Just don’t tell Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, or Matt Drudge.

In April, the Obama administration unveiled its 2014 budget proposal, which included $145.8 billion for agriculture, $520 million for the International Trade Administration, and a bunch of other stuff. It also included a $105-million initiative to lasso an asteroid, tow it toward Earth, place it into the moon’s orbit, and claim the space rock for the United States of America. The idea is to eventually have astronauts travel to the asteroid to conduct mining operations, test technology for missions to Mars, and research strategies for deflecting future world-ending asteroids.

On Thursday, NASA chief Charles Bolden got a good look at the progress being made. The Associated Press reports (emphasis mine):

Bolden checked on…the mission, which may eventually cost more than $2.6 billion. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and Glenn Research Center in Ohio are developing a thruster that relies on ion propulsion instead of conventional chemical fuel…NASA is under White House orders to fly humans to an asteroid as a stepping stone to Mars. Instead of sending astronauts to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, as originally planned, the space agency came up with a quicker, cheaper idea: Haul the asteroid close to the moon and visit it there…”If you can’t get to the asteroid, bring the asteroid to you,” Bolden said.

President Obama had previously established a goal of landing astronauts on a near-Earth asteroid by 2025. This plan bumps the date up to 2021. Last month, an administration official with knowledge of the mission filled in some of the details.

More: NASA: We’ve Made Progress on Obama’s Asteroid-Lasso Initiative

A new NASA and university analysis of ocean data collected more than 135 years ago by the crew of the HMS Challenger oceanographic expedition provides further confirmation that human activities have warmed our planet over the past century.

Researchers from the University of Tasmania, Sandy Bay, Australia; and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., combined the ship’s measurements of ocean temperatures with modern observations from the international Argo array of ocean profiling floats. They used both as inputs to state-of-the-art climate models, to get a picture of how the world’s oceans have changed since the Challenger’s voyage.

The Challenger expedition, from 1872 to 1876, was the world’s first global scientific survey of life beneath the ocean surface. Along the way, scientists measured ocean temperatures, lowering thermometers hundreds of meters deep on ropes.

“The key to this research was to determine the range of uncertainty for the measurements taken by the crew of the Challenger,” said Josh Willis, a JPL climate scientist and NASA project scientist for the upcoming U.S./European Jason-3 oceanography satellite, scheduled to launch in 2015. “After we had taken all these uncertainties into account, it became apparent that the rate of warming we saw across the oceans far exceeded the degree of uncertainty around the measurements. So, while the uncertainty was large, the warming signal detected was far greater.”

Uncertainties around the Challenger’s measurements were caused by the limited areas measured during the voyage; the actual depths the thermometers descended to; and the likely natural variation in temperature that could occur in each region during the voyage.

“Our research revealed warming of the planet can be clearly detected since 1873 and that our oceans continue to absorb the great majority of this heat,” said researcher and lead author Will Hobbs of the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies and the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science. “Currently, scientists estimate the oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases, and we attribute the global warming to anthropogenic (human-produced) causes.”

The Challenger expedition measurements also revealed that thermal expansion of sea water caused by global warming contributed about 40 percent of the total sea level rise seen in tide gauges from 1873 to 1955. The remaining 60 percent was likely to have come from the melting of ice sheets and glaciers. Prior to this research, climate models offered the only way to estimate the change before the 1950s.

Results of the study are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

For more on the study, visit: imas.utas.edu.au .

More: Century-Old Science Helps Confirm Global Warming - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

More: Weinstein’s Theory of Everything Is Probably Nothing - Opinion - 24 May 2013

See also LGF

Geology is what we look to when we want enduring monuments. Rock and metal outlast anything made of living tissue. Or do they? In another example of science getting poetic, it seems that a symbol of ephemera — a butterfly — provides evidence of a mountain long turned to dust.

Monarch butterflies are some of the toughest insects in the world. Their migration takes them from southern Canada to central Mexico. The journey is so long and difficult that it outlasts the butterfly’s lifetime. Monarchs lay eggs at different stages through the journey. No one generation makes the whole trip.

Along this journey are several sites that have become local treasures and tourist attractions. The monarchs, flying in swarms, group together to rest in small areas, covering the trees like bright orange leaves. But although these sites are the most showy part of the journey, they’re not the most amazing.

The amazing part of the journey is the sudden eastward turn that monarchs take over Lake Superior. Monarchs fly over the lake, necessarily, in one unceasing flight. That alone would be difficult, but the monarchs make it tougher by not going directly south. They fly south, and at one point of the lake turn east, fly for a while, and then turn back toward the south. Why?

