We Demand Answers!

The latest flyby of the planet Mercury has sent back a stream of images for NASA scientists. Today, they released the very first image from the MESSENGER probe.

Scientists are sifting through their first new views of the planet Mercury in more than three decades thanks to images beamed home by NASA's MESSENGER probe.

The car-sized spacecraft zipped past Mercury in a Monday flyby and is relaying more than 1,200 new images and other data back to eager scientists on Earth.

"Now it's time for the scientific payoff," MESSENGER principal investigator Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington told SPACE.com after the flyby. "It's just a complete mix of results that we're going to get."

In one new image, released today, the planet's stark surface is shown peppered with small craters, each less than a mile (1.6 km) in diameter and carved into an area about 300 miles (482 km) across. MESSENGER used its narrow-angle camera to photograph the scene, which is dominated by a large, double-ringed crater dubbed Vivaldi after the Italian composer. While the crater was last seen by NASA's Mariner 10 probe, MESSENGER's camera observed it with unprecedented detail, researchers said.

The image released is this one:

We direct our reader's attention to the right side of the image. Now we demand to know whether AOL managed to get product placement for their AIM logo! The probe is called MESSENGER, after all….

Batter Up

A terrified burglar ran like heck when confronted by the man who's house he was attempting to rob. One can imagine why he ran like the wind, too. It isn't often one is being chased down the road by an underwear and socks-clad man waving an ax handle in subfreezing weather.

(Jose) Sedillo, 46, who lives roughly four miles outside this western Colorado town, said he was dozing in his shorts, a T-shirt and socks Monday afternoon when he heard noises and an intruder opened his bedroom door.

"I jumped up. He looked me right in the eye. I reached for my bat, and off to the races we went," Sedillo said. He said his "bat" is actually the hickory handle of a pick ax.

After Sedillo called 911, Garfield County deputies arrested two suspects. Sedillo identified one as the man who barged into his bedroom.

Sedillo says that he's glad he wasn't wearing a thong. Since the current temperature in Silt is running at about 20° F, he should be happy. He could have frozen something right off.

On the other hand, the story would have been even funnier than it already is.

Double Whammy

Inflation has shot up in the past year to 4.1% - a very significant jump over the 2006 rate of 2.5%. What's driving it?

Food and fuel.

Consumer prices rose by 4.1 percent for all of 2007, up sharply from a 2.5 percent increase in 2006, the Labor Department said Wednesday. Consumers felt the pain when they filled up their gas tanks or shopped for groceries. Prices for both energy and food shot up by the largest amount since 1990.

In a second report, the Federal Reserve said that output at the nation's factories, mines and utilities showed no growth in December, adding to a string of weak economic reports showing that the economy was slowing at the end of last year….

….The Consumer Price Index rose by 0.3 percent in December, slower than the 0.8 percent in November, as food costs were flat for the month and energy prices rose by 0.9 percent after an even bigger 5.7 percent jump in November.

Outside of food and energy, inflation rose a more moderate 0.2 percent in December. This measure of core inflation rose by 2.4 percent for all of 2007, down slightly from a 2.6 percent increase in 2006.

Think it's bad now? Wait until the newest diversion of corn into ethanol production begins to bite. This is going to get steadily worse as more and more corn is taken out of the food supply. Food prices are also being socked by vicious fuel prices - but those will likely skyrocket even more as tax increases are put into place. Which is what a Federal commission just recommended - a sharp, 40 cent increase per gallon in taxes.

Wait until this double whammy really begins to hit. Things are going to get unpleasant.

Spreadsheet Malware Program

Microsoft is warning of a new - and serious - security flaw in their Excel spreadsheet program. It is a potentially huge problem since business users are so used to opening spreadsheets. It can be easily fixed by applying the security patches Microsoft has put in place - but you will need to get those patches ASAP. This hits the Windows and Mac versions of Excel, folks.

