According to CBS radio journalist Mark Knowler, President Bush did in fact set one Presidential record- most days on vacation. He has spent 1 of every 3 days of his Presidency either en route to, or at one of his vacation spots. Most often his ranch in Crawford Texas. Over the course of 8 years that amounts to more than TWO SOLID YEARS of brush clear'n and mountain bike'n.Subscribe to Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! on iTunes here:
White House officials are quick to say of course that as he travels with his principal staff and lots of high tech communications equipment, he was never really... "on vacation" He was fully able to continue screwing things up wherever he was.
Check out the new website: www.whitehouse.govhttp://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/change_has_come_to_whitehouse-gov/Do I believe Obama and his cabinet can change the world? I do. But it sure will be a long journey. Good luck to you Mr. President in these first four years of your term. Lord knows you'll need it...
"One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it."
Why is there methane on Mars? No one is sure. An important confirmation that methane exists in the atmosphere of Mars occurred last week, bolstering previous controversial claims made as early as 2003. The confirmation was made spectroscopically using large ground-based telescopes by finding precise colors absorbed on Mars that match those absorbed by methane on Earth. Given that methane is destroyed in the open martian air in a matter of years, the present existence of the fragile gas indicates that it is currently being released, somehow, from the surface of Mars. One prospect is that microbes living underground are creating it, or created in the past. If true, this opens the exciting possibility that life might be present under the surface of Mars even today. Given the present data, however, it is also possible that a purely geologic process, potentially involving volcanism or rust and not involving any life forms, is the methane creator. Pictured above is an image of Mars superposed with a map of the recent methane detection.
Given that the Obamas want to move to Blair House ten days before the traditional January 15 pre-inaugural start date -- so that they're in DC for Sasha and Malia's first day of school -- which Bush administration official decided to shut them out of the official presidential guest house and tell them to book a hotel?http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2009/01/06/blair_house_mystery_solved_its.html?hpid=topnews
The veil is lifted. We now know who is booked at Blair House, kicking President-elect Barack Obama and his family to the waiting list and across Lafayette Park to the Hay-Adams Hotel.The only overnight visitor at the presidential guest manse is none other than John Howard, a former Australian prime minister and leading member of President Bush's coalition of the willing in Iraq.
Since velocity is related to mass, the 15% increase in solar-system speed translates into a near doubling of mass of the Milky Way, according to Reid's group — and all of that newfound bulk is composed of dark matter.I also checked the Wiki article to do some comparisons. Looks like the speed cited in the WIKI article is about x2.5 times faster than what the first article claims.
Original estimates of the solar system's speed were based on what Reid calls "one-dimensional velocity" obtained solely from Doppler shifts. "Now we have three-dimensional velocity and more exact measurements," he says, a huge advancement in the field. The findings debunk the notion that the Milky Way is a little sister galaxy to her neighbor Andromeda. "They're more like fraternal twins," Reid says.
In the Nature experiment, the research team began by placing a microscopically small sphere of gold on a glass surface. Gold and glass get along well enough and under the right circumstances will attract. But what they both like a whole lot more is a liquid called bromobenzene. When the researchers introduced a little bromobenzene to the other two materials, they both began drawing so much of it to them that the gold began to rise above the glass. In effect, it levitated on a thin bromobenzene film.OK, it's not Houdini. The microscopic pas de deux isn't even visible to the naked eye. Still, the phenonemon is not as exotic as it might seem. Every time you ice skate, you experience something similar, as the shared properties of skate blade against ice create a thin film of water of a very particular thickness on which you, after a fashion, levitate. What makes the Harvard and NIH work so promising is its nano scale.
These shots aren't edited. This cave system is located under Naica mountain in the Chihuahuan Desert of Mexico. It was discovered in 2000. Some of these are as large as 30 feet... STUNNING! Maybe Superman spent time here.
