Which means that (for instance) our compulsary helmet legislation is all three.

It breaks the law because it infringes on your liberty.
It could be a causal factor in an accident (and therefore cause harm to others) for any of several reasons. (inability to properly shoulder-check, heat/sweat distraction, reduced field of view, etc.)
It is therefore unethical too.

how do you decide what's criminal/wrong/unethical?

I was shocked when I started reading up on this about how cold the moon can get.

Ok still have issues with this.

Firstly, why would NASA need to make assumptions when they had 6 missions there and their rover made a round trip of some 35 miles, I think? You could only make an assumption IF you have never been there to test it. You could say that there was no water where they were but not conclusively say there was no water at all on the moon but now they are saying that water is in abundance.

Secondly, they looked for water in a crater, on the permanent shady part. Ok is this not the site of a catastrophic event? Would this site have not been exposed to direct sun previous to this impact? So either the water was there before the crater formed, in which case water would/should be where the moon landings were or it condensed there in which case it should be detectable in what little atmosphere the moon has. If you are claiming that water evaporated from where the landings were then it should have evaporated from the crater site before the crater happened…did water turn up after the crater formed? How?

Without looking too much into the figures, water boils at 212 degrees at sea level...with little to almost no atmosphere (negligable) on the moon, even on the shady bit, wouldn't water have evaporated away anyway. I am happy to be corrected on this point though.

(To many folks, the phrase “dark side of the moon” suggests there’s a place you could go to on the moon which is perpetually cloaked in darkness. This is incorrect! Sunlight is always falling on some part of the moon.)

SPLASH! NASA MOON CRASH STRUCK LOTS OF WATER

By ALICIA CHANG (AP) – 29 minutes ago

LOS ANGELES — Suddenly, the moon looks exciting again. It has lots of water, scientists said Friday — a thrilling discovery that sent a ripple of hope for a future astronaut outpost in a place that has always seemed barren and inhospitable.

Experts have long suspected there was water on the moon. Confirmation came from data churned up by two NASA spacecraft that intentionally slammed into a lunar crater last month.

"Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit. We found a significant amount," said Anthony Colaprete, lead scientist for the mission, holding up a white water bucket for emphasis.

The lunar crash kicked up at least 25 gallons and that's only what scientists could see from the plumes of the impact, Colaprete said.

Some space policy experts say that makes the moon attractive for exploration again. Having an abundance of water would make it easier to set up a base camp for astronauts, supplying drinking water and a key ingredient for rocket fuel.

"Having definitive evidence that there is substantial water is a significant step forward in making the moon an interesting place to go," said George Washington University space policy scholar John Logsdon.

Even so, members of the blue-ribbon panel reviewing NASA's future plans said it doesn't change their conclusion that the program needs more money to get beyond near-Earth orbit. The panel wants NASA to look at other potential destinations like asteroids and Mars.

"This new and terrific result reassures us about lunar resources, but ... the challenges currently facing the human spaceflight program remain," Chris Chyba, a Princeton astrophysicist who is on the panel, said in an e-mail.

President George W. Bush had proposed a more than $100 billion plan to return astronauts to the moon, then go on to Mars; a test flight of an early version of a new rocket was a success last month. President Barack Obama appointed the special panel to look at the entire moon exploration program. The decision is now up to the White House, and NASA's lunar plans are somewhat on hold until then.

As for unmanned exploration, previous missions had detected the presence of hydrogen in lunar craters near the moon's poles, possible evidence of ice. In September, scientists reported finding tiny amounts of water in the lunar soil all over the moon's surface.

But it was NASA's Oct. 9 mission involving the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, LCROSS, that provided the stunning confirmation announced Friday — water, in the forms of ice and vapor.

"Rather than a dead and unchanging world, it could in fact be a very dynamic and interesting one," said Greg Delory of the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the mission, led by NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

The LCROSS spacecraft only hit one spot on the moon and it's unclear how much water there is across the entire moon.

The October mission involved two strikes into a permanently shadowed crater near the south pole. First, an empty rocket hull slammed into the Cabeus crater. Then, a trailing spacecraft recorded the drama live before it also crashed into the same spot four minutes later.

Though scientists were overjoyed with the plethora of data beamed back to Earth, the mission was a public relations dud. Space enthusiasts who stayed up all night to watch the spectacle did not see the promised giant plume of debris.

NASA scientists had predicted the twin impacts would spew six miles of dust into the sunlight. Instead, images revealed only a mile-high plume, and it was not visible to many amateur astronomers peering through telescopes.

Scientists spent a month analyzing data from the spacecraft's spectrometers, instruments that can detect strong signals of water molecules in the plume.

"We've had hints that there is water. This was almost like tasting it," said Peter Schultz, professor of geological sciences at Brown University and a co-investigator on the LCROSS mission.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who in 1969 made his historic Apollo 11 moonwalk with Neil Armstrong, was pleased to hear the latest discovery, but still believes the U.S. should focus on colonizing Mars.

"People will overreact to this news and say, `Let's have a water rush to the moon,'" Aldrin said. "It doesn't justify that."

Mission scientists said it would take more time to tease out what else was kicked up in the moon dust.

AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

The powers that be were just trying to be politically correct............. One more instance where political correctness raised its ugly head.

Seeing how you don't really have to do anything anymore to get a Nobel prize.......................

Hmm... Lets see now, water vapor makes clouds, which make rain.......... hmmm

Ancient Muse.... that's blasphemy... You're a Canadian...lol

"I think the evidence for a link between reconstructions of past climate change and solar activity is too strong to ignore," explains Jasper Kirkby, "There are a lot of observations showing that variations of the sun seem to be affecting the climate, but we don’t yet know what the mechanism for this is."

