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Moon may be younger than thought, study says

2011-08-18T23:53:00.000-07:00

An analysis of a lunar rock raises questions about when and how the moon was formed. It may be 200 million years younger than widely believed.

The moon rises over Los Angeles City Hall. The new analysis could leave scientists who model the moon's formation "scratching their heads," said an isotope geochemist who was not involved in the study. (Scott Harrison / Los Angeles Times)

By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times

The moon may be 200 million years younger than widely believed, according to a new analysis of a rock brought back to Earth in 1972 by Apollo 16 astronauts. Or, if not, the moon may never have had the magma ocean that scientists think covered its surface soon after it formed.

Either way, the findings published online Wednesday by the journal Nature could send lunar scientists back to the drawing board to reconsider the moon's evolution.

The moon is thought to have formed from debris ejected into space after a Mars-sized body collided with the still-molten Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The young moon would have been hot and blanketed by magma. But without a thick atmosphere to trap its heat, the molten rock cooled relatively quickly, while minerals that were less dense than the magma floated to the top first, forming the moon's crust. These rocks give the white highlands of the moon's near side their pale hue, and have been used to determine the point at which the moon solidified into the body we know today.

But an international team of scientists decided to use sophisticated techniques to better test a sample collected by the Apollo 16 mission — one that was considered one of the oldest moon rocks and that would, with any luck, provide an accurate age because it is relatively unscathed by meteoric impacts.

Planetary scientists can determine a rock's age by calculating how many radioactive "parent" isotopes of a particular element have decayed into "daughter" isotopes. But rather than test the radioactive decay using just one method, the researchers used three, involving the elements lead, samarium and neodymium. Because different isotopes decay at different rates, each method provided a slightly different measuring stick.

All three calculations resulted in very similar ages: an average of about 4.36 billion years, which surprised the scientists. "We all looked at one another and laughed," said lead author Lars Borg, a geochemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California.

If that is correct, it means the moon's magma ocean formed — and cooled — more recently than scientists have generally thought was the case based on evidence from meteorites containing some of the oldest minerals in the solar system. This also could mean that the great impact that separated the moon from Earth happened more recently too.

The study authors propose another, more radical, explanation: The crustal rock they analyzed, called ferroan anorthosite, is not linked to magma dynamics at all. Perhaps the moon never even had a magma ocean and the rocks were formed another way, they suggested.

"You're left with picking your poison," Borg said.

The new dates could leave scientists who model the moon's formation "scratching their heads," said Alex Halliday, an isotope geochemist at Oxford University who was not involved in the study. "It's a little bit awkward, because nobody likes to say, 'They've got their data wrong.' "

But there are less dramatic explanations, Halliday said, including the possibility that both these and previous dates are right, and the ferroan anorthosite examined in this study simply does not represent the oldest rocks on the lunar surface.

"I hope it's going to cause a real stir," said Clive Neal, a planetary geologist at the University of Notre Dame who was not involved in the study. But, he added, the researchers need much more evidence that other rocks have been inaccurately dated before they jump to radically different theories about the moon's formation.

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Potato genome sequenced by international team

2011-07-11T01:52:00.000-07:00

The humble spud provides the world's fourth-largest crop

An international team has uncovered the full DNA sequence of the potato for the first time.

The breakthrough holds out the promise of boosting harvests of one of the world's most important staple crops.

Researchers at the James Hutton Institute in Dundee, which contributed to the work, say it should soon be possible to develop improved varieties of potato much more quickly.

The genome of an organism is a map of how all of its genes are put together.

Each gene controls different aspects of how the organism grows and develops.

Slight changes in these instructions give rise to different varieties.

Each individual has a slightly different version of the DNA sequence for the species.

Professor Iain Gordon, chief executive of the James Hutton Institute, said decoding the potato genome should enable breeders to create varieties which are more nutritious, as well as resistant to pests and diseases.

Colour and flavour

He hopes it will help meet the challenge of feeding the world's soaring population.

The research is far from complete. Analysing the genetic sequence of the plant will take several more years.

At the moment it can take more than 10 years to breed an improved variety.

By locating the genes that control traits like yield, colour, starchiness and flavour, the research should make it possible to develop better spuds much more quickly.

Potatoes provide the world's fourth-largest crop, with an annual, global yield of 330m tonnes.

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Ocean's carbon dioxide uptake reduced by climate change

2011-07-11T01:50:00.000-07:00

How deep is the ocean's capacity to buffer against climate change? As one of the planet's largest single carbon absorbers, the ocean takes up roughly one-third of all human carbon emissions, reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide and its associated global changes.

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But whether the ocean can continue mopping up human-produced carbon at the same rate is still up in the air. Previous studies on the topic have yielded conflicting results, says University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor Galen McKinley.

In a new analysis published online July 10 in Nature Geoscience, McKinley and her colleagues identify a likely source of many of those inconsistencies and provide some of the first observational evidence that climate change is negatively impacting the ocean carbon sink.

"The ocean is taking up less carbon because of the warming caused by the carbon in the atmosphere," says McKinley, an assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and a member of the Center for Climatic Research in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

The analysis differs from previous studies in its scope across both time and space. One of the biggest challenges in asking how climate is affecting the ocean is simply a lack of data, McKinley says, with available information clustered along shipping lanes and other areas where scientists can take advantage of existing boat traffic. With a dearth of other sampling sites, many studies have simply extrapolated trends from limited areas to broader swaths of the ocean.

McKinley and colleagues at UW-Madison, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, and the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris expanded their analysis by combining existing data from a range of years (1981-2009), methodologies, and locations spanning most of the North Atlantic into a single time series for each of three large regions called gyres, defined by distinct physical and biological characteristics.

They found a high degree of natural variability that often masked longer-term patterns of change and could explain why previous conclusions have disagreed. They discovered that apparent trends in ocean carbon uptake are highly dependent on exactly when and where you look – on the 10- to 15-year time scale, even overlapping time intervals sometimes suggested opposite effects.

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"Because the ocean is so variable, we need at least 25 years' worth of data to really see the effect of carbon accumulation in the atmosphere," she says. "This is a big issue in many branches of climate science – what is natural variability, and what is climate change?"

Working with nearly three decades of data, the researchers were able to cut through the variability and identify underlying trends in the surface CO2 throughout the North Atlantic.

During the past three decades, increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide have largely been matched by corresponding increases in dissolved carbon dioxide in the seawater. The gases equilibrate across the air-water interface, influenced by how much carbon is in the atmosphere and the ocean and how much carbon dioxide the water is able to hold as determined by its water chemistry.

But the researchers found that rising temperatures are slowing the carbon absorption across a large portion of the subtropical North Atlantic. Warmer water cannot hold as much carbon dioxide, so the ocean's carbon capacity is decreasing as it warms.

In watching for effects of increasing atmospheric carbon on the ocean's uptake, many people have looked for indications that the carbon content of the ocean is rising faster than that of the atmosphere, McKinley says. However, their new results show that the ocean sink could be weakening even without that visible sign.

"More likely what we're going to see is that the ocean will keep its equilibration but it doesn't have to take up as much carbon to do it because it's getting warmer at the same time," she says. "We are already seeing this in the North Atlantic subtropical gyre, and this is some of the first evidence for climate damping the ocean's ability to take up carbon from the atmosphere."

She stresses the need to improve available datasets and expand this type of analysis to other oceans, which are relatively less-studied than the North Atlantic, to continue to refine carbon uptake trends in different ocean regions. This information will be critical for decision-making, since any decrease in ocean uptake may require greater human efforts to control carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

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Obama Says Last Space Shuttle Launch Ends One Era, But Opens Another

2011-07-11T01:45:00.000-07:00

by Tariq Malik, SPACE.com Managing Editor

The President answers a tweeted question on space policy
CREDIT: whitehouse.gov

View full size image

President Barack Obama lauded NASA's final space shuttle launch Friday (July 8), saying that the blastoff marks the end of one chapter of human spaceflight, but also the start of a new one.

"Today's launch may mark the final flight of the Space Shuttle, but it propels us into the next era of our never-ending adventure to push the very frontiers of exploration and discovery in space," Obama said in a statement.

Atlantis launched into space at 11:29 a.m. EDT (1529 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, marking the final flight of the space shuttle program, which NASA is shutting down after 30 years of spaceflight. The shuttle is carrying four astronauts on a 12-day delivery mission to the International Space Station.

"Behind Atlantis and her crew of brave astronauts stand thousands of dedicated workers who have poured their hearts and souls into America's Space Shuttle program over the past three decades," said Obama, who did not attend the launch but did tour Atlantis with his family before launch. "To them and all of NASA's incredible workforce, I want to express my sincere gratitude. You helped our country lead the space age and you continue to inspire us each day." [Photos: President Obama and NASA]

Space shuttle Atlantis is seen through the window of a Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA) as it launches from Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on the STS-135 mission, July 8, 2011 in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on the final shuttle mission.
CREDIT: NASA/Dick Clark

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American icon's last voyage

NASA is retiring its space shuttle fleet to make way for a new exploration program aimed at deep space missions. Thousands of NASA and shuttle contractor workers are expected to lose their jobs once the program is no more.

Previously, the agency planned to replace the shuttle program with a new one aimed at returning astronauts to the moon. But Obama canceled that plan and gave NASA a new directive for deep space exploration, including a crewed asteroid mission by 2025.

"And I have tasked the men and women of NASA with an ambitious new mission: to break new boundaries in space exploration, ultimately sending Americans to Mars. I know they are up to the challenge – and I plan to be around to see it," Obama said.

Obama's comments came just days after he said NASA needs to develop new technologies in order allow faster and longer spaceflights.

"Frankly I have been pushing NASA to revamp its vision," Obama said on July 6 in answer to question from a Twitter user during a Town Hall event. "The shuttle did some extraordinary work in low orbit: experiments, the International Space Station, moving cargo. It was an extraordinary accomplishment and we're very proud of the work that it did. But now what we need is that next technological breakthrough." [Video: See Obama's Full Comments]

Future of U.S. spaceflight

NASA currently plans to use a new space capsule, called the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, for future deep space missions. The vehicle is based on work for the agency's Orion spacecraft developed for the previous moon plan.

The heavy-lift rocket for the new program is called the Space Launch System, but the details of the booster are not yet final. This week, NASA officials said they plan to settle on a design for the new rocket by the end of summer.

NASA's space exploration plan will lead to new advances in science and technology, as well spur education, innovation and economic growth, the president said.

A major hurdle to Obama's deep space exploration vision is NASA's budget, which is mired in a maze of congressional battles over cutbacks.

On Thursday, the House Appropriations commerce, justice and science committee, which oversees NASA funding, released a $16.8 billion 2012 budget proposal for the agency that is nearly $2 billion less than what Obama proposed in his 2012 budget request.

The House proposal includes $1.95 billion for the Space Launch System, which is $150 million more than the heavy-lift rocket received for 2011 but nearly $700 million less the amount recommended in the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, which Obama signed into law in October.

In the meantime, Obama said Americans should take pride in the accomplishments of the shuttle program and he wished the shuttle's veteran astronaut crew well.

"Congratulations to Atlantis, her astronauts, and the people of America's space program on a picture-perfect launch, and good luck on the rest of your mission to the International Space Station, and for a safe return home," Obama said in the Friday statement. "I know the American people share my pride at what we have accomplished as a nation, and my excitement about the next chapter of our preeminence in space."

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Brain surgery boosts spirituality

2010-02-11T21:32:00.000-08:00

Lose a tumour, gain self-transcendence.

Janelle Weaver

Lights and wings have been associated with spirituality in different cultures.Urgesi, C. et al.

Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas.

To investigate the neural basis of spirituality, Cosimo Urgesi, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Udine, and his colleagues turned to people with brain tumours to assess the feeling before and after surgery. Three to seven days after the removal of tumours from the posterior part of the brain, in the parietal cortex, patients reported feeling a greater sense of self-transcendence. This was not the case for patients with tumours removed from the frontal regions of the brain.

"Self-transcendence used to be considered just by philosophers and crank new age people," says co-author Salvatore Aglioti, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Sapienza University of Rome. "This is the first really close-up study on spirituality. We're dealing with a complex phenomenon that's close to the essence of being human."

The authors pinpointed two parts of the brain that, when damaged, led to increases in spirituality: the left inferior parietal lobe and the right angular gyrus. These areas at the back of the brain are involved in how we perceive our bodies in spatial relation to the external world. The authors of the study in the journal Neuron¹, say that their findings support the connection between mystic experiences and feeling detached from the body.

"The most surprising part was the rapidity of the change," says Urgesi. "This discovery shows that some complex personality traits are more malleable than previously thought."

The science of spirituality

The researchers interviewed 88 people with brain tumours of various severities. Twenty of these people had benign tumours and although they underwent surgery no brain tissue was removed. All 88 people participated in interviews about their religious habits and beliefs before surgery and afterwards answered a series of true or false questions that assessed spirituality. The questionnaire tapped into three main components of self-transcendence: losing yourself in the moment, feeling connected to other people and nature, and believing in a higher power. Examples of the items on the questionnaire include: "I often become so fascinated with what I'm doing that I get lost in the moment - like I'm detached from time and place" and "I sometimes feel so connected to nature that everything seems to be part of one living organism."

The researchers then mapped the precise areas of the patients' brains where they had lesions as a result of surgery.

Spirituality was tracked to the the left inferior parietal lobe (left) and the right angular gyrus (right).Urgesi, C. et al.

Previous studies have shown that a broad network of frontal and parietal brain regions underlies religious beliefs ²^,³^,⁴^,⁵. But spirituality does not seem to involve exactly the same regions of the brain as religion.

In the past, neurologists have observed spiritual changes in patients with brain damage, but it is not something they systematically evaluate. "We usually stay away from it, not because it's not an important topic, but because it's very private and personal," says Rik Vandenberghe, a neurologist at the University Hospital Gasthuisberg in Leuven, Belgium. "This paper is very interesting, but like many pioneering studies, it leaves open many questions." Vandenberghe, who uses a similar lesion-mapping technique, says the data should be interpreted with caution. "It's very unlikely that something like self-transcendence is localizable to just two brain areas," he says.

Coarse measure

Probably the most worrisome aspect of the study is the way the authors measured self-transcendence. "It's important to recognize that the whole study is based on changes in one self-report measure, which is a coarse measure that includes some strange items," says cognitive neuroscientist Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "In the future, it will be important to understand why lesions in the parietal cortex induce changes on this scale."

"Self-transcendence is an abstract concept, and different people will attribute different meanings to the word," says Vandenberghe. Patient self reporting is not always accurate, he says, adding that tapping into spirituality with more rigorous behavioural measures and pinpointing the specific thoughts and feelings that constitute it are the obvious next steps.

In future studies, Urgesi would like to measure other aspects of spirituality and determine how long changes in spirituality last in patients. He'd also like to inactivate parietal regions in healthy subjects using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a non-invasive technique that temporarily changes neural activity in a specific region, to see if he can induce immediate changes in self-transcendence. He envisions a day when TMS can be used to increase the feeling of self-transcendence in people with neurological or psychological disorders.

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Dwarf Dinosaurs Lived on 'Neverland'-Like Island

2010-02-11T21:30:00.000-08:00

By Jennifer Viegas

The largest group of animals ever to walk the earth included dwarf varieties.
Vlad Codrea

THE GIST:

Dwarf dinosaurs existed on a Late Cretaceous island, a new analysis of bones confirms.
Dwarf dinosaurs appear to have emerged from a process called progenesis, which shortens the developmental period.
The dwarf dinosaurs lived fast, reaching sexual maturity at earlier ages than their mainland counterparts, and they likely died young.

When Hungarian baron Franz Nopcsa claimed that his sister in 1895 found bones belonging to dwarf dinosaurs on his family's Transylvanian estate, many thought his claims were on par with Count Dracula fiction.

A new study not only confirms the existence of dwarf dinosaurs, but also explains how dinosaurs shrank during the Late Cretaceous at a Neverland-like place -- Hateg Island, Romania -- where dinos never really grew up.

According to the study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, the unusual phenomenon appears to have only affected some of the island's dinosaur residents.

WATCH VIDEO: From a tiny, tough guy T. rex to a mummified duck-billed dino, take a look at these stories and more in these dinosaur videos.

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"The other animals living with the dinosaurs -- fish, frogs, albanerpetonids (salamander-like amphibians), turtles, crocodilians, pterosaurs, birds, lizards, snakes, and mammals -- were generally much smaller anyway, but so far haven't shown obvious size differences from mainland relatives," lead author Michael J. Benton told Discovery News.

Benton, who directs the Palaeobiology and Biodiversity Research Group at the University of Bristol, and his colleagues conducted one of the most extensive studies yet on the Hateg Island dinosaur remains. They analyzed the dinosaurs' limb proportions and bone growth patterns, comparing them with those of mainland dinos.

The analysis determined that at least four of the Hateg dinosaurs were dwarves.

The diminutive dinosaurs included the titanosaurian sauropod Magyarosaurus, which had a body length of about 16 to 19 feet. That's impressive by human standards, but is miniature compared to a sauropod such as Argentinosaurus, which grew to be at least 82 feet long.

Another small dinosaur was the hadrosaurid Telmatosaurus. Its 13-foot-long body contrasted with the average size of other hadrosaurids, which were 23 to 33 feet long, according to Benton.

Two species of Zalmoxes dinosaurs also appear to have been dwarves, with one -- Zalmoxes robustus -- measuring about 10 feet in length.

"So these forms are all typically half the length of their close relatives on larger land masses, and this equates to a body mass of perhaps one-eighth that of the relatives," said Benton. "Body mass is what matters most in biological terms, such as physiology and food intake."

Magnified sections of the dinosaurs' bones revealed that the animals were adults and not juveniles. The scientists believe the dinosaurs likely shrank due to a process called progenesis, which shortens the developmental period. Sexual maturity happened early, and these dinosaurs may have also died two to five years younger than their "normal"-sized counterparts.

"This in-depth study by Benton and colleagues is both fascinating and provocative," paleontologist Scott Sampson, a research curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History, told Discovery News, "demonstrating that the largest group of animals ever to walk the earth included dwarfed varieties."

Sampson added that the study also supports "the more general 'island rule'-- the idea that, when marooned on islands, evolution tends to make large animals smaller, and small animals larger."

Scientists continue to debate why this happens on islands. Reduced supplies of food, smaller ranges, and few larger predators have all been theorized.

"I think most biologists accept that there is something going on, and that the island rule has validity," Benton said.

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Directed Panspermia: Moral Obligation or Bio-Pollution?

2010-02-11T21:28:00.000-08:00

By Ian O'Neill

The Huygens probe as it descended through Titan's atmosphere in 2004. Could a similar delivery method seed life on other worlds? (NASA)

The speculative mechanism of panspermia could explain how life formed on Earth and how it might exist elsewhere in our solar system and beyond. Hitching rides on chunks of rock blasted into space by meteorite impacts or gliding through space on a comet, it turns out that "life as we know it" has an astonishing knack of surviving in the most extreme environments.

But what if mankind could purposefully launch space probes packed with little biological "starter kits" toward star systems that appear to have the potential to nurture life? We have lots of life down here, isn't it our duty to spread our seed amongst the stars?

WATCH: Extremophiles, micro-organisms that can live in volcanos, space and the deep oceans, are still a mystery, but one scientist has found a way to use them to study other elements.

Yes, says Michael Mautner, Research Professor of Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University, in a paper submitted to an upcoming issue of the Journal of Cosmology. Before the rich biosphere of Earth is dead, Mautner believes that we need to ship Earth Brand™ biology to suitable adopted homes so our evolutionary line has a chance to gain a foothold elsewhere in the universe.

"We have a moral obligation to plan for the propagation of life, and even the transfer of human life to other solar systems which can be transformed via microbial activity, thereby preparing these worlds to develop and sustain complex life," Mautner said. "Securing that future for life can give our human existence a cosmic purpose."

