July 1, 2014

Cassini Probe Celebrates 10 Years at Saturn Today

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A NASA spacecraft marks a big milestone today (June 30) — a decade exploring Saturn and its many moons.

Since arriving in orbit around Saturn 10 years ago today, the Cassini probe has made a number of unprecedented observations and discoveries. Although the spacecraft was originally approved for a four-year mission, it has been granted three mission extensions, allowing it to continue roaming the gas giant’s system.

"Having a healthy, long-lived spacecraft at Saturn has afforded us a precious opportunity," Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "By having a decade there with Cassini, we have been privileged to witness never-before-seen events that are changing our understanding of how planetary systems form and what conditions might lead to habitats for life." [See amazing images taken by Cassini]

For example, Cassini has helped scientists learn more about what kinds of molecules populate our solar system. The spacecraft discovered plumes containing water-ice shooting out into space from the south polar region of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

more

http://www.space.com/26391-cassini-spacecraft-10-years-saturn.html


http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/06/Saturn_s_shadows

July 1, 2014

Pipeline proponents consider explosives in ocean to scare whales from potential oil slicks

The proponents of two controversial pipelines to British Columbia’s coast say they would consider deploying underwater firecrackers, helicopters and clanging pipes, among other methods, to ensure whales don’t swim toward any disastrous oil spill that might result from increased tanker traffic carrying bitumen to Asia.

It’s called hazing and documents obtained by The Globe and Mail show the methods have been studied carefully by U.S. scientists before and since the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill killed 22 orcas in 1989. Last month, the Washington State Department of Ecology asked Trans Mountain to describe any plans it might have to help whales in a spill. In the preamble to its request filed with the National Energy Board, the department notes the proposed expanded pipeline would contribute to “potential cumulative effects on sensory disturbance,” something that “was determined to be significant for southern resident killer whales.”

“NOAA [National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration] identified oil spills as an acute extinction threat to the southern resident killer whales,” the U.S. department says in its request for information from the pipeline project.

“Please describe any Trans Mountain plans to minimize the direct acute threat to marine mammals in general and southern resident killer whales in particular by applying techniques such as the use of ‘hazing’ to drive the animals out of areas heavily affected by surface oil slicks,” says the request for information.

more

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/us-considers-dropping-bombs-in-ocean-to-scare-whales-from-potential-oil-slicks/article19387821/

July 1, 2014

Arizona Man Arrested After Mistaking Car For Alien Spaceship

BRYANT, AZ- An Arizona man was arrested after police say he followed a couple around town harassing and threatening them because he thought the car was a spaceship and the driver was an alien.

The driver of the car was nervous enough to call police and feel threatened to the point he considered the concealed carry weapon he had with him.

The man in custody was 44-year-old-James Bushart.

When police stopped Bushart, he was found with meth, a pipe used to smoke meth, and he was charged with DWI and Disorderly Conduct

more

http://www.myfoxorlando.com/story/25833539/arizona-man-arrested-after

June 30, 2014

An abandoned mall in Bangkok has been overtaken by fish

There's something particularly eerie about an abandoned shopping mall. Perhaps it's the stark contrast from its intended purpose: to see such a sterile place once designed to entice throngs of shoppers into its doors, now so completely devoid of any human life, dilapidated and darkened with time. It's basically the very definition of post-apocalyptic. But in the case of the (now ironically named) New World shopping mall in Bangkok, Thailand, abandonment by humans doesn't equate with lifelessness. The mall, which reportedly caught fire in 1999 (rumored to be arson by a competitor), has since flooded with several feet of water and become a paradise for koi and catfish.