Edit: And I HATE snow!!!!

But what worries me about these dubious claims that somehow we are NOT responsible for climate change, is that we will simply carry on doing what we're doing and reach a point, global warming or no global warming, in which Life on this planet will become utterly unbearable due to our own selfish actions.

Actually muse, we're coming out of minimum and there's a nice sunspot group. Check it out.

sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov

Right now, no one is really sure what's going to happen. This minima is certainly unprecedented.

I come home.
I walk through the front door..
I say, "lights on"....the lights downstairs turn on.
I say, "when's dinner ready?"....a calming voice answers; "10 minutes Steven, your bath is running/how was your day my friend?".
I walk through to the living room. I snap my fingers 4 times and my fourth favourite film begins to play on my holographic television.
I say, "17 degrees celsius please, home".. (the temperature adjusts).

If science carries on moulding our lives, what do you imagine the future to hold?
What do you think the future will look like?

Any thoughts?

Hey muse

I know that the research is proceeding on both fronts, and am curious which one has made more progress.....................

How can that be considered rhetorical, if I am asking for an update from a person who seems to have that information?

A little paranoid?

Paul K

Do you have any stats as to how much progress has been made using adult stem cells as in this case vs. stem cells obtained from a fetus?

Yes, yes, this is where some of you complain about how you think Joseph Smith's evidence can't be compared to Isaac Newton's evidence because it doesn't fall in line with your ideas of what "evidence" should be. And that's fine, that's because you're not Joseph Smith nor are you (presumably) mormon. And ultimately that's the trouble you'll always have, that you think you're the judge of what's "good" evidence or "bad" evidence.

ARTIC HEAT WAVE 'UNIQUE' IN HISTORY: Study
Lake sediment suggests summer temperatures have only been this warm once before in last 200,000 years


By Martin Mittelstaedt
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
Published on Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2009 12:00AM EDT


The Canadian Arctic is experiencing a heat wave that has seldom been matched in the past 200,000 years, says a new scientific paper based on the study of sediment found at the bottom of a remote lake on Baffin Island.

Scientists looking at the remains of microscopic plants and insects preserved in the lake's crusty bottom say a comparison of flora and fauna found in the remote past and in recent decades suggest temperatures similar to those occurring now have been exceedingly rare.

Over the 200,000 years, the sediment revealed a natural ebbing and rising of various species that either favoured warmer or colder climate conditions.

But recently, there have been unprecedented increases of some algae types dependent on warmer weather that were almost never found during the preindustrial era.

"Our findings show that the last several decades have been the most ecologically unique in 200,000 years," said Neil Michelutti, a research scientist at Queen's University in Kingston and one of the members of the team that conducted the study, which is appearing this week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to the study, the only time that summer temperatures were similar to current readings was just after the last ice age ended about 8,000 years ago, and during a warm period before the last glaciation.

The research also extends far back into time reconstructions of previous climate conditions in the Arctic.

Up until now, past climates have been inferred from Greenland's ice cores and the 120,000 years of records they provide. But the data derived from the lake sediment predate the creation of Greenland's massive ice sheets by 800 centuries, allowing scientists to peer that much further back.

The new finding is adding to the flurry of research suggesting dramatic and far-reaching changes are under way in the Arctic, considered the part of the world most at risk from climate change.

Last week, a team of British researchers said the Arctic Ocean is undergoing a swift melting that they predicted will leave it largely free of summertime ice in as little as 20 years. Earlier this year, a report suggested global warming in the decades ahead would allow tree growth as far north as Baffin Island.

In the new research, scientists conducted a painstaking reconstruction of life at the site by looking at the fossilized remains of tiny algae and insects preserved in the sediment at the water body, located in an isolated part of the east coast of Baffin Island facing Greenland.

The algae are microscopic, with hundreds fitting onto the head of a pin, and the insects primarily midges, small two-winged gnats.

While the composition of the insect and plant communities varied over time, depending on the climate, recently the species have switched to those that thrive in ice-free conditions to a degree unlike anything previously seen.

"The lake has followed a trajectory through the 20th century toward increasingly exceptional environmental conditions with no natural analogues in the past 200,000 years," the study said.

Over the period preserved in the sediments, there were two ice ages and three warmer periods, so-called interglacial eras, highlighting the rarity of modern climate conditions.

"This historical record shows that we are dramatically affecting the ecosystems on which we depend. We have started uncontrolled experiments on this planet," said John Smol, a biologist at Queen's University.

The lake was small and unremarkable by most standards - less than a square kilometre in surface area and with a maximum depth of only 10 metres.

But scientists say it had one rare attribute that made it a major scientific find: during previous ice ages, it wasn't covered with moving glaciers, but rather frozen solid. That meant the sediments at its bottom were preserved. They weren't scoured up and deposited elsewhere, bulldozer fashion, as were lake bottoms throughout the rest of the area that was covered by the glaciers.

The study was conducted by researchers at five U.S. and Canadian universities, including the University of Alberta in Edmonton and the University of Colorado in Boulder.

but it is common sense, which has nothing to do with socialism.........

You think that testing and observing means factual conclusions?

And I thought you would be all for the freedom allowed to the states.......

Your attitude and replies to my comment solidify my argument that scientists can be just as dogmatic as people who believe in God, so thanks.

Science is as much as a religion as Christianity or any other religion.

Just setting things straight darlin'

Spoken like a true socialist.