These are certainly lofty plans, but he proposes that we send a variety of basic organisms to "potentially fertile" worlds throughout the universe (to worlds from a few to over 500 light years away). Using early-Earth as an example, organisms like cyanobacteria could be sent to alien worlds to go into reproductive overdrive, feasting on toxic gases and releasing byproducts such as oxygen.

These little biological starter kits would support a brand new biosphere, helping more complex life forms to develop and evolve.

(Is anyone else thinking this was borrowed from the plot of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock?)

In his paper, Mautner goes into some detail about what this galactic seeding mission would look like. As current launch costs are astonishingly high (using current technology, it costs $10,000 to get a one kilogram payload off the Earth's surface and into space), the space seeding pods would need to be small. But using tiny "pods" weighing only 0.1 grams, as many as 100,000 microorganisms could be accommodated to give a reasonable chance of success.

Perhaps surprisingly, he indicates that we'd need "hundreds of tons" of biological material. But in this case, the launch costs would be a modest $1 billion; a bargain considering we'd be ensuring the continuation of Earth Brand™ life on various new worlds.

All these plans are completely speculative however, and to put a cost on such a mission is fanciful at best. Although Prof. Mautner does a great job of identifying how we could go about flinging our seed to the furthermost reaches of the galaxy, I'd question the fundamental point of "directed panspermia" at all. Is it really our "moral responsibility"?

I understand that we -- as life forms -- see the whole life thing as sacred, but what if one of these biological pods fertilizes a world where another life form is struggling to survive? Who are we to say that our Earth Brand™ life is superior to another brand of alien microbe?

If our life takes hold of a planet where another life had the opportunity to evolve into an interstellar civilization in a couple of billions of years time, wouldn't we be in violation of some kind of cosmic anti-monopoly regulation (or at least in violation of the Prime Directive)?

And there's another thing to ponder: What if "life" is the universal equivalent of some kind of infection. Is life rare because the universe has a very strong immune system? Firing our genetic code far and wide could be considered to be biological pollution.

I'm all for spreading the human influence around the galaxy, but I think this can only be considered if we physically go to these alien worlds, to evaluate these places in person before we start setting up home. Blindly sending life from Earth to habitable worlds and planet-forming accretion disks seems a little reckless, especially as we have no clue about the consequences if we started impregnating unsuspecting planets.

I know these points are just as speculative as Mautner's paper, but it does make you wonder whether sending it into space is really a "moral responsibility" when we have little clue about who or what we are in the grand (cosmic) scale of things.

Just because we've got it doesn't mean the rest of the universe wants it.

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Martian Dune Mystery Solved by Bouncing Sand Grains Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/martian-dune-mystery-solved-by-bouncing-sand-

2010-02-11T21:26:00.000-08:00

By Lisa Grossman, Science News

Once Martian sand grains hop, they don’t stop.

That’s the conclusion of a new study that finds sand can move on Mars without much windy encouragement.

Mars’ sandy surface has clearly been shaped by wind. Its characteristic dunes and ripples are the kind formed by sand particles taking short wind-borne hops, a process called saltation.

But atmospheric simulations and landers’ direct measurements of wind speed have found that the Martian wind hardly ever blows hard enough to kick sand grains off the ground in the first place.

The new paper, to appear in an upcoming Physical Review Letters, suggests a solution to this paradox: a kind of billiard-ball effect in which one sand particle knocks the next one into motion. “It’s much easier to keep this process going than it is to start it in the first place,” says study author Jasper Kok, an atmospheric physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who did most of this research while at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “It’s like when you ride a bike: It costs a lot of exertion to get it going, but once you’re going it’s easier to keep going.”

Kok modified a numerical model, previously applied to geological processes on Earth, to include Martian gravity and atmospheric conditions. Unlike in other models, Kok simulated a process called splashing, in which a flying sand particle knocks at least one new grain into the air as it smacks into the ground.

“That’s hard to study in a wind tunnel,” notes planetary scientist Robert Sullivan of Cornell University. The study “goes numerically where we have a hard time going with wind tunnel experiments,” he says.

The way sand grains knock each other around turns out to make all the difference, Kok says. Because Martian gravity and air density are so much lower than Earth’s, a small kick from the wind sends sand particles on Mars flying much higher, up to a meter off the ground.

“It’s like playing golf on the moon,” Kok says. Particles get caught in stronger winds as they rise, causing them to pick up speed and ultimately slam into the ground, where they kick up more particles and start the cycle over. “This splashing process is really efficient,” Kok says. “It can keep saltation, or sand blowing, going on Mars at relatively low wind speeds.” These jumping sand grains can create ripples over time even without high sustained winds, he says.

The finding could help solve other puzzles in the Martian landscape. Earlier models predicted that crescent-shaped sand dunes called barchan dunes should grow to at least 500 meters long — but many are only 100 meters. And the Mars rover Opportunity has found sand ripples made up of particles only 100 micrometers in diameter, so small that scientists had expected them to stay aloft once kicked up. The new model could explain both riddles by showing that splashing can keep particles moving at low wind speeds. Slow-moving sand grains don’t travel far and therefore make short dunes, but even tiny particles can get pushed into ripples, Kok says.

“This study is very welcome, very informative,” Sullivan says. “The results go a long way toward explaining several mysteries.”

Images: Martian dunes imaged by HiRISE 1) Barchan dunes. 2) Barchan dunes. 3) Megaripples. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.

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Winter Overcomes 1,200-year-old Oak

2010-02-11T21:11:00.000-08:00

CHIRK, Wales, Feb. 10 (UPI) — A Welsh oak tree, already more than 300 years old when King Henry II spared it in 1165, couldn’t withstand the unusually cold winter of 2010, locals say.

Mark Williams, a historian of the Wrexham area in North Wales, told the BBC he and Deryn Poppit visited the tree Tuesday and found its trunk had been split. He said ice apparently formed around the base of the tree, which had a circumference of 34 feet.

“The tree is on marshy ground in a basin with a stream running down nearby,” he said. “With the stream overflowing because of melting snow, the water must have settled around the trunk and it looks as if this has caused it to split.”

The Great Oak at the Gates of the Dead near Chirk was 1,200 years old, dating from the 9th century. According to legend, in 1165, King Henry II of England, preparing to meet Owain Gwynedd in the Battle of Crogen, commanded his men to clear Ceiriog Woods but ordered the Great Oak to be spared.

“Although some parts of the tree were rotten, some of it was still as strong as an oak,” Williams said.

Mike McKenna, owner of Kronospan, a wood-panel producer in Chirk, has retained a firm of tree surgeons to determine if anything can be done to keep the Great Oak going.

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How to Answer the Dumb Things Climate Deniers Say

2010-02-11T21:09:00.000-08:00

If you are like me you probably have encountered a few people that do not believe global warming exists, or if they do, they are not always convinced that humans are contributing to the problem. There are usually a range of issues these skeptics raise in an attempt to cast doubt on climate change evidence. Below are a few responses to some of the more frequent statements these deniers toss our way.

The Skeptics: There is simply no evidence that humans are contributing to climate change, if the earth is even warming.

Answer: As carbon dioxide (CO2) is pumped into the air through human activities, heat becomes trapped in the atmosphere. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as the "greenhouse effect." If the earth's global temperatures rise a mere 3 degrees, there will be catastrophic results all over the world.

The Skeptics: CO2 can't possibly be to blame for any so-called climate change as emissions only stay in our atmosphere for up to 10 years. Our oceans and terrestrial carbon sinks absorb this CO2 anyway. In fact, the oceans are so big that they could absorb over 50 times more CO2 than humans contribute now. As such, we can't possibly be to blame for any change in global temperatures today.

Answer: Actually the ocean's ability to store CO2 is not very long. Only 50% of CO2 is absorbed by areas of the ocean that are not very deep. In these areas, CO2 is released back into the atmosphere. Recent studies have shown that only 30% of CO2 is stored in the deep ocean. The rest, some 20%, stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years.

The Skeptics: The evidence that CO2 emissions are linked to any rise in global temperatures is casual at best. Global CO2 emissions do not match Arctic temperatures, which are often used as the best gauge for how to measure the earth's climate.

Answer: While the Arctic may serve as a great resource for measuring climate change, looking at one small area of the planet is not the best way to assess the situation. During the 1930s, for example, warming occurred in the Arctic, but the cause is not exactly known and did not take place all over the planet.

The Skeptics: It's actually been much hotter than it is today during recorded human history. During medieval times, for example, warm temperatures plagued much of Europe. This happened long before humans started burning fossil fuels, which is hard proof that we aren't causing global warming today.

Answer: The warming that happened during 800-1300 AD is considered to be a local warming event, which is quite different than the changes in the global climate we are experiencing today. Ice samples have shown that temperatures around the world varied during that time.

The Skeptics: But ice core sampling is simply not a reliable way to measure changes to our climate because it is an imperfect science. Records come from measuring gas that is trapped in tiny air bubbles. But this air isn't saved in stone, it can seep out over time.

Answer: Specific ice samples may not be completely reliable, this is true. However, in order to reduce error many samples are taken all over the world, which gives us a much better record of the earth's historic climate trends. When used in conjunction with other resources, like tree rings, these records are undeniably accurate and reliable.

The Skeptics: Scientists fix the data all the time. One ice sampling in the Arctic at Siple has shown us that CO2 levels were around 328 parts per million all the way back in 1890. However, global warming believers insist that this level wasn't met until the early 1970s. In order to make their point, graphs have been altered to fix this data in order to have us believe that CO2 emissions, from humans, were to blame for the rise in global temperatures.

Answer: When new evidence is found scientist alter their theories and data. No additional samplings taken anywhere in the world confirm that CO2 levels were above 290 parts per million in the last half of a million years. The Siple ice core samples in the Arctic cannot be used to counter this overwhelming consensus. Perhaps temperatures in the Siple area were elevated for a month or a year, but not consistently and not anywhere else on the planet at the same time. Since new data has come to light to address these findings, scientists have adjusted their graphs.

The Skeptics: Our environment has a great ability to adjust for inflation in CO2 emissions. When an increase occurs, our carbon sinks pick up the slack over a period of decades. So all the hype about global warming is nothing more than hot air.

Answer: Past warming cycles are not the result of greenhouse gas emissions. These warming trends were the result of the earth's rotation around the sun. When the earth heated up in the past, more CO2 was released from our carbon sinks, which created a greenhouse effect. So when humans release CO2 today we are not allowing the earth to go through its natural cycle. Our oceans haven't even started heating up yet. But if they do, and we do not cut CO2 in the atmosphere over the next twenty years, catastrophic effects will ensue.

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Another Blizzard: What Happened to Global Warming?

2010-02-11T21:06:00.000-08:00

By Bryan Walsh

A pedestrian crosses Fuller Place in Brooklyn, New York.

As the blizzard-bound residents of the mid-Atlantic region get ready to dig themselves out of the third major storm of the season, they may stop to wonder two things: Why haven't we bothered to invest in a snow blower, and what happened to climate change? After all, it stands to reason that if the world is getting warmer — and the past decade was the hottest on record — major snowstorms should become a thing of the past, like PalmPilots and majority rule in the Senate. Certainly that's what the Virginia state Republican Party thinks: the GOP aired an ad last weekend that attacked two Democratic members of Congress for supporting the 2009 carbon-cap-and-trade bill, using the recent storms to cast doubt on global warming. (See pictures of the massive blizzard in Washington, D.C.)

Brace yourselves now — this may be a case of politicians twisting the facts. There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm. As the meteorologist Jeff Masters points out in his excellent blog at Weather Underground, the two major storms that hit Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., this winter — in December and during the first weekend of February — are already among the 10 heaviest snowfalls those cities have ever recorded. The chance of that happening in the same winter is incredibly unlikely.

But there have been hints that it was coming. The 2009 U.S. Climate Impacts Report found that large-scale cold-weather storm systems have gradually tracked to the north in the U.S. over the past 50 years. While the frequency of storms in the middle latitudes has decreased as the climate has warmed, the intensity of those storms has increased. That's in part because of global warming — hotter air can hold more moisture, so when a storm gathers it can unleash massive amounts of snow. Colder air, by contrast, is drier; if we were in a truly vicious cold snap, like the one that occurred over much of the East Coast during parts of January, we would be unlikely to see heavy snowfall. (See pictures of the effects of global warming.)

Climate models also suggest that while global warming may not make hurricanes more common, it could well intensify the storms that do occur and make them more destructive. (Comment on this story.)

But as far as winter storms go, shouldn't climate change make it too warm for snow to fall? Eventually that is likely to happen — but probably not for a while. In the meantime, warmer air could be supercharged with moisture and, as long as the temperature remains below 32°F, it will result in blizzards rather than drenching winter rainstorms. And while the mid-Atlantic has borne the brunt of the snowfall so far this winter, areas near lakes may get hit even worse. As global temperatures have risen, the winter ice cover over the Great Lakes has shrunk, which has led to even more moisture in the atmosphere and more snow in the already hard-hit Great Lakes region, according to a 2003 study in the Journal of Climate. (Read "Climate Accord Suggests a Global Will, if Not a Way.")

Ultimately, however, it's a mistake to use any one storm — or even a season's worth of storms — to disprove climate change (or to prove it; some environmentalists have wrongly tied the lack of snow in Vancouver, the site of the Winter Olympic Games, which begin this week, to global warming). Weather is what will happen next weekend; climate is what will happen over the next decades and centuries. And while our ability to predict the former has become reasonably reliable, scientists are still a long way from being able to make accurate projections about the future of the global climate. Of course, that doesn't help you much when you're trying to locate your car under a foot of powder.

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New Study of Meteorite Provides More Evidence for Ancient Life on Mars

2009-12-20T00:49:00.000-08:00

By Lisa Zyga

Enlarge

This image of the meteorite, seen through a scanning electron microscope, shows bumps that resemble a fossilized colony of microbacteria. Some of the rounded bumps are preserved at the top of the surface and resemble individual spherical and ovoid-shaped microbes. Image credit: NASA.

PhysOrg.com) -- In 1996, when scientists examined a meteorite from Mars previously uncovered in Antarctica, they were intrigued by what looked like microscopic fossils of ancient Martian life forms. Now, using new technology that wasn't available 13 years ago, NASA scientists have found further evidence that the materials and structures in the meteorite are likely signs of ancient life, rather than the results of inorganic processes.

ALH84001 History

Scientists estimate that the meteorite, called Allan Hills 84001 (ALH84001), formed on Mars about 4.5 billion years ago, making it one of the oldest known objects in the solar system. Because the meteorite contains microscopic carbonate disks that are about 4 billion years old, scientists have previously hypothesized that the meteorite interacted with water that may have existed on Mars at this time.

Much later, about 15 million years ago, a larger meteorite likely struck Mars and ejected ALH84001 into space. After spending most of that time traveling throughout the solar system, the meteorite landed on Earth about 13,000 years ago. Then, in 1984, a team of US scientists discovered it in Antarctica. The meteorite finally made news headlines in 1996, when NASA scientist David McKay and others peered at the rock under a scanning electron microscope and saw what appeared to be nanoscale fossils of bacteria-like life forms.

Bacterial or Thermal Origin?

Now, McKay, along with Kathie Thomas-Keprta, Everett Gibson, Simon Clemett, and Susan Wentworth, all of NASA's Johnson Space Center, have revisited the original hypothesis with new observations of the meteorite. The study is published in a recent issue of the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.

In the new study, the scientists used advanced microscopy techniques to investigate the carbonate disks and, more importantly, the magnetite nanocrystals within the disks. These embedded magnetites are the apparent fossils that exhibit features similar to contemporary magnetotactic bacteria.

During the past 13 years, different groups of scientists have proposed competing hypotheses to explain the origins of these magnetites. Some of the leading hypotheses are non-biological, suggesting that the magnetites were formed via thermal decomposition of the carbonates in which ALH84001 was struck by other meteorites. Such impacts may have increased the temperature of ALH84001 and caused the carbonates to decompose into magnetites via bond redistribution. In some models, ALH84001 may have experienced this shock by a random meteorite impact while still on Mars, while in other models, thermal decomposition may have occurred due to the impact event that ejected ALH84001 from its home planet.

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But whatever event might have triggered a thermal decomposition process, the scientists argue in the current study that very few - if any - of the magnetites embedded in ALH84001 carbonates are a product of thermal decomposition. By analyzing details such as the percentage of magnetite volume in the carbonate disks, the trace amounts of impurities observed in some of the magnetites, and the lack of siderite which some previous models suggested may have decomposed to form magnetite, the scientists concluded that these new observations were inconsistent with the previous inorganic-based thermal decomposition hypotheses.

By showing that it’s very unlikely that the magnetite originated from the decomposition of ALH84001’s carbonate, the scientists argue that possible biological origins of the magnetite need to be considered more seriously than before.

“For the past 10 years, the leading (and only) viable non-biologic hypothesis for the origin of the nanophase magnetites concentrated in ALH84001 has been thermal or shock decomposition of iron-bearing carbonates, a process known to produce small magnetite crystals,” Thomas-Keprta told PhysOrg.com. “Our paper has falsified this non-biologic hypothesis by showing, based on thermodynamics and minor element chemistry, that this non-biologic hypothesis simply cannot produce the ultrapure magnetites actually present in ALH84001 as a significant population of all magnetites. By falsifying this non-biologic hypothesis, we are left with only the biologic hypothesis to explain the detailed properties of the magnetites in this martian meteorite.”

Magnetite Biosignature

Although they have not yet developed a model for the origin of the magnetite in ALH84001, the researchers’ new observations are consistent with the possibility that the magnetite has an “allochthonous origin,” in which it was exposed to aqueous solutions such as water.

As Thomas-Keprta explained, the magnetite in ALH84001 could have been one of several ferromagnetic minerals produced by magnetotactic bacteria that live in aquatic environments. When these bacteria die and their shells degrade, a chain of magnetite is released into the environment. Without its confining shell, the magnetite chain configuration cannot be maintained, so individual magnetite crystals begin to mix with inorganic particles in the water.

On Earth, magnetotactic bacteria are quite common in aqueous environments, and scientists often find magnetites in surface and subsurface sediments.

“For many years, the presence of the specific kind of nanomagnetite formed by magnetotactic bacteria on Earth have been completely accepted as a biosignature when found in any Earth sediment or rock,” Thomas-Keprta said, noting that these magnetite have very specific properties.

“When we first documented these specific properties in the ALH84001 carbonates, the only alternate non-biologic hypothesis that was commonly accepted as viable was the thermal decomposition of iron-bearing carbonate,” she said. “Now that we have completely falsified this hypothesis with this latest paper, we are still left with the specific properties of the ALH84001 magnetite that, if found on Earth, would be a robust biosignature indicating production by bacteria.

“We also point to the many discoveries since our original paper showing supporting evidence such as an early strong magnetic field on Mars (necessary for the development of magnetotactic bacteria); the presence of near surface water at many locations on current-day Mars; the presence of possible oceans, major drainage channels, and other features associated with an early wet Mars; and the recent evidence for variable releases of methane into the Martian atmosphere. . . . We do not believe it is too incautious to restate our original hypothesis that such magnetites constitute strong evidence of early life on Mars.”

More information: K.L. Thomas-Keprta, S.J. Clemett, D.S. McKay, E.K. Gibson, and S.J. Wentworth. “Origins of magnetite nanocrystals in Martian meteorite ALH84001.” Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, 73 (2009) 6631-6677.

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Ancient Book of Mark Found Not So Ancient After All

2009-12-20T00:40:00.000-08:00

The University of Chicago has found after careful study that what was previously was thought be a very old copy of the Gospel of Mark in its library is a modern fraud. (Credit: University of Chicago)

A biblical expert at the University of Chicago, Margaret M. Mitchell, together with experts in micro-chemical analysis and medieval bookmaking, has concluded that one of the University Library's most enigmatic possessions is a forgery. The book, a copy of the Gospel of Mark, will remain in the collection as a study document for scholars studying the authenticity of ancient books.

