January 28, 2015

After same-sex marriage ruling, a question: Are we American? Or just Alabamian?

By John Archibald | jarchibald@al.com

The question is simple.

Are we Americans? Or are we Alabamians?

Are we Americans, loyal above all else to the notion of liberty and justice for all? Or are we Alabamians, steadfast in the belief that our way is ...

The way?

It is not a new question, but it's hard not to ask it these days, as righteous indignation drips from the lips of Gov. Robert Bentley, of Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, Attorney General Luther Strange, House Speaker Mike Hubbard and every angry Alabama politician with a fist to shake at change.

It sounded like a prelude to secession this week. Again. Because it appeared a group of people who have long been denied a right to marry would get that right after all.

"The people of Alabama elected me to uphold our state Constitution, and when I took the oath of office last week, that is what I promised to do," the governor said after a federal court struck down Alabama's same-sex marriage ban.

The U.S. Constitution was not a consideration. Just an annoyance.

more

http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/01/after_same-sex_marriage_ruling.html#incart_m-rpt-2

January 28, 2015

Obama is about to ask for the largest Pentagon budget in history

On Tuesday, news broke that the President is planning to request the largest Pentagon budget in history.

You read that right. President Obama will likely ask for a $534 billion base budget, in a move that’s being sold as part of a strategy to beef up responsiveness to emerging worldwide threats and fund efforts against ISIS and others.

This plan will blow past budget caps to the tune of $34 billion in 2016 and $150 billion over the next five years.

Many in the new Congress, it’s sad to say, are eager to both hike overseas spending and ignore budget controls, with some Republican leaders saying they’ll do anything they can to “fix” sequestration.

Read more at http://rare.us/story/obama-is-about-to-ask-for-the-largest-pentagon-budget-in-history/

January 28, 2015

Wednesday Toon Roundup 2- The Rest

Saudis








Remember






War




Drones








Cops





Economy



Climate





Storm

January 28, 2015

Wednesday Toon Roundup 1-Rethug Party

January 28, 2015

Study shows that Oil is the dominant reason countries go to war

Researchers have for the first time provided strong evidence for what conspiracy theorists have long thought - oil is often the reason for interfering in another country's war.

Throughout recent history, countries which need oil have found reasons to interfere in countries with a good supply of it and, the researchers argue, this could help explain the US interest in ISIS in northern Iraq.

Researchers from the Universities of Portsmouth, Warwick and Essex modelled the decision-making process of third-party countries in interfering in civil wars and examined their economic motives.

They found that the decision to interfere was dominated by the interveners' need for oil over and above historical, geographical or ethnic ties.

more
http://phys.org/news/2015-01-crude-conspiracy-theories.html

January 28, 2015

NASA's Dawn Spacecraft Captures Best-Ever View of Dwarf Planet

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has returned the sharpest images ever seen of the dwarf planet Ceres. The images were taken 147,000 miles (237,000 kilometers) from Ceres on Jan. 25, and represent a new milestone for a spacecraft that soon will become the first human-made probe to visit a dwarf planet.

"We know so little about our vast solar system, but thanks to economical missions like Dawn, those mysteries are being solved," said Jim Green, Planetary Science Division Director at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

At 43 pixels wide, the new images are more than 30 percent higher in resolution than those taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 2003 and 2004 at a distance of over 150 million miles (about 241 million kilometers). The resolution is higher because Dawn is traveling through the solar system to Ceres, while Hubble remains fixed in Earth orbit. The new Dawn images come on the heels of initial navigation images taken Jan. 13 that reveal a white spot on the dwarf planet and the suggestion of craters. Hubble images also had glimpsed a white spot on the dwarf planet, but its nature is still
unknown.

"Ceres is a 'planet' that you've probably never heard of," said Robert Mase, Dawn project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "We're excited to learn all about it with Dawn and share our discoveries with the world."

more
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/display.cfm?News_ID=48703

January 28, 2015

Learning From Animal Friendships

A goat frolics with a baby rhinoceros. A pig nestles up to a house cat. A rat snake makes nice with the dwarf hamster originally intended as its lunch.

Few things seem to capture the public imagination more reliably than friendly interactions between different species — a fact not lost on Anheuser-Busch, which during Sunday’s Super Bowl will offer a sequel to “Puppy Love,” its wildly popular 2014 Budweiser commercial about friendship between a Clydesdale and a yellow Labrador puppy. The earlier Super Bowl spot has drawn more than 55 million views on YouTube.