Biologists, and certain geologists, believe that something was blocking the monarchs’ path. They believe that that part of Lake Superior might have once been one of the highest mountains ever to loom over North America. It would have been useless for the monarchs to try to scale it, and wasteful to start climbing it, so all successfully migrating monarchs veered east around it and then headed southward again. They’ve kept doing that, some say, even after the mountain is long gone.

This puts a new spin on how we look at geology and geography. We think of mountains as structures that are, nearly, ageless. They stand while successive generations of animals change and evolve around them. Perhaps not this time, though. This time, butterflies kept up their same pattern while the world changed under them, the mountain wearing away, or being destroyed. This time, flesh outlasted stone.

More: Butterflies Remember a Mountain That Hasn’t Existed for Millennia

So let me get this straight. A Monarch butterfly whose life span is one year, so that it takes several generations to complete it’s migration cycle (just getting my head around that idea already gives me a headache) is genetically programed to fly around a mountain that was a millennium ago, located where Lake Superior is today. Just thinking about this is a religious experience for me.

The NASA Astrobiology Program has started the process of outlining future research directions at the organization. Roughly every ten years, the program updates NASA’s official Astrobiology Roadmap – a document that guides research and technology develop

ment across NASA and encompass the space, Earth, and biological sciences. This time around, the program is opening the process up to the wider astrobiology community and calling for the public to participate in decisions that will guide research funding and missions for the coming decades.

In May of this year, the Astrobiology Program launched the Astrobiology Future site (www.astrobiologyfuture.org/). The site hosts on-line hangouts and discussions, with each week dedicated to different scientific topics. This week kicks off with talks concerning the Early Evolution of Life and the Biosphere and Planetary Conditions for Life. The webinars begin today (Monday, May 20) at 1pm Eastern Standard Time. Video and transcripts from previous weeks are also available on the site, and there is still time be involved.

Road mapping history

The first NASA Astrobiology Roadmap resulted from a meeting of 150 scientists at the NASA Ames Research Center on July 20-22, 1998. The discussion focused on a set of fundamental questions that were developed at a workshop on astrobiology held in 1996. The group of scientists drafted a document that was designed to guide astrobiology research for the next 20 years (with a particular emphasis on the first 5 years). Since then, the roadmap has been updated with contributions from scientists and technologists selected from government, universities and private institutions.

The 1996 Astrobiology Roadmap outlined ten goals for research at NASA, and in 2008 this list was refined to seven:
Understanding the nature and distribution of habitable environments in the universe
Exploring for habitable environments and life in our own Solar System
Understanding the emergence of life
Determining how early life on Earth interacted and evolved with its changing environment
Understanding the evolutionary mechanisms and environmental limits of life
Determining the principles that will shape life in the future
Recognizing signatures of life on other worlds and on early Earth.

Each of these goals are expanded by objectives in the roadmap that directly inform how research funding is distributed by NASA. Previous versions of the roadmap are available from the Astrobiology Program website at: astrobiology.nasa.gov/roadmap

At 4pm on Thursday at the University of Oxford, the latest attempt to fill the biggest holes in physics will be presented in a lecture at the prestigious Clarendon Laboratory. The man behind the ideas, Eric Weinstein, is not someone you might normally expect to be probing the very edge of theoretical physics. After a PhD in mathematical physics at Harvard University, he left academia more than two decades ago (via stints at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and is now an economist and consultant at the Natron Group, a New York hedge fund.

More: Roll Over Einstein: Meet Weinstein

In fact, it may be the “biggest deal” in Physics and our understanding of reality since Einstein.

Weinstein begins the paper in which he explains his proposal with a quote from Einstein: “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.” Weinstein’s theory answers this in spades. Very little in the universe is arbitrary. The mathematics explains why it should work the way it does. If this isn’t a description of how our universe works then frankly I’d prefer to move to the universe where it does!

More: Eric Weinstein May Have Found the Answer to Physics’ Biggest Problems

there is no history of evolution recorded either by man or by fossils. This lack of evolutionary records does not disturb most evolutionists because they believe they have a model of how evolution took place. This model is often illustrated by a phylogenetic tree — a line-up of organisms based on how they are supposedly related in an attempt to show the path that evolution has taken.

It is quite natural to notice similar facial features in different members of one family. But people who look very much alike may be entirely unrelated. One organism may have characteristics similar to another organism’s but not be related to it at all.

More: Sundays With the Christianists: A Biology Textbook That Explains Science Is Mostly Atheists Making Things Up

A new study confirms that the vast majority of scientists who research the climate accept that the planet is warming and human beings are largely responsible. Yet a large slice of the American public believes that scientists are deeply split about global warming.

More: Scientists Agree on Climate Change, Why Doesn’t the Public? : NPR