Mysterious Pioneer Anomaly, Likely Solved

The debate has been raging ever since an astronomer named John Anderson first noticed the anomaly in 1980. Anderson created an impossibly complicated algorithm so that he and other JPL scientists could use the radio transmission data to study gravitational effects in the outer solar system.

But it didn’t seem to work. Or rather, he noticed a small discrepancy between the Doppler shifts predicted by his algorithm, and the actual shifts being measured in the radio signals coming from the Pioneer spacecraft.

Dark Matter Drag?

The discrepancy is 10 billion times smaller than the acceleration due to gravity, but it was unmistakably there in Anderson’s calculations. (The canonical number, for those who care, is 8.74 x 10-10 m/s2.)

What could be causing this discrepancy? Theories have abounded over the years. One popular hypothesis is that there are huge quantities of dark matter — as yet undetected — hanging around in the universe and exerting a little extra drag on the spacecraft, thereby slowing them down.

Another possible explanation is that gravity doesn’t follow an inverse square law as formulated by Isaac Newton; this falls under the rubric of MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics), the focus of a flurry of technical papers over the last 10-15 years. It’s among the alternatives to dark energy to explain the fact that the expansion of our universe is accelerating.

Evidence for this hypothesis appeared to be bolstered in 1994, when Los Alamos cosmologist Michael Martin Nieto noticed that the value for the deviations of the Pioneer spacecraft was almost exactly equivalent to cosmic acceleration (the speed of light multiplied by Hubble’s constant).

For Nieto, and others who noticed this strange coincidence, “The Pioneer anomaly could be the first evidence that gravity deviates from an inverse square dependence,” he told Popular Science last year. “It could be huge.” …

On the more mundane side of things, there was always the possibility that the culprit might just be heat. Specifically, heat from the plutonium inside the spacecrafts’ generators, some of which got converted into electricity while the rest of it radiated into space. If it did so unevenly, radiating more heat in one direction than in another — only a 5 percent difference is required — that might be sufficient to give rise to the Pioneer anomaly. …

Previous calculations have only estimated the effect of reflections. So Francisco and co used a computer modeling technique called Phong shading to work out exactly how the the emitted heat is reflected and in which direction it ends up traveling.

Phong shading was dreamt up in the 1970s and is now widely used in many rendering packages to model reflections in three dimensions. It was originally developed to handle the reflections of visible light from 3D objects but it works just as well for infrared light, say Francisco and co.

In particular, Phong shading has allowed the Portuguese team to include for the first time the effect of heat emitted from a part of the spacecraft called the main equipment compartment. It turns out that heat from the back wall of this compartment is reflected from the back of the spacecraft’s antenna. Since the antenna points Sunward, towards Earth, reflections off its back would tend to decelerate the spacecraft. “The radiation from this wall will, in a first iteration, reflect off the antenna and add a contribution to the force in the direction of the sun.”

via Mysterious Pioneer Anomaly May Finally Be Solved : Discovery News.

I was really hoping for some momentous variation in the force of gravity, but it seems that possibility with regard to the Pioneer data, has been vanquished.

Special Delivery! Oregon Mailman Caught Defecating in Citizen’s Yard

An Oregon postal worker has had a bad day and has been suspended without pay after he was caught with his pants around his ankles, momentously defecating in one of the yards along his delivery route.

Portland resident Don Derfler came to the window last week and spotted the mailman striking out against unseen opponents on the ground by his neighbor’s house.

“He started pulling his pants down and started defecating, and at that point I grabbed my camera and started to take pictures,” Derfler told MSNBC.

The evidence was quickly vanquished, but the neighborhood still wasn’t pleased.

An official with the U.S. Postal Service said it is investigating why the mailman delivered his loss and if he allowed any runs.

U.S. Postal Service representative Ron Anderson did not balk and went up with a good apology to customers and to the public.

“We’re taking this very seriously … I’ve worked for the Postal Service for many years and have never heard of an incident like this, and I hope I never do again.”via Special Delivery! Oregon Mailman Caught Defecating in Citizen’s Yard.

Clarksville police report intoxicated 4-year-old

A 4-year-old had a bad day, as the youngster’s unusual intoxication resulted in an investigation by a Clarksville police dispatch.