The problem in Excel allows a hacker to create a malicious Excel document that when opened can compromise a computer, Microsoft said in an advisory. The vulnerability could allow remote code to be executed on a computer, which means a user risks having their personal data exposed.

Microsoft downplayed the risk, saying only targeted attacks have been seen. But since Microsoft Excel documents are commonly used for business, vulnerabilities such as this pose a greater risk.

"Users are familiar with the document being sent to them and are likely to open it," wrote security analyst Maarten Van Horenbeeck, in a commentary on the Web site for the SANS Internet Storm Center, which monitors Internet threats.

The vulnerability is within the Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Service Pack 2, Microsoft Office Excel Viewer 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2002, Microsoft Office Excel 2000 and the Mac version, Microsoft Excel 2004.

Those who have installed Office Service Pack 3, which includes updates for Excel as well as other products in the office productivity suite, are not affected, Microsoft said. That service pack was released last September.

Do yourself and the rest of us a favor. If you have not installed Service Pack 3 yet, please do so at once. This is also a good time to remind folks that the December Microsoft Windows updates are out - and they are important.

The Colossus Of Rodents

Forget that old lighthouse/statue thingee that stood in Rhodes for a while before it fell down. This is really big. A one ton rat once munched pretty much whatever it wanted to in South America.

The newly-identified species is the greatest-known member of the order Rodentia and by comparison makes the biggest rodent alive today, the 60-kilo (132-pound) capybara, look like a pygmy shrew.

The skull of the extraordinary beast was found in a broken boulder on Kiyu Beach on the coast of Uruguay's River Plate region, palaeontologists reported in a study on Wednesday.

Measuring a whopping 53 centimetres (21 inches), the skull has massive incisors several centimetres long.

Despite this fearsome look, the creature was not carnivorous and looked more hippo-like than rat-like.

Well, ok, they don't think it was all that good at chewing, since it had relatively small teeth. But still, a one ton rat would be very large, indeed. Why that's nearly half the size of a New York City sewer rat.

Sunshine, Lollipops And Rainbows

Ah, the classics. Ok, it isn't a classic, just a treacly pop song by Lesley Gore. But Robert Samuelson is calling the "economic stimulus" talk by politicians nothing more than lollipop politics. Because the ugly fact is that there is literally nothing that can - or should - be done to the economy that would actually work. But the politicians are arguing about what flavor lollipop to hand out with great earnestness.

Every day, the housing situation seems to worsen. Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, likens a stimulus package to insurance. "The important part," he says, "is to prevent a bad situation from getting worse." Bernstein worries that Federal Reserve policy alone — cuts in short-term interest rates — won't suffice to spur the economy.

All this sounds sensible, but it stumbles on a stubborn dilemma. Folks, we have a $14 trillion economy. A one-time stimulus (rebates aren't permanent tax cuts, and grants to states would probably be temporary) of $75 billion or $100 billion is too small to do much. If the economy is in serious trouble, something much larger is needed. But if the outlook is not so dire, then a modest stimulus plan is mostly political symbolism.

The truth is that there's a touch of hysteria to much current economic commentary that is, as yet, unjustified by what's actually happened to the economy. Yes, the housing slump is vicious, but at its peak, housing was only 5.5 percent of the economy, and the present slump is still only the fourth worst since World War II.

Whether a recession occurs — a determination made by academic economists, usually after the fact — probably won't affect most people. Economist Richard Berner of Morgan Stanley expects a "mild and short" recession, with peak unemployment of 5.6 percent or 5.7 percent in early 2009. According to economist David Wyss of Standard & Poor's, the average unemployment rate of the past 50 years is 5.6 percent. This would be a setback, but not a disaster.

Only time and patience will cure some economic problems. Though few mention it, rising inflation is a threat. For the year ending in November, consumer prices increased 4.3 percent. Slower economic growth — even a recession — would dampen prices and incipient inflationary psychology.