As seen in these photos from chef / travel writer Jesse Rockwell, the resulting "urban aquarium" is at once delightful and surreal. Rockwell writes on his travel, photography, and food blog A Taste of The Road that someone deliberately introduced the fish into the vacant mall, but that locals in Bangkok's old town "discourage people from visiting it." He says he had to wait for a policeman to leave before entering, which makes his resulting images all the more breathtaking.



more

http://www.theverge.com/2014/6/30/5856856/abandoned-mall-in-bangkok-has-been-overtaken-by-fish

June 30, 2014

Dragonfly: Western Energy Companies Under Sabotage Threat

An ongoing cyberespionage campaign against a range of targets, mainly in the energy sector, gave attackers the ability to mount sabotage operations against their victims. The attackers, known to Symantec as Dragonfly, managed to compromise a number of strategically important organizations for spying purposes and, if they had used the sabotage capabilities open to them, could have caused damage or disruption to energy supplies in affected countries.

Among the targets of Dragonfly were energy grid operators, major electricity generation firms, petroleum pipeline operators, and energy industry industrial equipment providers. The majority of the victims were located in the United States, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, and Poland.

The Dragonfly group is well resourced, with a range of malware tools at its disposal and is capable of launching attacks through a number of different vectors. Its most ambitious attack campaign saw it compromise a number of industrial control system (ICS) equipment providers, infecting their software with a remote access-type Trojan. This caused companies to install the malware when downloading software updates for computers running ICS equipment. These infections not only gave the attackers a beachhead in the targeted organizations’ networks, but also gave them the means to mount sabotage operations against infected ICS computers.

This campaign follows in the footsteps of Stuxnet, which was the first known major malware campaign to target ICS systems. While Stuxnet was narrowly targeted at the Iranian nuclear program and had sabotage as its primary goal, Dragonfly appears to have a much broader focus with espionage and persistent access as its current objective with sabotage as an optional capability if required.

more

http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/dragonfly-western-energy-companies-under-sabotage-threat

June 30, 2014

Why Women Aren't People (But Corporations Are)

by Erin Gloria Ryan

Earlier today, five men agreed that closely held corporations with anti-birth control religious beliefs cannot be required to provide contraceptive coverage to female employees. Corporations are people, my friend. Women? Not so much.

The decision to declare women Unpeople was a narrow one; the five men agreed that corporations (people) shouldn't be able to use Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby to justify discriminating against anyone except women (lesser people-ish entities), and won't be able to use it to deny other health care besides contraception. The same religious exemption to the Affordable Care Act that applies to nonprofit organizations also applies to for-profit companies controlled by a small group of people who think birth control is black magic. This ruling applies to whore pills only. Not to blood transfusions, AIDS retrovirals, vaccines, treating infections caused by getting a SATAN RULES tattoo with an infected needle at an unsafe tattoo parlor, antibiotics purchased to fight off a nasty case of the clap caught while raw dogging a stranger in a bar bathroom. Just birth control. No matter why a woman needs it.

The five men also agreed that their ruling only applies to corporations (people) with "sincerely held" religious beliefs. You know, the kind of religious beliefs that are so sincerely anti-birth control that they invest in and profit from companies that manufacture birth control. The kind of religious beliefs that cite as justification for their beliefs a series of religious texts written before Western Medicine as we know it existed.

If corporations are people then why can't I punch one in the fucking face?
more

http://jezebel.com/why-women-arent-people-but-corporations-are-1598061808

June 30, 2014

Charles Pierce- THE STAKES THIS FALL

By Charles P. Pierce on June 30, 2014

In the other big decision today, Harris v. Quinn, the conservative majority among the Nine Wise Souls once again played their favorite game of coring out a precedent while, simultaneously, chickening out on what they really wanted to do, but can't do, at least until a couple more of their ideological bro's come on board because, otherwise, they might scare Anthony Kennedy into common sense, and none of them wants that. What happened in this case happened to (for the most part) poor women doing one of the most thankless and necessary jobs that there is—home health-care workers. (Ask anyone who is in anyway associated with, say, the extended Alzheimer's community. We'd throw these people a parade every day if we could.) Another delightful 5-4 decision held that unions could not extract fees from all state employees working in specific fields. However, it left weakened, but intact, the 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board Of Education, in which the court held that public employees could be compelled to pay for collective bargaining. (The plaintiff in the Harris case was a woman caring for her disabled son at home and she argued that it was unfair for her to have to pay a fee to the SEIU to cover collective bargaining.) Writing for the majority, on the biggest day he's had on the Court since smart people were telling us what a moderate he was, Justice Samuel Alito made it plain that he didn't think much of the Abood decision, but that he didn't have the votes (yet) to blow it up entirely. He referred to it as an "anomaly," and said it was decided "on questionable grounds." He also wrote that:


