News 3 April 2023 More problems with the Starliner spacecraft. Its next launch has been pushed back to no earlier than July 21, 2023. It seems this time there are problems with the parachutes. These are deployed when the vehicle is coming down in earth’s atmosphere. NASA said the delay was attributed to a delay in the pre-flight process and traffic from other vehicles which are using the space station in June and the first half of July. I have to wonder how many people have noticed all those videos of the Ukrainians blowing up Russian tanks and soldiers. No matter how many are being shown, the Ukrainians are in an impossible position. They are in a war area and the Russians are in Russia with everything mostly safe from attack. How can a country win a war, in a situation like this? The answer is they can’t, but even if they could, their entire country will eventually be reduced to rubble. The truth is if they can’t take the war to Russia, they can’t win unless Putin thinks he has had enough, and I don’t think that will ever happen. A cubesat is a tiny satellite. Hundreds of them or more can be launched at a time and they usually are very inexpensive to build. Recently there was a tremendous gamma-ray explosion in space. It was so bright it blinded our satellites. It was said to have been the brightest burst in over 10,000 years, and went over the earth. One device was able to handle the burst and provide data. It was an inexpensive and tiny cubesat built by a Czech astronomer and he was shocked to receive a call from NASA asking for data on the blast. Speaking about NASA, they are getting ready to put a rover on the moon. It looks like they will be beat in the endeavor by a group of college students who have designed their own moon rover and plan to put it on a commercial space flight and have it deposited on the surface of the moon. The students are all from Carnegie Mellon University and I hope they succeed, that would be quite an accomplishment for the University. Scientists seem to be fascinated with the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, they have been examining them for years and have found some anomalies in them some of which are in the perspective, the way characters are drawn and other areas. They have even decided to examine the paint. Now they think they have found a secret ingredient. No, it is not gold flakes or other exotic ingredients. The researchers believe Leonardo mixed egg yolks into the paint to alter brush strokes and age the paint differently. When one thinks of the pyramids, they usually think of Egypt, but there are those who might think of those wonderful pyramids in Mexico, Central and South America. They are every bit as mysterious as the Egyptian ones and as a matter of fact, the pyramid of the moon at Teotihuacan is a very mysterious place. It is about 148 feet high, and its base is 460 feet by 490 feet and not the biggest pyramid in Teotihuacan, the biggest there is the pyramid of the sun. An artificial cave had been found under the pyramid of the moon. The cave has been designed to look like the native’s idea of what the underworld would look like. There are also tunnels and secret passages under the pyramid and under the pyramid of the sun. An unusual asteroid has been found by scientists. What makes it so unusual is the rate at which it spins. Scientists are saying they think the spin rate is so high, loose rocks and material may be sent into space because of the rapid spinning. Guess we can be sure we won’t find any life there. Speaking about life, scientists are now saying, or should I say guessing, rogue planets, those planets which were knocked out of orbit into space, might have moons which could contain life. So far no moons have been detected orbiting rogue planets. Now that we seem to be finished shooting down balloons we had an interception of an unknown object by NORAD, the North American Defense Command. It turns out the object was another balloon called a Pico balloon. This type of balloon is used by hobbyists. We are going to have to find a way to differentiate between small hobby balloons and other objects, it is costing us millions of dollars to send up planes for these things. To check this balloon, we sent up several planes and even a tanker plane. Scientists have figured out a new logarithm for fixing blurry space photos and it is accurate enough to allow them to use measurements and give realistic scenes. Australia has a problem resulting from green power generating. They have 80 million solar panels which will have to be disposed of at the end of their life. It turns out while people think they are doing the environment a favor by using them, the destruction of them at end of life is devastating to the environment. They are made of some pretty dangerous elements to have to get rid of and hard to recycle. Green is not always green, even though we are told it is. The same is true for electric car batteries. Scientists have just mapped an entire complex brain for the first time. No, they have not mapped a human one completely yet, but they have done it with an insect brain. The insect was a fruit fly lava. The map shows all the neurons and their links to the brain. This brain has 548,000 connections and 3,016 neurons. Remains of the oldest sea reptile has been found and it dates back to the time of the dinosaurs. The reptile is an ichthyosaur. The fossils were found on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen. Scientists have been trying for years to find the origins of reptiles from the time of the dinosaurs. Scientists think they might have made an incredible breakthrough in Counterportation. It is a breakthrough in quantum physics which they believe will allow for the creation of wormholes. Even with what they believe is the holy grail of breakthroughs, they confess it could still be many years before they will be able to do worm hole creation. They do say however the discovery will provide a blueprint in the lab to create wormholes. If one wants to see the biggest representation of Earth, all they have to do is go to Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, New York where the Unisphere from the world’s fair in 1964 to 1965 is still standing.
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