The American Liberal And Progressive Idea is a blog that engages discourse and discussion on information that appears in the media and in historic artifacts that reflects The American Liberal And Progressive Idea on topics that range from: American constitutional government, civics, civil rights, culture, democracy, humanities, history, human rights, jurisprudence, peace, philosophy, politics, systems of belief, and the sciences.
The stars represented in the above illustration depict "a previously unseen stage in the lifecycle of millisecond pulsars, the fastest-spinning objects in the universe."
Pulsars are simply "a special class of neutron stars, the corpses of massive stars that exploded as supernovae. They’re born spinning quickly, up to tens of times per second, and sweep the sky with a beam of radio energy as they rotate. Eventually, they slow down to the point where they can no longer emit radio waves and die a second death."
Discovery of this process has eluded scientists for decades as they searched for the reason why "some old, dead pulsars become millisecond pulsars, which rotate hundreds of times a second." Now that scientists understand that there is "an intermediate step" that occurs as a transferral of material "between the companion neutron stars has provided researchers with a plausible solution that "appears to be the missing link," in the lifecycle of binary neutron stars.
"Astronomers have long theorized that these superfast stars share their orbit with a companion star from which they leech extra material. The material settles around the pulsar’s middle in a so-called accretion disk. As material from the disk falls onto the surface of the pulsar, it imparts enough angular momentum to spin back up into what scientists call a ”recycled pulsar.”"
“We mean it in the same sense as recycling your plastics,” Archibald said. “These pulsars have died and become invisible and useless to us, but they get brought back to life by getting fed from a companion.”
"Astronomers suspect that another type of pulsar-star pair is a way station between normal pulsars and millisecond pulsars. Called a low-mass X-ray binary, such a system is also made up of a neutron star and an accretion disk, but it doesn’t emit radio waves. While the neutron star feeds off its neighbor, the gas flowing between them blocks low-energy radio waves from escaping the system. But when the accretion disk runs out, the radio waves come back, and astronomers can recognize it as a pulsar.
"Until recently, this was only a theory. But Archibald and an international team using radio telescopes on four continents, stumbled on just such a pulsar right in the middle of this metamorphosis.
"The system, called J1023, was discovered in 2007 when the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia was down for repairs. The radio telescope couldn’t be steered to different points in the sky, but resourceful astronomers took data anyway, observing whatever happened to pass overhead. That survey uncovered a millisecond pulsar about 4,000 light years away, spinning 592 times per second.
"But this wasn’t the first time this system caught astronomers’ attention. Another survey in 1999 missed the pulsar but identified its companion as a sun-like star. When they looked again with radio telescopes in 2000, they saw evidence for an accretion disk around a neutron star. By 2002, the accretion disk had disappeared, but the neutron star was still not emitting radio waves as would be expected of a pulsar.
"It was only the 2007 observations that pinned it down as a millisecond pulsar. Astronomers had managed to catch the system changing over the course of 10 years, an eye blink on astronomical timescales.
“This is a completely new thing, seeing it go from one state to another,” said co-author Maura McLaughlin of West Virginia University. “We’ve never seen that before, ever.”
'Aside from proving that recycled pulsars form through cannibalism, J1023 provides a living laboratory for studying how these systems evolve.
“Studying this system will teach us an awful lot about the recycling process,” McLaughlin said. “We may see the radio pulsations disappear and come back again a year from now. There are lots of neat things we can do.”
“It’s a bit of a landmark in tying together what we think happens in these dead stars,” said Don Backer, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the discoverers of the first millisecond pulsar. “You can see the transitions and understand more about how both of these stars work. That’s a great deal of fun.”
The beautifully preserved remains of a 47-million-year-old, lemur-like creature have been unveiled in the US.
"Scientists have unveiled a 47-million-year-old fossilised skeleton of a monkey hailed as the missing link in human evolution.
"The search for a direct connection between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom has taken 200 years - but it was presented to the world today at a special news conference in New York.
"The discovery of the 95%-complete 'lemur monkey' - dubbed Ida - is described by experts as the "eighth wonder of the world"
"The preservation is so good, it is possible to see the outline of its fur and even traces of its last meal.
"The fossil, nicknamed Ida, is claimed to be a "missing link" between today's higher primates - monkeys, apes and humans - and more distant relatives.
"But some independent experts, awaiting an opportunity to see the new fossil, are sceptical of the claim.
"And they have been critical of the hype surrounding the presentation of Ida.
"The fossil was launched amid great fanfare at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, by the city's mayor.
"Although details of the fossil have only just been published in a scientific journal - PLoS One - there is already a TV documentary and book tie-in.
"She belongs to the group from which higher primates and human beings developed but my impression is she is not on the direct line." Dr Jens Franzen conjectured.
"Ida was discovered in the 1980s in a fossil treasure-trove called Messel Pit, near Darmstadt in Germany. For much of the intervening period, it has been in a private collection.
"The investigation of the fossil's significance was led by Jorn Hurum of the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway.
"He said the fossil creature was "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor" and described the discovery as "a dream come true".
"The female animal lived during an epoch in Earth history known as the Eocene, which was crucial for the development of early primates - and at first glance, Ida resembles a lemur.
