Today, the United States military ended its policy of allowing gay troops to serve as long as they didn't publicly identify themselves as gay. The "don't ask, don't tell" policy, enacted 18 years ago during the Clinton administration, was a bridge from the days when being homosexual was an automatic ticket to a dishonorable discharge, to today, where gay soldiers, sailors and airmen can serve openly. Over the years, Miller-McCune has examined the process that led to the repeal of DADT, starting with a 2009 piece that examined the general acceptance — based on polling of both the public ... Read More
Las Cumbres Helps Confirm Planet With Two Suns
September 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Three years ago, Lisa Conti told us about the retired Google honcho who set about ringing the globe with a network of telescopes available to both school kids and astrophysicists. That effort paid a dividend, made public this week, as the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network contributed to discovering a planet that orbits two suns, the first such planet definitively identified by human astronomers. This “circumbinary planet,” to use its fancy name, was detected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope near the constellation Cygnus. (Even NASA couldn’t resist drawing attention to ... Read More
Culturomics 2.0 Aims to Predict Future Events
September 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Last week, shortly after Idea Lobby blogger Emily Badger wrote about "a new R&D project to test tools that would mine publicly available data to predict political and humanitarian crises, disease outbreaks, mass violence and instability," a professor at the University of Illinois published his findings on how a computational analysis of millions of news stories could have predicted the Arab Spring. Kalev H. Leetaru, writing in the online journal First Monday, showed how data mining in the worldwide news archive could have "have forecasted the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, ... Read More
Black Rats Take the Bait on Palmyra Atoll
September 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In a precedent-setting project for tropical restoration, invasive black rats that had been preying on native animals on a remote Pacific atoll were successfully eradicated this summer. "Although it will be two years before we can confirm rat removal, the operations were a great achievement," said Susan White of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who oversaw the operation on Palmyra Atoll. She explained how crews from several government agencies and nonprofit groups dropped poison by plane on Palmyra in June; spread it on the ground by hand and shot it by slingshot into palm trees ... Read More
If Postal Service Diversifies, It Can Deliver
September 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
When U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe told a Senate committee this week that the U.S. Postal Service had some pretty big bills coming up and no money to pay them, he really just updated an old story with new facts. The USPS has been pretty much in "check in the mail" mode for years, and the current liquidity crunch just caps years of declining volume (especially in the most profitable niches), greater competition on the delivery front and online, and higher operating costs. To banish an estimated $20 billion shortfall by 2015, Donahoe asked the legislators to let the ... Read More