Scholars have argued for nearly 70 years over the provenance of what's called the Archaic Mark, a 44-page miniature book, known as a "codex," which contains the complete 16-chapter text of the Gospel of Mark in minuscule handwritten text. The manuscript, which also includes 16 colorful illustrations, has long been believed to be either an important witness to the early text of the gospel or a modern forgery, said Mitchell, Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature.

"The mystery is now solved from textual, chemical, and codicological (bookmaking) angles," said Mitchell, who first became intrigued by the codex when she saw it as a graduate student in 1982. Comprehensive analysis demonstrates that it is not a genuine Byzantine manuscript, but a counterfeit, she said, "made somewhere between 1874 and the first decades of the 20th century."

Mitchell said experts from multiple disciplines made the findings possible. "Our collective efforts have achieved what no single scholar could do -- give a comprehensive analysis of the composite artifact that is an illustrated codex. The data collected in this research process has given us an even deeper understanding of the exact process used by the forger," said Mitchell. "It will, we hope, assist ongoing scholarly investigation into and detection of manuscripts forged in the modern period."

Since 1937, when Edgar J. Goodspeed a University of Chicago biblical scholar, acquired the Archaic Mark, the manuscript has been an enigma. As early as 1947, scholars speculated about its authenticity. Because it is the closest of any known manuscript to the venerable 4th-century Codex Vaticanus for the text of Mark's Gospel, Mitchell said, it was believed to be "either a very important textual witness (from the 14th Century) or a forgery based upon some late 19th-century critical edition of the Greek New Testament incorporating the readings of the Vatican manuscript." The modern blue pigment in the illustrations, indentified in 1989, would support the latter, but Mitchell explained this finding was not definitive because the pigment could have come from a restoration effort on an earlier manuscript.

In 2006, the University of Chicago Library digitized the Archaic Mark, making it available to scholars worldwide (goodspeed.lib.uchicago.edu) and stimulating renewed interest in it. The following year, in response to that growing interest in the mysterious manuscript, Alice Schreyer, Director of the Special Collections Research Center, convened a committee to lead a complete and definitive examination of the material components of the Archaic Mark.

The Library commissioned materials analysis from McCrone Associates, and enlisted the aid of Abigail Quandt, a rare books expert and preservationist at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

Last January, Joseph G. Barabe, a senior scientist at McCrone, took 24 samples of parchment, ink and a range of paints used in illustrations. Barabe analyzed the samples using an array of techniques -- polarized light; energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry; the scanning electron microscope for elemental analysis; X-ray diffraction; Fourier Transform infrared spectroscopy; and Raman spectroscopy. Under microscopic analysis, Barabe and his colleagues found no evidence of retouching of any kind in the manuscript, disproving earlier suspicions of restoration attempts.

Barabe determined the Archaic Mark was created after 1874 -- using materials not available until the late 19th century -- on a parchment substrate dating from about the middle of the 16th century. Carbon dating determined the animal hide was from some time between 1485-1631.

The rest of the authentication team confirmed and helped interpret Barabe's findings.

Quandt carefully reconstructed the steps the modern forger took to produce the manuscript, from preparing the parchment, to the painting of images and inscription of text, as well as the application of the modern coating, cellulose nitrate. Quandt also identified specific ways in which its production defies usual Byzantine procedures, and she determined that the reused parchment contains no recoverable text underneath.

Mitchell completed the analysis with a study of the textual edition the forger had used. She confirmed and refined Stephen C. Carlson's proposal that the modern edition from which the forger copied the text was the 1860 edition of the Greek New Testament by Philipp Buttmann. Mitchell identified telltale readings in the Archaic Mark that arose from the original 1856 edition of Buttmann's critical text, reproducing errors later corrected in the flurry of collations of the famous manuscript Vaticanus between 1857 and 1867.

Mitchell, Barabe and Quandt have detailed these findings in a paper scheduled for February publication in the journal Novum Testamentum.

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'Green' vibrators promise sustainable pleasure

2009-12-20T00:34:00.000-08:00

by Jurgen Hecker

DUBLIN (AFP) – When world leaders in Copenhagen argue for days in knife-edge talks to save the planet, what more fitting way to relieve the tension than an environmentally-friendly vibrator?

The global sex toy industry is worth an annual 15 billion dollars (22 billion euros), and uses up a mountain of batteries in the process, many of which end up as toxic waste.

But now one Irish company reckons they've got the solution to shake up the market: a vibrator they are calling the world's first-ever "green technology sex toy".

The Earth Angel, described as "eight inches (20 centimetres) with a sleek white finish", is a wind-up vibrator which comes with a handle built into the bottom.

"You just flip out the handle, grab a hold of it there, and you just wind it," said Janice O'Connor, the co-founder with her husband Chris, of Caden Enterprises which makes the gadget.

"So for four minutes of doing that, you should generate enough power to give you 30 minutes of full-on, right-to-the top vibrations," she told AFP.

She added: "I've only used it a couple of times, and it's fantastic. It's very intense, and sometimes, at the top level, depending on the person that's using it, it can actually be too intense sometimes.

"That's why we have four different levels on it."

The vibrator is made of 100 percent recyclable materials and the couple hope it will encourage sex toy fans around the globe to do their bit for the environment.

"We want to change the way that people view adult toys and the adult industry as a whole," they said.

"We wanted to produce an environmentally-friendly sex toy that appealed to all consumers.

"Every industry has an obligation to do as much as they can to reduce the effects of climate change and by developing this new technology we hope that others will follow suit and look for alternative ways to design and manufacture their products."

Chris O'Connor is the brains behind the power-storing technology that he said could be applied to any small power device, such as electric toothbrushes.

He said climate change had been his primary motivation rather than sexy fun.

"When I was a child we'd have months of good weather," the inventor said.

"Now that's totally changed, 100 percent changed, in this country. And that's why I decided I'd try to make a change for the better, for the planet."

Public morality in Ireland is still traditionally Catholic, so producing the green vibrator there was out of the question - it is manufactured by a British-based company - while financing it proved an obstacle course.

But the O'Connors, both practising Catholics, believe God is on their side.

"In all fairness, wouldn't God want something that's green and that doesn't do any damage to the environment?" asked Chris.

An Earth Angel costs 70 euros (100 dollars) plus shipping costs and around 1,000 have already been sold to people seeking its special brand of "sustainable pleasure".

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The Brain Humanity's Other Basic Instinct: Math

2009-11-22T02:26:00.000-08:00

by Carl Zimmer

Image: iStockphoto

Numbers make modern life possible. “In a world without numbers,” University of Rochester neuroscientist Jessica Cantlon and her colleagues recently observed in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, “we would be unable to build a skyscraper, hold a national election, plan a wedding, or pay for a chicken at the market.”

The central role of numbers in our world testifies to the brain’s uncanny ability to recognize and understand them—and Cantlon is among the researchers trying to find out exactly how that skill works. Traditionally, scientists have thought that we learn to use numbers the same way we learn how to drive a car or to text with two thumbs. In this view, numbers are a kind of technology, a man-made invention to which our all-purpose brains can adapt. History provides some support. The oldest evidence of people using numbers dates back about 30,000 years: bones and antlers scored with notches that are considered by archaeologists to be tallying marks. More sophisticated uses of numbers arose only much later, coincident with the rise of other simple technologies. The Mesopotamians developed basic arithmetic about 5,000 years ago. Zero made its debut in A.D. 876. Arab scholars laid the foundations of algebra in the ninth century; calculus did not emerge in full flower until the late 1600s.

Despite the late appearance of higher mathematics, there is growing evidence that numbers are not really a recent invention—not even remotely. Cantlon and others are showing that our species seems to have an innate skill for math, a skill that may have been shared by our ancestors going back least 30 million years.

One sign that this skill truly is innate: Children enter the world with a head for numbers. Veronique Izard, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, demonstrated this in a recent study of newborns. She and her colleagues played cooing sounds to babies, with varying numbers of sounds in each trial. The babies were then shown a set of shapes on a computer screen, and the scientists measured how long the babies gazed at it. (The length of time a baby spends looking at an object reflects its interest.) Newborns consistently looked longer at the screen when the number of shapes matched the number of sounds they had just heard. For example, a baby who heard “tuuu, tuuu, tuuu, tuuu” would look the longest at four shapes, less at eight, and still less at twelve. Izard’s study suggests that newborns already have a basic understanding of numbers. Moreover, their concept of numbers is abstract; they can transfer it across the senses from sounds to pictures.

Mathematical intuition develops as we grow up, but probing its growth is tricky because older children draw on both their innate skills and the ones they learn. So scientists have come up with ways to force people to rely on intuition alone. Cantlon, working with Elizabeth Brannon of Duke University, ran an experiment in which adult subjects see a set of dots on a computer screen for about half a second, followed by a second set. After a pause, the participants see two sets of dots side by side. They then have a little more than a second to pick the set that is the sum of the previous two pictures.

People do fairly well on these tests, which summons up a weird feeling in them: They know they are right, but they don’t know how they got the answer. Even in toddlers who cannot yet count, these studies reveal, the brain automatically processes numbers. From infancy to old age, mathematical intuition consistently follows two rules. One is that people score better when the numbers are small than when they are large. The other is that people score better when the ratio of the bigger number to the smaller one is greater. In other words, people are more likely to correctly tell 2 from 4 than they are to tell 6 from 8, even though both pairs of numbers differ by two. As we get older, our intuition becomes more precise. Other experiments have shown that a six-month-old baby can reliably distinguish between numbers that differ by as little as a factor of two (like 4 and 8). By nine months the ratio has dropped to 1.5 (8 and 12, for example). And by adulthood the ratio is just 10 to 15 percent. The fact that the same two rules always hold true suggests that we use the same mental algorithm throughout our lives.

Brain scans using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) are shedding some light on how our brains carry out that algorithm. Neuroscientists have found that when people do mathematical intuition problems, a strip of neurons near the top of the brain, surrounding a fold called the intraparietal sulcus, consistently becomes active. And when we confront more difficult problems—when the numbers are bigger or closer together—this region becomes more active.

Psychologists suspect that the mathematical intuition that these neurons help produce lays the foundation for all of our more sophisticated kinds of math. Justin Halberda of Johns Hopkins University and his colleagues recently carried out a telling study of mathematical intuition in a group of 14-year-olds. Some of the children demonstrated a more accurate intuition than others. Halberda then looked at the subjects’ scores on standardized school tests. Students who had a sharper mathematical intuition scored better on math tests from kindergarten onward.

The fact that children possess a mathematical intuition long before they even start school implies that our evolutionary ancestors had it too. Indeed, recent research indicates that our forebears possessed such an intuition long before they could walk upright. Scientists have found that many primates, including rhesus monkeys, can solve some of the same mathematical problems we can. Since monkeys and humans diverged 30 million years ago, mathematical intuition presumably is at least that old.

Providing evidence of that shared heritage, Cantlon and Brannon were able to teach monkeys to do addition by intuition the same way people do. The animals’ intuition is about as good as ours, and it follows the same rules. As the ratio between numbers gets larger, the monkeys are increasingly likely to pick the right one. And when monkeys use their mathematical intuition, they rely on the same region of the brain around the intraparietal sulcus that we do.

Monkeys can even learn written numbers, a skill children develop only around age 5. In order to make the link between a 2 and a pair of objects, children use a region of the brain located underneath the temple called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This region is like a blacksmith shop for forging associations between signs and concepts. Once the association has been formed, children recognize written numbers quickly, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex becomes quiet.

Monkeys can learn, with enough training, to pick out a 4 if they see four dots on a screen. Andreas Nieder, a physiologist at the University of Tübingen, and his colleagues have discovered that, like children, the monkeys use their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to make those associations. They have even found individual neurons in the region that fire strongly at both the number 4 and four dots.

But does a monkey actually understand what a written 4 signifies? To find out, Nieder and his former student Ilka Diester trained monkeys for a new experiment. The monkeys learned to press a lever, after which they saw one number followed by another. If the numbers matched, the monkeys could release the lever to get a squirt of juice. If the numbers didn’t match, the monkeys had to keep the lever pressed down until a new number appeared, which was always a match.

The monkeys were able to learn to release the lever for matching numbers and to keep it down for numbers that did not match. If they had succeeded simply by matching shapes, you would expect them to sometimes confuse similar-looking numbers: They might choose 1 as a match with 4 because both are made of straight lines, for example. But Diester and Nieder found that the monkeys got confused in a different way. The monkeys were most likely to mix up numbers that were numerically close to each other: the sticklike 1 and the curvaceous 2, for example. What’s more, the monkeys took more time to release the lever if larger numbers matched than if smaller ones did—another sign that the animals were responding to quantity, not shape.

Once our ancestors linked their natural instinct for numbers with an ability to understand symbols, everything changed. Math became a language of ideas and measurements.

To neuroscientists, these studies raise a deep question. If monkeys have such solid foundations for numbers, why can’t they perform high-level mathematics? Finding an answer may help us understand what makes humans so much better with numbers than other animals. Nieder and Cantlon have both speculated that the difference lies in our ability to understand symbols, which enables us to transform our approximate intuition of numbers into a precise understanding. When we say “2,” we mean an exact quantity, not “probably 2 but maybe 1 or 3.” We can then learn rules for handling exact numbers quickly. And then we can generalize those rules from one number to the next, thus understanding general mathematical principles. Other primates, lacking our symbolic brains, take thousands of trials to learn a new rule.

The recent studies of monkeys and infants cast a new light on the old notched bones. The earliest recorded numbers coincide with the first appearance of many other expressions of abstract thought, from bone flutes to carvings of zaftig female figures. Before then, humans may have thought about numbers the way monkeys (and babies) still do today. But once our ancestors began to link their natural instinct for numbers with a new ability to understand symbols, everything changed. Math became a language of ideas, of measurements, and of engineering possibilities. The rest—the skyscrapers and supermarkets and weddings—were just a matter of derivation.

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Malaria Gaining Resistance to Best Available Treatment

2009-11-22T02:23:00.000-08:00

By Nathan Seppa, Science News

WASHINGTON — Malaria that is resistant to the best available drug is more widespread in Southeast Asia than previously reported, new research shows. The worrisome finding poses a risk that travelers could carry this strain of the malaria parasite to other parts of the globe and unwittingly spread it, scientists reported Nov. 19 at a meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

The frontline drug in question is called artemisinin, the most potent medication currently in use against malaria. Signs of malarial resistance to artemisinin have surfaced over the past several years in Cambodia (SN: 11/22/08, p. 9). The new findings confirm that resistant malaria has now cropped up beyond a spot on the border of Thailand and Cambodia where it was initially detected. Now it has appeared in Vietnam and in two spots along the Burma border with Thailand and China.

“Things are changing. There’s no doubt the signs are concerning,” said Robert Newman, director of the Global Malaria Programme at the World Health Organization in Geneva. But he added that these signals are early and need further verification.

Patients in these areas take longer on average to overcome a malaria infection when given a standard combination of artemisinin and another antimalarial. This lag results from slower clearance of the malaria parasites from the blood, said WHO’s Pascal Ringwald, a medical officer who presented the update.

Patients who remain ill for longer stretches despite treatment need extra medication to recover from malaria and are also more likely to have severe or fatal cases, Ringwald said.

Malaria is caused by a single-celled parasite that infects the blood. Symptoms include fever, headache, chills, anemia and a swollen spleen. Of the more than 350 million people who come down with malaria worldwide each year, up to 1 million die. Mosquitoes spread the parasite from person to person.

Malaria has a history of becoming resistant to drugs, and artemisinin now risks becoming the most recent addition to that list. The new reports are disheartening to doctors because artemisinin normally packs a considerable wallop. Although artemisinin is a short-acting drug that gets cleared from the body in a few hours, it makes the most of its time — driving down parasite levels dramatically.

Using artemisinin alone invites resistance. So the standard therapy teams it with one of the longer-acting drugs, which perform mop-up duty on the remaining parasites, said Christopher King, a physician and epidemiologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

The new flashes of resistance may have arisen because combination treatment isn’t always available. And since artemisinin can be bought over the counter in many parts of Asia, people seeking relief don’t always follow the WHO guidelines of pairing artemisinin with another drug, King said.

Also, taking artemisinin for a fever that isn’t caused by malaria can allow resistant strains of the parasite to take hold, Newman said.

In the past, malaria’s resistance to other drugs has been linked to specific genetic changes in the parasite. The precise mechanism underlying resistance to artemisinin is still unsolved, King said.

Artemisinin is derived from extracts of the sweet wormwood bush. The bush’s leaves have been used as a folk remedy against fevers for roughly 2,000 years in Asia but fell out of use in the 20th century with the introduction of modern antimalarial drugs such as chloroquine.

During the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh appealed to China for traditional remedies for soldiers who had malaria. Tea made from sweet wormwood leaves worked and ultimately became the basis for artemisinin drugs. It’s not clear whether parasites in Southeast Asia are the first to become resistant because they have had a long history with artemisinin, or if other factors are involved, Newman said.

Image: Malaria from Plasmodium falciparum. Flickr/Got_Jenna

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Evolution and history compulsory

2009-11-22T02:21:00.000-08:00

Evolution should be taught early, scientists advised

Primary school children in England will have to learn about evolution and British history under a shake-up of the national curriculum.

Schools Minister Vernon Coaker says the subjects will be compulsory elements of a new primary school curriculum being introduced in 2011.

Scientists and humanists had lobbied ministers for the inclusion of evolution in the theme-based timetable.

History is already compulsory, but there were fears it would be sidelined.

Schools will not be told which parts of British history to teach.

Earlier this year, when the curriculum changes were announced, critics complained that children would learn more about the internet than history.

Ministers say they want to "reinforce" history by making it a statutory element of the new primary curriculum.

Campaign

The curriculum is set out in a new education Bill just introduced to Parliament.

It was drawn up after a review by Sir Jim Rose, which called for distinct subjects to be replaced by six new "areas of learning".

Mr Coaker said: "What and how our children learn lies at the heart of our policies to raise standards.

"We've seen that an inspiring and rigorous curriculum can transform failing schools, which is why these plans are based on the very best practice from this country's top-class teachers."

He added: "Teachers will have more freedom to use their professional judgement and creativity to make links between subjects that make sense to their pupils: from linking history to the arts, or science to PE."

Evolution is arguably the most important concept underlying the life sciences

Andrew Copson, British Humanist Association

The British Humanist Association (BHA) had led a campaign to have Darwin's theory of how life evolved through natural selection made a compulsory element of the new primary curriculum.

It organised a public letter signed by more than 500 from scientists and supporters.

Andrew Copson of the BHA said: "This is excellent news. Evolution is arguably the most important concept underlying the life sciences.

"Providing children with an understanding of it an early age will help lay the foundations for a surer scientific understanding later on."

He added: "Public authorities clearly need to do more to tackle the growing threat to the public's understanding of science from creationist-inspired beliefs and other pseudoscience".

Evolution is already taught in secondary schools and many primary schools, but under the curriculum changes, it will become compulsory for primary pupils, with the recommendation that they are taught the subject in their later years at school.

The new curriculum says schools must "investigate and explain how plants and animals are interdependent and are diverse and adapted to their environment by natural selection".

Professor Sir Martin Taylor, vice-president of the Royal Society, said: "We are delighted to see evolution explicitly included in the primary curriculum.

"One of the most remarkable achievements of science over the last two hundred years has been to show how humans and all other organisms on the earth arose through the process of evolution."

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Extinction of Giant Mammals Changed Landscape Dramatically

2009-11-22T02:19:00.000-08:00

By Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer

The last breaths of mammoths and mastodons some 13,000 years ago have garnered plenty of research and just as much debate. What killed these large beasts in a relative instant of geologic time?

A question asked less often: What happened when they disappeared?

A new study, based partly on dung fungus, provides some answers to both questions. The upshot: The landscape changed dramatically.

"As soon as herbivores drop off the landscape, we see different plant communities," said lead researcher Jacquelyn Gill of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, adding the result was an "ecosystem upheaval."