"But the creature lacks primitive features such as a so-called "toothcomb", a specialised feature in which the lower incisor and canine teeth are elongated, crowded together and projecting forward. She also lacks a special claw used for grooming.
"The team concluded that she was not simply another lemur, but a new species. They have called her Darwinius masillae, to celebrate her place of origin and the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin.
"Dr Jens Franzen, an expert on the Messel Pit and a member of the team, described Ida as "like the Eighth Wonder of the World", because of the extraordinary completeness of the skeleton.
"It was information "palaeontologists can normally only dream of", he said.
"In addition, Ida bears "a close resemblance to ourselves" he said, with nails instead of claws, a grasping hand and an opposable thumb - like humans and some other primates. But he said some aspects of the teeth indicate she is not a direct ancestor - more of an "aunt" than a "grandmother".
"She belongs to the group from which higher primates and human beings developed but my impression is she is not on the direct line."
Independent experts are keen to see the new fossil but somewhat sceptical of any claim that it could be "a missing link".
Dr Henry Gee, a senior editor at the journal Nature, said the term itself was misleading and that the scientific community would need to evaluate its significance.
"It's extremely nice to have a new find and it will be well-studied," he said. But he added that it was not likely to be in the same league as major discoveries such as "Flores man" or feathered dinosaurs.
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"Dr Chris Beard, curator of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and author of The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey, said he was "awestruck" by the publicity machine surrounding the new fossil.
"He argued that it could damage the popularisation of science if the creature was not all that it was hyped up to be.
"Dr Beard has not yet seen scientific details of the find but said that it would be very nice to have a beautiful new fossil from the Eocene and that Ida would be "a welcome new addition" to the world of early primates.
"But he added: "I would be absolutely dumbfounded if it turns out to be a potential ancestor to humans."
"In the PLoS paper itself, the scientists do not actually claim the specimen represents a direct ancestor to us. But Dr Hurum believes that is exactly what Ida is.
"He told BBC News that the key to proving this lay in the detail of the foot. The shape of a bone in the foot called the talus looks "almost anthropoid".
"He said the team was now planning a 3D reconstruction of the foot which would prove this.
"We're not finished with this specimen yet," said Dr Hurum. "There will be plenty more papers coming out."
The White House Office of the Press Secretary released the following statement after 6am on Saturday, May 16, 2009
WEEKLY ADDRESS: President Obama Says Progress on Clean Energy and Healthcare Reform Will Lay New Foundation
WASHINGTON – This week, President Barack Obama praised individuals representing different perspectives for coming together to address the challenges of building a clean energy economy, reforming the healthcare system and laying a new foundation for the long-term strength of our economy. Utility companies and corporate leaders are working with environmental advocates and labor leaders to find a way to reduce dependence on foreign oil, to fight climate change, and to create millions of new jobs in America. Recently, past critics and advocates of healthcare reform sat down with the President to work on reducing the healthcare costs by $2 trillion in the next decade and saving families $2,500 in the coming years.
On Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 11:59 pm the White House released the following:
Weekly Address: Two Pillars of a New Foundation This week the President discusses breakthroughs on two issues where stakeholders from all sides, who once opposed each other, are coming together for real reform. On health care and energy, solutions would provide key pillars for a new foundation for the country.
"President Barack Obama says agreement on an energy bill and a promise by interest groups to squeeze trillions of dollars in savings from the health care system show that change has come to Washington.
"Some of those most opposed to past attempts at health care overhaul pledged this week to reduce the annual rate of growth in such spending by 1.5 percentage points, for a promised savings of $2 trillion in the next decade.
"Weeks of negotiations have led to the introduction in the House of an energy proposal that, for the first time, would mandate reductions in the heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming and shift the country toward cleaner sources of energy.
"Obama campaigned for president on a promise to change the way Washington works.
"He said Saturday in his weekly radio and Internet address that he was heartened by the "willingness of those with different points of view and disparate interests to come together around common goals, to embrace a shared sense of responsibility and make historic progress."
"Obama singled out utility companies and health insurers, doctors and hospitals for coming to the table.
"I have always believed that it is better to talk than not to talk, that it is far more productive to reach over a divide than to shake your fist across it," he said. "This has been an alien notion in Washington for far too long, but we are seeing that the ways of Washington are beginning to change."
"Both agreements, in the long term, will strengthen an economy experiencing its worst days since the Great Depression, Obama said.
"The climate bill will help create millions of jobs producing wind turbines and solar panels, and developing alternative fuels with the goal of reducing U.S. reliance on foreign energy sources, he said. Controlling health care costs will make businesses more competitive and give families more money to save or spend.
"Republicans said they agree with Obama that the health care system needs an overhaul.
"But they warned against offering consumers an option for health insurance that would be run by the government and replace employer-based coverage, saying it could have "devastating consequences" that include limits on care and higher taxes.
"A government takeover of health care will put bureaucrats in charge of health care decisions that should be made by families and doctors," Rep. Charles Boustany of Louisiana said in the Republican radio and Internet message.
"It will limit treatment options and lead to rationed care. And to pay for government health care your taxes will be raised," said Boustany, a cardiovascular surgeon and member of the House Republican Health Care Solutions Group. "That is something we cannot support, and frankly, it would clearly violate some of the principles the president himself has endorsed."