The housing predicament is similar. Inventories of unsold homes are high; monthly sales are low. When there's a big gap between supply and demand, prices must adjust. That has to happen in housing. Home prices must drop further, so that houses become more affordable and revive both sales and new construction. True, falling home prices would probably lead to more mortgage losses and foreclosures. But the more the adjustment is delayed, the longer the housing market will remain moribund.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is nothing at all. But that appears to be the correct path. Every candidate has a plan, however. The bidding starts around $75 billion or so and escalates rapidly. But against a $14 trillion economy, all of the billions they are yapping about spending amount to noise on the system. It isn't about economic reality, it is about handing everyone a lollipop, patting them on the head and deferring the necessary corrections until after the elections. The lollipops will, as lollipops do, eventually dissolve, leaving behind the tooth decay of having to pay for all the treats.

Basic Failure

Federal Highway Administration is rushing to get states to look at a basic component of bridges that is routinely overlooked in calculating bridge loads. This in the wake of the announcement that the Minneapolis bridge collapse was a result of a failure of these basic components called gusset plates. This is a serious issue and could potentially cause many bridges to fail if the gusset plates are not thick enough.

A weakness built into that bridge went undetected for 40 years because it involved a part so basic that highway departments and bridge contractors seldom considered it even when they reanalyzed a bridge’s capacity, experts said Tuesday.

As the National Transportation Safety Board announced its findings in the bridge collapse, the highway agency recommended an analysis of the flawed parts, known as gusset plates, every time major work was done on a bridge. There are about 12,600 bridges nationwide that could be vulnerable to the kind of design error found in Minneapolis, although the problem may not exist anywhere else.

Engineers found broken steel plates in 8 of 122 spots where they held together steel beams in the latticework of the 1,000-foot span that collapsed, each plate half an inch thick when they should have been an inch thick, said Mark Rosenker, the chairman of the transportation safety board. The plates are customarily the strongest part in a steel truss.

“In the history of this organization, we have not seen anything like this before,” said Mr. Rosenker, briefing reporters on Tuesday on the fatal flaw in the bridge’s design.

In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Pawlenty said state workers would immediately recalculate the maximum loads on the 23 highway bridges in the state that shared design similarities with the bridge that collapsed. Workers had begun such reviews on 7 of those bridges even before the board made its recommendation, said Mr. Pawlenty, a Republican. The reviews will cost about $500,000, he said, and will probably take until June to complete.

Although the problem may not be widespread - or even exist in any other bridge at all - it needs to be looked into. In the type of bridge design that was used in Minneapolis, the failure of a single gusset plate could cause the collapse of the entire structure. Investigators found eight of them broken out of the 122 used. Inspections have already begun on the most critical bridges with the highest potential for problems. Unfortunately, replacing these plates is a very challenging operation - simply because they are so basic to the integrity of the structures.

Ugly Situtation For Clinton

I mentioned last night that the Michigan win for Hillary Clinton - running unopposed - was potentially bad news. CNN is reporting that the win might be more than bad news - it could be disastrous.

Even so, roughly 70 percent of Michigan’s African-American voters — a group that makes up a quarter of Michigan’s Democratic electorate — did not cast their votes for Clinton, choosing the “uncommitted” option instead. Yet these voters weren’t uncommitted at all: in fact, according to CNN exit polls, they overwhelmingly favored Barack Obama, whose name did not appear on the ballot.

Had Obama’s name been on the Michigan ballot, CNN exit polls show that he would have won an overwhelming 73 percent of the African-American vote, in contrast to 22 percent who say they would have voted for Clinton under those circumstances. If South Carolina’s large African-American community votes as Michigan’s, Hillary may not be feeling much ‘southern hospitality’ in that state.

Much is being made in other news about how much the candidates in the Democratic debate were playing nice and backing away from all the ruckus of the last week or so. But really, how much damage has already been done at this point? The Michigan results may indicate that too much has already occurred.