My ‘Warp Drive’ space vehicle is ‘up on the

My ‘Warp Drive’ space vehicle is ‘up on the rack’, so no trip for me. I’ll take offers from any of you. It’s a sweet ride!

And now, big worry it was, I won’t have to worry about some tranny jumping me in the shitter. Thanks Donald, you chicken-shit!

I WILL however need to continue to keep a wary eye out for iterations of sexual predators, dishonorable ’tripods’ all, Sen Larry Craig, Rep Denny Hastert and coach Jerry Sandusky.

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On at least one of these planets, Donald Trump is not president



•NASA astronomers have discovered a single star system, 40 light-years away, that has seven Earth-like planets (small, rocky, and within the range of orbit in which liquid water could form). [Vox / Brian Resnick]

•Three of the planets are directly in what's called the "habitable zone," meaning temperature water could easily remain in liquid form on their surfaces; the other four could have water as well, depending on the compositions of their atmospheres. [NASA]

•The star at the center of the system — called Trappist-1 — isn't like the sun at all. It's a super-cool dwarf star (which means sunsets on these planets are likely salmon-colored). [The Atlantic / Marina Koren]
•That's actually extremely promising — not only are super-cool stars easier to discover planets around (because they are dim enough to flicker when a planet passes in front of them), but they are also far more common than sun-like stars. [TRAPPIST.one]

•To discover more potential Earth-like planets around super-cool stars, NASA is working with an initiative called (in an epic act of backronymery) SPECULOOS — like the cookie butter. [SPECULOOS]

•Few, if any, of these worlds will actually be habitable by human standards. The astronomical term "habitable" applies to plenty of arrangements that sensible humans would call, as Katie Mack puts it, "lethal nightmare planets." [Cosmos / Katie Mack]

•But for the moment, the planets of Trappist-1 exist in the world of tantalizing possibility. Fittingly, Nature magazine published a sci-fi story side by side with the paper announcing the discovery.


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John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

• The Trump administration has officially revoked guidance to federally funded public schools informing them that under Title IX, school officials are obligated to protect the rights of trans students, including allowing them to use their preferred bathroom. [Vox / German Lopez]

• The guidance was issued by President Obama in the final year of his term, and has led to a court battle between the federal government and Republican governors. [Vox / German Lopez]

• The Trump administration has revoked the guidance "in order to further and more completely consider" the question of whether Title IX protects gender identity and expression. [US Department of Justice]

• The guidance revocation was formally posted as a notice to the Supreme Court, which agreed last fall to hear a case in which the federal government sided with a trans student against his school district. [Washington Post / Gavin Grimm]

• Withdrawing the guidance could throw the SCOTUS case into limbo, depending on whether the Court had a majority on legal issues beyond the federal government's opposition to the states. Josh Blackman laid out how this might go last fall. [Josh Blackman]

• (Typically, the Supreme Court doesn't look kindly on new administrations that switch sides on a bunch of pending cases when they arrive in office. But the Trump administration doesn't appear to spend too much time worrying about what the judicial branch thinks.) [BNA / Kimberly Strawbridge Robinson]

• Such a move has been anticipated for weeks. It was held up, reportedly, by the resistance of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos — who ultimately caved to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the president himself in their push to strike down the guidance. [NYT / Jeremy W. Peters, Jo Becker, Eric Lichtblau, and Julie Hirschfeld Davis]

• Since President Trump (not to mention his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner) has sometimes portrayed himself as the face of a new, more LGBTQ-friendly GOP, it's striking that he stood so strongly on the side of conservative Christians on this fight. [Politico / Annie Karni]

• But perhaps it's not surprising. This issue has often been collapsed to the question of bathrooms, and bathrooms have, historically, been a point of anxiety when marginalized groups start fighting for integration and equal rights. [The Guardian / Maria L. La Ganga]

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