Another ISS overflight tonight

Seven minute overflight starts at 5:34 PM
By Will Collette

The International Space Station (ISS) will be flying over Charlestown tonight in a pass that will last seven minutes and will go practically from one horizon to the other.

We've had a number of ISS overflights in recent weeks, but just about all on cloudy or overcast nights. But tonight, viewing conditions are ideal, though cold.

Starting at 5:34 PM, the ISS will suddenly appear in the sky at 10 degrees above the horizon in the west-northwest. It will rise to 60 degrees at maximum height with a total running time of seven minutes which is just about the maximum time the ISS is ever visible overhead.

Time: Sat Feb 03 5:34 PM, Visible: 7 min, Max Height: 60°, Appears: 10° above WNW, Disappears: 10° above SE 

It will end its journey by disappearing at 10 degrees above the horizon in the southeast. I always find it to be beautifully serene as it makes its silent pass.

Given the astrophysics, seven minutes is pretty much the longest possible time for a pass over Charlestown.

The weather forecast for today is clear all day and night. Ideal viewing weather.

Here are the overflight details from NASA:

Time: Sat Feb 03 5:34 PM, Visible: 7 min, Max Height: 60°, Appears: 10° above WNW, Disappears: 10° above SE 

MAGA menace: Canada

Some Republicans are saying we need to wall off the 5,500 mile Canadian border, too. 

By Jim Hightower 

They must be stopped!

In the 1980s, many Texans were alarmed that hordes of immigrants were fleeing Rust Belt states and pouring across the Red River to take our jobs. So my friend Steve Fromholz recommended a big beautiful wall across our northern border to keep them out.

Fromholz, a popular singer-songwriter and renowned political sprite, was ahead of his time in the political sport of wall building.

Instead of steel barriers and miles of nasty razor wire, Steve proposed preventing Yankee refugees from entering the Lone Star State by planting a 10-foot high, 10-foot thick wall of jalapeño peppers along the length of the Red River. Eat your way through and you’d be accepted as a naturalized Texan.

I thought of Steve’s impishness when I read that Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and other Republicans were concocting a whole new xenophobic bugaboo to goose up their anti-immigrant demagoguery.

Let's Control All Drug Prices

It’s past time to regulate profiteering.

SONALI KOLHATKAR

Major pharmaceutical companies in the United States are battling with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders over an issue that is at the heart of whether we value human wellbeing over corporate profits. As chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), Sanders has vowed to force CEOs of pharmaceutical companies to publicly answer for why their drug prices are so much higher than in other nations. 

He plans to bring a committee vote to subpoena them. The subpoenas are necessary because—brazenly—the CEOs of Johnson & Johnson and Merck have simply refused to testify to the HELP committee. What are they afraid of?

In a defensive-sounding letter to Sanders, an attorney for Johnson & Johnson accused the Senator of using committee hearings to “punish the companies who have chosen to engage in constitutionally protected litigation.” 

The letter does not specify the litigation in question—perhaps because it would sound so ridiculous and would reveal the company’s real agenda. Last July, the company, along with Merck and Bristol Myers Squibb sued the Biden administration for allowing the Medicare program to regulate prescription drug prices.

It appears that Johnson & Johnson and Merck are indeed afraid of being questioned by lawmakers about drug-profiteering in the U.S.

One pharmaceutical expert, Ameet Sarpatwari of Harvard Medical School explained to the New York Times that, “The U.S. market is the bank for pharmaceutical companies… There’s a keen sense that the best place to try to extract profits is the U.S. because of its existing system and its dysfunction.” Another expert, Michelle Mello, a professor of law and health policy at Stanford university, told the Times, “Drugs are so expensive in the U.S. because we let them be.”

In other words, it’s been a free-for-all for pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. In 2003, then-President George W. Bush signed a Medicare reform bill into law, promising help for seniors struggling to pay for medications, but that law stripped the federal government of its power to negotiate drug prices for Medicare’s participants. It was a typically Republican, Orwellian move: promise help to ordinary people and deliver the exact opposite.

Cost of his spew

By Bill Bramhall

Job opening: Help ecoRI raise money

Need for speed

How hummingbirds switch mental gears in flight

Hummingbirds use two distinct sensory strategies to control their flight, depending on whether they’re hovering or in forward motion, according to new research by University of British Columbia (UBC) zoologists.

