Three Chinese astronauts, Liu Yang, Jing Haipeng and Liu Wang will launch at 1237 GMT on Saturday in a Shenzhou 9 spacecraft to dock with the orbiting Tiangong 1 space “station” (module) now orbiting 322 kilometers above the Earth.
(Updated with new image below).
Liu Yang, China’s first female astronaut, at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in Gansu province on Friday. Photo AP
China Daily:The impending launch of the manned Shenzhou IX spacecraft will be the first time that China’s astronauts will stay in space for more than 10 days, said Cui Jijun, chief commander of the country’s first space docking mission’s launch site system, on Wednesday. The previous record is five days, set by the Shenzhou VI spacecraft in 2005.
The mission will also complete the country’s first manned space docking to master thenecessary technology for assembling a space station, see China’s first female astronaut in space and have astronauts entering a space lab module for the first time, he added.
It is also the first time for the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, located in a desert, to conduct a mission in the summer. The past nine launches of China’s manned space program were held in the spring, autumn and winter, but not summer. The three manned spacecraft all blasted off in autumn.
Xinhua:China succeeded in the automatic docking between Shenzhou-8 spacecraft and Tiangong-1 lab module last year. A manual docking between Shenzhou-9 and Tiangong-1 will be attempted this time. ……. a female astronaut will be included in a space mission for the first time in China’s space program, the selection, training, medical monitoring and security, and flight crew equipment for female astronauts will also be tested.
A new paper in Nature suggests that before we were apes we were fish and not just any old fish. The primitive fish which predates the split between sharks and bony fish, Acanthodes bronni was the common ancestor of all jawed vertebrates on Earth – including mankind, according to the paper. The split with bony fish occurred some 420 million years ago and Acanthodes bronni disappeared some 250 million years ago.
The researchers re-examined fossils of Acanthodes bronni, the best-preserved acanthodian species. They created highly detailed latex moulds of specimens revealing the inside and outside of the skull, generating a new data set for assessing cranial and jaw anatomy as well as the organizations of sensory, circulatory and respiratory systems in the species. The analysis of the sample combined with recent CT scans of skulls from early sharks and bony fishes led to the reassessment of what Acanthodes bronni tells us about the history of jawed vertebrates.
Open access is still evolving and the bottom-line is finding the revenue model that works. But open access is inevitable and the glory days of the high impact factor, pay-walled journals is coming to an end. They will not disappear any time soon but history will show that their era was the 20th century and that their decline was the natural consequence of the world-wide-web.
PeerJ provides academics with two Open Access publication venues: PeerJ (a peer-reviewed academic journal) and PeerJ PrePrints(a ‘pre-print server’). Both are focused on the Biological and Medical Sciences, and together they provide an integrated solution for your publishing needs. Submissions open late Summer.
Maximum is expected to be reached in Spring 2013 with a sunspot number of 60 and this prediction is for the lowest sunspot number in 100 years. This only confirms that we are currently in a solar minimum – the Landscheidt Minimum – though it remains to be seen whether this will be a Grand Minimum in the style of the Maunder Minimum or the Dalton Minimum. In any event a period of several decades of global cooling is to be expected and is already probably upon us (starting some 10 years ago).
Reuters reports that Chinese carbon dioxide emissions may be some 20% higher than previously thought. But then the Reuters reporters (David Fogarty and David Stanway) and their editor Jonathan Thatcher get their knickers properly in a twist and conclude that this suggests that “the pace of global climate change could be even faster than currently predicted”.
Perhaps some bright schoolboy could point out to our intrepid reporters that if the change in B is supposed to be dependent upon the change in A and if the change in A is actually higher than assumed, then the change in B is less dependent upon the change in A than assumed.
When science leads to activism great things can be accomplished but when activism leads to “biased science” to justify the activism, we plumb the depths.
The Gergis affaire has some way to run as her activism-led science is revealed. ACM has preserved some of her activist writings on her now-disappeared blog :
Success is transient. Just like profit or cash-flow – it is over once it has been recognised. The success counter is set to zero once the success is “booked”. Goodness lasts longer – it is like a balance sheet item. This financial analogy is sound. A success once booked – like profit or cash – gets transferred to the goodness in the balance sheet. It is available as a balance sheet item for future results but does not – in itself – ensure such future results. Past successes like previous profits provide a track record and an indication of things to come but do not, in themselves, ensure future success or profit. And just as a lack of profit or a shortage of cash can impair a balance sheet, a lack of success can impair a manager’s goodness.
Success and goodness are different.
Here I address the use of hypothetical scenarios in selection interviews to find the “good” manager.
that the peer review process at the AMS is either incompetent or corrupt (in that it is especially friendly to papers propounding the global warming orthodoxy), and
that the “tricks” revealed by Climategate are still being actively used by so-called climate scientists to support their beliefs
That one of the authors – probably responsible for this cock-up – a Joelle Gergis from the University of Melbourne, is more an “activist” than a “scientist” does not help matters . Going through the abstracts of her list of publications suggests that she often decides on her conclusions first and then selects data and writes her papers to fit the conclusions. Cherry picking data is bad enough but when it is done because of confirmation bias it is perhaps the most insidious form of scientific misconduct there is.
The AMS Journal “peers” who reviewed this paper don’t come out of this very well either. But of course they will receive no strictures for a job done badly.
A case well made though I would suggest that it is “dissemination” that is being hindered and that any hindrance of “scientific progress” is collateral damage. But I suspect that the role of journals in scientific dissemination is in transition and the scientific community has yet to exploit, come to terms with or understand the potential of open access. However I do not believe – as Dienekes does – that the solution lies in government coercion – we have enough of that already. The solution will – I think – come from the technology itself. The possibility to disseminate widely will lead to “open access” truly becoming open access. It is already noticeable that the more enlightened scientists – and I would suggest they are the better scientists – all run their own blogs and open themselves up to much wider scrutiny than that available through pay-walled journals. I also note in passing that “plagiarism” is a scientific crime only because copyright is “violated” or because an individual is trying to get undue credit. But plagiarism – unlike faking data or cherry-picking data – does not necessarily hinder scientific progress (which must necessarily build on the shoulders of those who went before – even if they were not giants and only unacknowledged pygmies).
The k2p blog 