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Wednesday, March 03, 2004 |
The Asteroid that Almost Hit. For a few hours on January 13, 2004, some astronomers believed that a 30-metre asteroid could strike the Earth in less than two days. The asteroid, named 2004 AS1, ended up passing 12 million kilometres away, but it demonstrates the difficulty asteroid hunters have searching for objects that could hit our planet. Had it struck, 2004 AS1 could have caused destruction on a city-wide scale. NASA currently has a program to search for asteroids larger than 1 km, and should locate them all by 2008. Other proposals have been suggested to search for smaller - and still dangerous - asteroids that threaten the Earth, but nothing has been approved yet. [Universe Today]
3:03:11 PM Permalink
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She Blinded Me With Science. New at Reason: Are the Bush Administration's offenses against science the worst ever, or exactly par for the course? Ron Bailey laments the sad history of government meddling in research. [Hit & Run]
Of course, the Bush Administrations to make science politically and religiously correct aren't unprecedented, and this is a piece worth reading. Still, the extent to which the Bushies have monkeyed with science to make it agree with their policies does seem to be much more egregious than it used to be. The consequences of phonying up smoking research to make it seem worse than it might have been are far less onerous than the consequences of phonying up global warning data.
9:27:49 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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