“When in forward fight, hummingbirds rely on what we call an ‘internal forward model’—almost an ingrained, intuitive autopilot—to gauge speed,” says Dr. Vikram B. Baliga, lead author of a new study on hummingbird locomotion published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “There’s just too much information coming in to rely directly on every visual cue from your surroundings.”

“But when hovering or dealing with cues that might require a change in altitude, we found they rely much more on real-time, direct visual feedback from their environment.”

"While the birds did change velocity or stop altogether depending on the patterns, there wasn’t a neat correlation.”

The findings not only provide insights on how the tiny, agile birds perceive the world during transitions in flight, but could inform the programming of onboard navigation for next generation autonomous flying and hovering vehicles.

No, not another Led Zeppelin story

Heavy metal exposure linked to problems for middle-aged women

SHANNON KELLEHER

Women with higher exposure to heavy metals may have fewer eggs in their ovaries as they near menopause compared to others the same age, a condition linked to hot flashes, weak bones, heart disease, and other health problems, according to a new study in more than 500 middle-aged women.

Exposures to cadmium, arsenic, and mercury, in particular, were linked to lower levels of a hormone that strongly correlates with the number of eggs left in a woman’s ovaries, according to the study, which was published Jan. 25 in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

How Patients and Doctors Are Navigating the Fallout of the Massive Recall of Philips Breathing Machines

Rock and a hard place for sleep apnea sufferers

By Liz Moughon for ProPublica

Philips Respironics received thousands of complaints about a dangerous defect in its breathing machines but kept them secret for years as stock prices soared. The devices, including the popular DreamStation for sleep apnea, went to children, the elderly and veterans before the global giant announced a massive recall.

In 2021, Philips Respironics recalled its DreamStation breathing machines, along with other sleep apnea devices and ventilators, leaving millions of customers worldwide waiting for replacements. Foam inside the machines could crumble in heat and humidity, sending potentially carcinogenic materials into the lungs of patients.

I spent eight months making a film about this, following sleep apnea patients through airports to doctor appointments. I recorded their home lives, their bedtime routines. I tried to capture the claustrophobic details of the mask that fits tightly over the nose and mouth.

Pay to play

Hundreds of Millions of Dollars for Mitigation Can Ease Offshore Wind Opponents’ Pain

By Mary Lhowe / ecoRI News contributor

Opponents of offshore wind offer different reasons for their position: fear of impacts on the marine ecology; fear of loss of income for fishers; fear of loss of tourism dollars and private property values due to the sight of the turbines on the horizon.

The cloudy threat of wind projects off the New England coast comes with a golden — not silver — lining. That gold would arrive in the form of millions of dollars contractually promised to communities by developers in the form of mitigations, sometimes through a mechanism called host community or good neighbor agreements.

Even the towns and historic property owners who dread wind farms but yearn for funds to do worthy projects could be excused for reacting to mitigation deals in similar fashion to the character Gaz in the movie “The Full Monty.” Watching men audition for a new amateur dance troupe, Gaz observes the impressive talents of one particular auditioner, and mutters, “Gentlemen, the lunchbox has landed.”

A brief tally of the “lunchbox” of mitigations — touching on communities and institutions from Long Island, N.Y., to Cape Cod to Nantucket to Portsmouth, R.I. — shows a total of about $282 million in negotiated mitigation payments from 2017 to this month. (see below for details).

A few notable opponents of offshore wind are not looking for money. Just the past year, Rhode Island entities have filed at least three civil lawsuits against the state and federal governments over the wind farms, objecting to what they call rushed, biased, and improper permitting processes. A fourth lawsuit, with a long list of plaintiffs that includes a national wind opposition group, was filed Jan. 19.

Green Oceans, a Little Compton-based citizens group, filed a civil suit in the Rhode Island courts in June 2023 against the Coastal Resources Management Council, claiming the permitting process was flawed and asking for a permission granted by CRMC to be rescinded. 

Similarly, the Preservation Society of Newport County and the Southeast Lighthouse Foundation on Block Island sued the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) in November, claiming the entire permitting process for the South Fork and Revolution Wind projects was done wrongly and should be re-done.

