Caves on the Moon, Apollo 16 landing site imaged, more Moon Zoo photos, poverty in India

The Moon has received some attention over the past few days due to a number of interesting discoveries on its surface. One is here, the discovery of another cave. Since Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter began orbiting the Moon we have been a lot of these caves there, and the possibilities of exploration there are quite intriguing. From a practical standpoint as well the idea of setting up shop in a cave is somewhat appealing considering the benefits one would provide in protection from radiation and a steady temperature, though simply constructing a habitat using the lunar soil would still certainly be a better idea as it allows one to construct it anywhere, and so places near the south pole (Malapert for example) where solar energy is plentiful could be chosen.

The Apollo 16 landing site was recently imaged again by the same craft, and you can see it here.

Moon Zoo photos: the ones I have added to my favourites can be seen at the feed here, and some of the most interesting ones over the past few days are:





Finally, poverty in India: a new study using an index called the multidimensional poverty index shows India to have some 420 million living in poverty, more than the number in sub-Saharan Africa, which is what has caused a few headlines. At the same time, the ratio of those living under the official poverty line continues to fall, and the same would be true for this new index if it had been conducted over years and decades. To have such a large number of the world's poor concentrated in a single country is actually a stroke of luck, since the actions of a but a single government is what can alleviate this, whereas in sub-Saharan Africa this is often complicated by other issues that cannot be solved by domestic policy alone. In other words, though India is at the point where it is able to build probes to help explore the Moon, there is also a lot of untapped potential there as well.