Somebody just buy it already. The big question that I don’t know if anyone knows the answer to is how much it would cost to maintain it if you have to keep paying Boeing for replacement parts. Or how much they’d cost to get from someone else, and if it could be done.
The First Airplane Passenger
An interesting bit of history about the Wrights that I’d never heard before.
Greenpeace And Climate
Patrick Moore has a letter to the editor. Unfortunately, the GreenWarmMongers he left behind still believe the lunacy.
The National Space Council
I don’t know whether or not it will help with the current policy mess. It probably partly depends on who heads it up (that is, the real day-to-day work, not Pence).
This is strange:
According to historians, in 1992, council staff convinced Bush to fire the NASA chief because they thought he would resist their ideas. As is the case in many bureaucratic environments, the dysfunction of the council had little do with national interest or policy, but with office politics.
Truly wasn’t fired because the council staff “thought he would resist their ideas.” He was fired because he was actively sabotaging Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative, and actually having his AA for legislative affairs lobby against it on the Hill.
[Update a while later]
Stephen Smith has a blog post on the (meaningless) NASA authorization ceremony last week. Trump seems remarkably uninformed, but that’s true of most subjects, I think.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Jeff Kluger says that magical thinking won’t get you to Mars. But a) this isn’t an appropriation and b) he seems to think that we can do Apollo again.
Human Heart Tissue
…grown from a spinach leaf. Well, that’s…different. But whatever works.
Mary Katherine Ham
A very nice profile on an up and comer. I’ve met her a couple times (but a decade ago), great person.
A New Lung Function
Turns out that bone marrow isn’t the only place that blood is made.
I think a little humility is in order on how much we still don’t understand about the human body.
[Update later morning]
Surprise, surprise, the testes are connected to the immune system.
A Pen And A Phone
Trump plans to undo Obama’s wealth-destroying “Clean” Power Plan this week.
And no, this has nothing to do with asthma.
NAD+
In the latest paper, the scientists revealed new details on how NAD+ works to keep cells young. Sinclair put drops of NAD+ into the water of a group of mice, and within a couple of hours, their NAD+ levels started to rise. Within the first week, the scientists saw obvious age reversal in muscle and improvements in DNA repair. “We can’t tell the difference between the tissues from an old mouse that is two years old versus a young mouse that is three to four months old,” Sinclair says.
I’ve started taking it myself. And this is interesting, too:
“The idea is to protect the body from radiation exposure here on earth, either naturally occurring or doctor-inflicted,” he says. “If I were going to have an X-ray or a CT scan, I would take NMN beforehand.” He already has plans to go even farther than earth: NASA is collaborating with Sinclair’s group on the human tests to see if it’s possible to insulate astronauts from the effects of cosmic radiation in space.
That would be nice.
[Sunday-afternoon update]
This looks like a promising similar breakthrough.
[Bumped]
The Republican ObamaCare Debacle
Byron York has a good analysis. This is a key point, which was entirely predictable:
‘The Art of the Deal’ doesn’t work with ideologically-driven politicians. The pundits mentioned Trump’s most famous book thousands of times during the Obamacare negotiations. But in dealing with the doctrinaire conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus, Trump was facing differently-motivated partners than in the deal-making recounted in his 1987 book. If the president wants to succeed in Washington, he’ll have to learn how to deal with people who aren’t in it just for the money.
I'd also note that today was the day that Trump finally figured out that he's not the CEO of the country, and the limits of the presidency.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) March 25, 2017
[Update a few minutes later]
Inside the Trumpcare meltdown.
Rookies.