Syllabus: Introduction to Astronomy (20797)

Syllabus Webpage:http://relevantscience.blogspot.com/  From January 22, to May 17, 2013 Midterm: 03/29/2013 Final: 05/10/2013 These exams are similar to weekly quizzes. Term Paper Deadline: 05/17/2013 Rubric: Class participation        20% Term Paper & Quizzes 20% Midterm                          20% Final                                20% Homework                      20% Topic for Term Paper Book Report on "The Universe Within", by Neil Shubin Apart from  five pages for this report, I expect to see a write-up from each class, i.e., I want to see your class notes. Course Topics: 1. The scale of the universe 2. The night sky and stellar observations 3. Cycles of the moon and sun 4. Archeoastronomy 5. Origins of modern astronomy; including the Copernican Revolution, Brahe, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein 6. Tools of astronomy; including light, radiation, and telescopes (ground, and space based) 7. Stellar evolution; including nebulae, and HR diagrams 8. Life and death of stars; including processes, and types, such as main sequence, variable stars, supernovae, white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes 9. Galaxies; including Hubble classification, AGN, and quasars 10. The solar system; its origin, inner planets, outer planets, asteroids, comets, KBOs 11. Cosmology; including Big Bang, Hubble equation, and current theories 12. Life in the universe Calendar: Chapter Date 1,2 1/25 3 2/1 4 2/8 5 2/15 6 2/22 7 3/1 8 3/8 9 3/15 10 3/29 11 4/5 12 4/12 13 4/19 14 4/26 15 5/3 16 5/10 17,18 5/10 Grading Criteria:  Final grade: Exams 40% ( 2 x 20% each), Homework assignments 20%, In-class work 20%, Term paper and quizzes 20%. A: (>90%) Outstanding performance in of the subject. Achievement of superior quality. B: (80-89%) Consistent performance beyond the usual requirement of the course. Achievement of high quality. C: (70-79%) Performance of a satisfactory nature; 'average' grade. D: (60-69%) Minimally acceptable performance. F: (≤60%) Achievement  at a level insufficient to demonstrate understanding of the basic elements of the course. I: Incompletes will be granted only to students in good standing under extreme circumstances. W: Instructor will only withdraw a student from this class due to disruptive conduct.  Cases of plagiarism will be given a score of 0, with possible referral to the Student Conduct Board. Expectations: Conduct yourself in all manners as an adult in a formal education environment; including assuming responsibility for your choices and actions (i.e., see make-up policy), adhering to proper classroom etiquette, and conforming to academic policies and deadlines. Disruptive behavior will not be tolerated. You are prepared for each class discussion, including pre-class reading from the text. Students must obtain changes that are announced in class; it is your responsibility to seek for this new information. Ask questions, even the 'dumb' ones! Complete the assigned reading before class (remember 3 hours / credit per week!) You should consult me promptly if you are struggling or consistently receive failing grades in the class. Make Up Policy: Make-up homework and exams will be granted only if you contact me BEFORE the   due date, and may only be for valid reasons such as emergencies or severe illness and if you can provide written verification. The validity of these reasons is at the discretion of the instructor. The following are NOT valid reasons for a make-up exam: vacations, oversleeping, forgetting, car troubles (mechanical or logistical). Missing exams or assignments can seriously affect affect your grade. If you are granted a make-up exam, your grade may be reduced. Term Paper and Homework: As I told you during the first lecture, I want a write-up of what you understood in the lecture. I prefer you post it online, I recommend the Google service I am using right now. It is called Blogger, register in http://www.blogger.com . Each write-up should have an introduction, development, and conclusion. If you do not do it electronically, I am expecting a paper copy in class when we meet. The sum total of your notes will be in a term paper. Whichever way you do it, I do not want copy and paste. If I find out, that your term paper was ripped off from a classmate, or other sources, I will subtract points appropriately. You will write a mandatory five-page term paper on the book "The Universe Within", by Neil Shubin, due on the date noted on the class schedule. It is strongly recommended that you begin the paper early! A brief introductory abstract should summarize the contents to follow and the main focus of the paper is on the science content. More details will be provided in class. Class Schedule and Attendance: Be sure to do the textbook readings before the corresponding lecture so that you can ask any questions during the lecture. You are given 1 week to complete assignments, after the due date, you will lose points at 10% per day. Remember, in-class assignments cannot be made up and only ONE late assignment will be accepted for the entire course. Attendance/Classroom Policy: A passing grade is not possible without regular attendance and participation. Successful completion of in-class assignments is vital to your grade. Note that in-class assignments CANNOT BE MADE UP. At least one-half of all homework assignments must be completed or you may fail. In the event that your final grade is borderline, regular excellent class participation may make a difference. Students whose conduct disrupts the class will be asked to leave; repeated offenses will result in withdrawal from the class. Course Objectives: Upon successful completion of this course the student will be able to: 1. Apply scientific and mathematical reasoning to interpret observed phenomena. 2. Demonstrate a familiarity with the basic vocabulary and concepts in modern astronomy. 3. Describe the fundamental ideas of archeoastronomy. 4. Describe the motions of celestial bodies (moon, planets, stars) in the night sky. 5. Describe the electromagnetic spectrum, and its importance and use in astronomy. 6. Demonstrate an understanding of fundamental concepts used in modern astronomy including gravity, ground-and-space - based telescopes, and spectroscopy. 7. Describe the birth and structure of the solar system, including the Sun, the Terrestrial, and Jovian planets, the Asteroid and Kuiper Belts, and the Oort Cloud. 8. Describe the properties of and the birth, evolution, and death of stars, including types and processes. 9. Describe the properties and types of galaxies including dark matter. 10. Describe the current thoughts on dark energy, cosmology and extraterrestrial life.

