But first, more Trump madness, bribery and assorted hijinks:- His diversity equity inclusion (DEI) attack is more and more alienating those misguided middle to low class voters who previously supported him.
- His cabinet met for the first time today.
Elon Musk was the first speaker. That says a lot.- EPA secretary Lee Zeldin plans to cut 65% of his agency.
- According to Trump, President Zelenskyy has caved-in to one Trump piece of blackmail. Ukraine has agreed to "share" their rare earth minerals with the USA. What this means will be disclosed on Friday when Zelenskyy meets with Trump in the White House. Ukraine has deposits of nearly half of the 50 minerals the U.S. Geological Survey lists as critical for America’s economic development, including titanium and lithium.
- Trump said that while he wants to expand his immigration program, nothing wrong with selected individuals entering the country, and predicted his $5 million Gold Card will sell like crazy.
- Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick indicated that these appliers will be thoroughly vetted to ensure they were wonderful, world-class global citizens.
- Trump likes Russian oligarchs.
- This Gold Card will provide a path to citizenship for $5 million.
- The administration mentioned that up to 10 million participants might apply. That number is ridiculous, for the total revenues would then be $50 trillion.
- However, later in that article, they are hoping for 1 million Gold Cards. Still a lot, for the payoff would be $5 trillion if accomplished.
Portugal has a Golden Visa program that costs around $565,000, while Spain has something linked to property ownership for that same amount, and Greece of $262,000. Both the UK and Cyprus had a similar program for a little more than $2 million, but both were terminated, one for security and other for financial scandal reasons.- Some (meaning Democrats) will challenge the legality and constitutionality of this program. Trump will prevail
- This is the best source I found for details.
- A group of traditional Republican lawmakers criticized the Trump administration for siding with Russia at the U.N. on resolutions about the war in Ukraine.
Republican town hall meetings are worrying Republicans. So much that they are now turning to tele-hall programs so the media cannot record the irate responses.- Also, the Trump administration announced that it would handpick the media outlets that get to ask the president questions at the White House.
- With a lot of pressure from Trump on a few recalcitrant Republicans, the U.S. House passed his budget last night, extending his 2017 tax cuts. One Republican, Tom Massie (R-Kentucky) voted with the Democrats for the 217-215 victory. For some reason, the Senate was not happy about the details, but will of course approve an adjusted version. Can Trump's big, beautiful bill meet the key deadline of March 14 when Congress again suffers through another government shut down vote?
A HUGE ASTEROID COULD STRIKE EARTH IN 7 YEARS
Well, fear no more, for NASA said their latest calculation of YR4 impacting Earth in 2032 fell to 0.004%, or one chance in 25,000. The European Space Agency also did a reassessment, and dropped their risk potential to one in 100,000. Interestingly enough, according to NASA, the odds of this asteroid hitting our moon is at 1.7%. There remain around 37,000 known large space rocks still in our general area.
While in a space mode, from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescope, their 2025 calendar:
The February issue of Scientific American has a few articles that might someday find themselves into my blog:
- A developing new look of how life works in a cell.
- We must do something about the space junk above.
- Could simple crushed rocks spread across farm fields reduce global warming?
- What we inherited from Neanderthal DNA.
- Redefining Alzheimer's.
- Anatomy of a Supernova.
The January issue of Scientific American was particularly newsworthy. It resulted in two postings so far, THE NEXT PANDEMIC IS COMING and the hunt for Planet Nine. So this will be the third.
- Physicists have built the first nuclear clock.
- Over millennia, we have measured the movement of our sun and moon to tell time.
- Then came the swing of the pendulum, rate of water flow and incense burns.
- Today, we are familiar with electric clocks using vibration of quartz crystals.
- Then came atomic clocks in 1949 with an accuracy now of one second every 40 billion years. Note that our universe is less than 14 billion years old.
An atomic clock measures time by detecting the vibrations of electrons within an atom, while a nuclear clock measures time by detecting the vibrations of particles within the atom's nucleus. To the right is a cesium atomic clock.
The February issue of SA has an article on atomic clocks, so I might go into detail on this to become obsolete clock, featuring a maser and cesium atoms.- But about the next generation, the nuclear clock, instead of entire atoms, all the movement is restricted to deep inside the nucleus.
- If an atom were the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would only be as big as a marble.
The first one was built in Boulder, Colorado by an international team, led by Jun Ye, here with grad student Chuankun Zhang, at the University of Colorado's Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics and National Institutes of Standards and Technology.
Uses a radioactive isotope thorium-229 pinged by a laser to run an ultracold strontium clock.- In time, the nuclear clock will be ten times more accurate than an atomic clock, and maybe up to a thousand times.
It will be portable, so can be used in GPS satellites.- Maybe most excitingly, this work could lead to revealing dark matter.
- But why do we need such accuracy? For long distance transmission and exploration of fundamental laws.
A few Trump-Musk cartoons.
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