"Obama said during an appearance in New Mexico this week that his goal is to improve the existing system, not replace it."
Archeologist Conard said of the artistically designed exagerated carving, referred to as the "Hohle Fels Venus" (named after the cave of the same name it was found in) that is at least 35,000 years old and was carved from mammoth ivory is “one of the oldest known examples of figurative art” ever found. The true importance of the finding is that it drastically reshapes perceptions of Paleolithic art.
According to a summary in the scientific journal Nature: "Discovery of the sexually explicit figurine of a woman, dating to 35,000 years ago, provides striking evidence of the symbolic explosion that occurred in the earliest populations of Homo sapiens in Europe."
Hohle Fels Venus
Hohle Fels Venus (side View)
Willendorf Venus
Discovered in Willendorf, Germany in 1908, the Willendorf figurine provides the archetypal example of the Venus -type carvings. It is estimated to be approximately 28,000 years old.
Blanchard Phallus
Perhaps representative of 'girls toys,' not all Paleolithic carvings were devoted to the female form as this 36,000 year old object found in France demonstrates.
Hohle Fels figurine
This earlier find from the Hohle Fels Cave, thought to be around 30,000 years old, was described by Conard in Nature in 2003. He reported the discovery of this therianthropic (half-animal/half-human) figurine along with the oldest known representation of a bird and an animal that most closely resembles a horse.
As quoted in Nature: "Conard says the discovery should radically change our thinking about Paleolithic art... Previous sculptures from the Aurignacian culture found in Swabia have focused on animals or half-animal/half-human figures, with no female figures. The Hohle Fels Venus predates the famous Gravettian Venuses by more than 5,000 years, blowing apart suggestions that it was that era that developed three-dimensional female idols."
"The pieces of the Swabian figurine "were recovered in association with characteristic stone, bone and ivory tools belonging to a period, the Aurignacian, that represents the earliest settlement of Europe by fully anatomically and genetically modern human populations, and which saw the simultaneous demise of the preceding Neanderthals", says Paul Mellars, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, UK.
"And the figure is explicitly — and blatantly — that of a woman," he says, "with an exaggeration of sexual characteristics (large, projecting breasts, a greatly enlarged and explicit vulva, and bloated belly and thighs) that by twenty-first-century standards could be seen as bordering on the pornographic."
"Mellars adds that while symbolic expressions have been found in Africa dating back to at least 75,000 years ago, attempts to represent reality with 'figurative art' currently appears to be an exclusively European phenomenon."
"The discovery, Dr. Conard wrote, “radically changes our view of the origins of Paleolithic art.” Before this, he noted, female imagery was unknown, most carvings and cave drawings being of mammoths, horses and other animals.
"Scholars say the figurine is roughly contemporaneous with other early expressions of artistic creativity, like drawings on cave walls in southeastern France and northern Italy. The inspiration and symbolism behind the rather sudden flowering have long been debated by art historians.
"Commenting in the journal on the discovery, Dr. Mellars, who did not take part in the research, wrote that the artifact was one of 25 similar carvings found over the past 70 years in other caves in the Swabian region of southern Germany, “a veritable art gallery of early ‘modern’ human art.”
"These sites, he concluded, “must be seen as the birthplace of true sculpture in the European — maybe global — artistic tradition.”
"Scholars say the large caves were presumably inviting sanctuaries for populations of modern humans migrating then into Central and Western Europe. These were the people who eventually displaced the resident Neanderthals, around 30,000 years ago.
"Dr. Conard reported that the discovery was made beneath three feet of red-brown sediment in the floor of the Hohle Fels Cave. Six fragments of the carved ivory, including all but the left arm and shoulder, were recovered. When he brushed dirt off the torso, he said, “the importance of the discovery became apparent.”
"The short, squat torso is dominated by oversize breasts and broad buttocks. The split between the two halves of the buttocks is deep and continuous without interruption to the front of the figurine. A greatly enlarged vulva emphasizes the “deliberate exaggeration” of the figurine’s sexual characteristics, Dr. Conard said.
"The object reminded experts of the most famous of the sexually explicit figurines from the Stone Age, the Venus of Willendorf, discovered in Austria a century ago. That Venus is somewhat larger and dated about 24,000 years ago, but it is in a style that appeared to have been prevalent for several thousand years. Scholars speculate that these Venus figurines, as they are known, were associated with fertility beliefs or shamanistic rituals.
"The Hohle Fels artifact, less than 2.5 inches long and weighing little more than an ounce, is headless. Carved at the top, instead, is a ring, evidently to allow the object to be suspended from a string or thong."
“The advent of fully representational, ‘figurative’ art seems at present to be a European phenomenon, without any documented parallels in Africa or elsewhere earlier than about 30,000 years ago,” writes ... Paul Mellars in a commentary accompanying the discovery, published Wednesday in Nature.
“How far this ‘symbolic explosion’ associated with the origins and dispersal of our species reflects a major, mutation-driven reorganization in the cognitive capacities of the human brain — perhaps associated with a similar leap forward in the complexity of language — remains a fascinating and contentious issue,” he wrote.
The Current Republican Party Version of Mount Rushmore
There's the old saw that if you give them enough ropethey will certainly hang themselves. and that's just what the current edition of the GOP has done to itself.
