Short Takes – 6-1-24

GOP faces internal battle over defense spending. TheHill.com article. Pull quote: “Reed will likely hold back from endorsing a top-line defense spending number until Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.), House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee, reach a deal with their GOP counterparts on the top-line defense and nondefense spending numbers.”

Procurement: USN Fails at Ship Building. StrategyPage.com article. Pull quote: “The American warships are still, on average, more powerful than their Chinese counterparts. This is largely due to the American nuclear aircraft carriers and nuclear submarine forces. China has nothing like these but does have more anti-ship missiles on their ships plus cruise and ballistic missiles launched from land to hit American ships far from the Chinese coast. American warships are generally well-protected from those but supply ships aren’t. At all. The primary American weakness is seaborne supply and the Chinese are well aware of that.”

House Republican sounds the alarm on threats to food and agriculture sector. CyberScoop.com article. Pull quote: “Finstad, who chairs the House Agriculture Subcommittee on Nutrition, Foreign Agriculture and Horticulture, chided the U.S. Department of Agriculture for lacking direction when it comes to assisting the sector against cybersecurity threats — which is one of the reasons he introduced legislation [HR 7062, the Farm and Food Cybersecurity Act of 2024] to address the issue earlier this year alongside Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., and Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.”

The launch of Boeing’s crewed Starliner space capsule is called off yet again. NPR.org article. Pull quote: “NASA said the scrub was "due to the computer ground launch sequencer not loading into the correct operational configuration after proceeding into terminal count" and that teams were working to understand the cause.”

NASA, Mission Partners Forgo June 2 Launch of Crew Flight Test. Blogs.NASA.gov blog post. Pull quote: “NASA, Boeing, and ULA (United Launch Alliance) are forgoing a Crew Flight Test launch attempt Sunday, June 2, to give the team additional time to assess a ground support equipment issue at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex-41 in Florida.”

Bird flu can infect cats. What does that mean for their people? ScienceNews.org article. Pull quote: “The U.S. Department of Agriculture has found viral particles in muscle and other tissue from a dairy cow that was being culled, the agency said May 24. None of the meat entered the food supply, but the incident highlights that raw beef might contain the virus. (For anyone worried about their summer cookout, cooking burgers spiked with H5N1 to 145° Fahrenheit (medium) or higher was enough to inactivate the virus, the agency says.)”

GOP senator aims to block floor action over Trump conviction. Axios.com article. Pull quote: “Eight Republican senators are vowing to vote against any spending bills, judicial nominees or other Democratic legislation brought to the floor in protest of former President Trump's conviction on 34 felony charges.”

Study: Derailment risk rises with the number of cars in a freight train. Trains.com article. Pull quote: “The researchers then estimated derailment risk while taking into account the reduced overall accident risk that comes from moving freight on fewer but longer trains. They concluded that, compared to a 50-car train, a 100-car train has an 11% higher risk of derailment and that the odds of a wreck rise as the number of cars in a train increases.”

Rail safety experts question conclusions of long-train derailment study. Trains.com article. Pull quote: ““The authors acknowledge an important limitation, namely the lack of exposure or ‘denominator’ data that are necessary to calculate rates. Specifically, they don’t know train-miles by train length, so they cannot calculate rates,” he explains. “To their credit the authors applied a novel statistical approach to try and overcome this but they have made a number of implicit assumptions that may affect their results and need to be investigated before the results can be accepted.””