action required

Sign the petition at http://www.getup.org (Austrsalians only) to stop the government funding religious groups to give pregnant women false and misleading "advice". They lie to women to make them think that abortion is no option at all, telling them bullshit like "it will increase the chance of breast cancer" or "it makes it impossible to have another baby". They use emotional blackmail on women during a particularly trying period, telling them that they are murderers. No woman wants an abortion. It is a difficult enough decision anyway, but women derserve honesty instead of being manipulated for a religious agenda.

These groups hide behind neutral names like Pregnancy Help Australia in order to deliver their tainted propaganda. And we pay for them with taxes!

The Federal Parliament is considering legislation which will end this deception. Go to the petition at http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/StopDeceivingWomen
It will only take a minute of your time and could prevent theft of public money and misery from religious lies..

seeing inside clouds

Wow! How cool is this!

The new CloudSat satellite was launched at the end of April and is now peering into clouds to work out the fine detail of what are the processes operating inside them, giving us a better idea of what drives weather. It promises to revolutionise our understanding of what drives the atmosphere's engines. It has very simple, practical implications too because it can alert us to dangers by letting us see the guts of a storm instead of just its top surface.

CloudSat takes vertical slices through the atmosphere, seeing through all but the heaviest rain and can discriminate between different sized particles inside clouds. It could potentially be able to measure upward velocities too, though I don't know if they do that.

Click on the images above for the CloudSat home page where this and more info is displayed.
You can get high resolution images of this particular structure at here