The solar wind is a fairly fast 398 km/sec and there are 7 sunspots on the sun today. Solar activity ticked upward on May 24th with the eruption of an M1-class solar flare from sunspot AR2065. Sunspot AR2073 also poses a threat for M-class flares, so the weekend might not be as quiet as previously supposed. The May Camelopardalids were a bit of a dud. There were a few fireballs, but it was not as frequent as expected. Nothing hit the ground.
If you thought they don’t come much bigger than the Tyrannosaurus rex and the Argentinosaurusthen think again – scientists in Argentina have uncovered the bones of a creature believed to be the world’s biggest dinosaur.
According to the measurements of its gigantic thigh bones, the herbivore would have been 40m (130ft) long and 20m (65ft) tall, the BBC reported.
Palaeontologists think it is a new species of titanosaur – part of a diverse group of sauropod dinosaurs that were characterised by their long necks and tails and small heads – dating from the Cretaceous period.
The mega dino would have weighed in at 77 tonnes (the equivalent of approximately 14 elephants), making it seven tonnes heavier than the previous record holder Argentinosaurus.
A farm worker discovered the fossilised remains in desert land near La Flecha, which is around 250km (135 miles) west of Trelew, Patagonia.
Scientists from the Museum of PalaeontologyEgidioFerugliom excavated the fossils and found seven partial skeletons, amounting to around 150 bones.
The researchers, led by Dr Jose Luis Carballido and Dr Diego Pol, told the BBC: “Given the size of these bones, which surpass any of the previously known giant animals, the new dinosaur is the largest animal known that walked on Earth.
"Its length, from its head to the tip of its tail, was 40m.
“Standing with its neck up, it was about 20m high - equal to a seven-storey building.”
They added that the creature, which lived in the forests of Patagonia between 95 and 100 million years ago, was yet to be named.
“It will be named describing its magnificence and in honour to both the region and the farm owners who alerted us about the discovery,” the researchers said.
Drone Wars Update
In 13 short years, killer drones have gone from being exotic military technology featured primarily in the pages of specialized aviation magazines to a phenomenon of popular culture, splashed across daily newspapers and fictionalized in film and television, including the new season of “24.”
What has not changed all that much — at least superficially — is the basic aircraft that most people associate with drone warfare: the armed Predator.
The Predator, with its distinctive bubble near the nose and sensor ball underneath, is the iconic image of drone warfare, an aircraft that grew out of 1980s work supported by the Pentagon’s future-thinking Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Originally developed to perform surveillance, the CIA added Hellfire missiles and began using the Predator to hunt down members of the Taliban and al Qaeda after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Though the CIA and Air Force now fly an updated version of the Predator — named Reaper — the drone is still relatively easy to detect, and easy to shoot down, at least for a country with a modern military.
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A MQ-9 Reaper during a 2009 combat mission over southern Afghanistan.Photo: AP
In fact, as terrifying as drones sound, they actually aren’t all that sophisticated compared to other weapons in the US arsenal. The original Predator plodded along at a pokey 84 miles an hour.
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A ShadowHawk drone with the Montgomery County, Texas, SWAT team. Civilian cousins of the drone are being sought by police departments, border patrols, power companies, and news organizations who want a bird’s-eye view.Photo: AP
Its missiles, though lethal, are decades-old technology developed to destroy tanks, not terrorists. And despite concerns about autonomous killing machines, the Predator must be operated by a pilot (albeit remotely). The Predator has proved effective, but it is not exactly the sci-fi miracle that many might imagine.
Under development, however, is a new generation of drones that will be able to penetrate the air defenses of even sophisticated nations, spotting nuclear facilities, and tracking down — and possibly killing — terrorist leaders, silently from high altitudes. These drones will be fast, stealthy and survivable, designed to sneak in and out of a country without ever being spotted.
In fact, the Predator may someday be to drone warfare what the V-2 was to long-range ballistic missiles: a crude, but important, first step in a new era of warfare.
The Past
1980 — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launches “Teal Rain,” a top-secret study on high altitude, long endurance unmanned aircraft.
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An SR-71A Blackbird in flightPhoto: Getty Images
1984 — DARPA contracts with Abe Karem to design a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) called “Amber.”
1990 — General Atomics buys Abe Karem’s company, Leading Systems. It sells Karem’sUAV, now called “Gnat,” to the CIA. In 1994, General Atomics is given contract to develop the Predator, a successor to the Gnat.
1990s — Pentagon secretly funds development of an unmanned successor to the SR-71 Blackbird (a stealth plane introduced in 1964 and famous in popular culture; it’s even used by the “X-Men”). Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed compete.
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The Dark Star at the National Museum of the United States Air Force.Photo: US Air Force
1998 — Retirement of SR-71 Blackbird. The Pentagon pursues two new spy drones: the Global Hawk, a high-altitude surveillance drone, and the RQ-3 DarkStar, a stealthy spy drone, which crashes and is cancelled.