For those who haven't quite figured it out yet; the Republicans are unabashidly showing us their posteriors as a means of showing their true, heartfelt contempt for the United States and its people and laws.
There can be no doubt, the Republicans are the "reactionary" party of American politics.
Ever since President Johnson gained passage of the civil rights act and created a backlash among Dixiecrats who became Republicans and Nixon injected race as a central plank of the Republican platform, the GOP has conducted itself as a reactionary party that stood for the values and traditions of the past that upheld racial apartheid throughout the South. And then when Johnson and the Democrates passed the fair housing laws, that was too much for the rest of the nation and the Republicans had their majority.
So the Republicans had bound themselves beyond their big business ties and had brought the racially hateful voters under the control of their party. Soon the Republicans would use divisive tactics and again fracture the Democratic Party as the GOP brought the rising organizational power of the Christian Evangelicals into the Republican fold.
So the reactionary consolidation of the GOP over America was complete and would hold power in the country from the presidencies of Nixon to Bush 43 by following a simple plan ofcontrolling the nation using the values of the past, to tradition, to forms of thought that had been legislatively overcome. The Republicans took great pleasure in using their divisive and reactionary tactic to divide and control America.
The Republican Reformation of course hit it's high water mark with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Reagan took it upon himself to entrence conservatives throughout the federal government and judiciary.He introduced an economic model that drew heavily from the University of Chicago and promoted the rejection of all economic policies that had anything to do with Keynesian macroeconomics and instead initiated economic policies built upon the foundations of deregulation and monetarism; te introduction of cultural conservatism which acted tough agaist crime, fought affirmative action, rallied against feminism, and promoted traditional values; neoconservativism which forced the engines of industry to provide the means to create a strong military that in turn proved to be the undoing of liberal internationalism, the shifting of power from government to the private sector, and plenty of substantial tax cuts to those on the highest rungs of the economic ladder.
With the fall from power of Communism in the Soviet Union, capitalism's triumph signaled the end of history and provided further creedence to the activities of the reactionaries of conservatism. But now today, the intellectual fervor for reactionary conservative politics has dried up because fir the most part it never had developed a taproot of ideas that could sustains policies and ideas that did nothing bt harken back to a lost mythic past.
Coupled with the inability of the American military to gain U.S. foreign policy dominance; the denial of science and the dismissal of global warming, reliance on religious litmus testing for the hiring of public officials, the neglect and rejection of government; an ovrreliance on using abortion to divide the electorate; and the huge creation of overwhelming budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, over-excessive foreign borrowing, especially from China and asset-price inflation.
And then the final straw that broke the camel's back in the form of the Great Depression-like financial crash that took place just weeks ahead of the election.
The result being that Milton Friedman's monetarism and his efficient-market theory of finance as followed by the much reverred Alan Greenspan was proved to be baseless.
So now all that the Republican reactionaries can do is become the party of no and try to force slogans down the throats of the American people by claiming that the Democrats are in fact the Democratc Socialist Party of the United States.
Hopefully, we are witnessing the death throes of a party full of reationaries coming to its well-justified end.
The Hubble Space Telescope is getting one final repair before it's mission will be ended.
"Periodic maintenance visits by astronauts have been the lifeblood of the Hubble telescope ever since it was launched in 1990 from the shuttle. Floating above the murky atmosphere, the telescope was designed to see the stars with peerless precision. It was hailed as the greatest advance in astronomy since Galileo, until astronomers discovered shortly after its launching that it couldn’t be focused because its mirror had been exquisitely polished to the wrong shape."
Ever since 1993 when astronauts refitted the Hubble Space Telescope with a new lens that allowed man's clearest vision into the depths of space there have been three more missions that have retrofitted Hubble with updated parts to ensure the improvement of the space telescope's capabilities.
"On the Atlantis mission that began Monday, astronauts for the first time will be opening instruments and replacing circuit boards in space. The last maintenance mission was in March 2002.
"Virtually every important part of the telescope, except the warped mirror itself, has been replaced over the last 19 years. The result, astronomers say, is that the telescope today is 100 times as powerful as the one they thought they were putting in orbit back in 1990.
"In 2003, astronomers used Hubble to record the deepest optical and infrared images ever made, showing galaxies forming in the primordial mist only 800 million years after the Big Bang. Before it conked out due to electrical problems in 2007, Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys took one of the first ever images of a planet around another star, a dot orbiting Fomalhaut, and it had become the foremost instrument on or near the Earth for investigating dark energy, the strange effect that is accelerating the expansion of the universe.
"Another instrument, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, or STIS, made the first identification of ingredients in the atmosphere of a planet around another star.
"If all goes well, in five spacewalks starting Thursday morning, the crew members will revamp and refresh the telescope, which has dazzled the public and the science community with its iconic cosmic postcards. Then they will say goodbye on behalf of humanity forever. Sometime in the middle of the next decade, the Hubble will run out of juice, and it will eventually be crashed into the ocean.
The mission to repair the Hubble took on a new meaning "last fall, when a router that controls all the telescope’s instruments and data failed, shutting Hubble down. Engineers on the ground resuscitated the router by activating a backup electrical channel on the telescope, but rather than send astronauts all the way to space in order to leave the telescope with no further backup should the other side of the router fail, NASA postponed the already long-delayed mission until a replacement router could be readied."
