This week in science: To the moon!

I thought the video from Golden Spike about going back to the moon was a lot more uplifting than the dismal one above, but we are the reality-based community. It's ironic that one of many wickedly effective spinoffs from the space program is real-time highly accurate streaming data from orbit. This week the scientists who study that data issued a report card showing that climate change is real, it's happening now, and it may be worse than we think:

This warm air from Arctic waters has temperatures shooting up on the adjoining shores (see for instance air temps during the first half of this month on Vize Island in the Kara Sea), sometimes up to 10-20 ºC more than the long-term average, and also causes more rain and snow to fall. This is a regular feature now, a sure sign that the Arctic climate is changing as we speak. And for a large part because of Anthropogenic Global Warming.

• Bill Nye the Science Guy opines on the future of the U.S. space program:

  I believe,  as a country, we want to move NASA from [being] an engineering organization to a science organization, and this is going to take years, decades.

• Dino remains that spent years in obscurity inside a museum may hold a secret: The nondescript therapod may be the earliest dino known and could shed light on the original stem population that survived the apocalyptic Permian-Triassic extinction to give rise to dinos as a clade beginning about 250 million years ago.
• Sounds like time for another blogger ethics panel!
• Amid the letdown of Mars Curiosity this week, there was news of another red rover we're gonna send over. Which got me to thinking, are we anywhere near a sort of Model "T" of rovers that could greatly lower the cost of these magnificent devices?
• Is there any science at all brought to bear on the failed War on Drugs? Obviously not by this WH:

  Noticeably absent from the discussion is the morality of locking up millions of Americans for using a harmless weed. No mention of the overcrowding in prisons or the wasted lives our laws have created. Also conspicuously absent is any discussion of the billions we have wasted on the drug war while having ZERO success stopping people from using drugs. Also missing, any analysis of the positive effects of marijuana use for certain medical conditions. No mention of the millions of people who spoke at the ballot box.