Textbook: Essential Cosmic Perspective by Jeffrey Bennett, et al.

DNA shows ancient humans related to Asians and Native Americans - Sci/Tech - DNA

DNA shows ancient humans related to Asians and Native Americans - Sci/Tech - DNA:

"Early DNA has revealed that humans living some 40,000 years ago in an area near Beijing were likely related to many present-day Asians and Native Americans."

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30 Blogs with Tricks for Getting Kids to Eat Healthy | Babysitters

30 Blogs with Tricks for Getting Kids to Eat Healthy | Babysitters:

"It’s not always easy to get kids to eat a healthy diet.  Many would like to live on pizza and chicken nuggets, not broccoli and spinach, and making the switch to feeding your kids a healthy diet may be received with some resistance.  Keep the faith; there are tricks for getting your kids to eat healthy.  As you know, breakfast is the most important meal of the day and it’s very important for your child to eat breakfast so they have brain food to fuel them through their day.  Breakfast tips and other tricks for getting kids to eat their fruits and veggies can be found in these 30 blog entries."

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Allende 1969

Fall That Glitters: Microscopy Reveals Stained-Glass Beauty in Ancient Meteorites [Slide Show]: Scientific American

Fall That Glitters: Microscopy Reveals Stained-Glass Beauty in Ancient Meteorites [Slide Show]: Scientific American:

 "Under a polarizing light microscope, chondrules—melted bits of silicate-rich material in meteorites—turn slices of the space rocks into bedazzling art"

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New Semester

I have around twenty students. The textbook is here. You can follow the class here.

I want to emphasize the following:

The concept of consciousness represents a state of mind. When we go to sleep it changes, there may be dreams. When we are thinking, images appear, like an image of my deceased mother going to cook. This state of mind, as far as we know, has never existed before Homo sapiens appeared on Earth. When there is consciousness, knowledge appears, now knowledge changes the Universe.

The current cosmology teaches, that more than thirteen thousand million years ago, almost everything was different. From before that moment, which is called the Big Bang, we do not know what was the same to things today, “Time” allows us to perceive change and permanence. Some things change, others stay the same.