"The problematic router is scheduled to be replaced during the first spacewalk along with the Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2, which has been on the telescope since 1993 and is currently the only operating instrument on Hubble. In its place will be the new Wide-Field Camera 3.
"On the second day the astronauts will install the new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph in place of Hubble’s original corrective lenses, which are no longer needed. The spectrograph is designed to investigate an invisible “cosmic web” of dark matter and primordial gas that is thought to stretch like tendrils through space connecting galaxies and in which most of the atoms in the universe are thought to reside.
"More dicey and uncertain are the plans on the third and fourth days to attempt to repair the advanced camera and the imaging spectrograph, partly because these instruments were not designed to be opened in space and partly because the engineers, especially in the case of the camera, have had to do instrument forensics from 350 miles away and don’t know for sure what went wrong inside of them.
The flight comes as NASA is once again at a crossroads. The agency lacks a permanent administrator; Christopher Scolese has been acting administrator since Michael D. Griffin stepped down in January, and the White House is said to have been having trouble finding a candidate who can pass various forms of muster.
"The agency has begun laying off workers as part of the decision to retire the shuttles next year. Last week, President Obama ordered a review of the agency’s long-heralded plan to return humans to the Moon and of the Constellation spacecraft that are to succeed the shuttle.
"So if it is the beginning of the last act for the Hubble, the flight Monday also marks the beginning of the end for the space shuttle, whose greatest legacy might very well be the role it played in the repair and maintenance of the Hubble, what Commander Altman recently called “an incredible example of how humans and machines can work together.”
Dr. Grunsfeld, who has earned the sobriquet of “Hubble repairman” for his previous exploits in space with the telescope, said: “The only reason Hubble works is because we have a space shuttle. And of all things we do, I think Hubble is probably the best thing we use it for.”
"If all goes completely to plan on Hubble Servicing Mission 4, the orbiting observatory will be reborn as the most productive telescope in history, with even greater powers to probe the Universe's deep history and help cosmologists make sense of one of their biggest problems - "dark energy".
"Hubble was also at the forefront of unveiling the existence of dark energy: the name coined for a mysterious and pervasive force which appears to be inflating the Universe at an ever increasing speed.
"Cosmologists had assumed that for most of the 14-odd billion years since the Big Bang, the Universe's expansion had been slowing down.
"In the mid-1990s Hubble - along with the ground-based Keck telescope in Hawaii - made the key measurements on distant exploding stars, supernovae, which showed otherwise.
"It was the most shocking cosmological revelation since the 1920s when astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the Universe was expanding.
"The mystery of dark energy may be a little clearer, if not solved, with the new camera the astronauts are going to install.
"This is the Wide Field Camera 3 - an instrument with the dimensions of a street telephone box.
"Like Hubble's existing, but currently dead, Advanced Camera for Surveys, the WFC-3 has a sensitive detector which can form images of very distant galaxies in the same wavelengths of light our eyes perceive.
"These objects are so faraway, their starlight started its journey across the cosmos just under 13 billion years ago. The camera catches them as they were at that early time - though only just. They are very faint.
"But the new Wide Field Camera will make its great advance by virtue of a second detector chip, sensitive to wavelengths of light in the infrared part of the spectrum.
"This will let astronomers use Hubble to see deeper with more detail. This is because visible light from stars that has travelled from very far away in the cosmos has been "stretched" en route as the Universe itself has expanded.
"Its wavelengths are widened - or "red-shifted" - in proportion to the distance it has crossed. So if a galaxy or supernova is well beyond 13 billion years away, all of its light reaches us as infra-red radiation.
"According to Steven Beckwith - professor of astronomy at University of California, Berkeley, and former director of the Space Telescope Science Institute - the new Wide Field Camera should help to characterise the nature of dark energy.
Steven Beckwith said: "I think the new instrument will let us zero on those few ideas that could be right and get rid a lot of bad ideas. But I don't think it will tell us the answer."
"The problem of dark energy aside, the new Wide Field Camera will give us a deeper view into the early Universe in general: the epoch when the first galaxies and stars came into being.
"To date Hubble has seen back to 900 million years after the Big Bang. Steven Beckwith says that with WFC-3, the telescope's view will extend to 400 million years after creation.
"It is almost anyone's guess what astronomers will see, although theory would suggest the earliest mini-galaxies of stars should have formed by then.
"They would be untidy ill-formed blobs lacking the size and regular shapes of "modern day" galaxies like our own Milky Way.
"They would be populated by stars much more massive and burning more fiercely than our Sun.
"This is how astronomers picture the first galaxies and stars that formed out of dark gaseous debris created in the Big Bang.
"Exactly when that happened and starlight began to flood across the Universe is unknown. Steven Beckwith speculates that Hubble's new camera might pin-point the "Cosmic Dawn", if it broke more than half a billion years after the Big Bang.
The Hubble Space Telescope's imagery of a deep space field full of stars' galaxies and nebula.
"COS team member Mike Shull at the University of Colorado, Boulder, describes the instrument as "a very fancy prism which takes the light from Hubble's mirror and spreads it out into its component colours."