Gill and her colleagues found that once emptied of a diversity of large animals equaling or surpassing that of Africa's Serengeti, the landscape completely changed. Trees once kept in check by the mammoth gang popped up and so did wildfires sparked by the woody debris.

The results, which are detailed in the Nov. 20 issue of the journal Science, could paint a picture of what's to come if today's giant plant-eaters, such as elephants, disappear.

"We know some of these large animals are among the most threatened that we have on the landscape today and they have a lot of large habitat requirements and they eat a lot of food," Gill told LiveScience. "If these animals go extinct we can expect the landscape will respond."

Dung fungus

Gill and her colleagues analyzed sediment samples collected from Appleman Lake in Indiana as well as data from sites in New York.

They focused on a dung fungus called Sporormiella that must pass through a mammal's gut to complete its life cycle and reproduce via spores. More of such spores indicate more dung and more megafauna around to contribute to the fecal contents. Within that same sediment, the team looked at pollen and charcoal as proxies for vegetation and fires, respectively.

Sediment layers accumulate over time and can indicate when the stuff embedded in it was around. By matching up the dung spores along with vegetation and fire indicators in certain layers, the researchers figured the large herbivores were already declining before the vegetation started changing or wildfires took off.

The changes in spore abundance suggest the megafauna began to decline some time between 14,800 and 13,700 years ago. By 13,500 years ago, the decline was in full force, Gill said.

Rather than getting vaporized in an instant, the results suggest the animals gradually dwindled for about 1,000 years.

Here's how it may have gone down: The large herbivores started to decline. Without such leafy eaters to keep broad-leaved species in check, trees such as black ash and elm took over a landscape once dominated by conifers. Soon after, the accumulation of woody debris sparked an increase in wildfires, another key shaper of landscapes, the researchers say.

What killed the mammoths?

As for what drove the beasts into their graves, Gill says the findings don't put the nail in the coffin, but do rule out some ideas. To explain the extinction, scientists have put forth climate change, hunting by humans such as the Clovis people (known for using advanced spear tips), and even impact by a comet. The answer could be a combination of several factors, scientists say.

Gill says this new study is a strong one because all of the evidence comes from one place, and so the researchers aren't making comparisons across different regions whose sediments may be off in terms of timing.

If the timing is accurate, as Gill says it should be, the findings can rule out the idea of a meteor or comet killing off the creatures some 13,000 years ago.

And since the plant community didn't change until after the big guys began to decline, that's a mark against climate change. (A warming climate was considered the cause of a revamping of vegetation, and thus animal habitat.)

"At this site, we can say that habitat loss didn't cause the decline, because the major habitat shift happens after the collapse [of the megafauna]," Gill said. "And habitat change is a big line of argument in the climate camp. If climate change is causing these extinctions, you'll have to evoke another process than habitat loss."

Hunting, at least that by the Clovis people, can also be ruled out at the site.

"It seems as though the animals were already in decline by the time [Clovis] people adopted this tool kit," Gill said, referring to the advanced spear tips thought to be more efficient at taking down large prey than hunting instruments used by humans prior to the Clovis.

The new study was funded by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and the National Science Foundation.

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Bangladesh arsenic poisoning mystery solved

2009-11-22T02:15:00.000-08:00

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may have solved one of the great environmental disaster riddles of the last 30 years -- where did the arsenic that has poisoned between two and 25 million people in Bangladesh come from?

In a paper from this week’s edition of the journal Nature Geoscience, engineers from MIT, Harvard and the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in Dhaka, Bangladesh offer a new potential source -- tens of thousands of human-dug ponds.

The ponds were dug over the past 50 years to provide dirt so home could be sited on high ground and so flood barriers could be built.

Using chemical tracers, the researchers show that when organic carbon settles at the bottom of these ponds, it seeps underground where microbes consume it. This creates a chain of biochemical events that causes naturally occurring arsenic to dissolve out of the sediment and into the ground water.

Tragically, international health agencies in the 1970s began a successful push to get villagers to dig shallow tube wells for water, to stop the spread of cholera and other water-borne bacterial diseases that came from drinking pond and river water. Upwards of 40% of those wells are now contaminated with arsenic.

Beginning in the late 1970s the country was struck with severe, widespread arsenic poisoning. The immediate symptoms are violent stomach pains, vomiting, diarrhea, convulsions and cramps. Over the longer term, serious skin diseases can result.

Scientists at MIT and Harvard also estimate that the in the end the exposure will result in 125,000 cases of skin cancer, and 3,000 deaths from internal cancers.

The researchers found that when rice fields are irrigated with this arsenic-laden water, the rice filtered arsenic out of the water system. So one solution is to dig wells for drinking water below the level of the ponds. Another would be to put shallow wells under rice fields which naturally filter the arsenic.

They estimate that by replacing 31% of the wells in the country with deeper wells the health effects of the arsenic could be reduced by 70%.

By Elizabeth Weise
Photo: Installing a pore-water sampler into the soil of a rice field. (Sarah Jane White, Nature)

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Water mission returns first data

2009-11-22T02:12:00.000-08:00

By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News

Smos builds up its map data in strips as it sweeps around the Earth

Europe's latest Earth observation satellite has returned its first data.

Smos was launched earlier this month on a quest to help scientists understand better how water is cycled around the Earth.

The spacecraft will make the first global maps of the amount of moisture held in soils and of the quantity of salts dissolved in the oceans.

The data will have wide uses but should improve weather forecasts and warnings of extreme events, such as floods.

"Smos is performing like a dream," said Dr Yann Kerr, a lead investigator on the mission from the Centre for the Study of the Biosphere from Space (Cesbio), Toulouse, France.

"Everything went as clockwork and exactly as expected or better up to now. We did not expect to have images so soon," he told BBC News.

The European Space Agency's (Esa) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (Smos) satellite was launched on 2 November.

The mission will run for three years in the first instance

After its initial check-out in orbit, its sole instrument - an interferometric radiometer called Miras - was sent live on Tuesday this week.

The first publicly released image on this page has not been properly calibrated by researchers but they say it proves the instrument is in good shape.

Miras is some eight metres across; it has the look of helicopter rotor blades.

It measures changes in the wetness of the land and in the salinity of seawater by observing variations in the natural microwave emission coming up off the surface of the planet.

It does this through 69 antennas positioned on a central structure and along the lengths of its three arms.

Generally speaking, the "colder" (blue) the "temperature brightness" of the microwave signal, the saltier the water and the wetter the soil; but a lot of processing will be needed before any real values can be attached to the measurements coming down from Smos.

"Moreover, there seem to be radio frequency interferences (RFIs) over China, western Russia and parts of Europe (the reddish stripes)," explained Dr Kerr.

"We will have to tune the reconstruction algorithm before we can reduce or address these."

Scientists were well aware before launch that RFIs might be a problem. Smos is operating in the so-called L-band (21cm) which is supposed to be protected, but pre-flight testing established known interference hotspots, such as airports.

The 315m-euro ($465m; £280m) Smos programme, although led by Esa, has with significant input from French and Spanish interests. The satellite is expected to operate for at least three years.

The amount of water retained in soils varies between about 5% and 50%

This will cover most conditions from 'bone dry' to 'mud bath'

Smos sees the entire range with an accuracy of 4% at the 50km scale

Natural salinity in water covers the range from near zero to 30%

Drinking water might be one extreme; salt lakes would be the other extreme

Smos is seeking sea waters which are typically in the 3-3.5% range

This needs high accuracy (0.01-0.02%). Maps are at the 200km scale

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Water found in lunar impact probably came from comets

2009-11-22T02:08:00.000-08:00

Volatiles, including hydrocarbons known to be present in comets, have been detected in lunar material kicked up by NASA's LCROSS mission (Image: T.A.Rector/I.P.Dell'Antonio

by Dana Mackenzie, Houston

The mystery of where the moon's water came from may soon be solved. Evidence from NASA's LCROSS mission suggests much of it was delivered by comets rather than forming on the surface through an interaction with the solar wind.

In October, the mission crashed two impactors – a spent rocket stage and a few minutes later, the LCROSS spacecraft itself – into a crater near the moon's south pole. The spacecraft snapped images and took spectra of lunar debris kicked up by the rocket's impact and found that it contained the unmistakable signs of water.

Previous missions have also found hints of lunar water but its source has not been clear. One idea is that it forms when hydrogen atoms from the solar wind latch onto oxygen atoms in the lunar soil, creating hydroxyl and water.

But now, the evidence is mounting in favour of an alternative explanation – comet impacts. The data was discussed this week at the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group meeting, a gathering of 160 lunar scientists in Houston, Texas.

'Dirty iceballs'

The first line of evidence comes from compounds that vaporise readily, called volatiles. LCROSS found spectral signs of volatiles containing carbon and hydrogen – likely methane and ethanol – as well as others such as ammonia and carbon dioxide. "It appears that we impacted into a very volatile-rich area," LCROSS principal scientist Tony Colaprete told the conference.

These compounds should have been mostly lost to space billions of years ago, when the moon coalesced from the debris of an impact between the Earth and a Mars-sized object. Water formed through an interaction with the solar wind would therefore be relatively pure – and free of volatiles.

But comets, which are thought to have been responsible for many of the moon's impact scars, are "dirty iceballs" known to contain volatiles such as methane. "If you can nail down the source of the water [on the moon], that could tell us a lot about the cometary history of the moon for the last couple of billion years," says Larry Taylor of the University of Tennessee.

High concentrations

The second line of evidence pointing to comets comes from the amount of water detected. The solar wind is expected to form water in minute amounts, amounting to concentrations of no more than 1 per cent in the lunar soil.

LCROSS team members are still analysing the data, but calculations suggest the concentration of water is higher than that. "The data are consistent with a total hydrogen content in the range of several per cent," says Colaprete.

Beyond their link to comets, volatiles generated excitement at the meeting because of their value as a resource for human spaceflight. While water is important for survival on the moon, it is the water's hydrogen that can be used as rocket propellant.

The possibility of finding compounds like ethanol and methane, which can be used as fuel directly, makes the economic case for returning astronauts to the moon even sweeter. "LCROSS has given us our ticket back to the moon," says Noah Petro of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

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First ape woman suggests human ancestors may have started walking in pursuit of sex

2009-10-04T04:12:00.000-07:00

By Daily Mail Reporter

She lived at the dawn of a new era, when chimps and people began walking (or climbing) along their own evolutionary trails. This is Ardi - the oldest member of the human family tree we've found so far.

Short, hairy and with long arms, she roamed the forests of Africa 4.4million years ago.

Her discovery, reported in detail for the first time today, sheds light on a crucial period when we were just leaving the trees. Some scientists said she could provide evidence that our ancestors first started walking upright in the pursuit of sex.

Ardi's skeleton (left) revealed she was 4ft tall and weighed 7st 12oz

Enlarge

Conventional wisdom says our earliest ancestors first stood up on two legs when they moved out of the forest and into the open savannas. But this does not explain why Ardi's species was bipedal (able to walk on two legs) while still living partly in the trees.

Owen Lovejoy from Kent State University said the answer could be as simple as food and sex.

He pointed out that throughout evolution males have fought with other males for the right to mate with fertile females. Therefore you would expect dominant males with big fierce canines to pass their genes down the generations.

But say a lesser male, with small stubby teeth realised he could entice a fertile female into mating by bringing her some food? Males would be far more successful food-providers if they had their hands free to carry home items like fruit and roots if they walked on two legs.

Mr Lovejoy said this could explain why males from Ardi's species had small canines and stood upright - it was all in the pursuit of sex.

He added that it could also suggest that monogamous relationships may be far older than was first thought.

Ardi - short for Ardipithecus ramidus or 'root of the ground ape' - stood 4ft tall and weighed 110lb.

She lived a million years before the famous Lucy, the previous earliest skeleton of a hominid who was dug up in 1974.

Experts believe Ardi is very, very close to the 'missing link' common ancestor of humans and chimps, thought to have lived five to seven million years ago.

'This is not that common ancestor, but it's the closest we have ever been able to come,' said Dr Tim White, director of the Human Evolution Research Centre at the University of California, Berkeley, who reports the discovery today in Science. The first fossilised and crushed bones of Ardi were found in 1994 in Ethiopia's Afar Rift.

But it has taken an international team of 47 scientists 17 years to piece together, analyse and describe the remains.

Ardi's skeleton had been trampled and scattered, while the skull was crushed to just two inches in height.

Despite this, Dr David Pilbeam, curator of palaeoanthropology at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology said: 'This is one of the most important discoveries for the study of human evolution.

'It is relatively complete in that it preserves head, hands, feet, and some critical parts in between.'

Enlarge

Digital representations of Ardi's skull (left) and hand (right)

Researchers have pieced together 125 fragments of bone - including much of her skull, hands, feet, arms, legs and pelvis - which were dated using the volcanic layers of soil above and below the find.

The results were surprising. Previously, scientists believed that our common ancestor would have been very chimp-like, and that ancient hominids such as Ardi would still have much in common with them.

But she was not suited like a modern- day chimp to swinging or hanging from trees or walking on her knuckles.

This suggests that chimps and gorillas developed those characteristics after the split with humans - challenging the idea that they are merely an 'unevolved' version of us.

Analysis of the ape skeleton of Ardi, found in Ethiopia in 1994, reveals humans and chimps evolved separately from a common ancestor

Ardipithecus ramidus

- Volcanic layers around the fossil were used to date it from 4.4million years ago

- Ardi's upper canine teeth are more similar to stubby human teeth than sharp chimpanzee teeth

- Tooth enamel analysis revealed they ate fruit, nuts and leaves

- Ardi's brain was positioned in a similar way to that of humans

- Pelvis and hip show the gluteal muscles were positioned so she could walk upright

Ardi's feet were rigid enough to allow her to walk upright some of the time, but she still had a grasping big toe for use in climbing trees.

And she had long arms but short palms and fingers which were flexible, allowing her to support her body weight on her palms.

Her upper canine teeth are more like the stubby teeth of modern people than the long, sharp ones of chimps. An analysis of her tooth enamel suggests she ate fruit, nuts and leaves.

Scientists believe she was a female because her skull is relatively small and lightly built. Her teeth were also smaller than other members of the same family that were found later.

Alan Walker, of Pennsylvania Sate University, told Science: 'These things were very odd creatures. You know what Tim (White) once said: 'If you wanted to find something that moved like these things you'd have to go to the bar in Star Wars'.'

Since the discovery, scientists have unearthed another 35 members of the Ardipithecus family.

Ardi was found in alongside crumbling fossils of 29 species of birds and 20 species of small mammals - including owls, parrots, shrews, bats and mice.

Lucy, also found in Africa, thrived a million years after Ardi and was of the more human-like genus Australopithecus.

'In Ardipithecus we have an unspecialized form that hasn't evolved very far in the direction of Australopithecus. So when you go from head to toe, you're seeing a mosaic creature that is neither chimpanzee, nor is it human. It is Ardipithecus,' said Dr White.

How Ardipithecus fits into humankind's evolutionary path

He noted that Charles Darwin, whose research in the 19th century paved the way for the science of evolution, was cautious about the last common ancestor between humans and apes.

'Darwin said we have to be really careful. The only way we're really going to know what this last common ancestor looked like is to go and find it. Well, at 4.4 million years ago we found something pretty close to it,' Dr White added.

'And, just like Darwin appreciated, evolution of the ape lineages and the human lineage has been going on independently since the time those lines split, since that last common ancestor we shared.'
Some details about Ardi in the collection of papers:

- Ardi was found in Ethiopia's Afar Rift, where many fossils of ancient plants and animals have been discovered. Findings near the skeleton indicate that at the time it was a wooded environment. Fossils of 29 species of birds and 20 species of small mammals were found at the site.

- Geologist Giday WoldeGabriel of Los Alamos National Laboratory was able to use volcanic layers above and below the fossil to date it to 4.4 million years ago.

- Paleoanthropologist Gen Suwa of the University of Tokyo reported that Ardi's face had a projecting muzzle, giving her an ape-like appearance. But it didn't thrust forward quite as much as the lower faces of modern African apes do.

Some features of her skull, such as the ridge above the eye socket, are quite different from those of chimpanzees.

The details of the bottom of the skull, where nerves and blood vessels enter the brain, indicate that Ardi's brain was positioned in a way similar to modern humans, possibly suggesting that the hominid brain may have been already poised to expand areas involving aspects of visual and spatial perception.

The first signs of Ardi were discovered in Middle Awash, a desert site that would have been much wetter, teeming with animal life and thickly covered with trees 4 million years ago. A graduate student from the University of California at Berkley found two finger bones. Further excavation turned up pieces of pelvis, feet, hands and skull. By the end of three years, scientists realised they'd found a paleontological treasure.

The search continues for the 'last common ancestor' from which both modern humans and modern chimpanzees can trace their ancestry.

Many experts think the common ancestor lived at least 7 million years ago.

Research on Ardi suggests that this ancestor didn't look nearly as much like a modern chimpanzee as had been previously suspected.

This suggests that chimpanzees have themselves evolved significantly.

For more information visit www.sciencemag.org

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Opportunity Finds Another Big Meteorite

2009-10-04T04:09:00.000-07:00

Written by Nancy Atkinson

It's amazing what a rover can find laying by the side of the road. The Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has found a rock that apparently is another meteorite. Less than three weeks ago, Opportunity drove away from a larger meteorite called "Block Island" that the rover examined for six weeks. Now, this new meteorite, dubbed "Shelter Island," is another fairly big rock, about 47 centimeters (18.8 inches) long, that fell from the skies. Block Island is about 60 centimeters (2 feet) across and was just 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) away from this latest meteorite find. At first look, the two meteorites look to be of a similar makeup; Opportunity found that Block Island was is made of nickel and iron.

This image was taken during Oppy's 2,022nd Martian day, or sol, (Oct. 1, 2009).

See below for a 3-D version of this image created by Stu Atkinson.

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Scientists Discover What Makes The Same Type Of Cells Different

2009-10-04T04:07:00.000-07:00

A research team led by Lucas Pelkmans at ETH Zürich has managed to decipher a well-known phenomenon that had, until now, remained unexplained: why cells of the same type can react differently, and what the reason for this is.

The properties of a cell population determine the different cell activities observed in cells of the same type. This is the conclusion drawn by a research team lead by Lucas Pelkmans, professor at the Institute for Molecular Systems Biology at ETH Zürich. The scientists examined the cause of the well-known phenomenon of cell heterogeneity. Until now, the reasons behind the different reactions seen in cells of the same type had not been scrutinised.

No random distribution

After three years of intensive development and research work, researchers have developed a computer-supported process, which allows them to observe the processes behind the variability of individual cells in cell cultures with millions of cells for the first time, and uncover the secret behind these processes. Until now, cell variability was simply called “noise”, implying statistical random distribution. However, the results of the study now show that the different reactions are not random, but that certain causes lead to predictable distribution patterns. The study has now been published in “Nature” and Pelkmans is glad to be reaping the first rewards for the research project, which was supported by ETH Zürich to the sum of 1.8 million Swiss Francs.

“For the project, we created an automated setup, the RNAi image-based screening centre, which we used to carry out a high turnover of cell experiments”, Pelkmans explains. The computer-supported methods were developed in conjunction with the experiments and allow the phenotypes of the cells to be quantified and described automatically. The data is fed into models and used to show how individual cell properties develop and affect each other.

The scientists focused their study on the cell properties predetermined by the population of the cell culture. This includes, for example, the size of the population, the local cell density, the size of an individual cell, whether the cell is on the edge of the cell culture and therefore not limited by another cell on one side, whether the cell is in the process of duplicating its nucleus (mitosis) or whether it is in the process of so-called programmed cell death.

Collecting large volumes of data

For each cell, the scientists examined the variety in endocytosis activity, by which cells invaginate parts of its biological membrane and absorbs the surrounding medium. They further looked at the variable amounts of a certain fat molecule (sphingolipid) on the surface of the cell, which plays an important role in relaying the cell’s signals and reactions. They also infected the cell culture with three different viruses and observed the differences in progression of the infection.