By mass, the amount of matter participating in consciousness is practically zero, but nevertheless, it exists, and it is important. Our pointy heads resemble antennae, we see each other’s eyes, and through them, we know what we mean when we talk.

Consciousness is social. Before each one of us was born, our ancestors constructed social consciousness, as we grow inside a community, we build our own personal consciousness, and through our children we pass the biological conditions to acquire this social consciousness  to the future of the Universe. Besides the external marks to guide our consciousness, there are internal marks, passed to our children by chemical combinations, which allow the permanence of biological traits. DNA is one of these repositories of information for our children.

Some of  the stages in the evolution of the Universe are: quarks and leptons, tied together with gluons, weak bosons, and photons. Protons, and neutrons, turning into two main types of nuclei: Hydrogen, and Helium. By gravitational attraction hydrogen nuclei, i.e. protons, and helium, made of two protons, form stars; these stars turn hydrogen, and helium into carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, among other nuclei. Big enough stars explode throwing new elements in space. Dust and water provide bench tables, where other molecules like alcohol, are formed. Even the complex molecule, glycine, may be present in the so-called molecular clouds in space.

At some moment in this race towards complexity, life appeared on Earth. After life, consciousness followed.

It is unlikely that my failings will stop my consciousness growth. They would definitely hamper this growth, but not stop it. The Otomi in Mexico have been living under very harsh conditions, and they keep moving in their quest for knowledge. The young otomis come to the United States to get money for their families in Mexico.

My friend Antonella Faggetti de Glockner, my sister Sandra Cantoral, and other enlightened women, are helping to bring about, communication between different social consciousness. We do not have to go to Alpha Centauri, to meet intelligent beings outside our European Cosmovision. On the other hand, the Cosmovision I use here, can be understood by all conscious beings we know. This could  truly be, the first Cosmic Vision on Earth. This vision is presented in “The New Universe and the Human Future”, by Abrams and Primack.

On January 20, 2013, Barack Obama took office for the second time. He is the 44th President of the USA. He changed health care in this country, he built social consciousness for his two daughters. On Martin Luther King Jr.’s Day, there was an inauguration ceremony for the first African American President of the USA. The life of this country has been hard, Lincoln could not participate in Reconstruction, I hope Obama can implement Immigration Reform.

I am excited!

The Promise and Perils of Mining Asteroids

The Promise and Perils of Mining Asteroids:

 "A Virginia company has joined the ranks of entrepreneurs looking to space for their next economic opportunity."

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Seeking Clues About Sea Level From Fossil Beaches - NYTimes.com

Seeking Clues About Sea Level From Fossil Beaches - NYTimes.com:

"BREDASDORP, South Africa — A scruffy crew of scientists barreled down a dirt road, their two-car caravan kicking up dust. After searching all day for ancient beaches miles inland from the modern shoreline, they were about to give up."

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Climate Change Prominent in Obama’s Inaugural Address - NYTimes.com

Climate Change Prominent in Obama’s Inaugural Address - NYTimes.com:

 "WASHINGTON — President Obama made addressing climate change the most prominent policy vow of his second Inaugural Address on Monday, setting in motion what Democrats say will be a deliberately paced but aggressive campaign built around the use of his executive powers to sidestep Congressional opposition."

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The Pepperdine Graphic » Bang goes the universe

The Pepperdine Graphic » Bang goes the universe:

 "Do your eyes deceive you? No, this is indeed a science column. My goal here is simply to make complex yet relevant science available to readers of all levels of scientific understanding."

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Star Talk

Bikes and Buses Propel Mexico City to Sustainable Transport Award

Bikes and Buses Propel Mexico City to Sustainable Transport Award:

"Bicycles, pedestrian-friendly plazas and walkways, new bus lines, and parking meters are combining to transform parts of Mexico City from a traffic nightmare to a commuter's paradise. The Mexican capital, one of the world's most populated urban areas, has captured this year's Sustainable Transport Award, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) announced Tuesday."

