March 23, 2012

Friday TOON Roundup 2- GOP koolaid

March 23, 2012

Friday TOON Roundup 1-Stand Your Ground

March 22, 2012

Pentagon: Trillion-Dollar Jet on Brink of Budgetary Disaster

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the supposed backbone of the Pentagon’s future air arsenal, could need additional years of work and billions of dollars in unplanned fixes, the Air Force and the Government Accountability Office revealed on Tuesday. Congressional testimony by Air Force and Navy leaders, plus a new report by the GAO, heaped bad news on a program that was already almost a decade late, hundreds of billions of dollars over its original budget and vexed by mismanagement, safety woes and rigged test results.

At an estimated $1 trillion to develop, purchase and support through 2050, the Lockheed Martin-built F-35 was already the most expensive conventional weapons program ever even before Tuesday’s bulletins. The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps are counting on buying as many as 2,500 F-35s to replace almost every tactical jet in their current inventories. More than a dozen foreign countries are lined up to acquire the stealthy, single-engine fighter as well.

In its report the GAO reserved its most dire language for the JSF’s software, which agency expert Michael Sullivan said is “as complicated as anything on earth.” The new jet needs nearly 10 million lines of on-board code, compared to 5 million for the older F-22 and just 1.5 million for the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornet. “Software providing essential JSF capability has grown in size and complexity, and is taking longer to complete than expected,” the GAO warned.

Software delays plus continuing mechanical and safety problems prompted JSF program chief Adm. David Venlet to back away from a firm schedule for the new fighter’s frontline introduction. When the F-35 was conceived in the late 1990s, it was expected to begin flying combat missions as early as 2010. Lately military officials have mentioned 2018 as a likely start date. In his Congressional testimony, Venlet declined to even mention a possible timeframe for the JSF’s service entry.

more
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/f35-budget-disaster/

March 22, 2012

Museum discovers 'new' Van Gogh painting

London (CNN) -- A painting dismissed for years as the work of an unknown artist has been identified as a piece by Vincent Van Gogh, after x-rays revealed an image of two wrestlers fighting underneath the floral still life.

"Still Life with Meadow Flowers and Roses" has hung in the Kroeller-Mueller Museum in the town of Otterlo, in the eastern Netherlands, since 1974, but doubts over its authorship have dogged the painting for decades.

Experts argued that the large format, the location of the signature, and the huge number of flowers in the composition all suggested the painting was the creation of an unidentified artist, rather than the famed Dutch painter, and the work was officially "dismissed" from his catalogue in 2003.

"There were so many questions around this painting," explained Teio Meedendorp, researcher at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. "There were a lot of things about it that were strange -- it couldn't quite be trusted [as a piece by Van Gogh]."

more
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/22/world/europe/new-van-gogh-painting-found/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

March 22, 2012

GM Crops Are Killing Monarch Butterflies, After All

—By Tom Philpott| Wed Mar. 21, 2012 10:00 AM PDT

If any insect species can be described as charismatic minifauna, it's the monarch butterfly. The gorgeous creatures flutter about in a migratory range that stretches from the northern part of South America up into Canada. The monarch is the only butterfly species that undertakes such a long-distance migration. And when they alight upon a place en masse, heads turn. No fewer than five states—Texas, Alabama, Idaho, illinois, and Minnesota—claim the monarch as their state insect.

Unfortunately, the monarch populations appear to be in a state of decline. Why? A new study (abstract; press release) from University of Minnesota and Iowa State University researchers points to an answer: the rapid rise of crops engineered to withstand herbicides.

Their argument is powerful. Monarchs lay their eggs on one particular kind of plant: the milkweed. And when the eggs hatch, the caterpillars feed exclusively on the weed. Milkweed is common throughout the Midwest, and has long thrived at the edges of corn fields. But when Monsanto rolled out its "Roundup Ready" seeds in 1996, which grew into plants that could thrive amid lashings of its flagship Roundup herbicide, the Midwest's ecology changed. As farmers regularly doused ever-expanding swaths of land with Roundup without having to worry about the hurting their crops, milkweed no longer thrived—and as a result, the charismatic butterfly whose caterpillars require it can no longer thrive, either.

The researchers estimate that the amount of milkweed in in the Midwest plunged by 58 percent from 1999 to 2010, pressured mainly by the expansion of Roundup Ready genetically engineered crops. Over the same period, monarch egg production in the regions sank by 81 percent. And it turns out that monarchs tend to lay more eggs milkweeds that sprout up in and around cultivated fields. So when farmers snuff out the milkweeds with Roundup, they're exerting a disproportionate effect on monarchs.
more

http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/03/researchers-gm-crops-are-killing-monarch-butterflies-after-all

March 22, 2012

Beck's Website Calls Trayvon Martin "The Aggressor"

—By Adam Serwer


The right-wing reaction to the shooting of of Trayvon Martin has been mercifully muted. George Zimmerman, who followed Martin through the streets of an Orlando suburb believing he "was up to no good," claims he was acting in self-defense. But the evidence suggest that Zimmerman provoked a confrontation with the unarmed Martin, who was out to grab a snack while watching the NBA All-Star game.

As my colleague Kevin Drum notes, Fox News has almost completely avoided the story, doing one segment between Martin's death and March 19. National Review published a thoughtful piece this morning by Robert VerBruggen calling for Florida's self-defense laws to be altered so they protect individuals genuinely acting in self-defense rather than vigilantes.

