057
Head of U.S. Chemical Safety Board Resigns
Source: Scientific American
The chairman of the Chemical Safety & Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) has resigned at the request of the White House. Members of Congress had called on President Barack Obama to fire Rafael Moure-Eraso, charging that he mismanaged the small independent agency that investigates accidents at chemical facilities and refineries.
Moure-Eraso, who had just three months left in his five-year term as head of CSB, announced his resignation to staff in an e-mail sent on Thursday evening. “Effective March 26, 2015, at 5:00 PM, I have submitted my resignation as Chairperson of the CSB to President Barack Obama. It has been a privilege to serve the agency since June 2010,” the e-mail says.
“My wishes are for the continued success and productivity of the Board. I am forever grateful for the hard work of the agency that has led to so many successes over the past five years,” Moure-Eraso writes.
His tenure was marked by turmoil at the agency and charges that he delayed investigations and created a toxic work environment that led to low employee morale and staff attrition.
Read more: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/head-of-u-s-chemical-safety-board-resigns/
A revolt is growing as more people refuse to pay back student loans
Remember those 15 people who refused to repay their federal student loans? Their “debt strike” has picked up 85 more disgruntled borrowers willing to jeopardize their financial future to pressure the government into forgiving their student loans.
And the government is starting to listen. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has invited the group to Washington on Tuesday to discuss their demand for debt cancellation. Although the CFPB doesn’t have the power to grant that request, the agency’s overture shows that the strike is being taken seriously.
It’s been a month since 15 former students of the failing for-profit giant Corinthian Colleges said they would not pay a dime of their student loans because the school broke the law.
Corinthian, which runs Everest Institute, Wyotech and Heald College, has become the poster child for the worst practices in the for-profit education sector, including high loan defaults and dubious programs. Clouded by allegations of deceptive marketing and lying to the government about its graduation rates, Corinthian lost its access to federal funds last year, forcing the company to sell or close its schools.
more
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/get-there/wp/2015/03/30/a-revolt-is-growing-as-more-people-refuse-to-pay-back-student-loans/?tid=sm_fb
Charles Pierce on Carly Fiorina
Carly Fiorina, who has failed spectacularly at business and even more spectacularly at politics, is now thinking of running for president based on her staggering career success. She's already the most entertaining harpy the Republicans have produced since Jean Schmidt 's slandering of John Murtha's military service. She dropped by the Cafe over the weekend for a takeout order. The staff expects to see a lot more of her as the campaign grinds on.
I have heard of humble-bragging, but this is an entirely new tactic -- failure-bragging. At Hewlett-Packard, she nearly ran the company into Middle Earth, bragged about outsourcing jobs when she did it, and was generally so incompetent a manager that the company paid her millions of dollars to never darken its towels again. This is the record on which she is running for president. Also, no porn at work, or she's going to outsource the Department of Agriculture to a sweatshop in Bangladesh.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a33998/carly-fiorina-takes-her-lunch-to-go/
Monday Toon Roundup 3- The Rest
Obamacare
CONgress
NJ
Police
Saudis
Economy
Air travel
Jupiter Is a Garden of Storms
Why the Great Red Spot refuses to die.
BY BRIAN GALLAGHER
It’s always a mistake to read,” Philip Marcus, a computational physicist and a professor in the mechanical engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley, tells me in a coffee shop near campus. “You learn too many things. That’s how I got really fascinated by fluid dynamics.”
It was 1978, and Marcus was in his first year of a post-doctoral position at Cornell focused on numerical simulations of solar convection and laboratory flows using spectral methods. But he had wanted to study cosmic evolution and general relativity; the problem, as Marcus told me, was that there was talk of no one seeing results of general relativity within their lifetime. As a result, “the field kind of collapsed on itself a little bit, and so everybody from general relativity was going to other fields.”
more
http://nautil.us/issue/22/slow/jupiter-is-a-garden-of-storms
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