Watch China Watch the Sky...

... While the U.S. watches our President Ignore our sky watcher

Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope nicknamed Tianyan
Chinese!  Brand new and up and running. Twice as big as our Arecibo radio telescope and already making discoveries, this monster rig in China will be making astronomical history AND be vital to Chinese deep space activities. Like their plans to go to Mars.

Meanwhile, back in Puerto Rico...


.. and the prognosis ain't good

.
“I fear that if there is significant damage, that will provide the decision point to decommission the observatory,” says space scientist John Mathews of Pennsylvania State University in State College. (There is SIGNIFICANT damage)

He hasn't even got our hands around rescuing the whole island, so fat chance President Trump is going to save one of our great scientific instruments.

I stay worried about China passing us in one leadership role after another. It doesn't help when our leaders seem to help them along.

Other Chinese worries
Electric cars... Here
Airliners... Here; here
Hypersonic weapons... Here; here 
Robots... Here
Quantum communications... Here; here




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teddy and Bernie

Image
By Gosh, I Think I've Got It! Bernie caught some gaff for having a narrow focus campaign. Here's how he's going to broaden it out. IMHO. And that doesn't mean he's running for anything,  just being Bernie. * Teddy as the model for... ...The New Bernie campaign? * I was zapping through the pile of political pitches I get everyday on my old fashioned e-mail (wduffer@aol.com), zap, zap, zap... Congressmen from Colorado, Florida, Ohio... on and on, Democrats I never heard of, but I'm on "The List." I don't get irritated, I just get rid of the ads; I mean after all, they're Democrats. After I finished my zapping, I had a snack and set to recording another audiobook chapter. Then it hit me, based on one of the ads I zapped.  Here 'tis: It was when I dragged it up again that I noticed it was a Bernie ad, and I said, "That's it!" Do you how many great quotes flowed from Teddy R? About half of them ar
Read more

An Informational Present

Image
I TOLD YOU ABOUT THIS SIX YEARS AGO (Surely you remember ?)  ...And in those six years, multiple research projects have affirmed and reaffirmed that SENOLYTICS is a big deal. The science of senolytics: how a new pill could spell the end of ageing                                    * I'm reminded of this by a well-researched article in The Guardian , a newspaper I respect. Aside from that hyperbolic, click-bait-ish headline, it's a fair summary of the state of knowledge on the subject. In brief: Certain drugs and several supplements help the body get rid of senescent cells, "zombie cells" that don't die after they quit doing their thing and just hang around spitting out inflammatory chemicals that damage various organs, joints, and brain cells. The senolytic agents augment apoptosis , nature's way of killing off the senescent cells. When those senescent cells are gone, things start improving measurably (see the mouse with the young look in the Guardian piece.)
Read more

Scooter Duff's Theory of Cosmology [UPDATED 5.4.24]

Image
 [Olde Duff Gets Seriouser] SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES  ARE MOSTLY PRIMORDIAL  DARK MATTER [Draft 8/19/2023] [UPDATED 5.4.24] & [9.25.24] THE BIG NEWS.. ..Is from the James Webb Space Telescope. There were furiously active galaxies very soon after the Big Bang, not that long after the first generation stars happened. This implies supermassive black holes at the centers of the new galaxies.  The question, "how did these giant black holes get there so early?" seems not quite answered by the two main contenders, "Giant dust collapse," and "Many stellar black holes consolidating." Thus I decided to toss this hat into the ring: At the big bang, and dark matter was the first matter of any kind to form (perhaps during the mysterious “inflation” event -- my personal theory).  It’s mutual gravitational attraction and lack of interaction to any electromagnetic force allowed it to exist and start to coalesce, even in the heat of the BB, long before baryonic matter
Read more