At about 9:20 p.m, the girl was carried to the hospital by her parents who told police they heard her crying upstairs after playing on the bed and falling off.

The mother came to notice her daughter’s hazy eyes and unsteadiness, according to the police report.

Police returned to the family’s home on Vanessa Drive to figure out what the child had ingested to vanquish her equilibrium.

In the upstairs bathroom, a momentous clue stuck: A bottle of prescription oral rinse was found on the counter with an unsecured lid. The content of alcohol read out at 10 percent.

The little girl came up short of sober with a BAC of .14 in her first blood test and a .12 reading on her second blood test, the report said.

A nurse at Gateway did not balk and contacted the Department of Children Services

via Clarksville police report intoxicated 4-year-old | The Leaf Chronicle – Clarksville, Tenn., and Fort Campbell | theleafchronicle.com.

Outbreak of toxic caterpillars in Pangbourne

Residents have had some bad days due to a toxic caterpillar in Pangbourne and parts of west London.The Forestry Commission came out with a caution not to touch the caterpillars of the oak processionary moth.

Their momentous hairs contain a toxin that can score you some itchy skin rashes as well as eye and throat irritations.

The Forestry Commission’s Stewart Snape stepped up to the plate to say that residents can report sightings but that the caterpillars should only be vanquished by pest control operators.

Officials are now recording outbreaks of the moth in Pangbourne in West Berkshire and the London boroughs of Ealing, Brent, Hounslow, Richmond upon Thames and Hammersmith Fulham.

Health Protection Agency director Dr Brian McCloskey said: “We strongly advise people not to touch or approach the caterpillars or their nests because of the health risks caused by the toxin-containing hairs.

“Pets can also be hit by these opponents and should be kept away as well”.

He added that anyone who experiences an itchy skin rash or other allergic symptoms after being near oak trees in these areas should not balk at consulting their GP.

As a caterpillar, each oak processionary moth has around 62,000 hairs, which they can eject.

Hairs that fall to the ground can be active for up to five years.

The moths only live for two to three days in July or August before their final out.

via BBC News – Outbreak of toxic caterpillars in Pangbourne.

Robot Sportswriter Outperforms Human

… when they came across a particularly bad account of a baseball game on the official George Washington University athletics website, GWSports.com, they assumed it was machine-generated.

The University of Virginia’s Will Roberts had pitched a perfect game against George Washington. The story on GWSports.com neglected to mention that fact until the second to last paragraph.

“That was shocking,” Carmichael says. “This was the first time this had happened in the NCAA since 2002. And when it happens, you expect to see it in the headline and you expect to see everyone talking about that aspect of the game.”

The writer of that story — it turns out — was a living, breathing human being. But the creators of Narrative Science, a news-writing software program, took Deadspin’s assumption as fighting words. They set out to prove that their system could produce a better story.

“We actually got hold of the information director of the school, we got the raw material, the numbers around the story,” said Kris Hammond, chief technology officer of Narrative Science. “And we fed it to our system, which wrote the story, where the headline and the lead were focused on the fact that it was a no-hitter. Because how could you write a baseball story and not notice that it was a no hitter? I mean what kind of writer or machine would you be?”

And, here’s the machine-generated copy Narrative Science sent in to Deadspin:

Tuesday was a great day for W. Roberts, as the junior pitcher threw a perfect game to carry Virginia to a 2-0 victory over George Washington at Davenport Field.

Twenty-seven Colonials came to the plate and the Virginia pitcher vanquished them all, pitching a perfect game. He struck out 10 batters while recording his momentous feat. Roberts got Ryan Thomas to ground out for the final out of the game.

Tom Gately came up short on the rubber for the Colonials, recording a loss. He went three innings, walked two, struck out one, and allowed two runs.

The Cavaliers went up for good in the fourth, scoring two runs on a fielder’s choice and a balk.

Deadspin conceded. It published a follow-up saying that — in this case — the machine did write the better story.

“The image of the robots typing wins me over for sure,” says Carmichael. “And on top of that, in some cases, as we’ve seen with Narrative Science’s story, they actually can produce the stronger story.”

via Big Swing: Robot Sportswriter Outperforms Human : NPR.

Underwater Microphone Captures Honshu, Japan Earthquake

YouTube – Underwater Microphone Captures Honshu, Japan Earthquake.