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Seeking Revenue, Greece Approves New Mines, But Environmentalists Balk - NYTimes.com

Seeking Revenue, Greece Approves New Mines, But Environmentalists Balk - NYTimes.com:

 "IERISSOS, Greece — In the forest near here, bulldozers have already begun flattening hundreds of acres for an open pit gold mine and a processing plant, which Canada’s Eldorado Gold Corporation hopes to open within two years. Eldorado has reopened other mining operations around here, too, digging for gold, copper, zinc and lead from nearby hills."

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What is a 'Hacktivist'? - NYTimes.com

What is a 'Hacktivist'? - NYTimes.com:

"The untimely death of the young Internet activist Aaron Swartz, apparently by suicide, has prompted an outpouring of reaction in the digital world. Foremost among the debates being reheated — one which had already grown in the wake of larger and more daring data breaches in the past few years — is whether Swartz’s activities as a “hacktivist” were being unfairly defined as malicious or criminal. In particular, critics (as well as Swartz’s family in a formal statement) have focused on the federal government’s indictment of Swartz for downloading millions of documents from the scholarly database JSTOR, an action which JSTOR itself had declined to prosecute."

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California and Nevada Update Tahoe Development Plan - NYTimes.com

California and Nevada Update Tahoe Development Plan - NYTimes.com:

"SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. — Deep in the Sierra Nevada, 39 trillion gallons of crystalline water straddles the border between California and Nevada."

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Texas Drought Pushes Lawmakers to Focus on Water in New Session - NYTimes.com

Texas Drought Pushes Lawmakers to Focus on Water in New Session - NYTimes.com:

"AUSTIN, Tex. — There is usually no shortage of controversial and politically divisive issues for lawmakers to address in the opening days of a state legislative session, from abortion to immigration to gun rights."

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Heat, Flood or Icy Cold, Extreme Weather Rages Worldwide

Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Snow blanketed Jerusalem on Thursday, an example of weather extremes that are growing more frequent and intense.More Photos »

By SARAH LYALL

Published: January 10, 2013

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WORCESTER, England — Britons may remember 2012 as the year the weather spun off its rails in a chaotic concoction of drought, deluge and flooding, but the unpredictability of it all turns out to have been all too predictable: Around the world, extreme has become the new commonplace.

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From Freezing to Burning: Extreme Weather Across the World

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Viktor Everstov/Reuters

RUSSIA In Siberia, a man braved temperatures of 47 degrees below zero last month. More Photos »

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Lukas Coch/European Pressphoto Agency

AUSTRALIA  A bush fire, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave, killed dozens of sheep at a farm near Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory. More Photos »

Especially lately. China is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so freezing — minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and counting — that the traffic lights recently stopped working in the city of Yakutsk.

Bush fires are raging across Australia, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected flooding in September. A vicious storm bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle East. And in the United States, scientists confirmed this week what people could have figured out simply by going outside: last year was the hottest since records began.

“Each year we have extreme weather, but it’s unusual to have so many extreme events around the world at once,” said Omar Baddour, chief of the data management applications division at the World Meteorological Association, in Geneva. “The heat wave in Australia; the flooding in the U.K., and most recently the flooding and extensive snowstorm in the Middle East — it’s already a big year in terms of extreme weather calamity.”

Such events are increasing in intensity as well as frequency, Mr. Baddour said, a sign that climate change is not just about rising temperatures, but also about intense, unpleasant, anomalous weather of all kinds.

Here in Britain, people are used to thinking of rain as the wallpaper on life’s computer screen — an omnipresent, almost comforting background presence. But even the hardiest citizen was rattled by the near-biblical fierceness of the rains that bucketed down, and the floods that followed, three different times in 2012.

Rescuers plucked people by boat from their swamped homes in St. Asaph, North Wales. Whole areas of the country were cut off when roads and train tracks were inundated at Christmas. In Megavissey, Cornwall, a pub owner closed his business for good after it flooded 11 times in two months.