“We created a multivariable analysis of individual cells and obtained a very large number of very different readings”, Pelkmans explains. With this huge volume of data, the researchers used computer models to determine which variables affect each other. This allowed them to establish many rules, coined “heterogeneity signatures” by the scientists, which describe the way in which population-dependant properties of a cell culture influence cell reactions in the models.

Properties of the cell cultures determine variability

As the next step, the scientists tested how well the models would be able to predict the reactions of the cell. It was shown that this is possible with a high degree of accuracy and that the variability is clearly determined by the properties of the cell population. The cell cultures are naturally different from one another, explaining the broad variation in reactions of individual cells in the respective cell cultures during endocytosis and viral infections. For example, endocytosis is more uniform and is easier to control when the cell culture is densely populated, and certain diarrhoea-causing viruses can infect a less densely populated cell area more easily.

The findings are of particular significance for research using comparative cell cultures: “This is one of the most important methods, but at the same time also one that poses big problems for cell biologists”, says Pelkmans. The study has shown that reactions in two cell cultures can be better compared when the models to predict these reactions in each cell culture are used as a reference, taking into account the effect of the properties of a cell population of at least ten thousand cells. This is an important aspect, for example, for the pharmaceutical industry. As the study shows, many changes do not directly influence the cell, but the population as a whole, which then leads to changes in behaviour of individual cells.

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The Mating Game is a Team Sport

2009-10-04T04:06:00.000-07:00

Are you looking for love but having trouble convincing the target of your infatuation to take you seriously? Or maybe hoping that certain unsavory types will stop looking for love with you? Well I'd recommend maybe updating your wardrobe and not hanging out in seedy bars by yourself anymore, but you might also be interested in new research suggesting that a important means of achieving your romantic goals involves less about what you do or where you do it, and more about who you do it with. That is, social coordination can improve your love life, whether that means finding the right person or avoiding the wrong one.

The idea that other people often factor into our search for romance is not new. Overbearing parents and desirable-but-pompous peers are two classic archetypes of history, literature and Hollywood movies (think Egeus in A Midsummer Night's Dream or Iceman in Top Gun). In scientific research, the role these other people play has by and large been restricted to competition. If you're a guy, other men represent people to trump in status or best in fights. If you're a girl, being more attractive or popular than other women is the name of the game. However, this other-people-as-competition framework misses a huge chunk of how we interact socially within romantic situations. We also: talk about potential romantic partners with people, find people to date by socially networking, and even directly help each other perform better on the mating market. You've probably done such things with your friends and family members. You may even have actively refrained from competing over the same guy or girl. These more cooperative forms of courtship behavior emerge through successful coordination of our own romantic interests with the interests of people with whom we share close, platonic relationships.

These behaviors may be immediately familiar, but research is now examining the evolutionary basis for "cooperative courtship" and identifying its differential appeal for women and men. Evolutionarily, the mating behavior of males and females (in all species) tends to be influenced by the physical and resource-based costs of pregnancy. Pregnancy is expensive, on the body as well as the pocketbook. The biological sex that spends the most effort gestating and rearing kids has the most to invest, and thus tends to be the most picky about choosing romantic partners (i.e., if you have to pay the cost, make sure to get a good deal). In many animals, including people, females are relatively more choosy. When it comes to cooperative courtship, therefore, females help each other to evaluate potential mates and avoid mates who don't make the grade. Males, on the other hand, tend to help each other get chosen. We see evidence for these strategies in animals, as when male turkeys help each other attract mates and when female bonobo chimpanzees form alliances to reduce sexual coercion.

People use very similar strategies, even though birth control has lowered the actual chance of unintended pregnancy. With my colleague Douglas Kenrick, I conducted several studies looking at how people coordinate their romantic interests. In one study, we showed people drawings of flirtatious scenes (see one in the image below) and asked them to identify who was a woman and who was a man.

Who would you guess? In other studies, we asked people about what kind of help people give to their friends and what kind of help they want to receive. We consistently found that everyone wants to help-competition is not the inevitable outcome. And though everyone helped in multiple ways, we found that women tended to help their friends build romantic barriers (weeding out the undesirable guys and testing the desirable ones), and men tended to help their friends break down those barriers (attempting to counter women's strategies). People used all sorts of techniques to do this, including having friends pose as counterfeit romantic partners (this worked for women AND men). Not only that, people also switched the kind of help they gave to their opposite-sex friends-now men helped women build barriers and women helped men break down barriers.

We even set up a Dating Game experiment in which people came to the lab expecting to be a contestant on a game show. The show wasn't all about competition though. At one point in the game, contestants had the option to act cooperatively with other contestants. Interestingly, in this "real-world" environment, women still gave more help when the potential date was an undesirable guy (suggesting barrier-building) and men still gave more help when the potential date was a desirable woman (suggesting barrier-breaking). We concluded that many of the romantic behaviors we think of as unique to our time and culture actually have their roots in universal biological principles.

There is still a lot of research to be done. I'd love to hear from people who have observed cooperative courtship in other cultures. Not all of the behaviors I mentioned will be cross-culturally identical, but I expect that people everywhere are helping each other achieve their romantic goals (e.g., in some cultures, family might provide more help than friends). I also think these findings are interesting because of their implications for cooperation in other contexts. For instance, how do people cooperate in business negotiations or in non-romantic social networking, and might women and men be better at certain negotiation and networking strategies than at others? Leave some comments below and let me know your thoughts.

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Scientists Develop Nasal Spray That Improves Memory

2009-10-04T04:04:00.000-07:00

Good news for procrastinating students: a nasal spray developed by a team of German scientists promises to give late night cram sessions a major boost, if a good night's sleep follows. (Credit: iStockphoto/Ana Blazic)

Good news for procrastinating students: a nasal spray developed by a team of German scientists promises to give late night cram sessions a major boost, if a good night's sleep follows. In a research report featured as the cover story of the October 2009 print issue of The FASEB Journal, these scientists show that a molecule from the body's immune system (interleukin-6) when administered through the nose helps the brain retain emotional and procedural memories during REM sleep.

"Sleep to remember, a dream or reality?" said Lisa Marshall, co-author of the study, from the Department of Neuroendocrinology at the University of Lubeck in Germany. "Here, we provide the first evidence that the immunoregulatory signal interleukin-6 plays a beneficial role in sleep-dependent formation of long-term memory in humans."

To make this discovery, Marshall and colleagues had 17 healthy young men spend two nights in the laboratory. On each night after reading either an emotional or neutral short story, they sprayed a fluid into their nostrils which contained either interleukin-6 or a placebo fluid. The subsequent sleep and brain electric activity was monitored throughout the night. The next morning subjects wrote down as many words as they could remember from each of the two stories. Those who received the dose of IL-6 could remember more words.

"If a nasal spray can improve memory, perhaps we're on our way to giving some folks a whiff of common sense, such as accepting the realities of evolution," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "This is exciting piece of interdisciplinary science, since IL-6 had previously been considered a by-product of inflammation, not an agent that affects cognition."

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New fossil moves story of mankind back one million years

2009-10-04T04:01:00.000-07:00

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent

The seven stone, four-foot tall female roamed forests 4.4 million years ago – a million years before the previous oldest discovered fossil.

Her skeleton promises to fill in gaps about how we became human and evolved from apes. It has already reversed some common assumptions of evolution.

Rather than humans evolving from chimps, the new find provides evidence that chimps and humans evolved together from another common more ancient ancestor.

Each has evolved and changed separately along the way, it is believed.

Formally known as Ardipithecus ramidus — which means root of the ground ape — the find is detailed in 11 research papers published in the journal Science.

“This is not that common ancestor, but it’s the closest we have ever been able to come,” said Dr Tim White, an anthropologist and one of the researchers at the University of California.

The lines that evolved into modern humans and living apes probably shared an ancestor six million to seven million years ago, the research suggests.

Ardi has many traits that do not appear in modern-day African apes, leading to the conclusion that the apes evolved extensively since they shared that last common ancestor with humans.

A study of Ardi, under way since the first bones were discovered in 1994 in the Afar region of Ethiopia, indicates her species lived in the woodlands and could climb on all fours along tree branches.

But the development of arms and legs indicates she did not spend much time in the trees, the study claims.

Her pelvis suggests she walked upright and her teeth are closer to humans than primates. While she would have had a muzzle, it did not project out as much as modern apes.

Dr White described her as a “mosaic” that was neither human or chimpanzee.

“The only way we’re really going to know what this last common ancestor looked like is to go and find it,” he said. “Well, at 4.4 million years ago we found something pretty close to it.”

Dr David Pilbeam, palaeoanthropology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, said: “This is one of the most important discoveries for the study of human evolution.

“It is relatively complete in that it preserves head, hands, feet, and some critical parts in between.”

Until the discovery of Ardi, the earliest well-known stage of human evolution was Australopithecus, the small-brained, fully bipedal “ape man” that lived between four million and one million years ago.

The most famous Australopithecus fossil is the 3.2-million-year-old “Lucy,” found in 1974 about 45 miles north of where Ardi would later be discovered.

Lucy was described as the “mother of man” and the missing link between humans and chimps. Before Ardi, she was thought to be the oldest fossil of a human ancestor that walked on two legs.

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Making people move in slow motion

2009-10-04T03:02:00.000-07:00

By Victoria Gill
Science reporter, BBC News

Brain waves appear to have a direct effect on behaviour

Researchers have used electrodes to make people move in slow motion.

The scientists "boosted" human subjects' brain waves - applying a small alternating current via electrodes on the volunteers' scalps.

These waves are patterns generated naturally by groups of neurons, or brain cells, firing in a rhythm.

In the journal Current Biology, the researchers described how their finding shows that brain waves directly affect human behaviour.

The results also reveal clues about movement disorders, such as Parkinson's disease, sufferers of which have difficulty making voluntary movements.

Lead author Professor Peter Brown, from University College London in the UK, said: "We induced the same patterns as you see in normal brains via electrodes."

He and his team boosted one specific form of relatively low frequency brain wave called a beta oscillation.

"Different parts of the brain work together and generate certain frequencies," he explained, "and the movement areas of the brain come together in beta activity.

"That activity is suppressed just prior to and during movement, so we think the body gets rid of it to prepare to make a new movement."

Boosting beta brain waves slowed people's movement by 10%

To investigate the effect of this beta activity, the research team gave healthy human subjects electrical stimulation through their scalps.

"The currents we use are very small... but [they] shape the likelihood of neurons firing in the imposed rhythm," he told BBC News.

During the test each volunteer was shown a dot on a computer screen. They were able to control another marker on the same screen with a joystick.

"The dot jumped to a new location and when they were signalled to by an alarm they had to move [their marker] to that new location as quickly as they could," Professor Brown explained.

"When we applied the beta stimulation that quick movement was slowed by 10%.

"So we have a direct experiment showing a causal link between the oscillations and the behaviour," he said.

Professor Brown explained that beta activity was important in Parkinson's disease.

"So this information is very helpful," he said. "Since we've shown that this slows people down, it tells us what Parkinson's disease treatments should be trying to suppress."

Professor John Stein, a neuroscientist from the University of Oxford pioneered the theory of what he refers to as a "beta straitjacket" - a pattern of brain activity that prevents Parkinson's disease patients from making voluntary movements.

"The theory is that... in Parkinson's disease when people try to move they cannot suppress beta [brain waves] and therefore cannot move," he told BBC News.

"This study is the first to show... in normal subjects that beta activity actually slows movement. This supports a causal role for [the] activity in causing a fixed posture and tending to prevent voluntary movements."

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Shell Executives Accuse Oil-Covered Otter Of Playing It Up

2009-10-04T02:56:00.000-07:00

The otter, milking it for every last ounce of sympathy.

OAK HARBOR, WA—Executives from the Shell Oil Company blasted a floundering, oil-covered sea otter Monday, accusing the small aquatic mammal of grossly exaggerating the effects of last week's hazardous petroleum spill.

According to Shell president Marvin Odum, the otter has been putting on "quite a show" in front of rescue workers and clean-up crews, and is making the 860,000-gallon, three-mile-wide toxic slick seem like a much bigger deal than it actually is.

"He's fine," said Odum, referring to the 40-pound sea creature, who was found washed ashore and appeared to be suffering from anaphylactic shock. "Trust me, before all of the cameras and reporters showed up, our little buddy here was having no problem at all cleaning himself off. Now, all of a sudden, it's severe spastic convulsions this and complete kidney failure that."

"Seriously, come on," the Shell executive continued. "Talk about laying it on thick."

Odum, who was alerted to the massive petroleum spill early Monday morning, claimed that the attention-seeking otter was not only overdoing it with his frantic and anguished squealing, but that his habit of gasping desperately for oxygen was "melodramatic."

In addition, Odum claimed that the otter's rapidly fluctuating body temperature and growing heart palpitations were nothing more than a sad attempt to curry favor with Coast Guard officials, Greenpeace volunteers, and anybody else not smart enough to see right through his "little ploy."

Enlarge Image

Shell executives were disgusted by the flamboyant, over-the-top act put on by contaminated wildlife Monday.

"Give me a break," Odum said as rescue crews tried to remove hazardous waste from the mammal's pelt. "Clearly, this otter has some weird, personal vendetta against Shell and large corporations in general, and wants everyone to cry at his pathetic sob story."

"Just look at him out there," Odum added while volunteers tried to keep the sea creature from losing consciousness. "The sick bastard's loving every minute of this."

Odum also downplayed claims by rescue workers that the otter may not be able to handle the stress of the clean-off process, saying that the animal is "acting ridiculous" and is just doing an impression of what he thinks an otter affected by a massive oil spill is supposed to act like.

"The extreme shivering, the wheezing, the prolonged dehydration, it's all part of the same gaudy burlesque," Shell CEO Peter Voser said. "It's simple: The otter gets some oil on his body, and he thinks that gives him carte blanche to play the victim. Don't you people get it? This is exactly what he wants. You're all playing right into his twisted little game."

Voser even called into question the otter's mental stability, citing the sea pup's early attempts to drink the highly contaminated water around him as an example of just how far the publicity-hungry mammal was willing to go to make the Shell Oil Company look like "the bad guy."

On Saturday, Shell chairman Jorma J. Ollila issued a statement accusing the sea mammal of being a master manipulator, and said that what the otter really needs to do is grow up.

Ollila went on to praise a number of petroleum-soaked seals, pelicans, and sea turtles in the contaminated area, commending them for remaining completely still and silent, and not "making a big production" out of the environmental disaster when rescue and camera crews arrived at the scene.

The one-page document, however, focused largely on the single otter, who as of press time was in critical condition.

"Rescue crews have to stop coddling him and giving him everything he wants," Ollila said. "Because if they don't, other otters are just going to pull the exact same crap the next time one of our tankers ruptures and we spill crude oil everywhere."

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Dinosaur eggs are found in India

2009-10-04T02:55:00.000-07:00

By Jyotsna Singh

The find has been likened to the discovery of a treasure trove

Geologists in southern India say they have found hundreds of dinosaur egg clusters which could be about 65 million years old.

It was a chance find discovered when a team of scientists were locating a place to excavate an ancient riverbed in the state of Tamil Nadu.

As they dug deeper they saw layers of what looked like fossilised eggs.

The photos and samples were then sent to various universities who confirmed that they were dinosaur eggs.

Each egg is the size of a football - about 13 to 23cm in diameter, lying buried in sandy nests.

The leader of the team, MU Ramkumar, told the BBC the finding is significant and could help to unravel the mystery about the extinction of dinosaurs.

'Infertile'

"The important finding is that these eggs have been found in different layers that means the dinosaurs came to the place over and over year after year," he said.

Sauropods are renowned for their size

"The second important thing is that we have got volcanic ash deposits on the eggs which suggests that volcanic activity could have caused their extinction.

"The other thing we have found is that all these eggs are unhatched and infertile. So what made the eggs infertile? We need to carry out further studies to learn more from the findings."

Scientists believe the eggs belong to the docile leaf-eating Sauropod branch of dinosaurs. Their remains have been dug up on every continent, including Antarctica.

Palaeontologists use the term to describe large, four-legged, plant-eating dinosaurs with bulky bodies, long necks and tails and tiny heads with relatively small brains.

Dr Ramkumar and his team have called on the central and state governments to protect what they are calling a "Jurassic treasure trove".

The presence of dinosaur eggs was first recorded in the same district by a British geologist in the 1860s. In the 1990s a dinosaur egg was found in a government-owned factory in the state.

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Triton's Ice Doesn't Mix

2009-10-04T02:53:00.001-07:00

Content prepared in collaboration with Discovery Space partner Lowell Observatory.

Triton is a mysterious world. Orbiting the gas giant Neptune, the planet's biggest moon was imaged up-close for the first time during Voyager 2's flyby of the outer reaches of the Solar System in 1989. Since then, no other robotic explorer has strayed close enough to catch a glimpse.

What makes Triton an interesting moon for me is the fact that it wasn't born from Neptune's debris disk when the planet was forming; Triton was kidnapped from the Kuiper Belt. Neptune is a gravitational bully, stirring up the Kuiper Belt population, nudging Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) into "resonances". However, Triton wasn't nudged, it was plucked from this icy region of asteroids and dwarf planets to become the oddball of Neptune's moon system.

Triton, if it wasn't the victim of planetary abduction, is actually an impressively-sized world itself. With a diameter of 2700 km (1680 miles), the is 40% larger than Pluto! It also orbits Neptune the wrong way, its retrograde orbit an obvious sign that it doesn't really belong there.

As one would expect with such a distant moon, it is actually rather icy, and planetary scientists and astronomers have been intrigued by Triton's composition for some time. In a publication soon to appear in the journal Icarus, a team of researchers have carried out a decade-long detailed infrared analysis (NASA Infrared Telescope Facility's SpeX instrument) of the various ices on the surface of Triton and discovered something peculiar. The different types of ice do not mix and they appear to be distributed separately, varying in concentration during the seasons.

"The expectation is that nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide should all go together," said Will Grundy, a Lowell Observatory planetary scientist and lead author of the paper. "They are volatile enough to move around even on the stately seasonal pace of Triton time scales. What we've observed, however, is that carbon monoxide and nitrogen do go together nicely, but the methane is doing its own thing."

Grundy suspects that methane has a different distribution due to the molecule's less volatile behavior at Triton's extremely cold surface temperatures.

The researchers also noticed a significant enhancement of nitrogen ice on Triton's Neptune-facing hemisphere. Also, carbon monoxide ice exhibits similar behaviour as nitrogen concentrations, indicating they occupy the same location. However, the methane ice has a completely different spatial distribution; it appears to be located in regions facing away from Neptune.

Over the 10-year study, the team also noticed that water and carbon dioxide ices (non-volatile ice species) are evenly distributed over the moon's surface.

"This type of long-term, detailed analysis would be equally valuable for small icy planets like Pluto, Eris, and Makemake, all of which are similar to Triton in having volatile ices like methane and nitrogen on their surfaces," said Grundy. "We have been monitoring Pluto's spectrum in parallel with that of Triton, but Eris and Makemake are quite a bit fainter. It is hard to get time on large telescopes to monitor them year after year. We expect that Lowell Observatory's Discovery Channel Telescope will play a valuable role in this type of research when it comes on line."

A special thanks to Steele Wotkyns, Public Relations Manager at Lowell Observatory for providing the material for this article.

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Gravitational Corridors Act Like Space Lanes

2009-10-04T02:50:00.000-07:00

By Bill Christensen

Gravitational corridors describe minimum energy pathways between objects in the solar system; they connect Lagrange points where gravitational forces balance out. They were first investigated by Jules-Henri Poincare, the French mathematician, in the 1890's.

These twisting, ever-changing pathways provide low speed but highly fuel efficient paths between planets and moons. They create what some call an Interplanetary Transport Network connecting all of the major bodies in the solar system.