"Every element whether it is helium, oxygen or carbon has a unique set of fingerprints that get imprinted on the light."
"The imprinting of particular wavelengths at tell-tale intensities reveals which chemical elements are present in distant planets, stars, galaxies or even the great expanses of space between galaxies.
"In the past 20 years, astronomers have found that galaxies are not uniformly distributed across the sky.
"Richard N. Bond, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee," recently stated: “Some days you’re rolling the barrel, and some days you’re rolling in the barrel. The fact is that right now, Republicans are rolling in the barrel.” The former chairman's observation was intended to provide some context to the recent hard times being faced by the GOP.
Adam Nagourney has observed that: "The latest round of intramural debate came on Sunday when Dick Cheney,"
"the former vice president, assailed not only President Obama, but also Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, a Republican who endorsed Mr. Obama.
"Mr. Cheney said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program that he would prefer Rush Limbaugh,"
"the conservative radio commentator, to Mr. Powell, a member of the shrinking class of moderate Republicans, as spokesman for his party. Within hours, the Democratic National Committee had used video from that interview — along with other Sunday morning appearances by Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, last year’s Republican presidential nominee — to produce a mocking Web advertisement that sought to portray Republicans as negative, out-of-touch and mired in the past.
President Obama and his administration have successfully keep the GOP off balance with well coordinated attacks since last November's presidential election. At first, the Democrats pointed out the Republicans complete failure to come up with a plan; any plan, that was "forward-looking" to challenge the Democrat's agenda. Now the GOP is in a quandary regarding: "How to say it."
"A party that has over the years been the home of a series of optimistic figures in American politics — from Ronald Reagan"
"to Jack Kemp, who died last week, to (at times) George W. Bush — is increasingly coming across as downbeat or angry. And it is something that has Republicans increasingly worried."
Nagourney asks: "How important is this? Certainly, the Republican party’s first task obstacle is finding compelling leaders to make the case against the Democrats, as it builds itself back up for the elections of 2010 and 2012. And of course it has to hone an agenda that offers specific alternatives to Mr. Obama’s far-reaching shifts in economic, social and national security policy.
"Yet tone matters, Nagourney explains. Time and time again, Americans have responded to optimism, delivered even in — indeed, particularly in — the most dire times, and even when that sunny message cloaked an attack. In many ways, Reagan’s presidency was symbolized by one 1984 reelection advertisement, “It’s morning again in America,” just as Bill Clinton’s was by his choice of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” as a musical reminder that he was “thinking about tomorrow.”
"Mike Murphy, a one-time senior adviser to Mr. McCain, argued that Mr. McCain’s hopes of winning the presidency were doomed when he lost the “Happy Warrior” stance that had defined his political persona for so long, and simply went on the attack last year. “Tone is important,” he said.P
“Ultimately, the message has to be about big things,” said Mr. Murphy. “But tone is how you wrap it.”
"The Republicans’ task would not be an easy one even in the best of times. In Mr. Obama,"
"Mr. Bond said that to return to power, Republicans have “to play error-free ball” and hope for what he described as the inevitable overreach by a party now so firmly in control of government. The real complication, he said, is coming up with “strong public alternatives” to make the case against Democratic policies, without appearing to be obstreperous or angry, or feeding the Democrats’ attempt to paint Republicans as “the party of ‘no.’
“They have to avoid being stigmatized as a bad bunch of people,” he said of the Republicans.
Nagourney explains: "The Democrats took obvious delight in the new round of attention paid to Mr. Cheney, Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Limbaugh, none of whom, it seems fair to say, are graduates of the Happy Warrior school of politics. Mr. Murphy said the influence of people like Mr. Limbaugh is overrated — “He doesn’t have that much power; he has the power to make a lot of noise” — and that over time, less-known leaders are going to develop the voice the party needs.
Nagourney uses Mike Murphy's observations to sum up: “We have a mix of the same old party dogma, but then you see new people popping up: Huntsman, Cantor, Jeb Bush,” said Mr. Murphy, referring to Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah, and Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the Republican Whip, and Mr. Bush, the former governor of Florida. “You have to pick through all of that to hear the right ideas.”
But it is not only figures from the party’s past. For many Republicans, the party struck the wrong tone when Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina — who also is frequently mentioned as a potential presidential candidate in 2012 — refused a portion of the stimulus money authorized for his state as part of the economic recovery package.
"That high-profile act of defiance drew Mr. Sanford national attention, as well as sharp attack by many people in his own state, including Republicans. It was a reminder, if Republicans needed one, of the challenges the party faces in the months ahead.
“It’s definitely going to be a work in progress,” Mr. Bond said.
It has been a long held belief that the cultivation of edible plants was a major step toward the establishment of human culture. The most widely held belief was that the domestication of crops took place in two major areas: the valley of the Fertile Crescent between the Tigress and Euphrates Rivers and in Central and South America. It was believed that these two areas provided the spark for the domestic cultivation of crops and then gradually spread out as human agricultural culture spread and incorporated various varieties of edible crops as culture spread. Recent scientific findings have pointed out that agriculture actually developed throughout regions populated by humans in particular "a series of new studies indicate that Chinese river valleys represent a second spot for the emergence of agriculture." A recent issue of Science takes a "look at different aspects of the process, along with a perspective that presents the big picture."