Such as, one supposes, protecting the process of collective bargaining from the powerful people who want to destroy it. But we digress.

If anyone needed proper motivation to turn out in the fall, and in 2016, here it is. The Court is one thin vote away from turning into the 21st Century memorial to Stephen Johnson Field. Right now, the four conservatives on the Court don't have the votes—and, therefore, the guts—to do everything they want to do because they have to keep poor Kennedy happy. But, even with that, they have gutted the Voting Rights Act, prompting an energetic voter-suppression effort aimed at minority citizens out in the states. (Field, who joined the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson, would have approved.) They have pushed the idea of corporate personhood even beyond what Field dreamed.

more

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Union_Case

June 30, 2014

Gliese 832c: Potentially Habitable Super-Earth Discovered 16 Light-Years Away

Gliese 832, also known as HD 204961 or LHS 3685, is a M1.5 dwarf located in the constellation Grus, about 16 light-years from Earth. It has about half the mass and radius of the Sun.

This star is already known to harbor Gliese 832b, a cold Jupiter-like planet discovered in 2009.

“With an outer giant planet and an interior potentially rocky planet, this planetary system can be thought of as a miniature version of our Solar System,” said Prof Chris Tinney, an astronomer with the University of New South Wales and a co-author of the discovery paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal (arXiv.org pre-print).



more

http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/science-gliese832c-potentially-habitable-super-earth-02029.html

June 30, 2014

Otherworldly Photos of Mysterious Megalithic Stones

Stonehenge may be the most famous prehistoric monument, but it’s by no means the only one. In 2003, photographer Barbara Yoshida was on a trip to Scotland when she photographed the Ring of Brodgar, a circle of standing stones in the Orkney Islands. She spent the next 10 years photographing lesser-known and rarely photographed megalithic stones in more than 15 countries and on three continents. Her photographs will soon be published in the book, Moon Viewing: Megaliths by Moonlight. “I’m drawn to places that are spiritual and have a depth of mystery, that have a sense of timelessness and history. These stones were obviously set up for ritualistic purposes, and people have continued to interact with them over thousands of years and invested them with meaning and resonance,” Yoshida said. “They have enormous power and a presence that you can feel when you're among them. We may not know much about the cultures that erected them, but this mystery is what draws me to them. I wanted to record my subjective perceptions and capture some of that mystery.”


The Gurranes, Castletownshend, Ireland, 2005.

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/behold/2014/06/Stones/Yoshida_S'Ortali%20'e%20su%20Monte72.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg
S’Ortali ’e su Monte, Tortolì, Sardinia, Italy, 2013.

more

http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2014/06/29/barbara_yoshida_photographs_megalithic_stones_in_her_book_moon_viewing_megaliths.html

June 30, 2014

George Takei as Grand Marshall of the 40th Seattle Pride Parade

George Takei, right, of Star Trek fame and acting Grand Marshall of the 40th annual Seattle Pride Parade, drapes beads over a Seattle Police Department officer Sunday, June 29, 2014, in Seattle, Wash. This year's theme was ÒGenerations of Pride."





George Takei, left, of Star Trek fame and acting Grand Marshall of the 40th annual Seattle Pride Parade, rides beside his spouse, Brad Altman, right, on Sunday, June 29, 2014, in Seattle, Wash. This year's theme was ÒGenerations of Pride."

many more pics-

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/slideshow/Seattle-Pride-Parade-2014-88815/photo-6533345.php