'Price Is Right' viewers complain about President Obama interrupting show with speech

When President Barack Obama hit the podium around 11 a.m. today to speak abut the Veterans Affairs scandal, social media erupted with criticism.
It wasn't for the reason one might think.

As Obama began delivering his remarks, he interrupted the CBS network broadcast of The Price Is Right, quickly sending hardcore TPIR fans to Twitter to complain.



Read more: http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2014/05/21/Price-Is-Right-viewers-complain-about-President-Obama-interrupting-show-with-speech/8341400697167/

Stellar behemoth self-destructs in a Type IIb supernova

Our Sun may seem pretty impressive: 330,000 times as massive as Earth, it accounts for 99.86 percent of the Solar System's total mass; it generates about 400 trillion trillion watts of power per second; and it has a surface temperature of about 10,000 degrees Celsius. Yet for a star, it's a lightweight.

The real cosmic behemoths are Wolf-Rayet stars, which are more than 20 times as massive as the Sun and at least five times as hot. Because these stars are relatively rare and often obscured, scientists don't know much about how they form, live and die. But this is changing, thanks to an innovative sky survey called the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF), which uses resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), both located at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), to expose fleeting cosmic events such as supernovae.

For the first time ever, scientists have direct confirmation that a Wolf-Rayet star -- sitting 360 million light years away in the Bootes constellation -- died in a violent explosion known as a Type IIb supernova. Using the iPTF pipeline, researchers at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science led by Avishay Gal-Yam caught supernova SN 2013cu within hours of its explosion. They then triggered ground- and space-based telescopes to observe the event approximately 5.7 hours and 15 hours after it self-destructed. These observations are providing valuable insights into the life and death of the progenitor Wolf-Rayet.

"Newly developed observational capabilities now enable us to study exploding stars in ways we could only dream of before. We are moving towards real-time studies of supernovae," says Gal-Yam, an astrophysicist in the Weizmann Institute's Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics. He is also the lead author of a recently published Nature paper on this finding.

"This is the smoking gun. For the first time, we can directly point to an observation and say that this type of Wolf-Rayet star leads to this kind of Type IIb supernova," says Peter Nugent, who heads Berkeley Lab's Computational Cosmology Center (C3) and leads the Berkeley contingent of the iPTF collaboration.

more

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140521133520.htm

Toon- End of the Year!

Thursday TOON Roundup 4- The Rest

VA












Net





9/11


Environment






Education


Economy


Immigration


Florida

Thursday TOON Roundup 3- Expensive Education

Thursday TOON Roundup 2- Just Accept it

Thursday Toon Roundup 1-Becoming TP

Backlash to Big Bang Discovery Gathers Steam

By Michael D. Lemonick

On March 17 Paul Steinhardt, a physicist at Princeton University, abandoned a theory he’d been championing for more than a decade. Known as the “ekpyrotic universe” model, it was an alternative to the prevailing theory of inflation, which says the cosmos expanded faster than the speed of light in the first fraction of a fraction of a second of the big bang. If so inflation is true, then the process should have released a burst of gravity waves; in Steinhardt’s model, they shouldn’t exist. On that day in March a team of observers announced at a major press conference at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics that they had indeed detected the waves, thus providing the first clear look at the universe’s earliest moments. The announcement made a huge splash. “Space Ripples Reveal Big Bang’s Smoking Gun,” trumpeted The New York Times front page. “Discovery Bolsters Big Bang Theory,” proclaimed The Wall Street Journal. Dozens of similar headlines appeared, seemingly everywhere. Steinhardt promptly pronounced his theory dead.

But now he’s not so sure. “The situation,” Steinhardt says, “has changed.” Right from the moment results from the BICEP2 microwave telescope at the South Pole were released, many cosmologists had a sense that the discovery rested on shaky ground. “I think it’s fair to say,” argues William Jones, a physicist also at Princeton, “that the claims struck a lot of people, myself included, as far overreaching what the data can support.” Charles Bennett, a physicist and astronomer at Johns Hopkins University who led research on the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite, agrees. “Several of the plots in their paper looked odd to me,” he says.

In the ensuing two months, the doubts have only grown stronger, as physicists have attempted, and failed, to reproduce the BICEP2 team’s calculations—admittedly, without the original data, which the team hasn’t yet provided, and without the “systematics” paper, laying out the possible sources of error, which the team has promised but not yet completed. The paper describing the results themselves has not yet been published by a peer-reviewed journal, although that process is underway.

Growing doubts in the astronomical community, meanwhile, have been raised, first in private and over e-mail, then in a blog post by physicist Adam Falkowski, of the French National Center for Scientific Research, in Paris, and most recently by articles in The Washington Post, New Scientist, Science News and other outlets.

more

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/backlash-to-big-bang-discovery-gathers-steam/

Louisiana continues the war on reproductive rights

A bill that could result in the shuttering of up to four of Louisiana's five abortion clinics received full passage from the Louisiana Legislature Wednesday (May 21), and Gov. Bobby Jindal has indicated he will sign it into law.

The legislation is, in part, based on a similar measure passed in Texas last year and led to the closing of several abortion clinics in that state. In its last legislative hurdle, the House concurred an amendment on Wednesday (May 21) that was added to the legislation on the Senate side. The bill's sponsor, Rep. Katrina Jackson, D-Monroe, asked for final passage of the bill to much fanfare, as dozens of lawmakers who signed on as "co-authors" swarmed the podium to stand behind her.

The House voted 88-5 to send the bill to Jindal's desk.

The legislation requires physicians who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the facility or medical office where it took place. It also imposes the same restrictions -- including a 24-hour waiting period -- on abortions induced by medication as those carried out through surgery. Abortion clinic providers have indicated they will likely not be able to comply with the law, which some supporters have acknowledged as they noted their goal is to reduce abortions in Louisiana.

more

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/05/louisiana_abortion_restriction.html#incart_graystrip#incart_orangestrip

BP to appeal Gulf oil spill payment ruling to U.S. Supreme Court

Source: Reuters

(Reuters) - BP Plc, seeking to limit costs related to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, said it would ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review whether it must pay some businesses for economic damages without proof that the spill caused such losses.

The British oil company will appeal Monday's decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans not to disturb a divided three-judge panel's March ruling over the payments. It will also ask the 5th Circuit not to require that it pay businesses for economic losses during the appeal.

BP has complained that the settlement it negotiated to cover business loss claims is being interpreted incorrectly by the businesses' lawyers and claims administrator Patrick Juneau. It said making payments unrelated to the spill could push the settlement's estimated $9.2 billion cost significantly higher.

"No company would agree to pay for losses that it did not cause, and BP certainly did not when it entered into this settlement," BP said.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/21/us-bp-lawsuit-idUSBREA4K0YO20140521