Videos of unlikely animal pairs romping or snuggling have become so common that they are piquing the interest of some scientists, who say they invite more systematic study. Among other things, researchers say, the alliances could add to an understanding of how species communicate, what propels certain animals to connect across species lines and the degree to which some animals can adopt the behaviors of other species.

“There’s no question that studying these relationships can give you some insight into the factors that go into normal relationships,” said Gordon Burghardt, a professor in the departments of psychology and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee, who added that one video he liked to show students was of a small and persistent tortoise tussling over a ball with a Jack Russell terrier.

more
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/science/so-happy-together.html?ref=science&_r=1

January 28, 2015

Surprise! Water Once Flowed on Huge Asteroid Vesta

Liquid water apparently flowed on the surface of the huge asteroid Vesta briefly in the relatively recent past, a surprising new study suggests.

"Nobody expected to find evidence of water on Vesta. The surface is very cold and there is no atmosphere, so any water on the surface evaporates," study lead author Jennifer Scully, a postgraduate researcher at UCLA, said in a NASA statement. "However, Vesta is proving to be a very interesting and complex planetary body."

Scully and her colleagues analyzed images of Vesta — the second-largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter — captured by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which orbited the 318-mile-wide (512 kilometers) protoplanet from July 2011 through September 2012. [Photos: Asteroid Vesta and NASA's Dawn Spacecraft]

The researchers noticed curved gullies and fan-shaped deposits within eight different Vesta impact craters. These craters are young compared to the 4.56-billion-year-old Vesta; all of them are thought to have formed within the last few hundred million years.

more

http://www.space.com/28352-huge-asteroid-vesta-water-flows.html

January 28, 2015

Why A Fake Article Titled “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?” Was Accepted By 17 Medical Journals

As a medical researcher at Harvard, Mark Shrime gets a very special kind of spam in his inbox: every day, he receives at least one request from an open-access medical journal promising to publish his research if he would only pay $500.

"You block one of them with your spam filter and immediately another one pops up," Shrime, an MD who is pursuing a PhD in health policy, tells me.

These emails are annoying, for sure, but Shrime was worried that there might be bigger issues at stake: What exactly are these journals publishing and who is taking these journals to be credible sources of medical information?

Shrime decided to see how easy it would be to publish an article. So he made one up. Like, he literally made one up. He did it using www.randomtextgenerator.com. The article is entitled "Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?" and its authors are the venerable Pinkerton A. LeBrain and Orson Welles. The subtitle reads: "The surgical and neoplastic role of cacao extract in breakfast cereals." Shrime submitted it to 37 journals over two weeks and, so far, 17 of them have accepted it. (They have not "published" it, but say they will as soon as Shrime pays the $500. This is often referred to as a "processing fee." Shrime has no plans to pay them.) Several have already typeset it and given him reviews, as you can see at the end of this article. One publication says his methods are "novel and innovative"!. But when Shrime looked up the physical locations of these publications, he discovered that many had very suspicious addresses; one was actually inside a strip club.

more
http://www.fastcompany.com/3041493/body-week/why-a-fake-article-cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs-was-accepted-by-17-medical-journals

January 28, 2015

Face of tattooed mummified princess finally revealed after 2,500 years

The first replica face has been created of the famous tattooed Siberian princess found mummified and preserved after almost 2,500 years in permafrost. A Swiss expert has used special taxidermy techniques to build an accurate reconstruction of the ice maiden who was uncovered by archaeologists in 1993.

Known as Princess Ukok, after the high altitude plateau on which she was discovered, her body was decorated in the best-preserved, and most elaborate, ancient art ever found. While her discovery was exciting, particularly given how intact her remains were, her face and neck skin had deteriorated, with no real clue as to what she once looked like.

However, now her face has been revealed to the world for the first time following the work by Swiss taxidermist Marcel Nyffenegger.

Mr Nyffenegger, who lives in the small town of Schaffhausen, was asked to work on a likeness of Princess Ukok for the Historical Museum of the Palatinate in Speyer, Germany. While he has expertise in stuffing animals, his main passion is the reconstruction of the faces of ancient peoples, including the Neanderthals.




more

http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/f0052-face-of-tattooed-mummified-princess-finally-revealed-after-2500-years/