These paths are reminiscent of that wonderful sf notion space-lanes. As far as I know, the first mention of this phrase was in Edmond Hamilton's 1928 classic Crashing Suns:

He had travelled the space-lanes of the solar system for the greater part of his life, and now all of his time-honored rules of interplanetary navigation had been upset by this new cruiser.

Just a generation later, Philip K. Dick borrowed this majestic term and used it to describe a harrowing daily commute back to Earth:

Commute ships roared on all sides, as Ed Morris made his way wearily home to Earth at the end of a long hard day at the office. The Ganymede-Terra lanes were choked with exhausted, grim-faced businessmen; Jupiter was in opposition to Earth and the trip was a good two hours.

In more modern sf movies, you might want to use a stellar cartography room, like the ones depicted in Star Trek: The Next Generation, to plot these routes.

Hardy spacefarers eager to ply the gravitational corridors between the Earth and Mars in real life should be prepared for a long voyage, though; it could take thousands of years. The best use for these "space-lanes" is as low-consumption routes between the moons of a planet like Jupiter.

One example of a real-life space voyage to use this method was the Genesis spacecraft launched in 2004 to capture solar wind particles and return with them to Earth.

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First rocky planet found outside solar system

2009-09-16T22:49:00.000-07:00

By Richard Allen Greene

(CNN) -- Scientists have discovered the first confirmed Earthlike planet outside our solar system, they announced Wednesday.

An artist's impression shows what the planet may look like in close orbit with its sun.

"This is the first confirmed rocky planet in another system," astronomer Artie Hatzes told CNN, contrasting the solid planet with gaseous ones like Jupiter and Saturn.

But "Earthlike" is a relative term.

The planet's composition may be similar to that of Earth, but its environment is more like a vision of hell, the project's lead astronomer said.

It is so close to the star it orbits "that the place may well look like Dante's Inferno, with a probable temperature on its 'day face' above 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius) and minus-328 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 200 degrees Celsius) on its night face," said Didier Queloz of Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, the project leader.

Hatzes, explaining that one side of the body is always facing the star and the other side always faces away, said the side "facing the sun is probably molten. The other side could actually have ice" if there is water on the planet.

"We think it has no atmosphere to redistribute the heat," Hatzes told CNN from Barcelona, Spain, where he is attending the "Pathways Towards Habitable Planets" conference.

The astronomers were stunned to find a rocky planet so near a star, he said.

"We would have never dreamed you would find a rocky planet so close," he said. "Its year is less than one of our days."

The planet, known as CoRoT-7b, was detected early last year, but it took months of observation to determine that it had a composition roughly similar to Earth's, the European Southern Observatory said in a statement.

Astronomers were able to measure the dimensions of the planet by watching as it passed in front of the star it orbits, then carried out 70 hours of study of the planet's effect on its star to infer its weight.

With that information in hand, they were able to calculate its density -- and were thrilled with what they found, Hatzes said.

"What makes this exciting is you compare the density of this planet to the planets in our solar system, it's only Mercury, Venus and Earth that are similar," Hatzes, of the Thuringer observatory in Germany, told CNN.

They were helped by the fact that CoRoT-7b is relatively close to Earth -- about 500 light years away, in the constellation of Monoceros, the Unicorn.

"It's in our solar neighborhood," Hatzes said. "The thing that made it easier is it's relatively close, so it's relatively bright. If this star was much much farther away, we wouldn't have been able to do these measurements."

At about five times Earth's mass (though not quite twice as large in circumference), it is the smallest planet ever spotted outside our solar system.

It also has the fastest orbit. The planet whizzes around its star more than seven times faster than Earth moves, and is 23 times closer to the star than Mercury is to our sun.

The planet was first detected early in 2008 by the CoRoT satellite, a 30-centimeter space telescope launched by the European Space Agency in December 2006, specifically with the mission of detecting rocky planets outside the solar system.

At least 42 scientists at 17 institutions on three continents worked on the project.

They are publishing their findings in a special issue of the Astronomy and Astrophysics journal on October 22 as "The CoRoT-7 Planetary System: Two Orbiting Super-Earths."

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Scientists Cure Color Blindness In Monkeys

2009-09-16T22:47:00.000-07:00

Researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Florida used gene therapy to cure two squirrel monkeys of color blindness — the most common genetic disorder in people.

A test for color blindness showing a "6". Scientists used gene therapy to cure two squirrel monkeys of color blindness -- the most common genetic disorder in people. (Credit: iStockphoto/Thomas Pullicino)

Writing online September 15 in the journal Nature, scientists cast a rosy light on the potential for gene therapy to treat adult vision disorders involving cone cells — the most important cells for vision in people.

"We've added red sensitivity to cone cells in animals that are born with a condition that is exactly like human color blindness," said William W. Hauswirth, Ph.D., a professor of ophthalmic molecular genetics at the UF College of Medicine and a member of the UF Genetics Institute and the Powell Gene Therapy Center. "Although color blindness is only moderately life-altering, we've shown we can cure a cone disease in a primate, and that it can be done very safely. That's extremely encouraging for the development of therapies for human cone diseases that really are blinding."

The finding is also likely to intrigue millions of people around the world who are colorblind, including about 3.5 million people in the United States, more than 13 million in India and more than 16 million in China. The problem mostly affects men, leaving about 8 percent of Caucasian men in the United States incapable of discerning red and green hues that are important for everyday things like recognizing traffic lights.

"People who are colorblind feel that they are missing out," said Jay Neitz, Ph.D., a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Washington. "If we could find a way to do this with complete safety in human eyes, as we did with monkeys, I think there would be a lot of people who would want it. Beyond that, we hope this technology will be useful in correcting lots of different vision disorders."

The discovery comes about 10 years after Neitz and his wife Maureen Neitz, Ph.D., a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Washington and senior author of the study, began training two squirrel monkeys named Dalton and Sam.

In addition to teaching the animals, the Neitz research group worked with the makers of a standard vision-testing technique called the Cambridge Colour Test to perfect a way the monkeys could "tell" them which colors they were seeing.

The tests are similar to ones given to elementary children the world over, in which students are asked to identify a specific pattern of colored dots among a field of dots that vary in size, color and intensity. The researchers devised a computer touch screen the monkeys could use to trace the color patterns. When the animals chose correctly, they received a reward of grape juice.

Likewise, decades were spent by Hauswirth and colleagues at the University of Florida to develop the gene-transfer technique that uses a harmless adeno-associated virus to deliver corrective genes to produce a desired protein.

In this case, researchers wanted to produce a substance called long-wavelength opsin in the retinas of the monkeys. This particular form of opsin is a colorless protein that works in the retina to make pigments that are sensitive to red and green.

"We used human DNAs, so we won't have to switch to human genes as we move toward clinical treatments," said Hauswirth, who is also involved in a clinical trial with human patients to test gene therapy for the treatment of Leber congenital amaurosis, a form of blindness that strikes children.

About five weeks after the treatment, the monkeys began to acquire color vision, almost as if it occurred overnight.

"Nothing happened for the first 20 weeks," Neitz said. "But we knew right away when it began to work. It was if they woke up and saw these new colors. The treated animals unquestionably responded to colors that had been invisible to them."

It took more than a year and a half to test the monkeys' ability to discern 16 hues, with some of the hues varying as much as 11-fold in intensity.

Dalton is named for John Dalton, an English chemist who realized he was colorblind and published the first paper about the condition in 1798.

"We've had Dalton and Sam for 10 years. They are like our children," Neitz said. "This species are friendly, docile monkeys that we just love. We think it is useful to continue to follow them — it's been two years now that they've been seeing in color, and continuing to check their vision and allowing them to play with the computer is part of their enrichment."

With the discovery, the researchers are the first to address a vision disorder in primates in which all photoreceptors are intact and healthy, providing a hint of gene therapy's full potential to restore vision.

About 1 in 30,000 Americans have a hereditary form of blindness called achromatopsia, which causes nearly complete color blindness and extremely poor central vision. "Those patients would be targets for almost exactly the same treatment," Hauswirth said.

Even in common types of blindness such as age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy, vision could potentially be rescued by targeting cone cells, he said.

"The major thrust of the study is you can ameliorate if not cure color blindness with gene therapy," said Gerald H. Jacobs, Ph.D., a research professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the research. "There are still questions about safety, but in these monkeys at least, there were no untoward effects. Those who are motivated to ameliorate their color defect might take some hope from the findings.

"This is also another example of how utterly plastic the visual system is to change," Jacobs said. "The nervous system can extract information from alterations to photopigments and make use of it almost instantaneously."

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Military robot can jump 7-meter walls

2009-09-16T22:45:00.000-07:00

By Simon Crisp

A shoebox-sized military robot has been revealed which can jump over walls 25ft (7.5m) high.

The Precision Urban Hopper -- which looks like it could just as easily be this year's must-have Christmas toy -- has been funded by DARPA, the US military's research arm.

It is essentially a GPS-guided remote control car, but is fitted with a piston leg which can accurately propel it onto, or over, obstacles of more than 25 feet tall.

Makers say the four-wheeled surveillance bot can overcome as many as 30 obstacles 40-60 times it's own size, and automatically adjusts controls for hop height depending whether it is jumping from concrete, asphalt or sand.

The researchers at Sandia said they considered making the bot hover rather than hop, but found that hopping is five times more efficient when traversing obstacles less than 10 meters -- even if it doesn't look quite as cool.

In addition to providing military assistance when it is deployed in late 2010, the hopping robot could be rolled out for use in law enforcement and homeland security, generally anywhere that wall jumping may be required. Keep reading to see video of the hopper in action.

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Out of darkness, sight

2009-09-16T22:43:00.001-07:00

Anne Trafton, MIT News Office

Cases of restored vision after a lifetime of blindness, though exceedingly rare, provide a unique opportunity to address several fundamental questions regarding brain function. After being deprived of visual input, the brain needs to learn to make sense of the new flood of visual information. Very little is known about how this learning takes place, but a new study by MIT neuroscientists suggests that dynamic information — that is, input from moving objects — is critical.

In the United States, as in most developed nations, infants with curable blindness are treated within a few weeks of birth. However, in developing nations such as India, there are relatively more instances of children born with curable forms of blindness that are left untreated for want of medical or financial resources. Such children face greatly elevated odds of early mortality, illiteracy and unemployment. Doctors have been hesitant to treat older patients because the conventional dogma holds that the brain is incapable of learning to see after age 5 or 6.

SIDEBAR: See how Pawan Sinha's initiative has treated hundreds of blind children

MIT brain and cognitive sciences professor Pawan Sinha, through his humanitarian foundation, Project Prakash (Sanskrit for "light"), has treated and studied several such patients over the past five years. The Prakash effort serves the dual purpose of providing sight to blind children and, in the process, tackling several foundational issues in neuroscience.

The new findings from Sinha's team, reported in the November issue of the Journal of Psychological Science, provide clues about how the brain learns to put together the visual world. They not only support the idea of treating blindness in older children and adults, but also offer insight into modeling the human visual system, diagnosing visual disorders, creating rehabilitation procedures and developing computers that can see.

This work builds on a 2007 study in which Sinha and graduate student Yuri Ostrovsky showed that a woman who had had her sight restored at age 12 had nearly normal visual processing abilities. These findings were significant since they challenged the widely held notion of a "critical age" for acquiring vision.

However, because they came across the woman 20 years after her sight was restored, the researchers had no chance to study how her brain first learned to process visual input. The new work focuses on three adolescent and young adult patients in India, and follows them from the time of treatment to several months afterward. It suggests that "not only is recovery possible, but also provides insights into the mechanism by which such recovery comes about," says Sinha.

Testing the patients within weeks of sight restoration, Sinha and his colleagues found that subjects had very limited ability to distinguish an object from its background, identify overlapping objects, or even piece together the different parts of an object. Eventually, however, they improved in this "visual integration" task, discovering whole objects and segregating them from their backgrounds.

"Somehow our brain is able to solve the problem, and we want to know how it does it or how it learns to do it," says Ostrovsky, lead author of the new paper.

'Many different pieces'

One of their subjects, known as S.K., suffered from a rare condition called secondary congenital aphakia (a lack of lenses in the eye) and was treated with corrective optics in 2004, at the age of 29. After treatment, S.K. participated in a series of tests asking him to identify simple shapes and objects.

S.K. could identify some shapes (triangles, squares, etc.) when they were side-by-side, but not when they overlapped. His brain was unable to distinguish the outlines of a whole shape; instead, he believed that each fragment of a shape was its own whole. For S.K. and other patients like him, "it seems like the world has been broken into many different pieces," says Sinha.

However, if a square or triangle was put into motion, S.K. (and the other two patients) could much more easily identify it. (With motion, their success rates improved from close to zero to around 75 percent.) Furthermore, motility of objects greatly influenced the patients' ability to recognize them in images.

During follow-up tests that continued for 18 months after treatment, the patients' performance with stationary objects gradually improved to almost normal.

These results suggest that movement patterns in the world provide some of the most salient clues about its constituent objects. The brain is programmed to use similarity of dynamics to infer which regions constitute objects, says Sinha. The significance of motion may go even further, the team believes. It may serve to "bootstrap" the learning of rules and heuristics by which the brain comes to be able to parse static images. The idea is simple but far-reaching. Starting from an initial capability of grouping via motion, the brain begins to notice that similar dynamics are correlated with similarity in other region attributes such as orientation and color. These attributes can then be used even in the absence of motion.

In addition to understanding how the human visual system works, the findings could help researchers build robots with visual systems capable of autonomously discovering objects in their environment.

"If we could understand how the brain learns to see, we can better understand how to train a computer to do it," says Ostrovsky.

Other authors of the paper are Ethan Myers, an MIT graduate student in brain and cognitive sciences, and Suma Ganesh and Umang Mathur of Dr. Shroff's Charity Eye Hospital in New Delhi, India.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the John Merck Scholars Fund, and The James
McDonnell Foundation.

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Hubble Goes Deep, Finds Farthest Galaxies Yet

2009-09-16T22:41:00.000-07:00

By Ron Cowen, Science News

Just days after NASA released the first cosmic dreamscapes taken by the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope three teams of astronomers have used the rejuvenated observatory to find what appears to be a bounty of the most distant galaxies known.

Analyses of infrared images of these galaxies captured in late August and early September with the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 suggest there were fewer bright galaxies early in cosmic history and those galaxies formed stars at an unexpectedly low rate.

Because the researchers do not yet have measurements of the wavelengths that make up the starlight from these galaxies, they do not directly know how far away the galaxies lie. But the starlit bodies’ colors suggest that about 16 reside roughly 12.9 billion light-years from Earth and another five or so sit even further, a record-breaking 13.1 billion light-years away.

“We are looking back 13 billion years and seeing galaxies just 600 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was like a 4-year-old,” says Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a member of one of the discovery teams.

The galaxies all lie within a small patch of the southern sky, called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, that has already been imaged by Hubble and a slew of other telescopes.

It’s the new camera’s greater sensitivity, as well as its larger field of view, that has enabled scientists to rapidly find what appear to be extremely remote galaxies, says Richard Ellis of Caltech in Pasadena, a coauthor of two of four papers that the three teams recently posted online at arXiv.org.

“This is a golden moment,” Ellis says. “All the groups independently analyzed the data with different software and broadly speaking, we’re all in agreement.”

A team that includes Illingworth and Rychard Bouwens, also of UC Santa Cruz, posted its findings on September 11. Ross McLure and James Dunlop of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, along with Ellis and their colleagues, posted their report on September 15. A team led by Andrew Bunker of the University of Oxford in England, again including Ellis, also posted an analysis of the new Hubble data on September 15.

The researchers all find a marked downturn in the number of bright galaxies as the telescope peers farther away and thus further back in time. That decrease in the galactic population is expected from current models of galaxy formation, comments Harry Ferguson of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who was not a member of any of the teams.

The findings “appear to show that galaxy formation is just starting at these [early times],” comments Simon White of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany.

Because the Hubble Ultra Deep Field is tiny — one one-hundred-fiftieth the apparent area of the full moon on the sky — and because the Wide Field Camera 3 has only just begun taking pictures, it is difficult to know how representative the findings are of the rest of the universe at these early cosmic times, Ferguson and Ellis both caution.

Ellis notes that the new findings also hint at a puzzle. His team estimates that the distant galaxies, which are too tiny to be clearly resolved by Hubble, are making stars at a puny rate. In some cases, that rate is as low as the mass equivalent of 0.0025 suns per year. According to current models, that rate couldn’t have generated enough ultraviolet starlight for a critical milestone in the evolution of the universe — the wrenching apart of neutral hydrogen atoms into their subatomic constituents.

About 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the cosmos had cooled sufficiently for protons and electrons to recombine into atoms. But the universe has long been reionized, with hydrogen atoms once again split into protons and electrons. Many astronomers have assumed that ultraviolet light from the first galaxies did the splitting.

This is not yet an astronomical crisis, Ellis says. It may be that the first stars were more efficient than expected at producing ultraviolet radiation. Another possibility is that ultraviolet light more easily escaped these early galaxies than it did from later galaxies.

Another possibility, comments White, is that “there might be enough undetected very small galaxies to do the job.”
New data is just starting to pour in that may solve this and other cosmic riddles, Ellis says. “This is a very exciting time.”

Image: A previous image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field taken in 2004./NASA

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Zero Gravity for Zero Dollars: Best Student Discount Ever

2009-09-16T22:36:00.000-07:00

By Alexis Madrigal

While the super-rich can pay millions to experience weightlessness at the International Space Station, some college kids have figured out how to experience the thrill of zero gravity for the student-friendly price of $0.

Through NASA’s Microgravity University program, teams of college students get to ride in and conduct experiments on a NASA jet that simulates zero-gravity conditions. Undergrads around the country will be sending their letters of intent to apply to this year’s competition this week, with completed applications due next month.

“It’s really an ‘as only NASA can’ program,” said Sara Malloy, coordinator of the Microgravity University office at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Students spend 10 days preparing for and going on their flights. Though the program’s science doesn’t get piped directly into NASA’s high-profile programs, some of the research can end up in the hands of engineers. And the students themselves get unique training in one of the strangest environments a human can experience.

The Microgravity University program hasn’t been heavily publicized, but it has reached more than 2,800 students at more than 165 colleges and universities since it first began in 1995. The trips on NASA’s Weightless Wonder, known more informally as the Vomit Comet, would cost more than $5,000 per person through the Zero Gravity Corporation.

Justin Nieusma headed up the College of New Jersey’s team, which flew this summer. (Some of Nieusma’s cohorts, though not him, are pictured above.) Their participation grew out of research some students were doing with the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab that required access to microgravity to continue.

“We got amazing scientific data that could never be reproduced on Earth or any other program I know of,” said Nieusma, now a graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics at University of Michigan.

Their experiment looked at how “dusty plasmas” like the ones that compose Saturn’s rings and comet tails react under different conditions. The experiments that College of New Jersey designed and built have been good (and lucky) enough to fly both of the past two years.

“You have to go through a very rigorous application process. These applications are like 50, 60 pages long, full of details that they want out of you,” Nieusma said. “It’s a crazy program, competitive, and we were so happy we got in the second year.”

By flying up, then nosing down, microgravity conditions are obtained for 18 to 25 seconds a time, and engineering students attempt to do science as their feet float above their heads. Conducting research while floating in the main cabin of a McDonnell Douglas C-9B Skytrain II isn’t the easiest thing, as YouTube videos of the microgravity experiments can attest.

Students bolt their experiments to the floor of the plane. When the plane dips, and the pull of the Earth’s gravity is counteracted by the force of the airplane’s descent, they attain weightlessness. Holding on to their experiment boxes, they race to complete whatever tasks they can before the plane levels off.

As the microgravity conditions ease, NASA personnel yell out, “Get down!” and the students bring their bodies out of dangerous positions and closer to the ground before gravity itself puts them there.

They also have time for some fun, floating and spinning in microgravity or doing one-armed pushups in simulated lunar gravity only one-sixth the strength of Earth’s.

“It’s the opportunity of a lifetime,” Niusma said.

