What's New Friday, 5 February 2010 Washington, DC

WHAT’S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 5 Feb 2010   Washington, DC

1. LUNACY: OUR DREAMS END WHEN REALITY SHAKES US AWAKE.
Anyone who still dreamed of a Moon base for human expeditions to Mars and 
beyond had a rude awakening this week by President Obama’a FY2011 budget 
request to Congress. This is an asking budget; its significance for space 
lies in what it did not ask for, namely a human mission back to the Moon.  
Incredibly, Apollo 11 made the first moon landing with vacuum tube 
electronics. Astronauts are now equally old-fashioned. Congress will hotly 
debate these matters in the coming months, but there won’t be an 
appropriation bill before October. International obligations make it 
difficult to withdraw from the ISS but that may well be the last human 
outpost in space, at least for a very long time. The asking budget calls 
for increasing NASA science by 11 percent. NASA will be free to do science, 
which it does very well.

2. LOCAL WARMING: SCIENCE IS SPARED FROM DOMESTIC SPENDING FREEZE.
The administration believes research will increase the long term prospects 
for employment, which is almost certainly true. Science was therefore 
exempted from the domestic spending freeze.  NSF would receive a boost of 
more than 7% and global climate research would increase by 21% across eight 
agencies. The scientific community must now demonstrate that the 
President's trust is not misplaced.

3. CELL PHONES: WHAT’S BEHIND THE CONTINUED CANCER SCARE?
The latest is a lengthy article in GQ demanding to know why America is not 
doing anything about the cell-phone hazard. At the top of the article is an 
eye-catching photograph of a pack of Marlboro's next to a cell phone. Well 
cell phones are a hazard, and rude and intrusive as well, but they don't 
cause cancer. They're a hazard because they distract people who are 
operating huge machines that can travel 100 mph. Go to 
http://www.bobpark.org , click on "search", and type in "cell phone". You 
will get a list of 38 issues of What's New going back to 1993 
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN93/wn012993.html that deal with cell 
phones.

4. ALTERNATIVE ENERGY: THE PRESIDENT’S CALL RAISES SERIOUS CONCERNS. 
Last week in his State of the Union address the president called for 
increased generation of nuclear power and offshore drilling for oil and 
gas. Who could argue? On Wednesday, however, the president sought to 
increase production of corn-based ethanol and spur development of 
technologies to capture carbon dioxide from burning coal.  Researchers have 
reportedly engineered a bacterium that can convert biomass directly into 
diesel fuel, but it would be a serious mistake to become dependent on food 
crops as fuel without firm plans to reduce fertility rates throughout the 
world. It seems impossible to find a single politician willing to utter the 
word "population" in public. All the evidence from the depletion of ocean 
fisheries to global warming and the Pacific garbage patch, are clear 
warnings that the population of Earth already exceeds that which can be 
sustained without further degradation of our beautiful home, Earth.

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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