8,000 cow abductions reported in southern U.S. sent White House into a panic

Cows were sacrificed by aliens sending the White House into a panic declassified FBI files have revealed.

It is claimed that more than 8,000 cows were abducted by UFOs before they were mutilated and thrown back down to earth over the southern United States during the 1970s.

The memo is one of thousands of previously unreleased classified files that the bureau has made public in a new online resource called The Vault.

The files detail how the aliens took trophies from their victims in the form of body parts and in some cases they drained the animals entirely of their blood.

One investigator’s theory was that ‘these animals are picked up by aircraft, mutilated elsewhere and returned and dropped from aircraft.

‘Identical mutilations have been taking place all over the south west. whoever is responsible is well organised with boundless technology, financing and secrecy.’

When news of the cow abductions reached the White House in 1979, there was fear.

‘The materials sent to me indicate one of the strangest phenomenon in my memory,’ said the then US Attorney General Griffin Bell in a letter to senator Harrison Schmitt, according to The Sun newspaper.

Mr Schmitt represented New Mexico, where countless incidents were reported at a ranch in Dulce, a small town in the north of the State.

In one case an 11-month old bull was dropped close to someone’s house from an aircraft and its sex organs had been removed.

The police report about the incident said: ‘The bull sustained visible bruises around the brisket seeming to indicate that a strap was used to life and lower the animal from the aircraft… flesh underneath the hide was pinkish in colour.

‘A probably explanation for the pinkish blood is a control type of radiation used to kill the animal… both the liver and the heart were mushy. Both organs had the texture and consistency of peanut butter.’

FBI agents were dispatched to farms across the country upon reports to probe the abductions.

A report from the farm in Dulce during 1976 said that a suspect aircraft had landed and left three pod marks in a triangular shape.

A further report commissioned in 1979 added: ‘The Department of Justice advised that their criminal division has been aware of the phenomenon of animals being mutilated in a manner that would indicate such acts were performed by persons as part of a ritual or ceremony.’

The FBI added that other possible theories for the mutilation of the animals was as a result of biological warfare or ‘unidentified objects’ were to blame.

The documents about the cows is just one among thousands of files released by the FBI. …

via 8,000 cow abductions reported in southern U.S. sent White House into a panic | Mail Online.

I researched this ten years ago when it was news. I poked around in Dulce and got stopped by a bunch of heavily armed men at a roadblock on the way out of town. During another adventure, I examined and photographed a mutilated cow that was being guarded(?) for some reason by men with uniforms and guns near Mt. Shasta.

I do not think aliens are involved. The truth, I believe, is more frightening than aliens.  The answer to this mystery can be found by searching for the dog that does not bark.  What is an obvious thing you would expect to find associated with an investigation of this phenomena? You won’t find it. When you ask why, you will see the rabbit hole. My advice: Don’t go down it. There are things with teeth in there. Big things. Big teeth. This is not a game.

Strange Exits: Man commits suicide by crocodile

A distressed farm worker may have committed suicide by wading into a crocodile-infested river, police in South Africa said today.

Detectives believe labourer David Lubisi, 40, was eaten alive after he entered the Lepelle river following an argument with his girlfriend.

The father-of-three has not been seen for more than a week after apparently telling a colleague about his painful plan on April 7.

Sergeant Malesela Makgopa today said officers believed Mr Lubisi had died in a bizarre case of suicide.

He said: ‘The man has not been seen since the incident and his body has not been found.

‘Our investigations have revealed that at around 7pm on April 7 he told a co-worker he wanted to walk into the river, which he knew to be infested with crocodiles.

‘He was last seen heading towards the water and never turned up after that.

‘We believe he may have been having domestic problems with his girlfriend and that he wanted to commit suicide.

‘If that is true then it was a particularly horrible and painful way to die.’ Police said the local community had been shattered by the apparent tragedy, which happened near the town of Bushbuckbridge close to the famous Kruger National Park in South Africa’s eastern Mpumalanga province.

Before his disappearance Mr Lubisi had worked in the area for five years as a labourer at a game farm.

The country’s Sowetan newspaper today reported that the owner of a neighbouring property reported seeing a crocodile with a human leg protruding from its mouth four days after the incident. …

via David Lubisi, 40, commits suicide by crocodile ‘after fight with girlfriend’ | Mail Online.