Not everyone’s proposals get accepted, unfortunately. Recent budget cuts have made the program, which used to accept about half of the applicants, more competitive.

Sean Currey, a junior at Dartmouth who wants to go into aeronautics, led a dedicated team that wanted to study how IV-fluid–bag preparation works in microgravity. The team went through the entire process, but didn’t get to fly. Still, Currey’s team will try again this year.

“The people who read over the proposal thought it was a great idea, but they wanted more technical writing and background in the proposal,” Currey said. “We’re going to take the comments that NASA gave us last year, and resubmit it.”

Images: NASA. 1. Rachel Sherman in Superman gear flies in between Russell Jones (left) and Chaz Ruggieri (right). 2. The “Weightless Wonder” in microgravity mode.

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Breakthrough Nano Tech Will Boost Solar Power Efficiency

2009-09-16T22:25:00.000-07:00

by Michael Graham Richard, Ottawa, Canada

Inexpensive Nanostructure Film Keeps Photons from Bouncing Off

That's the beauty of science. You discover something new, and then you keep finding new applications for it. Chemical engineers at Oregon State University (OSU) have invented a new way to deposit "nanostructure films" on a variety of surfaces. The obvious use is for eyeglasses; this could make them better and less expensive. But the holy grail here is making more efficient solar panels to reduce the cost of solar power. Here's how that would work...

Better Eyeglasses First, More Efficient Solar Panels Second
The nanostructure film reduces the amount of light that is reflected off the glass surface. For eyeglasses (or camera lenses!), this is good because you get less glare and more light goes through, so you see better. But for solar panels, this means that more of the sun's light reaches the surface of the panels (usually either silicon or copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS)) and doesn't just bounce back into space, so more photons can be captured and turned into clean electricity.

There are already other types of films that do this, but this new nano-film should be able to do it better, for less money, and in a way that is easy to apply to the surfaces (not expensive process that requires big equipment).

Here you can see the lenses over a concentrating solar power setup.

An Add-On to Existing Solar Power Technology
And the beauty of this is that this new nanostructure-film is applied on top of whatever technology you already have, so it doesn't matter too much if your solar panel is based on monocrystalline silicon cells, or polycrystalline cells, or thin films, etc. It could also be applied to the lenses of concentrating solar power setups.

As Chih-hung Chang, an associate professor in the OSU Department of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering, says: "They should be able to make almost any type of solar energy system work more efficiently."

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World Bank spends billions on coal-fired power stations

2009-09-16T22:23:00.000-07:00

The World Bank is spending billions of pounds subsidising new coal-fired power stations in developing countries despite claiming that burning fossil fuels exposes the poor to catastrophic climate change. The bank, which has a goal of reducing poverty and is funded by Britain and other developed countries, calls on all nations in a report today to “act differently on climate change”.

It says that the world must reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, but it is funding several giant coal-burning plants that will each emit millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide a year for the next 40 to 50 years.

Britain is contributing £400million to a World Bank fund that claims to support “clean technology” but is financing coal power plants.

The bank’s World Development Report says: “Developing countries are disproportionately affected by climate change — a crisis that is not of their making and for which they are the least prepared. Increasing access to energy and other services using high-carbon technologies will produce more greenhouse gases, hence more climate change.”

The report says that between 75 and 80 per cent of the damage caused by climate change through drought, floods and rising sea levels will happen in developing countries. It calls on richer nations, including Britain, to increase the amount that they spend on helping developing countries to adapt to climate change.

The bank also wants global spending on research and development on sustainable sources of energy to be increased from the present $70billion (£40billion) a year to $700billion.

The report says that unless the world acts now to cut carbon dioxide emissions it faces a 5C (9F) rise in global temperatures by the end of the century. “Such a drastic temperature shift would cause the possible dieback of the Amazon rainforest, complete loss of glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas, and rapid ocean acidification leading to death of coral reefs,” it says.

“The speed and magnitude of change could wipe out more than 50 per cent of species. Sea levels could rise by one metre this century, threatening 60 million people. Agricultural productivity would likely decline throughout the world and over three million additional people could die from malnutrition each year.”

The 260-page report advises against “locking the world into high-carbon infrastructure” but makes no mention of the bank’s plans to subsidise coal power plants in India, South Africa, Botswana and other developing countries.

Last year the bank and its partner, the Asian Development Bank, approved $850million in loans to finance a coal-fired plant in Gujarat, western India.

The Environmental Defence Fund, a US lobby group, said that the plant, the first of nine planned in India, would be one of the biggest new sources of greenhouse gases on Earth, emitting 26.7million tonnes of CO2 a year for the next 50 years.

The bank is also contributing $5billion towards South Africa’s power generation expansion plan, which includes six coal plants.

Marianne Fay, the bank’s chief economist for sustainable development, said that coal was the cheapest and most secure way to deliver electricity to the 1.6billion people without it. She said: “There are a lot of poor countries which have coal reserves and for them it’s the only option. The [bank’s] policy is to continue funding coal to the extent that there is no alternative and to push for the most efficient coal plants possible. Frankly, it would be immoral at this stage to say, ‘We want to have clean hands, therefore we are not going to touch coal’.”

Tim Jones, policy officer of the World Development Movement, which campaigns to reduce poverty, said: “The World Bank is acting in the interests of Western countries and companies and not in the long-term interests of the world’s poor.

“It is an absolute disgrace that money meant for clean technologies will actually be used for building new coal power stations. Every pound of green aid that will be spent on funding coal power through the World Bank is money that should be spent on supporting renewable energy in developing countries.”

The bank said that it had lent $5billion for fossil fuel projects in the past three years and $11billion for “low-carbon” alternatives.

A spokesman for the Department for International Development in Whitehall said: “We have informed the World Bank that we will be scrutinising future coal-fired power plant proposals to ensure that they have explored all other options (including accessing the additional finance needed for cleaner alternatives), and we would expect any future coal plants to reach the highest international standards.”

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Forced Fungus Sex Could Unlock Key Energy Sources

2009-08-14T10:37:00.000-07:00

By Charles Q. Choi

Scientists believe that fungi could hold the key to breaking down tons of cellulose to make rewnewable biofuels.

Helping a fungus have sex could lead to better ways of making biofuels, scientists now suggest.

To make renewable biofuels instead of manufacturing them from the sugars in food crops, researchers want to employ organisms that can make use of the hundreds of millions of tons of cellulose in sawdust, weeds and other plant scrap that would otherwise go to waste.

One especially promising organism when it comes to breaking down cellulose is the soil fungus Trichoderma reesei. It was originally discovered in the Solomon Islands during World War II eating away at the canvas and garments of the U.S. Army.

Improving this fungus was difficult because scientists thought it was asexual, which meant they couldn't breed different useful strains of it together for offspring better tailored to degrade cellulose.

Now researchers in Austria find this fungus isn't asexual after all. For the first time after its discovery more than 50 years ago, researchers have made it have sex.

The group this fungus belongs to, Trichoderma, includes several hundred species, including both sexual and asexual ones. By probing their DNA, investigators uncovered the genes responsible for mating and found them in Trichoderma reesei, proving it was theoretically capable of sex. However, it could not assume the female role.

Past studies had revealed that Trichoderma reesei was in fact genetically identical to another fungus, Hypocrea jecorina, which could assume both the male and female roles. The scientists managed to successfully mate Hypocrea jecorina with two mutant Trichoderma reesei strains known to be especially good at breaking down cellulose with existing wild strains.

Although researchers could in the past dose the fungus with radiation or chemicals to randomly create potentially useful mutations, "it was not possible to combine beneficial mutations of efficient production strains," said researcher Monika Schmoll, a microbiologist at the Vienna University of Technology. " Now it has become possible to cross these strains and mix their genetic material. Of course there is no guarantee that the combination of properties really results in even better strains, but in many cases it will work."

Sex can also lead to more fit strains. The methods used to create mutants could lead to strains of Trichoderma reesei that are good at making enzymes that break down cellulose, but otherwise "sometimes look quite poor and helpless," Schmoll explained. By crossing such a mutant with an ordinary 'wild-type' strain of the fungus, "there is the chance to preserve the high enzyme production, but to get rid of mutations that reduce growth and fitness by replacement with wild-type genes."

These findings might lead to better and more cost-effective ways of making biofuel. "I would be happy to see gas stations selling affordable bioethanol made from waste and plant material one day," Schmoll said. The researchers also noted that Trichoderma includes species that help plants by killing harmful fungi, and discovering ways of breeding strains of them together could help out farmers.

In the future, Schmoll and her colleagues want to find out what leads to this absence of females in Trichoderma reesei in the first place. If they do, they could reverse the situation, she explained.

The researchers detailed their findings online August 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Physicists hold breath as Large Hadron Collider prepares to rise from ashes

2009-08-14T10:34:00.000-07:00

If all goes to plan, the LHC will come back to life in November. Sam Wong explains the measures being taken to prevent another catastrophic failure, and gauges the mood of physicists at Cern. Can they bag the Higgs before the Americans?

A region between two magnets in the LHC that was crushed in the incident on 19 September 2008. Photograph: Public Domain

It's been nearly a year since the world's biggest science experiment, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was fired up for the first time in a flurry of excitement at Cern, the European Centre for Nuclear Research in Switzerland. But ever since a catastrophic explosion in the particle accelerator's tunnel just nine days after startup, the gargantuan machine has sat idling, to the acute frustration and no little embarrassment of all involved.

The incident on 19 September, variously described as an "electrical failure", "engineering breakdown" and "technical malfunction", was a major setback to physicists hoping to discover the Higgs boson (or "champagne bottle boson", as we rechristened it). It was caused when a short-circuit in a connection between superconductors in the tunnel burned a hole in a vessel containing liquid helium – resulting in an explosion.

Engineers have been working hard to get the $9bn supermachine up and running. They have now finished testing the 10,000 high-current, superconducting connections and repairing those in which the resistance was found to be abnormally high.

They've also installed highly sensitive warning systems in an attempt to avoid a repeat of the liquid helium leak.

There's more work to be done, though, including calibrating the detectors, installing 160km of new cabling around the tunnel, and cooling down the sectors that had to be warmed up to allow repairs (when it's colliding particles, the accelerator tunnel is cooled close to absolute zero).

All in all, the atom smasher's refit will rack up a bill in the region of 40m Swiss francs (£23m).

Last week, Cern announced that the LHC will finally begin firing protons around its 27km circular tunnel again in November. Initially, it will run at an energy of 3.5 tera-electronvolts (TeV) per beam – just half of what it's meant to achieve at full blast, but still several times more than the LHC's American competitor, the Tevatron at Fermilab, can manage. After operating at this lower level for a period, the energy will be increased to 5TeV per beam.

According to Cern spokesman James Gillies, the mood at Cern is optimistic.

"We're looking forward to getting going," he said. "There's consensus that the choices that have been taken to run the machine safely at 3.5TeV per beam are good choices. They allow the machine operators to learn how to drive the machine, if you like, under what should be very easy conditions for them, and they don't compromise the physics."

Gillies is confident that there won't be another serious mishap this time around.

"There will be small things, and that's part of life, but I don't think we're going to see another major setback like the one we had last year."

Once a good amount of data has been collected at lower energy levels, the LHC will have to be shut down again while it is geared up to reach 7TeV per beam. This will require dozens of superconducting magnets to be "retrained" – conditioned by gradual exposure to higher and higher currents.

The energy of a collision between two particles in the tunnel is converted into the mass of any new particles that are created, in keeping with Einsteins's celebrated equation E=mc². The more energetic the collision, the more massive the particles that might be created, as physicist Adam Yurkewicz explains on the LHC's US blog.

"For example, to discover a dark matter particle, the energy of the collision is converted into the mass of the new particle. Right now, we don't know exactly what mass the dark matter particle has, so the higher the collision energy, the more massive particle we could potentially make. Our potential to discover something new depends on the energy of the collisions."

For this reason, physicists are eager to get the collider running at full energy as soon as possible. But according to Peter Kalmus, emeritus professor of physics at Queen Mary, University of London, there are other considerations.

"We're looking for something that is almost bound to be rare," he said. "One has to have a very well understood apparatus, not just the accelerator but also the detectors that would be looking for it. It seems to me that people probably need, I would think, certainly much more than a year of operating the machine just to make sure that they understand all the nitty-gritty of quirks in the equipment."

Kalmus believes Cern are still the favourites to get their hands on the elusive Higgs before their American rivals.

"I think Cern ought to have the edge, but there is still a chance that Fermilab could come up with it," he said.

The Higgs boson would certainly be the prize in any hunt, but it is by no means the only target in the LHC's sights. Physicists also hope to verify the existence of supersymmetry – the idea that the known particles have heavier partners that have yet to be discovered.

"If they exist, and if the masses are not very much higher, then they could be discovered with the lower energy machine," says Kalmus.

There will be an anxious wait for the physics community between now and November. For researchers desperate to get their hands on some data, the resurrection of the LHC can't come a minute too soon.

"Collisions this year will bring joy, but first probably relief," Yurkewicz writes. "Relief at not having to answer questions about the LHC not working, and relief for graduate students who would have data they could analyse in order to graduate.

"Many of us will be holding our breath for the next few months. After we see some collisions we can experience that joy, and then start down the long path towards answering some of the fundamental questions we have about the universe."

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Storms of Saturn's Moon Titan - A Model of the Early Earth?

2009-08-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

NASA's Cassini spacecraft buzzed Titan last year, coming close enough to taste the Saturnian moon's atmosphere. The data acquired has implications for our understanding of life throughout the galaxy, as well as Earth's own past.

Meanwhile, just this month astronomers used the NSF-supported Gemini Observatory to capture the first images of clouds over Titan's tropics. The images clarify a long-standing mystery linking Titan's weather and surface features, viewed by some scientists as an analog to Earth when our planet was young.

The effort also served as the latest demonstration of adaptive optics, which use deformable mirrors to enable NSF's suite of ground-based telescopes to capture images that in some cases exceed the resolution of images captured by space-based counterparts.

On Titan, clouds of light hydrocarbons, not water, occasionally emerge in the frigid, dense atmosphere, mainly clustering near the poles, where they feed scattered methane lakes below. Closer to the moon's equator, clouds are rare, and the surface is more similar to an arid, wind-swept terrain on Earth. Observations by space probes suggest evidence for liquid-carved terrain in the tropics, but the cause has been a mystery.

Emily Schaller from the University of Hawaii and her colleagues used NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility, situated on Hawaii's Mauna Kea, to monitor Titan on 138 nights over a period of two years, and on April 13, 2008, the team saw a tell-tale brightening. The researchers then turned to the NSF-supported Gemini North telescope, an 8-meter telescope also located on Mauna Kea, to capture the extremely high-resolution infrared snapshots of Titan's cloud cover, including the first storms ever observed in the moon's tropics.

The team suggests that the storms may yield precipitation capable of feeding the apparently liquid-carved channels on the planet's surface, and also influenced weather patterns throughout the moon's atmosphere for several weeks.

The second largest moon in the solar system, Titan has long been of interest for hopeful exobiologists. As the only other body we know of with surface bodies of liquid, complete with nitrogen, methane and complete seasonal weather weather patterns (similar to Earth's). It even has beaches, though you'll need a little more than a swimsuit to visit. Vast bodies of chemicals constantly stirred by wind and wave, heated over a gentle sunlight heat with the occasional dash of articles from Saturn's magnetosphere for spice - a perfect recipe for life. Just like a certain planet you might be familiar with (look down if you forget).

Of course there a few minor differences from our own blue-green globe. There's no oxygen for one thing, but if you think that's a problem then you're guilty of "aerobic respiration prejudice" (don't worry, most multicellular organisms are). It's also really quite amazingly cold - so cold that it has awesomely-named "cryovolcanoes", where boiled (or even just melted) water is enough to set off seismic-level explosions. Again, that's a barrier that's been overcome by homegrown Earth bacteria, so there's no reason it couldn't be managed elsewhere.

Cassini's onboard instruments have detected hydrocarbons containing up to seven carbon atoms. How important is that for life? Here's a hint: molecules with carbon in them are called organic, and those without are inorganic. Carbon is kind of a big deal, and the more (and more complicated) carbon compounds present the further towards the great cosmic chemical cocktail that is "life" you are. Some scientists believe that the Titanian interior, with its greater temperature, could already host microbial life - but it'll be a while before we can check that (unless we get real lucky, and some alien cells get real unlucky, with a cryovolcano eruption). One thing's for sure - the craft is only on the sixth of forty-five planned flybys so we can expect to hear a lot more about this real soon.

PS: Yes, it is ironic that we're expecting Titanic lifeforms to be single celled.

Posted by Luke McKinney. Photo Credit: James Estrin/New York Times.

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New hope for intelligent life on other planets

2009-08-14T10:31:00.000-07:00

By Clara Moskowitz

NASA/JPL-Caltech

An artist's concept of the Milky Way galaxy, with the location of the Sun marked in yellow. Scientists think interactions between our planet and its galactic environment played a role in shaping the evolution of life on Earth.

Intelligent life beyond Earth might not be as dim a hope as many scientists think, according to a new study challenging a widely held anti-ET argument.

Many skeptics tout an idea called the anthropic argument that claims extraterrestrial intelligence must be very rare because the time it takes for intelligent life to evolve is, on the average, much longer than the portion of a star's existence that is conducive to such life.

But now astrobiologist Milan M. Cirkovic and colleagues say they've found a flaw in that reasoning.

The anthropic argument, proposed by astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1983, following on his pioneering work on anthropic principles in 1970s, is built on the assumption that the two timescales - the lifecycle of a star and the time required for evolution of living and intelligent creatures - are completely independent. If this is true, Carter argued, it's extremely unlikely that these two windows of possibility would last roughly the same amount of time, and would occur at the same time.

But that mode of thinking is outdated, Cirkovic claims. In fact, he says the relevant timescales are not independent; they are deeply entwined. "There are many different ways in which planets in our solar system are not isolated," Cirkovic said. "We must not regard habitable planets as closed boxes. If you abandon that assumption of independence, then you have a whole new background in which you can set up various models of astrobiological development."

Cirkovic points to gamma ray bursts, nearby supernovae, and perturbations of comet clouds as possible events in the astrophysical environment of the star that can influence the biological environment on a planet. For example, when a star travels through one of the dense spiral arms of the Milky Way, both its own development and that of its planets could be disrupted by higher levels of interstellar electromagnetic radiation and cosmic rays, due to the higher frequency of star-forming regions and supernova explosions.

All these connections conspire to rule out the independence suggested by Carter and connect the life of a star and the evolution of life on a planet, Cirkovic argues.

In the case of the Earth, the two timescales have lined up fortuitously to enable life. Our Sun is about 4.6 billion years old, and Earth is just slightly younger, at 4.5 billion years old. The first, most basic cells are thought to have formed on our planet about 3.8 billion years ago, although the homo genus, to which humans belong, did not appear until about 2.5 million years ago. And modern humans are only about 200,000 years old.

For more than 80 percent of the Sun's existence, life has existed in some form on Earth. It seems the timescales of biology and astrophysics have favorably aligned in our case. According to the anthropic argument, this coincidence means that Earth, and its life, are unique. But Cirkovic thinks the two timescales may not have overlapped by chance. Instead, they may be part of a complex history, involving interdependence of the Earth system with the rest of the Milky Way.

Clocking Catastrophes
Cosmic events like gamma ray bursts or nearby supernovae could reset the astrobiological clock to give a planet and star a second chance to sync up and try again to produce life. Gamma ray bursts are mysterious explosions that release huge amounts of energy, occurring either as the dying explosions of super-massive stars (like Eta Carinae) or collisions of neutron stars in close binary systems. If a gamma ray burst occurred in a large region near a planetary system, it might cause a flash of radiation and possibly cosmic-ray jets that could disrupt life on planets. Supernova explosions, though not quite as energetic as gamma ray bursts (but much more frequent overall), pack quite a wallop as well, and could send a shock of energy to any nearby planets.