Researchers have found that "material isolated from sites on the west slope of the Peruvian Andes, focusing on material that appears to come from domesticated plants. The big surprises are the dates obtained: squash appeared around 8-9,000 years ago, peanuts just shy of 8,000 years ago, and quinoa at roughly the same time. With agriculture in place, production moved to cotton by about 5,500 years ago. None of these items are likely to have originally been domesticated in this region, suggesting that seeds and techniques arose earlier and elsewhere."
"Genetic studies, using DNA from charred seeds gathered at the world’s first farms, are slowly rewriting the long-told story of how “civilization” began. In an essay in Science this week, Cambridge archaeologists Martin Jones and Xinyi Liu argue that millet spread west long before the Middle Eastern crops (wheat and barley) spread east."
More generally, they say that the Agricultural Revolution took place so slowly that it was probably imperceptible to those humans experiencing the transition. Early farmers continued to harvest wild rice varieties and the percentage of domesticated rice species that they the percentage of domesticated rice harvested versus wild rice increased just a few percent in a human lifespan.
“Rather than a revolutionary shift from hunter-gatherers to farmers in a few human generations, the evidence now suggests that many generations of ‘affluent foragers’ combined the gathering of wild fruits and nuts with the gathering of cultivated cereals,” write Martin Jones and Xinyi Liu, the article's co-authors .
Many researchers estimate that it was 10,000 years ago when agriculture first appeared, which sets up an interesting conundrum; he best estimate of humans populating the Americas was about 13,000 years ago. It has thus been reasoned that "limited local cultivation acted as a supplement to a hunting-gathering society for a few thousand years and only gradually fostered the transition to an agricultural society."
Scientists have speculated on: "what's gone on in the genome of wheat since we domesticated it at about the same time as squash."
"Compared to its wild relatives, domesticated wheat is tetraploid: it has four copies of every chromosome, instead of two. At least some cultivars are hexaploid, with a further set of chromosomes derived from a different species of grain by hybridization.
Another point the researchers have suggested is that: "all this extra genetic material has proven useful to the species in two ways. The domestication process normally creates a genetic bottleneck, in that relatively few ancestral plants wind up being expanded into a large population with little genetic diversity. Normally, low genetic diversity is harmful, but the extra chromosomes (especially those from a different species) have helped wheat remain diverse. The second is that it allows for an extremely flexible genome, one that has produced many variations for humans to select traits from. The extra copies of genes allow deletions, mutations, and even larger rearrangements to tweak gene expression and function in many ways, some of which would probably be fatal in an an organism with only two copies of a chromosome.
Scientists note: "that the South American model—one in which domesticated plants spread rapidly, but only gradually changed people to farmers—appears to apply in most other cases of domestication. It also discusses how slowly the genetic diversity that helped produce modern wheat allowed selection of a domestic species. It turns out that seeds from wild and domestic species are intermixed at agricultural sites for centuries after the tetraploid wheat appeared, and that the percentage of domestic wheat rose only slowly during that period.
The authors of the study conclude that: "It ends up with the big mystery: why did people suddenly think domesticating plants was a good idea? The 10,000 year figure is suspiciously close to the rapid climactic changes that accompanied the end of the last ice age, suggesting that changing temperatures might have disrupted food supplies enough to make domestic plants essential. The end of the ice age also pushed atmospheric carbon levels up by nearly 50 percent, which may have triggered favorable changes in the plants themselves. But it ends on an enigmatic note: maybe there was something cultural going on that we may never be able to reconstruct."
"President Obama took the stage at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night and said he was going to “speak off the cuff” — as two teleprompters loudly whirred into place.
“I’m Barack Obama,” he said. “Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me.”
"Such is the criticism of the annual soiree — that the president and the press corps who cover him are just a little too cozy — and this year’s dinner provided the usual mix of journalists, administration officials and Hollywood imports.
"But in addition to being an excuse for the wonk set to drink too much and Twitter too much (#nerdprom, anyone?), this year’s fiesta was eagerly anticipated as something of a coming out for President Obama, who skipped his first Gridiron Club dinner and sent Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in his place.
"Though Mr. Biden earned rave reviews, Mr. Obama was the first president to skip the white-tie dinner in his first year in office since Grover Cleveland, and Washington was eager to see how he would fare Saturday night in the Hilton’s cavernous ballroom.
“He was so funny,” said CNBC’s Jim Cramer, as he made his way out of the dinner. “And Wanda Sykes! She gave us a ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Wanda. Oh, it was so good.”
"It was also Ms. Sykes who provided one of the more charged lines of the evening, when she took on Rush Limbaugh, accusing him of “treason” for saying that “he hopes this administration fails.”
“I think maybe Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker, but he was just strung out on OxyContin and missed his flight,” she said, to cheers and nervous groans. “Too much?”
"But then she continued anyway. “Rush Limbaugh. ‘I hope the country fails’? I hope his kidneys fail, how about that? He needs some more waterboarding, that’s what he needs.”
"Mr. Obama, for his part, offered a series of jokes — spearheaded by his adviser David Axelrod and his speechwriter Jon Favreau — with bipartisan punch lines.