It was no anomaly: the floods of 2012 followed the floods of 2007 and also the floods of 2009, which all told have resulted in nearly $6.5 billion in insurance payouts. The Met Office, Britain’s weather service, declared 2012 the wettest year in England, and the second-wettest in Britain as a whole, since records began more than 100 years ago. Four of the five wettest years in the last century have come in the past decade (the fifth was in 1954).

The biggest change, said Charles Powell, a spokesman for the Met Office, is the frequency in Britain of “extreme weather events” — defined as rainfall reaching the top 1 percent of the average amount for that time of year. Fifty years ago, such episodes used to happen every 100 days; now they happen every 70 days, he said.

The same thing is true in Australia, where bush fires are raging across Tasmania and the current heat wave has come after two of the country’s wettest years ever. On Tuesday, Sydney experienced its fifth-hottest day since records began in 1910, with the temperature climbing to 108.1 degrees. The first eight days of 2013 were among the 20 hottest on record.

Every decade since the 1950s has been hotter in Australia than the one before, said Mark Stafford Smith, science director of the Climate Adaptation Flagship at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.

To the north, the extremes have swung the other way, with a band of cold settling across Russia and Northern Europe, bringing thick snow and howling winds to Stockholm, Helsinki and Moscow. (Incongruously, there were also severe snowstorms in Sicily and southern Italy for the first time since World War II; in December, tornadoes and waterspouts struck the Italian coast.)

In Siberia, thousands of people were left without heat when natural gas liquefied in its pipes and water mains burst. Officials canceled bus transportation between cities for fear that roadside breakdowns could lead to deaths from exposure, and motorists were advised not to venture far afield except in columns of two or three cars. In Altai, to the east, traffic officials warned drivers not to use poor-quality diesel, saying that it could become viscous in the cold and clog fuel lines.

Meanwhile, China is enduring its worst winter in recent memory, with frigid temperatures recorded in Harbin, in the northeast. In the western region of Xinjiang, more than 1,000 houses collapsed under a relentless onslaught of snow, while in Inner Mongolia, 180,000 livestock froze to death. The cold has wreaked havoc with crops, sending the price of vegetables soaring.

Way down in South America, energy analysts say that Brazil may face electricity rationing for the first time since 2002, as a heat wave and a lack of rain deplete the reservoirs for hydroelectric plants. The summer has been punishingly hot. The temperature in Rio de Janeiro climbed to 109.8 degrees on Dec. 26, the city’s highest temperature since official records began in 1915.

At the same time, in the Middle East, Jordan is battling a storm packing torrential rain, snow, hail and floods that are cascading through tunnels, sweeping away cars and spreading misery in Syrian refugee camps. Amman has been virtually paralyzed, with cars abandoned, roads impassable and government offices closed.

Israel and the Palestinian territories are grappling with similar conditions, after a week of intense rain and cold winds ushered in a snowstorm that dumped eight inches in Jerusalem alone.

Amir Givati, head of the surface water department at the Israel Hydrological Service, said the storm was truly unusual because of its duration, its intensity and its breadth. Snow and hail fell not just in the north, but as far south as the desert city of Dimona, best known for its nuclear reactor.

In Beirut on Wednesday night, towering waves crashed against the Corniche, the seaside promenade downtown, flinging water and foam dozens of feet in the air as lightning flickered across the dark sea at multiple points along the horizon. Many roads were flooded as hail pounded the city.

Several people died, including a baby boy in a family of shepherds who was swept out of his mother’s arms by floodwaters. The greatest concern was for the 160,000 Syrian refugees who have fled to Lebanon, taking shelter in schools, sheds and, where possible, with local families. Some refugees are living in farm outbuildings, which are particularly vulnerable to cold and rain.

Barry Lynn, who runs a forecasting business and is a lecturer at the Hebrew University’s department of earth science, said a striking aspect of the whole thing was the severe and prolonged cold in the upper atmosphere, a big-picture shift that indicated the Atlantic Ocean was no longer having the moderating effect on weather in the Middle East and Europe that it has historically.