It's all good

For more cartoons by Tom Tomorrow, CLICK HERE

Our Westerly neighbor has it right

 

Lots of "snags" in Charlestown

Study offers rare long-term analysis of techniques for creating standing dead trees for wildlife habitat

Steve Lundeberg

Joe Kosack  CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Ecologists have long known that standing dead trees, commonly referred to as snags, are an important habitat element for forest dwellers and act as a driver of biodiversity.

They’re so important that in some managed forests, snag creation is part of the conservation tool kit – i.e., crews sometimes convert a percentage of live trees into dead ones through techniques ranging from sawing off their tops to wounding their trunks to injecting them with disease-causing fungi.

Until now, however, key questions had remained unanswered: How well do any of those techniques actually work over the long term? And which ones are cost-effective for land managers seeking to enhance habitat?

Our sense of taste helps pace our eating

Understanding how may lead to new avenues for weight loss

Zachary Knight, University of California, San Francisco

A team of scientists uncovers a logic the brainstem uses
to control how fast and how much we eat. 
Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images

As a scientist who investigates hunger and weight control, I’m interested in the way our brains let us know we’ve had enough.

As we begin to feel full, we slow down how quickly we eat. For decades, scientists have thought that this change in pace was driven solely by signals from the stomach and intestines to the brain. 

But a new study from my lab at UC San Francisco shows that, in fact, there is another process at work, and it begins as soon as we taste our food.

This process has remained unknown until now because we haven’t been able to observe the relevant brain activity in an animal while it was eating. The neurons involved are deep in the brainstem. A graduate student in my lab, Truong Ly, developed new techniques that allowed us to see the activity of these neurons for the first time, in mice.

We discovered that there are two parallel pathways that control our eating – one that restrains how fast you eat and another that limits how much. The taste of food activates the first pathway. This may seem counterintuitive: We usually want to eat more of food that tastes good. But although we may not be consciously aware of it, the sensation of taste also paces our eating.

FTC Orders Maker of TurboTax to Cease “Deceptive” Advertising

"Free, free, free?" No, no, no

by Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel for ProPublica

ProPublica has long detailed how Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, and other companies have worked against making tax preparation easier and less costly.

The Federal Trade Commission has ordered the maker of TurboTax to stop what it called years of widespread deceptive advertising for “free” tax-filing software.

The order, released Monday, was accompanied by a 93-page opinion that harshly criticized Intuit, the Silicon Valley company behind TurboTax. Intuit’s “deceptive ad campaign has been sufficiently broad, enduring, and willful to support the need for a cease-and-desist order,” the commission’s opinion stated.

The order caps off a process that started four years ago when the FTC launched an investigation in response to a series of ProPublica stories documenting Intuit’s ad tactics. 

ProPublica revealed how millions of Americans were lured into paid tax preparation products even though they were eligible to file for free through a government-sponsored program. 

Progressive lawmakers lay out 2024 agenda: Tax the rich. Do right for everyone else.

Focus on child care, early education, roads and bridges, affordable housing and public transportation

By Nancy Lavin, Rhode Island Current

Rep. Megan Cotter, a South County Democrat, outlines of the legislative priorities of progressive lawmakers under the Working Families Agenda at a State House event on Jan. 30, 2024. (Nancy Lavin/Rhode Island Current)

The perennial push to raise taxes on Rhode Island’s richest residents has returned to the State House this year – but with a tuneup.

Rather than a new tax bracket for the top 1% of earners, progressive lawmakers are instead calling for a proposal that would raise taxes on those with more than $1 million in annual income – about 2,134 tax filers in Rhode Island, compared with 5,000 people who would see their income taxes rise if the top 1% of earners were subjected to a higher tax rate, as has been proposed in years past.

Speaking alongside two dozen progressive lawmakers about their “Working Families Agenda” at a State House event Tuesday, Rep. Karen Alzate, a Pawtucket Democrat, and bill sponsor, explained how the estimated $126 million in revenue from a 3% income surtax on millionaires will fund other priorities.

“Remember when I said, ‘How are we going to pay for all of this’” Alzate said. “This money would be appropriated for child care, early education, roads and bridges — remember that — and most importantly, public transportation which is crucial for districts like mine.”

Not to be forgotten from the list that is getting top billing by progressive lawmakers: extending paid family leave, universal free meals for public school students, stronger protections for tenants and reforming the protections granted to police officers facing misconduct charges.