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Enlarge / Would you ride back from space in this? The Soyuz TMA-17M spacecraft is seen after it landed on December 11 in Kazakhstan. It was -5 degrees Celsius outside. (credit: Bill Ingalls/NASA)

Just a little more than a week ago astronaut Kjell Lindgren prepared to take the ride of his life. The experience of returning to Earth inside a Soyuz spacecraft—likened to a fireball—may well be the most exciting thrill ride known to humans. Even before he departed for a year-long mission to the International Space Station, Soyuz reentry veteran Scott Kelly explained the ride thusly: "Even If I had hated the last six months, I would have done it all again for that last 20 minutes in the Soyuz.” This was fresh in Lindgren's mind as he strapped into the Soyuz spacecraft early on December 11.

"Scott had talked about that as well, in conversations we had had," Lindgren told Ars in an interview. "That certainly set an expectation in my mind for it being a lot of fun. We sometimes talk about things being fun, or type II fun, where it’s kind of fun in retrospect, but while you’re going through it, it’s maybe a little more arduous. I wasn't sure what this would be."

The ride begins quietly. Boring, even.

(credit: North Dakota State University)

Over the past couple of years, American labs have been caught mishandling biological samples that require extreme care: things like smallpox, anthrax, and avian flu. Largely in response to this, the White House issued a memo this past October 29 that outlined its vision of our future biosecurity and safety.

But in last week's Science, a trio of academics from Stanford lamented that the memo's approach was insufficient. Their exact criticism: “It grafts recommendations onto inadequate institutional structures and fails to address underlying systemic needs.”

When those assorted labs screwed up in their own distinctive ways, each was shut down and reviewed on a narrow, individualized basis. It is definitely great that the White House recognized that a more systematic, centralized approach is necessary but, according to this critique, they have not provided it.

Enlarge / Hillary Clinton. (credit: Clinton campaign.)

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has called for a "Manhattan-like project" to help law enforcement break into encrypted communications. This is in reference to the Manhattan Project, the top-secret concentrated research effort which resulted in the US developing nuclear weapons during World War II.

At Saturday's Democratic debate (transcript here), moderator Martha Raddatz asked Clinton about Apple CEO Tim Cook's statements that any effort to break encryption would harm law-abiding citizens.

"You've talked a lot about bringing tech leaders and government officials together, but Apple CEO Tim Cook said removing encryption tools from our products altogether would only hurt law-abiding citizens who rely on us to protect their data," Raddatz said. "So would you force him to give law enforcement a key to encrypted technology by making it law?"

Enlarge / Kangiata Nunata Sermia, Greenland. (credit: Nicolaj Krog Larsen, Aarhus University, Denmark)

Past performance may not always predict future results in the stock market, but in the Earth sciences, it can tell us a hell of a lot. Since we only have the one planet, examples of some processes can only be found in the past. That’s why so much effort goes into studying the past behavior of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. We need context for what we’re currently seeing and some ideas about what’s likely to happen next.

While many studies look tens of thousands or even millions of years into the past, much more recent histories can also be of interest. We’ve only had satellites measuring changes in the Greenland ice sheet since the early 1990s, so what happened over the preceding century is much less clear. That makes it difficult to answer questions about Greenland’s contribution to the full century's sea level rise or the ice sheet’s natural short-term variability.

But in a new study, a team led by Kristian Kjeldsen and Niels Korsgaard of the University of Copenhagen has managed to fill in this gap through some clever, if tedious, research. They took advantage of a trove of stereo aerial photos taken in the late 1970s and 1980s as part of a survey of Greenland.