“The intensity of the cold is unusual,” Mr. Lynn said. “It seems the weather is going to become more intense; there’s going to be more extremes.”

In Britain, where changes to the positioning of the jet stream — a ribbon of air high up in the atmosphere that helps steer weather systems — may be contributing to the topsy-turvy weather, people are still recovering from the December floods. In Worcester last week, the river Severn remained flooded after three weeks, with playing fields buried under water.

In the shop at the Worcester Cathedral, Julie Smith, 54, was struggling, she said, to adjust to the new uncertainty.

“For the past seven or eight years, there’s been a serious incident in a different part of the country,” Mrs. Smith said. “We don’t expect extremes. We don’t expect it to be like this.”

Reporting was contributed by Jodi Rudoren from Jerusalem; Irit Pazner Garshowitz from Tzur Hadassah, Israel; Fares Akram from Gaza City, Gaza; Ellen Barry and Andrew Roth from Moscow; Ranya Kadri from Amman, Jordan; Dan Levin from Harbin, China; Jim Yardley from New Delhi; Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon; Matt Siegel from Sydney, Australia; Scott Sayare from Paris; and Simon Romero from Rio de Janeiro.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 11, 2013, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Heat, Flood or Icy Cold, Extreme Weather Rages Worldwide.

NYT

Colleges Expect Lower Enrollment - NYTimes.com

Colleges Expect Lower Enrollment - NYTimes.com:

 "An annual survey of colleges and universities found that a growing number of schools face declining enrollment and less revenue from tuition."

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Not Even Close: 2012 Was Hottest Ever in U.S.

By JUSTIN GILLIS

Published: January 8, 2013 489 Comments

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The numbers are in: 2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the Corn Belt and a huge storm that caused broad devastation in the Middle Atlantic States, turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States.

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Record-Setting Heat Across the U.S. in 2012

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• A Record Worth Wilting For: Death Valley Is Hotter Than ...(December 29, 2012)

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• Dot Earth Blog: Australian Forecasters Add New Colors to Temperature Charts to Capture Record Heat (January 8, 2013)

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How hot was it? The temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree, but last year’s 55.3 degree average demolished the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit.

If that does not sound sufficiently impressive, consider that 34,008 daily high records were set at weather stations across the country, compared with only 6,664 record lows, according to a count maintained by theWeather Channel meteorologist Guy Walton, using federal temperature records.

That ratio, which was roughly in balance as recently as the 1970s, has been out of whack for decades as the country has warmed, but never by as much as it was last year.

“The heat was remarkable,” said Jake Crouch, a scientist with the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., which released the official climate compilation on Tuesday. “It was prolonged. That we beat the record by one degree is quite a big deal.”

Scientists said that natural variability almost certainly played a role in last year’s extreme heat and drought. But many of them expressed doubt that such a striking new record would have been set without the backdrop of global warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. And they warned that 2012 was probably a foretaste of things to come, as continuing warming makes heat extremes more likely.

Even so, the last year’s record for the United States is not expected to translate into a global temperature record when figures are released in the coming weeks. The year featured a La Niña weather pattern, which tends to cool the global climate over all, and scientists expect it to be the world’s eighth- or ninth-warmest year on record.

Assuming that prediction holds up, it will mean that the 10 warmest years on record all fell within the past 15 years, a measure of how much the planet has warmed. Nobody who is under 28 has lived through a month of global temperatures that fell below the 20th-century average, because the last such month was February 1985.

Last year’s weather in the United States began with an unusually warm winter, with relatively little snow across much of the country, followed by a March that was so hot that trees burst into bloom and swimming pools opened early. The soil dried out in the March heat, helping to set the stage for a drought that peaked during the warmest July on record.

The drought engulfed 61 percent of the nation, killed corn and soybean crops and sent prices spiraling. It was comparable to a severe drought in the 1950s, Mr. Crouch said, butnot quite as severe as the legendary Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s, which was exacerbated by poor farming practices that allowed topsoil to blow away.

