Wednesday Wallydrag Wardmote

 
It looks like some Creationists are manipulating search results to ensure websites pushing religion are appearing in response to queries about science. 

 Ask Google "What happened to the dinosaurs?" and you'll see links to Creationist sites right at the top. 

(And, right now, several hits to sites taking note of it.) 

Google has a feedback link waiting for you to use it in either direction...just saying...

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If your like me this means nothing much, almost pointless. But I do understand that there are people to whom this is great stuff.

At the center of almost every galaxy is a supermassive black hole (SMBH); at the center of almost every cluster is a supermassive galaxy with some of the largest SMBHs in the Universe.

 And every once in a while, a galactocentric black hole will become active, emitting tremendous amounts of radiation out into the Universe as it devours matter.

 This radiation can cut across the spectrum, from the X-ray down to the radio.

 At the heart of MS 0735.6+7421, there's a >10^10 solar mass black hole that appears to have been active for hundreds of millions of years, something unheard of!

Whoopy Do.


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Profits over public health as usual... 

EU Drops Plans For Safer Pesticides After Pressure From US

 The European Union recently published plans to ban 31 pesticides containing chemicals linked to testicular cancer and male infertility.

 Those potential regulations have now been dropped after a U.S. business delegation said they would adversely affect trade negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. 

 "Just weeks before the regulations were dropped there had been a barrage of lobbying from big European firms such as Dupont, Bayer and BASF over EDCs.

 The chemical industry association Cefic warned that the endocrines issue 'could become an issue that impairs the forthcoming EU-US trade negotiations.'"

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This is change...

The U.S. Air Force has given private rocket company SpaceX clearance to launch military satellites into orbit. This disrupts the lock that Boeing and Lockheed Martin have had on military launches for almost a decade.

 SpaceX will get its first opportunity to bid for such launches in June, when the Air Force posts a contract to launch GPS satellites.

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We all knew this was going to happen sooner or later...
A video that recently went viral shows a demonstration of a Volvo XC60's self-parking feature.

 It reverses itself, waits, and then confidently drives into a group of people at a non-negligible speed.

 (Two were hit, and while both were bruised, they were otherwise OK.) The situation was presumed to have resulted from a malfunction with the car — but the car might not have had the ability to recognize a human at all.

 A Volvo representative said the car was not equipped with the "Pedestrian detection" feature. That feature is sold as a separate package.

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The Trolls Are Still At It...

The Supreme Court ruled today (PDF) that Cisco Systems can't skip out of a patent suit against them from patent troll Commil USA. 

 The case reached the Supreme Court because Cisco argued it had a "good faith belief" that the patent they were infringing was invalid. 

The justices voted 6-2 that such a belief didn't matter if they were indeed infringing. The Supreme Court's opinion is that a company must know of the patent it's infringing, and that their product infringes upon the patent — which, at least, is more than what Commil was pushing.

The case isn't completely over — a $63.7 million verdict in Commil's favor was overturned by an Appeals Court, and now the Supreme Court has sent it back down for re-evaluation after it clarified the rules of infringement. 

The Appeals Court could still overturn the judgment for some other reason. The good news is that the Supreme Court dedicated a page in their opinion to telling lower courts how to sanction patent trolls and keep them from clogging the courts with ridiculous claims.

 "[I]t is still necessary and proper to stress that district courts have the authority and responsibility to ensure frivolous cases are dissuaded."