Charon, Pluto's very large "moon" for lack of a better term, as seen by New Horizons earlier this week
A blast from the past from Daily Kos in
March of 2009:
DS: Given the gloomy economic environment, what would you say to taxpayers who ask what they’re getting for that kind of money?
I’d say they are getting a lot. Jobs for starters -- and good, high tech ones at that. ... But more importantly: we are expanding human knowledge to the edge of our solar system. This is what great nations do -- they make great history. And New Horizons will be a landmark event in that history -- the first exploration of a whole new class of planets and the Kuiper Belt at the very frontier of our solar system. Years from now, when today’s economic problems are forgotten, when the rock stars and movie stars of today are too, when even the day’s politicians are hardly remembered, a student or teacher anywhere in the world who opens a textbook and sees Pluto or Kuiper Belt Objects, will be looking at images and data from New Horizons. I think that’s worth a lot, because it is a legacy for our nation and our civilization. -- Alan Stern, Principal Investigator, New Horizons
- Last year was the hottest on record according to NOAA. The US East Coast was the only sizable, populated region to record below average temperatures.
- The sun is unlikely to save us from global warming, and climate scientists are not predicting an ice age in 2030, despite what you may have heard from the usual sloppy traditional media sources.
- There were also mammals in the Jurassic, and new analysis shows those adorable, furry little ancestors of all that's cute and cuddly and vicious and hairy, today, underwent their own burst of evolution over 100 million years ago:
Long believed to be only small nocturnal insect eaters, recent fossil discoveries suggest that in the central millennia of the Jurassic mammals rapidly developed a number of new adaptations in their methods of locomotion - including swimming, digging and gliding - and new feeding behaviors.