Red Lights

I hope everyone enjoyed the Easter holiday. This has turned into an extraordinarily productive week.

HD 44179, nicknamed the Red Rectangle. This dying star displays a mysterious glow called Extended Red Emission. The phenomenon permeates the Milky Way but its source has been a mystery. A new computer simulation claims that the glow is caused by molecules in interstellar Space. There is still room for your own interpretation. Dark matter? A disk of tiny primordial Black Holes?

Steinn Siggurdson continues to post on the fate of NASA's Beyond Einstein programme. Not long "dark energy" was touted as increasing funding and trips to Stockholm. Now we see the red lights of an approaching train wreck. As reported back in February, it has come down to a cutthroat competition between missions, with a possibility of none surviving.

"No one is going to win this, only lose. It should never have come to this. The stakes are high; literally thousands of scientists are looking at the core science activity they have chosen to work in being annihilated for 10-20 years, a lot of junior people could be dumped from science, a lot of senior people could look at having the field they worked to build being shut down."

People think that GM=tc^3 has problems? Mother would say: remember that other people have bigger problems than you. Big science lives in perpetual fear of falling out of the funding line. Fortunately NASA has generously provided this writer with a purple BEYOND EINSTEIN pen. All one really needs to go beyond Einstein is a good pen.