n2doc
n2doc's Journal
Stunning Astrophoto: The Milky Way Over Death Valley
High School Physics teacher and photographer Jeff Moreau took this incredible photo of the Milky Way over Death Valley. Jeff planned his photo on a night where the Moon had already set, arriving in Badwater Basin at Death Valley around 3:30 am.
Regarding his image, Jeff says, “As a high school physics teacher, I love astronomy. I frequently am showing my students current astronomy news and images as there is so much that is so easily fascinating going on out in space.”
The image shown above is comprised of 7 photos, which do an incredible job of covering the extent of the Milky Way. According to Jeff, if he were to do this image again, he would take more images, possibly some shot horizontally, so that there would be a little less visible star trails on the top of the image.
Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/103838/stunning-astrophoto-the-milky-way-over-death-valley/#ixzz2aZhYRUeZ
http://www.flickr.com/photos/95912567@N02/9368937469/sizes/l/in/photostream/
Russian lawmaker: We will arrest gay athletes, tourists at Olympic Games
30 JULY 2013 | BY JOE MORGAN
A Russian lawmaker has said the ‘gay propaganda’ law will remain enforced during the Sochi Winter Olympic Games in 2014.
Vitaly Milonov, co-sponsor of the ‘non-traditional relationships’ bill, said the government cannot decide when to selectively enforce the law.
It comes as the International Olympic Committee said the Russian government had ‘assured’ them all athletes and spectators will be safe from arrest.
Speaking to Interfax and as translated by GSN, Milonov said: ‘I have not heard any comments from the government of the Russian Federation but I know it is acting in accordance with Russian law.
- See more at: http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/russian-lawmaker-we-will-arrest-gay-athletes-tourists-olympic-games300713
Mail from the (Velvet) Cybercrime Underground
By Krebs
Over the past six months, “fans” of this Web site and its author have shown their affection in some curious ways. One called in a phony hostage situation that resulted in a dozen heavily armed police surrounding my home. Another opened a $20,000 new line of credit in my name. Others sent more than $1,000 in bogus PayPal donations from hacked accounts. Still more admirers paid my cable bill for the next three years using stolen credit cards. Malware authors have even used my name and likeness to peddle their wares.
“Flycracker,” the administrator of thecc.bz crime forum, hatches plan to send drugs to my home.
But the most recent attempt to embarrass and fluster this author easily takes the cake as the most elaborate: Earlier this month, the administrator of an exclusive cybercrime forum hatched and executed a plan to purchase heroin, have it mailed to my home, and then spoof a phone call from one of my neighbors alerting the local police. Thankfully, I had already established a presence on his forum and was able to monitor the scam in real time and alert my local police well in advance of the delivery.
This would-be smear campaign was the brainchild of a fraudster known variously online as “Fly,” “Flycracker,” and MUXACC1 (muxa is transliterated Russian for “муха” which means “fly”). Fly is the administrator of the fraud forum “thecc[dot]bz,” an exclusive and closely guarded Russian language board dedicated to financial fraud and identity theft.
more
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/mail-from-the-velvet-cybercrime-underground/
Rand Paul's Weird Fixation on Slashing Bike Lane and Sidewalk Funding
by SARAH GOODYEAR
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky wants to fix the federal Transportation-Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill with a couple of super-important amendments.
First of all, the budget-conscious senator wants us to stop sending military money to Egypt, because, “based upon current law, which the United States is legally prohibited from providing foreign assistance to nations that experience a military coups d'état [sic].” The money saved, per his amendment, would go to repair bridges here in the United States.
Another amendment Paul is pushing to get money for bridge repair? He wants to cut all funding to the Transportation Alternatives Fund, which pays for pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, environmental mitigation, safe routes to school projects, and other initiatives to make it easier for people not in cars to get around without being killed.
If Paul has his way, the $800 million in the program – roughly the federal equivalent of the change you’d find in your couch, representing just 2 percent of total federal transportation dollars – would also be redirected to fixing the nation's bridges.
