Shouting Grounds

Per BBC News:

The object, known as 2009 DD45, thought to be 21-47m (68-152ft) across, raced by our planet at 1344 GMT on Monday.
The gap was just 72,000 km (44,750 miles); a fifth of the distance between our planet and the Moon.

Considering the name of the object, the absolute earliest we’ve known about it would have been January 1st of this year. Three months time is a very small window before a potential impact with an object “68-152ft across”. Enough mass to annihilate many cities (and some states) and significantly alter the landscape of our Earth. We would only have had, a most, three months to prepare for its arrival. This doesn’t fill me with too much confidence that any known method of altering the trajectory of threatening space debris would do the least bit of good. I’m not saying that we are prepared for a “Armageddon” style interception of any kind, but it is a sobering report to say the least. I hope that people eventually realize that we have to start making more substantive efforts towards protecting our planet from the possibility of a calamitous impact from space.

At this point in our understanding of these objects would authorities on the subject even bother to predict where such an object (or larger) would strike? Would such information do more harm, in terms of widespread panic, than good, considering we are in no way prepared to prevent it and we would have potentially so little time to evacuate? Would the response be to quietly shuffle support structures into place to prepare for the aftermath? I would hope that we would risk panic to save more lives, but who knows?

From the New York Times Online:

The Bristol University statement said a segment of trachea, roughly three inches long, was taken from a 51-year-old donor who had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Using a new technique developed in Padua University, the trachea was stripped of its donor’s cells over a six-week period “so that no donor cells remained,” the statement said.

At the same time, at Bristol University, stem cells removed from Ms. Castillo’s bone marrow, were grown into “a large population” and used to “seed” the donated windpipe using a new technique developed in Milan to incubate cells.

Can you only imagine what breakthroughs could have come about if the Bush administration wasn’t living in the dark ages? Although still needing to rely on 3rd-party donor tissue is a bit of a limitation. I wonder if they will find a way to grow organ tissue without the need for a destructive harvest of a host organ.

Original article here. I cherry picked what I thought to be the best ones.

I LOL’d hard.

When you start to read this stuff, it’s tough to stop. It just doesn’t any less fascinating. Imagine what it would be like (minus the cold, if one could even observe what it would be like) to see space from Sedna’s aphelion, which apparently is so far from the sun that if you were on the surface of the planetoid you could blot out our sun with the head of a pin.