I am presently in Cairns, sitting in a parallel session of the "Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum" conference, where I am convening a session on Statistical Methods for Physics Analysis in the XXI Century, giving a talk on the optimization of the SWGO experiment, and playing the piano at a concert for the conference, in addition of course to visiting the area. Anyway, all of the above is too much information to you, as this post is about something else.

Mars is no vacation paradise. The temperatures fluctuate dramatically and average minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit. The surface is red dust punctuated by craters, canyons, and volcanoes. On the plus side, the atmosphere is extremely thin, comprising only about 1% of the density of Earth’s, and gravity is 60 percent lower, so you can finally dunk a basketball.

With all of those challenges, Martian landers have still been able capture wind measurements — some gauging the cooling rate of heated materials when winds blow over them, others using cameras to image “tell-tales” that blow in the wind. Both anemometric methods have yielded valuable insight into the planet’s climate and atmosphere.

If humans ever intend to go there, we'll need more data first.

Last week I traveled from Venice to Tokyo through Zurich, and during the flights I could do some more tests of the RadiaCode 103 - the nice spectrometer for gamma radiation I have been playing with as of late (for a couple of earlier posts and tests see here and here).

Activists who just happen to take donations from competitors to normal farming - e.g. organic industry trade groups, corporations, and foreign nationals laundering money through offshore donor-advised funds - get paid to claim farming is a problem.(1)