What good would that do for Paul’s home state of Kentucky, to take one example? Well, as Tanya Snyder pointed out last week at Streetsblog, not a whole lot. The state receives less than $13 million in Transportation Alternatives funding, of which it can already divert half to whatever it wants. The Federal Highway Administration estimates the state needs $952 million to fix its bridge-related problems.
more
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/07/rand-pauls-weird-fixation-slashing-pedestrian-and-bicycle-funding/6368/
Libertarian populism is a fraud
BY MICHAEL LIND
Question: What is a libertarian populist? Answer: A libertarian in disguise.
That is my conclusion, after perusing much of the recent discussion of whether a new “libertarian populism” (or “populist libertarianism”) could prove to be a winning formula for the exhausted and discredited American right.
At first glance, creating a common ideology to unite the libertarian and populist wings of today’s right must be an appealing idea for GOP strategists. But to succeed, both parents would have to contribute to the genetic makeup of the libertarian populist baby. The leading advocates of libertarian populism, however, look very much like run-of-the-mill libertarians to me.
Ben Domenech, for example, tries to define libertarian populism by arguing that it takes “a few of its aims from the Rand Paul approach – a balanced budget amendment, flatter and simpler taxes, and more – but there is also a stronger focus on issues which cut across party lines, including reform of higher education, prison and justice systems, civil liberty protections, and an assault on D.C. cronyism from green energy to Big Banks.” But all of this is standard-issue libertarianism, including libertarian critiques of “prison and justice systems” and “civil liberty protections.” Nothing new here, folks, move along.
What Domenech and others mean by “populist” appears to be “popular.” They want a popular libertarianism, a libertarianism that majorities of Americans might vote for, not a movement that has anything to do with actual historic populism in the United States, which has generally been, to coin a phrase, illibertarian.
more
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/30/libertarian_populism_is_a_fraud/
NASA's Chandra Sees Eclipsing Planet in X-rays for First Time
RELEASE: 13-237
NASA's Chandra Sees Eclipsing Planet in X-rays for First Time
For the first time since exoplanets, or planets around stars other than the sun, were discovered almost 20 years ago, X-ray observations have detected an exoplanet passing in front of its parent star.
An advantageous alignment of a planet and its parent star in the system HD 189733, which is 63 light-years from Earth, enabled NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM Newton Observatory to observe a dip in X-ray intensity as the planet transited the star.
"Thousands of planet candidates have been seen to transit in only optical light," said Katja Poppenhaeger of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass., who led a new study to be published in the Aug. 10 edition of The Astrophysical Journal. "Finally being able to study one in X-rays is important because it reveals new information about the properties of an exoplanet."
The team used Chandra to observe six transits and data from XMM Newton observations of one.
The planet, known as HD 189733b, is a hot Jupiter, meaning it is similar in size to Jupiter in our solar system but in very close orbit around its star. HD 189733b is more than 30 times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun. It orbits the star once every 2.2 days.
HD 189733b is the closest hot Jupiter to Earth, which makes it a prime target for astronomers who want to learn more about this type of exoplanet and the atmosphere around it. They have used NASA's Kepler space telescope to study it at optical wavelengths, and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to confirm it is blue in color as a result of the preferential scattering of blue light by silicate particles in its atmosphere.
more
http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/13_releases/press_072913.html
Scientists grow human tooth using stem cells taken from urine
Scientists in China say they have successfully grown a human tooth using stem cells taken from urine.
Researchers say the technique could one day be used as a way to replace teeth lost through aging and poor dental hygiene, with the added bonus that urine is deemed a less controversial source of stem cells than human embryos.
The team at the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health extracted cells contained in the urine which would normally be passed from the body, such as those from the lining of the body's waterworks, and managed to coax them into becoming stem cells.
They then used these to implant the teeth-like structures in mice, and said the resulting bundle of cells eventually contained “dental pulp, dentin, enamel space and enamel organ,” researchers said.
The report, published in Cell Regeneration Journal, added that this could lead to further studies resulting in “the final dream of total regeneration of human teeth for clinical therapy”.
more
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientists-grow-human-tooth-using-stem-cells-taken-from-urine-8737936.html
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