"He talked about how Mother’s Day “is a tough holiday for Rahm Emanuel, because he’s not used to saying the word ‘day’ after ‘mother,’ ” and then turned his attention to Michael Steele, the Republican National Committee chairman.
“He is a person of color,” Mr. Obama explained. “Although not a color that appears in the natural world.”
"Mr. Obama finished his speech on a serious note, however, offering his thanks and support to the journalists who cover him, and acknowledging the struggling state of the industry. (Not surprisingly, this tribute to journalism earned him a standing ovation from the crowd of, well, journalists.) "The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner has a long history as Washington’s annual nerd prom — a black-tie confab where Washington’s A list meets Hollywood’s B (and C) list. It started in 1920, and received a red-carpet ramp-up in 1987, when Michael Kelly, then a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, brought Oliver North’s document-shredding secretary, Fawn Hall, as his guest. The next year he brought Donna Rice, whose involvement with Gary Hart sank his campaign, and soon all of the Beltway’s news organizations were competing to get the hottest “get.” "Which can lead to something of an unlikely crew. This year, there was Sean Smith, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, escorting the redheaded actress Kate Walsh around the lower level of the hotel. (They met on the campaign trail.) There was Mr. Axelrod sipping his drink at the NBC reception, just feet away from Colin Firth and Jason Bateman. And there was Meghan McCain entering the Atlantic pre-party — complete with Warholesque portraits of Obama officials covering the walls — and turning right, while the actor Richard Belzer turned left and held court at the bar.
“The difference is palpable,” Mr. Belzer said, who attended the dinner once before during the Bush years. “It just seems more glamorous. Now it’s rock-star, Kennedy elegance.”
"The Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page stood just inside the massive room, looking for his table before the dinner, and offered his own assessment on the giddy mood: “This is Christmas at Tysons Corner.” (Which is to say, we assume, cramped and crowded but with the promise of something exciting at the end.)
“With this president, they just want to be in the same room,” Mr. Page said, scanning the crowd. He caught sight of Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, and flagged her down. “You are the most beautiful ambassador,” he gushed, then quickly added with a giggle, “Don’t tell Madeleine Albright.”
"Mr. Page needn’t have worried. The main buzz, as guests filed out to the various after parties, seemed to be about the president and Ms. Sykes, who offered a performance vaguely reminiscent of Stephen Colbert’s in 2006, when he mocked President Bush’s low approval ratings and compared him to the Hindenburg disaster.
"In addition to her Limbaugh line, Ms. Sykes earned loud laughs when she mentioned Gov. Sarah Palin, who had withdrawn from the dinner “at the last minute. You know, somebody should tell her, that’s not how you really practice abstinence.”
"That drew a few boos, as well (perhaps from the First Dude, who went as the guest of Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren). “Oh, shut up,” Ms. Sykes said, responding to the crowd. “You gonna be telling that one tomorrow.”
To read a transcript of President Obama's address go here.
The White House announced: "This week the President recaps a busy week, from strides on fiscal discipline, to financial stability, to cracking down on tax havens and tax breaks for shifting jobs overseas. For his next big step, he calls for a credit card reform bill: "Americans know that they have a responsibility to live within their means and pay what they owe. But they also have a right to not get ripped off by the sudden rate hikes, unfair penalties, and hidden fees that have become all-too common in our credit card industry." Watch Your Weekly Address to hear what he plans to do about it."
The White House continued: "In his weekly address, President Barack Obama called on Congress to pass a credit card reform bill, so that he can sign it into law by Memorial Day. The American people know that they must act responsibly and fairly, and credit institutions must do the same. Sudden rate hikes, unfair penalties, and hidden fees are too common and are hurting too many people. The set of principles the President has advocated will bring strong and reliable protections to consumers and strengthen monitoring, enforcement, and penalties for credit card companies that attempt to take advantage of ordinary Americans.
The New York Times reported: "President Obama called on Congress to pass a credit card reform bill, aimed at trying to stop credit card companies from imposing certain late fees.
"Saying that he is focusing on “clearing away the wreckage of this recession,” Mr. Obama focused his weekly radio address on the credit card legislation in Congress.
“Americans know that they have a responsibility to live within their means and pay what they owe,” Mr. Obama said. “But they also have a right to not get ripped off by the sudden rate hikes, unfair penalties and hidden fees that have become all too common to our credit card industry.”
"Mr. Obama will hold a town hall meeting next week in New Mexico to promote the bill, White House officials said on Friday.
"American banks, including Bank of America and Capital One, are facing new rules issued by the Federal Reserve that are aimed at preventing abusive credit card practices. The rules are supposed to be put in place by July 2010; several lawmakers and consumer groups say that date is too far off to help people who are struggling now.
"The credit card bill would aim to fix that by codifying the rules now. It would, among other things, make it illegal to market the cards to minors.
“You shouldn’t have to fear that any new credit card is going to come with strings attached, nor should you need a magnifying glass and a reference book to read a credit card application,” Mr. Obama said. “It is past time for rules that are fair and transparent.”
"He said that he was calling on Congress “to take final action to pass a credit card reform bill that protects American consumers so that I can sign it into law by Memorial Day.”
“There is no time for delay,” Mr. Obama said. “We need a durable and successful flow of credit in our economy, but we can’t tolerate profits that depend on misleading working families. Those days are over.”