Extensive records covering the lower 48 states go back to 1895; Alaska and Hawaii have shorter records and are generally not included in long-term climate comparisons for that reason.

Mr. Crouch pointed out that until last year, the coldest year in the historical record for the lower 48 states, 1917, was separated from the warmest year, 1998, by only 4.2 degrees Fahrenheit. That is why the 2012 record, and its one degree increase over 1998, strikes climatologists as so unusual.

“We’re taking quite a large step above what the period of record has shown for the contiguous United States,” Mr. Crouch said.

In addition to being the nation’s warmest year, 2012 turned out to be the second-worst on a measure called the Climate Extremes Index, surpassed only by 1998.

Experts are still counting, but so far 11 disasters in 2012 have exceeded a threshold of $1 billion in damages, including several tornado outbreaks; Hurricane Isaac, which hit the Gulf Coast in August, and, late in the year, Hurricane Sandy, which caused damage likely to exceed $60 billion in nearly half the states, primarily in the mid-Atlantic region.

Among those big disasters was one bearing a label many people had never heard before: the derecho, a line of severe, fast-moving thunderstorms that struck central and eastern parts of the country starting on June 29, killing more than 20 people, toppling trees and knocking out power for millions of households.

For people who escaped both the derecho and Hurricane Sandy relatively unscathed, the year may be remembered most for the sheer breadth and oppressiveness of the summer heat wave. By the calculations of the climatic data center, a third of the nation’s population experienced 10 or more days of summer temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Among the cities that set temperature records in 2012 were Nashville; Athens, Ga.; and Cairo, Ill., all of which hit 109 degrees on June 29; Greenville, S.C., which hit 107 degrees on July 1; and Lamar, Colo., which hit 112 degrees on June 27.

With the end of the growing season, coverage of the drought has waned, but the drought itself has not. Mr. Crouch pointed out that at the beginning of January, 61 percent of the country was still in moderate to severe drought conditions. “I foresee that it’s going to be a big story moving forward in 2013,” he said.

NYT

2012 Was Hottest Year Ever in U.S. - NYTimes.com

2012 Was Hottest Year Ever in U.S. - NYTimes.com:

 "The numbers are in: 2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the corn belt and a massive storm that caused broad devastation in the mid-Atlantic states, turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States."

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Meteorite Offers 2-Billion-Year-Old Glimpse of Mars - NYTimes.com

Meteorite Offers 2-Billion-Year-Old Glimpse of Mars - NYTimes.com:

"A meteorite found in the Sahara, one of the oldest ever to come from Mars, offers evidence that life could have existed there more than two billion years ago, researchers say."

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Billions of Earthlike Planets Found in Milky Way

Billions of Earthlike Planets Found in Milky Way:

 "Tens of billions of Earthlike worlds are strewn across the Milky Way, many of them circling stars very much like our own sun, astronomers said today."

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Digital Globes, a New Way to View the World - NYTimes.com

Digital Globes, a New Way to View the World - NYTimes.com:


"In the main hall of the hands-on science exhibits at the Cape Town Science Center in South Africa, a lifeless, tattered globe stands under naked fluorescent bulbs, all but ignored by children passing through on school tours."

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Is High Energy Physics Weapons Research?

"Long ago I stumbled on an analogy that still seems relevant to me: business-cycle macro is to economics in general in something like the way that nuclear bombs (and to some extent, to be fair, nuclear power) are to high-energy physics. I’m sure that very few physicists working on the mysteries of the universe trouble themselves at all thinking about how to make things go boom. Yet the reason the field continues to receive public funding is in large part precisely the fact that once upon a time physicists did, indeed, find a way to make things go boom, and you never know what they might come up with in the future."

Paul Krugman

I have an opinion; the answer is NO, and to the extent that current Theoretical Work on High Energy Physics, is not weapons research, the support from the Government to this activity  has dwindled.