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A Global Hawk at Edwards Air Force Base in California in 2001.Photo: AP
2001 — October 7: First armed Predator strike in Afghanistan. The CIA attempted to kill Taliban leader Mullah Omar.
2007 — General Atomics delivers the Reaper, an upgraded version of the Predator, to the Air Force. The Reaper can fly higher and faster than the Predator, and carries a variety of weapons.
2009 — A photographer in Kandahar, Afghanistan, captured an image of the stealth RQ-170 drone, which aviation watchers called the “Beast of Kandahar.” Its mission: slip past air defense radar into countries like Pakistan and Iran. US officials soon leaked that RQ-170 had been used to keep tabs on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad in 2011. One RQ-170’s life was cut short, however, when it was captured by Iran later that year, possibly after Iran intercepted the signal used to control it. Last week, Iran claimed it had cloned the drone. It’s unclear how many RQ-170s exist.
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Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seated left, listens during an aerospace exhibition in Tehran Sunday. The exhibition revealed an advanced CIA spy drone, captured in 2011, and its Iranian-made copy, pictured in back.Photo: AP
The Future
After the retirement of the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, the military had an obvious gap in its arsenal.
In 2007, satellite pictures emerged showing new construction at Area 51, the Pentagon’s top-secret testing area in the Nevada desert. Veteran watchers of “black,” or secret, aircraft, immediately suspected that the Pentagon was preparing to test a new secret aircraft, and the most likely candidate was a stealth drone.
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Aviation Week produced this artist’s concept of the RQ-180, a stealth drone that spies from high altitudes.Photo: Aviation Week
Now, two unmanned spy drones are under development. One that appears almost ready for combat is the RQ-180, a stealthy spy drone built by Northrop Grumman. Though the Pentagon refuses to confirm its existence, Aviation Week & Space Technology ran this artist’s concept earlier this year and revealed a little about its rumored design.
The RQ-180 is designed to fly very high, for a very long time (perhaps as long as 24 hours). According to Aviation Week, it has a 130-foot wing span and a “cranked kite” stealthy design that would allow it to slip past enemy radar. Chances are it will only be used for surveillance, not attack, though it could carry out an electronic attack.
Another, recently revealed project is a high-altitude drone being developed by Lockheed Martin that can travel up to six times of the speed of sound. The drone would be both a spy and strike aircraft, according to Lockheed. But the SR-72, as Lockheed is calling the twin-engine aircraft, wouldn’t be ready to fly until 2030.
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Lockheed’s SR-72 will fly at six times the speed of sound, and could strike targets.
What about a replacement for a Predator? The original Predator was essentially a surveillance aircraft that was turned into an armed drone, so any future replacement aircraft would likely look very different. The Pentagon has openly funded work on unmanned combat aircraft, including Northrop Grumman’s X-47, a diamond-shaped drone that can take off and land from aircraft carriers. But aerospace watchers have long presumed that these programs are hiding even more secretive work.
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The X-47, a combat drone from Northrop Grumman.Photo: Zumapress.com
Part of the difficulty of deciphering the world of drones is that the Pentagon for over three decades has run a series of overlapping projects, often using unclassified programs as “covers” for more secret unmanned aircraft work.
Aviation Week, for example, says the RQ-180 was part of a secret, three-way contest that involved competing drones from Lockheed and Boeing. What happened to those other unmanned aircraft is unclear. Figuring out which are “real” drone project meant for deployment, and which are covers for secret drones, is a shell game.
Small & ubiquitous
Even the stealthy killer drones known or suspected to be under development fall short of some of the unmanned aircraft depicted in science fiction or thriller novels, which often feature swarms of autonomous killing machines. It is true that the Pentagon has been funding work to make drones operate with greater autonomy — for example, one of DARPA’s latest proposals calls on researchers to design ways to have drones collaborate with each other, such as having drones share information about a target.
But drones that can operate completely without the need for a pilot sitting in an air-conditioned trailer on a base in Nevada are still several years away, at least, and the Pentagon has long insisted that drones won’t be allowed to use weapons without a “man in the loop.”
Yet another longtime goal of military work is to create tiny drones, possibly disguised as birds or even insects (the CIA did develop a robotic dragonfly, though it never proved useful).
In terror expert Richard Clarke’s new novel, “Sting of the Drone,” the CIA operates stealthy mini-drones that are capable of assassinating someone inside a bar, and there is certainly evidence such drones are of interest. A four-minute animated video created by the Air Force Research Laboratory showed up on the Web in 2009, illustrating the lab’s work on micro aerial vehicles. The video featured a kamikaze insect-sized drone loaded with high explosives.