Yet The Blaze, the website started by former Fox News host Glenn Beck, has lived up to its founder's penchant for reactionary racial paranoia. One post attacking Al Sharpton for criticizing local police for not arresting Zimmerman posits that Martin was once suspended from school for being tardy. The post then speculates that Martin could really have been suspended for any number of reasons, and offers a list that includes "armed robbery," "arson," "kidnapping" or "sexual battery" among others. (Perhaps even for Beck's audience a black kid being late to school may not be enough to justify summary execution.) While Zimmerman stated at the very beginning of his call to the police that Martin "looks black," the Blaze post interprets this to mean that "the audio weakens the racism charge, as it shows that Zimmerman was already suspicious of the teen before he could tell what race he was." The post goes to excruciating lengths to rationalize away the possible racial elements at play, while groping for some implicit justification for Martin's death.

The post's original URL (tawana-brawley-2-0-al-sharpton-sides-with-aggressor-in-self-defense-case) refers to Martin as the "aggressor," despite the fact that the police call establishes that Zimmerman chased down Martin rather than the other way around. The post also compares the situation to the 1987 Tawana Brawley case, which involved a young black woman who falsely accused several white men of rape—the incident that first brought Sharpton to national prominence. The comparison implies that the outrage over Martin's death exists solely to substantiate a groundless charge of racism against white people who are, let's face it, the real victims here.

more

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/03/glenn-beck-blaze-trayvon-martin

March 22, 2012

"Lost" Great Wall of China Segment Found?

James Owen
for National Geographic News
Published March 19, 2012

A forgotten section of the Great Wall of China has been discovered deep in the Gobi Desert—and outside of China—researchers say.

With the help of Google Earth, an international expedition documented the ancient wall for roughly 100 kilometers (62 miles) in a restricted border zone in southern Mongolia in August 2011.

The defensive barrier formed part of the Great Wall system built by successive Chinese dynasties to repel Mongol invaders from the north, according to findings published in the March issue of the Chinese edition of National Geographic magazine.

Preserved to a height of 9 feet (2.75 meters) in places, the desert discovery belongs to a sequence of remnant walls in Mongolia collectively known as the Wall of Genghis Khan, said expedition leader and Great Wall researcher William Lindesay.

more
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/120319-great-wall-of-china-mongolia-science-lindesay/

March 22, 2012

Glowing Blue Waves Explained

Photograph by Doug Perrine, Alamy

Pinpricks of light on the shore seem to mirror stars above in an undated picture taken on Vaadhoo Island in the Maldives.

The biological light, or bioluminescence, in the waves is the product of marine microbes called phytoplankton—and now scientists think they know how some of these life-forms create their brilliant blue glow.

Various species of phytoplankton are known to bioluminesce, and their lights can be seen in oceans all around the world, said marine biologist and bioluminescence expert Woodland Hastings of Harvard University. (Also see "Glowing Sea Beasts: Photos Shed Light on Bioluminescence.&quot

"I've been across the Atlantic and Pacific, and I've never seen a spot that wasn't bioluminescent or a night that [bioluminescence] couldn't be seen," Hastings said.





more

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/pictures/120319-glowing-waves-ocean-blue-bioluminescent-plankton-science/

March 22, 2012

NASA has figured out how to cause a supernova

NASA, for some reason that the agency has chosen not to share, is quite interested in just exactly what it takes to set off a Type Ia supernova. Thanks to a series of X-ray and ultraviolet observations from the SWIFT satellite, NASA says that "we have a clearer picture of what's required to blow up these stars." Oh, good.

Type Ia supernovae are a specific type of stellar explosion that are very, very important because astronomers can use them as what's called "standard candles."

Standard candles (there are only a few different kinds and they're all very rare) are things that we can see with a telescope and know how far away they are. Usually, if you see something through a telescope, there's no reliable way of knowing whether it's a bright thing that's far away or a dim thing that's up close. A standard candle has a luminosity (or, an intrinsic brightness) that doesn't ever change, so based on how bright or dim it looks to us here on Earth, we can figure out how far away it (and everything around it) actually is.

With Type Ia supernovae, the standard candle is a white dwarf star that blows up. We know a fair amount about white dwarfs themselves: they're main-sequence stars (like our sun) that have used up all of their fuel and collapsed into a white blob about the size of the Earth, glowing thanks to stored-up leftover heat. Made up mostly of carbon and oxygen, white dwarfs can't undergo fusion on their own, so they just sit there and slowly cool off until eventually they stop putting out any light at all.

Sometimes, though, a white dwarf will have a companion star, as part of a binary system. And though the white dwarf is very small for a star, it still has star-like gravity, and it'll start sucking up material from its companion.

more

http://dvice.com/archives/2012/03/nasa-has-figure.php

March 22, 2012

Baffling Illness Strikes Africa, Turns Children Into Violent "Zombies"

Jason Mick (Blog) - March 20, 2012 9:11 PM


World Health Organization is on high alert about new Ugandan outbreak, cause is not fully known

It's called the "nodding disease" and it's a baffling illness that has struck thousands of children in northern Uganda. The illness brings on seizures, violent behavior, personality changes, and a host of other unusual symptoms.

I. Violent and Mindless: Child Victims Have no Cure, no Future

Grace Lagat, a northern Uganda native, is mother of two children -- Pauline Oto and Thomas -- both of whom are victims of the disease. For their safety, when she leaves the house, she now ties them up, using fabric like handcuffs. She recalls, "When I am going to the garden, I tie them with cloth. If I don't tie them I come back and find that they have disappeared."

Reportedly the children gnaw at their fabric restraints, like a rabid animals -- or "zombies" of popular fiction -- in an attempt to escape.

The effort to restrain the children is not unwarranted. In one of the most bizarre symptoms of this tragic illness, children with the disease are reportedly setting fire to buildings in their communities. Coupled with the aimless wandering this disease provokes in victims, this is a deadly combination. More than 200 people have been killed in fires believed to be set by the zombified children.


more

http://www.dailytech.com/Baffling+Illness+Strikes+Africa+Turns+Children+Into+Violent+Zombies/article24276.htm