But drones of that level of sophistication — able to perch on telephone wires or hunt down terrorists inside a building — still belong to the future.
The real drone revolution may come not through sophistication of drones, but the proliferation of drones. So far, unmanned aircraft have largely been the weapons of technologically advanced nations, but that is changing as drone technology becomes cheaper and more accessible.
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A model of an insect size US Air Force drone.Photo: Reuters
Just as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, fast became the No. 1 killer of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, experts are now warning that crude drones — in some cases essentially sophisticated model airplanes — could be the real threat in the years to come.
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Dr. Gregory Parker, Micro Air Vehicle team leader, holds another small winged drone.Photo: Reuters
Indeed, Hezbollah has already bragged of sending spy drones into Israeli territory, and Israeli leaders have warned of the possible drone threat that Hamas could pose from Gaza.
And a recent report by the Rand Corporation warned that, in the future, terrorist groups might be able to buy small, armed drones: “Smaller systems could become the next IEDs: low-cost, low-tech weapons that are only of limited lethality individually but attrite significant numbers of US or allied personnel when used in large numbers over time.”
The US military holds an annual exercise called Black Dart, which looks at ways to counter hostile drones, particularly small drones. Among the possible defenses are lasers to shoot down drones or systems that can jam the radio signals used to control drones. But this sort of counter-drone technology is scarce today.
Environmental Protectionist Agency
he EPA will launch the most dramatic anti-pollution regulation in a generation early next month, a sweeping crackdown on carbon that offers President Barack Obama his last real shot at a legacy on climate change — while causing significant political peril for red-state Democrats.
The move could produce a dramatic makeover of the power industry, shifting it away from coal-burning plants toward natural gas, solar and wind. While this is the big move environmentalists have been yearning for, it also has major political implications in November for a president already under fire for what the GOP is branding a job-killing “War on Coal,” and promises to be an election issue in energy-producing states such as West Virginia, Kentucky and Louisiana.
The EPA’s proposed rule is aimed at scaling back carbon emissions from existing power plants, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gases. It’s scheduled for a public rollout June 2, after months of efforts by the administration to publicize the mounting scientific evidence that rising seas, melting glaciers and worsening storms pose a danger to human society.
“This rule is the most significant climate action this administration will take,” said Kyle Aarons at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, one of a host of groups awaiting the rule’s release. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) has urged the EPA to “go ahead boldly” with the rule, saying the agency must step in where Congress has refused to act.
But for coal country, the rule is yet another indignity for an industry already facing a wave of power plant shutdowns amid hostile market forces and a series of separate EPA air regulations. Coal-state Democrats like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin have joined the criticism, echoing industry warnings that the fossil fuel was crucial to keeping the lights on in much of the U.S. during this past brutal winter.
“You have another polar vortex next year, how many people will lose their lives?” Manchin asked at a POLITICO energy policy forum Tuesday.
Other red-state Democrats like Alison Lundergan Grimes, who is challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky’s Senate race, have disavowed Obama’s EPA proposals — she denounced an earlier agency power plant rule as an “out-of-touch Washington regulation.” West Virginia Rep. Nick Rahall, one of the most vulnerable Democrats in November, complained last year that “this callous, ideologically driven agency continues to be numb to the economic pain that their reckless regulations cause.” And Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), a top Republican target this year, has voted with Republicans to hobble the agency’s rules.
But supporters say that whatever the political dynamics, the need for acting on climate change is dire.
Next month’s debut comes after a series of scientific reports warning about the rising seas, worsening storms and other havoc that global warming will bring to people around the world, including effects that have already started to appear in the U.S. The White House has spent months in a steady effort to call attention to those findings, as part of an outreach that included having Obama give one-on-one interviews with television meteorologists this month.
“This is a problem that is affecting Americans right now, whether it means increased flooding, greater vulnerability to drought, more severe wildfires,” Obama told one of the forecasters. “And people’s lives are at risk.”
‘We can’t sit by silently’
It’s not just the coal industry that’s losing sleep over the rule. Manufacturers and industries like oil refining have been eyeing the power plant regulations as the starting gun for a process that will eventually lead to greenhouse gas limits for a wide variety of businesses.
“These regulations could reduce the diversity of our energy supply, increase electricity and compliance costs for American businesses and shrink our competitiveness,” said Ross Eisenberg, vice president for energy and resources policy at the National Association of Manufacturers. “We can’t sit by silently while that happens.”
Despite opponents’ warnings that the rule will be a death sentence for coal-fired power, EPA leaders have been adamant that they’ll offer states ample “flexibility” to devise their own ways to cut carbon. Some states may join regional cap-and-trade networks, similar to an existing Northeastern compact that has co-existed with coal plants for years. Others could push for investments in wind and solar power, or in energy efficiency programs that help homeowners and businesses reduce their demand for electricity.