"A gamma ray burst won't affect whether life will begin at some particular point in time, but it would affect how quickly life develops or takes hold by causing changes in atmospheric chemistry on the planet," Cirkovic said. "This can be interpreted as resetting astrobiological clocks which tick on each habitable planet in the Milky Way."

This idea leads to a new way of thinking about the origin of life. Instead of a long, gradual evolution, a catastrophic event could spur development of a complex biosphere and intelligent beings, much like the evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium predicts that species will undergo long periods of slow evolution punctuated by brief bouts of drastic change.

For instance, paleontologists say that human beings evolved to our present state only thanks to an asteroid impact 65 million years ago that wiped out the planet's primary predator – the dinosaur. Earth has over the course of its history experienced many mass extinctions that had various causes. While extinctions wipe out life, they are also a "reset" button that alters the environment and allows other types of life to emerge. Overall, this is part of a complex set of astrobiological histories that Cirkovic and colleagues dub the "astrobiological landscape" of our Galaxy.

"The speed of evolution is very variable," Cirkovic said. "There is no reason to think that life on Earth has only one single origin. It is quite possible that there were several beginnings of life on Earth."

Cirkovic also notes that the evolution of intelligent life could occur slower or faster in different settings, and need not follow the astrobiological history of the Milky Way.

"Large-scale correlations might cause more such SETI targets to be contemporary with us than would be expected on the basis of planetary age distribution only," Cirkovic said.

Cirkovic and team outline their argument in the June 2009 issue of the journal Astrobiology.

Cesium atoms are able to take a "quantum walk"

2009-07-20T13:00:00.000-07:00

By Casey Johnston

Inspired by I Can Haz Cheeseburger?

Kevin Wolfe

Computer scientists have only begun to realize the potential of quantum computing and algorithms, where computers use quantum principles to store data in qubits. One thing that could help in the development of algorithms is the "quantum walk," which involves the movement of a particle as a superposition of all possible states. Until recently, quantum walks were a theoretical construct. However, according to Science, physicists in Germany are now able to make cesium atoms arranged in an optical lattice perform a physical quantum walk.

Quantum walks were first proposed by physicist Richard Feynman and are, in terms of probability, the opposite of a random walk. A random walk might be modeled by a person flipping a coin, and for each flip he steps left for heads and right for tails. In this case, his most probable location is the center, with the probability distribution tapering off in either direction. A quantum walk involves the use of internal states and superpositions, and results in the hypothetical person "exploring" every possible position simultaneously.

When a quantum walker flips a coin, it directs him to move one way, but he maintains an "internal state" that moves the other way, making him a superposition of both directions of movement. During a quantum walk, as the quantum object takes more steps, it becomes "delocalized" over all available positions, as if its presence is blurred.

A second feature of quantum walking is matter-wave interference, as when the person flips heads and next flips tails. The second step makes the new superposition overlap the old one, and the new superposition can either amplify the old position or remove it. After all this occurs and the desired number of steps have been taken, an attempted observation will collapse the superposition and "resolve" the object to a single position.

As previously mentioned, a random walk's probability distribution has a single peak tapering off in either direction. A quantum walk's probability distribution generally has two peaks placed evenly on either side of the starting position. However, this distribution can vary depending on the initial internal state of the particle doing the walking, which can cause the final position to strongly favor one side or the other.

While it has been asserted that quantum walks might be observable in many different systems, it has long been a theoretical construct. This has changed with scientists' ability to realize a quantum walk with laser-cooled cesium atoms held in the potential wells of a one-dimensional optical lattice. Using Hadamard-type gates, which perform a sort of Fourier transform on the atoms, the cesium atoms' physical and internal states can be shifted, resulting in a distribution of locations like that seen in a theoretical quantum walk, with two peaks or one heavily-favored off-center peak.

The authors of the new paper were able to replicate the theoretical quantum behavior on walks of up to ten steps and could refocus the delocalized particle backwards through the gates to its initial site on the lattice.

The ability to conduct quantum walks has enormous implications for the field of computer science. Quantum algorithms abandon the use of transistors and bits in favor of "qubits," or quantum binary digits. While a bit can only hold one piece of data, like a 0 or 1, a qubit can hold a superposition of all possible states of data (a 0, a 1, or both). Furthermore, a qubit can be entangled with other qubits to hold all possible collective

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What Apollo means to me

2009-07-20T12:57:00.000-07:00

On July 20, 1969, at 20:17:40 GMT, human beings landed on an alien world.

That was the moment that the Eagle lander touched down on the surface of the Moon, 40 years ago today. Nearly five hours later, at 02:56:15 GMT on July 21, Neil Armstrong placed his boot in the lunar regolith, planting it firmly into history as well.

You can read all about this event and its global and historical impacts all over the web, so I won’t belabor the point here. But the Apollo missions mean something special to me, so forgive me this small indulgence. While the overall significance of the missions is interesting and fun to think about and discuss, the real stories, the ones that sink in, are the personal ones.

I was four when Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins approached the Moon. That’s old enough to form memories of the event, but young enough that those memories are malleable; I have a hard time distinguishing what I actually saw with what I may have seen years later on TV. I seem to vaguely remember sitting on the couch with my family watching the events unfold; even at that age I was in love with science fiction and all things spacey. It’s possible my parents let me stay up late to watch that first step. It would’ve been 11:00 p.m. at our old home. But honestly, I don’t remember.

However, just a wee bit over two years later that changed. In July 1971, my parents rented a Winnebago — a monstrous recreational vehicle — and the whole family piled in so we could road trip down to Cape Canaveral. If all went according to plan, we would be there in time to watch Apollo 15 launch and make its way to the Moon.

I was six, so I remember this much better. The bathroom on the RV smelled overwhelmingly like fruit. My sister taught me that it’s OK to lie when you say something if you cross your fingers while saying it. We stopped to visit friends of my mom’s in South Carolina, and again in Georgia so my oldest brother could check out the Georgia Tech campus before applying there the next year.

I have lots of other memories that are trivial to others but which I cherish. But still and all, we finally reached Kennedy Space Center. I remember touring the area, and I also remember being on the tour bus and getting up pretty close to the Saturn V. I wonder now if that’s a distorted memory; it’s hard to imagine they let tourists get as close as my semi-fuzzy recollection indicates.

And then the day arrived. We parked on the banks of the Banana River and waited for the moment. I wandered off a bit to play on my own (times were different then), and I distinctly remember finding a blue plastic kiddie pool upside down on the river bank. I flipped it over, and a billion mosquitoes exploded out of it! Not too surprisingly, that’s one of the stronger memories I have from that day.

And then the moment finally arrived. I remember nothing of the countdown, but boy oh boy do I remember the launch. A man next to me had a camera that he was frantically snapping away with; I remember the noise of the shutter and him winding it, trying to keep up with the rocket lifting off into the sky miles away.

I can still picture the mighty Saturn V as it punched upward. It was magnificent, and even at the age of six I had some idea of what this all meant. I stood there, clutching the little scale model rocket my parents bought me on the KSC tour in one hand, and the blue plastic figurine of an Apollo astronaut standing on the Moon I had in the other. I still remember bringing that plastic model to school for show-and-tell when we got back home.

That memory of the launch is a powerful one for me even today, all these years later. I asked my dad years later what motivated him and mom to pack the whole family up into that RV and take us down there. He replied that it was something he thought we should all see. It was history being made in front of us, and not something you get a chance to see very often.

I asked him that for another reason. My father was a quality control engineer, and did a lot of government contract work. In fact — and this makes me proud, let me tell ya — he worked on the quality control for the astronauts’ food program. I don’t know what precisely he did for the program, to be honest, but he was involved for some time. I know he did some work on the packaging, including the freeze-dried food and the spaghetti the astronauts took with them. That’s why I asked him why we went to see the launch; I wondered if it was because the trip was work-related for him. But it wasn’t. He and mom wanted to share with us the sheer joy and wonder of humanity’s first tentative journey away from Earth.

We should all strive to be such people.

Years later, when my father died, my mom asked all us kids if we wanted any of his books or other items. I stood in front of his bookshelf, admiring the many texts on codebreaking, mathematics, the history of cryptography. He was fascinated by these topics, and was something of a dabbler in math; a formula he invented is published in the CRC handbook used by grad students across the planet.

My eyes fell on a magazine I hadn’t seen before; it was a 25th anniversary retrospective of Apollo. I opened it up, and to my surprise, found this picture:

That’s Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad, the third man to walk on the Moon. Clearly, dad must’ve met him and talked about the food program. Conrad had a great sense of humor, and signed the picture appropriately.

My dad was a major reason I’m a scientist now, and helped instill in me and all my siblings a love of science and space. My memories of Apollo are inextricably entangled with memories of my father from back then too. So to me, Apollo is personal.

I can take a mental step back and look at the whole picture: what that one small step meant, how it inspired a planet, what NASA did that day, and even how its faltered in many ways since then. But sometimes the real story, the human story, is the first-person account of events.

That’s how it plays in my head when I picture that hot July day in 1971, and that mental film is always running when I write about Apollo. It may not be at the forefront of my mind, but it’s there. Even without it I might still be inspired to write what I do. And though I strongly doubt it, I suppose it’s remotely possible that I’d still be where I am today without having had my parents expose me directly to space travel.

But they did. And I’m a better man for having it as a part of me.

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Massive Black Holes Roaming Edge of Milky Way -A Galaxy Insight

2009-07-20T12:56:00.000-07:00

Hundreds of rogue black holes should be traveling the Milky Way's outskirts, each containing the mass of 1,000 to 100,000 suns.

Avi Loeb -Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

New calculations by Ryan O'Leary and Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics suggest that hundreds of massive rogue black holes, left over from the galaxy-building days of the early universe, may wander the Milky Way.

The Earth appears safe, however, with the closest rogue black hole thousands of light-years away.

"These black holes are relics of the Milky Way's past," said Loeb. "You could say that we are archaeologists studying those relics to learn about our galaxy's history and the formation history of black holes in the early universe."

According to theory, rogue black holes originally lurked at the centers of tiny, low-mass galaxies. Over billions of years, those dwarf galaxies smashed together to form full-sized galaxies like the Milky Way.

Each time two proto-galaxies with central black holes collided, their black holes merged to form a single, "relic" black hole. During the merger, directional emission of gravitational radiation would cause the black hole to recoil. A typical kick would send the black hole speeding outward fast enough to escape its host dwarf galaxy, but not fast enough to leave the galactic neighborhood completely. As a result, such black holes would still be around today in the outer reaches of the Milky Way halo.

One telltale sign could mark a rogue black hole: a surrounding cluster of stars yanked from the dwarf galaxy when the black hole escaped. Only the stars closest to the black hole would be tugged along, so the cluster would be very compact.

Due to the cluster's small size on the sky, appearing to be a single star, astronomers would have to look for more subtle clues to its existence and origin. For example, its spectrum would show that multiple stars were present, together producing broad spectral lines. The stars in the cluster would be moving rapidly, their paths influenced by the gravity of the black hole.

"The surrounding star cluster acts much like a lighthouse that pinpoints a dangerous reef," explained O'Leary. "Without the shining stars to guide our way, the black holes would be all but impossible to find."

The number of rogue black holes in our galaxy depends on how many of the proto-galactic building blocks contained black holes at their cores, and how those proto-galaxies merged to form the Milky Way. Finding and studying them will provide new clues about the history of our galaxy

"Until now, astronomers were not searching for such a population of highly compact star clusters in the Milky Way's halo," said Loeb. "Now that we know what to expect, we can examine existing sky surveys for this new class of objects."

Loeb and O'Leary's journal paper will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is available online at http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.4262.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

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"You Want Me to Walk On the Freakin' Moon Wearing What?!"

2009-07-20T12:54:00.000-07:00

By Jack Loftus

These shots of gear from the first Apollo moon mission show just how far we have—and haven't—come in the 40 years since man first walked on the moon.

The suits shown here are part of a collection of Apollo-era artifacts on display right now at the National Air and Space Museum.

The exhibit is part of a 40th anniversary celebration for the event that attention-seeking idiots say never happened so that they can get a few extra clicks and adSense dollars on their crock conspiracy theory web site. Tons more pics over at io9. Can we go back now, please? [io9]

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* Earth Sciences * Astronomy * Environment * Space Exploration Astronauts deal with flooded toilet in orbit

2009-07-20T12:52:00.000-07:00

By MARCIA DUNN , AP Aerospace Writer

Enlarge

This image provided by NASA shows the underside of the crew cabin near the nose cap of the Space Shuttle Endeavour taken by an Expedition 20 crewmember during a survey of the approaching vehicle prior to docking with the International Space Station Friday July 17, 2009. Endeavour crew performed a back-flip for the rendezvous pitch maneuver. Mission Control said Saturday Endeavour looks to be in fine shape for re-entry at the end of the month. Areas where the heat tiles were dinged during Wednesday's launch can be seen in this image. (AP Photo/NASA)

(AP) -- The bathroom lines at the already crowded space shuttle and space station complex got a lot longer Sunday because of a flooded toilet. One of two commodes aboard the international space station malfunctioned, right in the middle of complicated robotic work being conducted by the two crews. The pump separator apparently flooded.

Mission Control advised the astronauts to hang an "out of service" sign on the toilet until it could be fixed. In the meantime, the six space station residents had to get in line to use their one good toilet. And Endeavour's seven astronauts were restricted to the shuttle bathroom.

There have never been so many people - 13 - together in space. The toilet repair work fell to Belgian Frank De Winne, who had to don goggles, gloves and a mask.

Flight director Brian Smith declined to speculate whether overuse caused the toilet trouble.

"We don't yet know the extent of the problem," Smith told reporters. "It may turn out to be of no consequence at all. It could turn out to be significant. It's too early to tell right now."

Teams of specialists in Houston and Moscow hurriedly convened to discuss the problem. The Russian-built, multimillion-dollar toilet flew up on a shuttle last November.

Smith said there is no urgency to the bathroom situation, at least for now. But he said if the toilet remains out of action for several days, "then we'll readdress the situation and see what we have to do."

Going into this mission, NASA wanted at least four of Endeavour's crew to use the space station's bathrooms, so the shuttle waste water tank would not fill up.

As long as Endeavour is docked to the space station, it cannot eject any waste water. The nozzle is located near the newly installed porch on the Japanese lab; the attach mechanisms for experiments could corrode if sprayed by water.

Two bathrooms ultimately are needed for a full station crew of six. Smith said he did not know how long six occupants could rely on a single toilet.

Both the shuttle and station are equipped with other ways for the astronauts to relieve themselves, Smith said, including Apollo-era urine collection bags.

Much of Sunday - the eve of the 40th anniversary of man's first moon landing - was spent using a pair of robot arms to move a large cargo carrier, loaded with batteries and spare parts, from the shuttle to the station. It was a relatively quiet day sandwiched between spacewalks.

The 13-by-8-foot platform holds an antenna, pump and engine for the station's rail car, all of which will be removed and secured to the space station during a spacewalk Monday. NASA wants to store as many big spare parts as possible at the space station, before shuttles stop flying at the end of next year.

Also on the carrier are six batteries that will be plugged into the station by spacewalking astronauts later in the week, replacing old batteries.

In all, five spacewalks are planned during Endeavour's 1 1/2-week space station visit.

As for the Apollo 11 anniversary, Smith noted that the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs contributed to today's international space station. He observed that he wasn't born when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon July 20, 1969; neither were two of the 13 spacefarers.

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Cooking With Sound: Bio-Mass Burning Stove Also Converts Heat Into Sound Then Electricity

2009-07-20T12:50:00.000-07:00

Researchers are developing a bio-mass burning cooking stove which also converts heat into acoustic energy and then into electricity, all in one unit. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Nottingham)

A low-cost generator with the potential to transform lives in the world’s poorest communities is now being tested across the UK and in Nepal. The Score project, led by The University of Nottingham, is developing a bio-mass burning cooking stove which also converts heat into acoustic energy and then into electricity, all in one unit.

The £2 million Score project (Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration and Electricity) brings together experts from across the world to develop the biomass-powered generator. By developing an affordable, versatile domestic appliance Score aims to address the energy needs of rural communities in Africa and Asia, where access to power is extremely limited.

Researchers in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at The University of Nottingham are working on the generator’s Linear Alternator — the part which turns the sound energy into electricity. The system uses special configurations of magnets which generate electrical energy from sound. Computer simulations of the linear alternator have proved successful, and test models are currently being constructed in the department’s workshops.

Nottingham researchers are working with Dai-ichi, one of Malaysia’s largest loudspeaker manufacturers, to bring down production costs through good design practice. Though the Score unit does not physically resemble the average loudspeaker, it is compatible with the Dai-ichi manufacturing process.

Score has been invited by Dai-ichi to exhibit at the “Better City Better Life” EXPO 2010 in Shanghai China from May to October 2010 to showcase its new advanced technology to 70 million expected visitors.

The aim of the Score project is to make a low-cost, high efficiency generator that can be used in the world’s poorest countries. The generator has a cost target of £20 per household, based on the production of a million units. The generator will weigh between 10 and 20kg. The target is to generate an hour’s use per kilogram of fuel — which could be wood, dung or any other locally-available biomass material.

Dr Chitta Saha, Research Assistant at Nottingham said: “The current Linear Alternator design is very exciting for me as it solves many of the problems we had with using loudspeakers as alternators, but can still be made cheaply. My mum lives in Bangladesh — she is so proud that I am working on such a worthwhile project that she can see will help her community.”

The University of Manchester, City University London and Queen Mary, University of London and the Charity Practical Action are partners in the project — from researching engine design to the manufacture and distribution of the stove in the developing world. The project will work with governments, universities and civil organisation across Africa and Asia, many of whom have already offered support. This collaboration will ensure the device is affordable, socially acceptable and that there is scope for communities to develop businesses to manufacture and repair locally.

Mark Johnson, Professor of Advanced Power Conversion at Nottingham, said: "I am particularly pleased with the way that the Score consortium, with partners from very different technical backgrounds, has developed into a cohesive research team. We now have solutions to the fundamental technical problems and the first demonstrators delivering significant electrical power, have been realised"

The Score team is now looking for sponsorship to fund testing in the countries in which the generator will eventually be deployed. Indeed Germany’s Department of International Development (GTZ South Africa) has already signed a Memorandum of Understanding to provide funding to test the stove in southern Africa.

Paul H Riley, Score Project Director says “We have had tremendous interest in the Score project from around the world and the Score community —launched a few months ago — is working extremely well. This includes entrepreneurs and volunteers that adapt the stove for local use among its members.”

Practical Action, a charity which promotes the development of sustainable technology to tackle poverty in developing countries, is already leading field trials in Nepal and Kenya. The charity will expand the test sites when more units are made available.

Score community member Mark Loweth works in Tajikistan, one of the poorer countries in Central Asia. He has adapted a variation of a Score Stove to ensure it is suitable for the communities it is aimed at.

“We are very excited with the Score technology as it has the capability of bringing small scale electrical generation to households in the developing world,” he said.

“We plan to field test 20 units in Tajikistan when funding is available through a jointly owned, locally registered company utilising the experience and extensive local knowledge of expatriates and nationals with strong links to rural communities.”

Other members of the international Score Community are investigating how a Score Stove could best be adapted for their local environments.

South African Score community member Rynier Ferreira said: “We are adapting a Score Stove to work with paraffin (kerosene) as many rural communities in South Africa are still highly dependant on it as a major fuel source for cooking. Adapting a Score Stove for paraffin will increase not only the safety aspect for stoves using this type of fuel, but will give the people in these rural communities the additional advantage of electricity and refrigeration.”

Gorge Crowson is also testing the stove in southern Africa after joining the Score community: He said: “We have identified a number of waste materials that can be burnt in a Score Stove and are actively seeking financial support to set up assembly plants in Southern Africa and a distribution network, once the test phase is completed.”

It’s thought that more units will be available for testing in field trials at the start of next year, with full production of the Score generator taking place after 2012.

The Score consortium is funded by grants from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council as part of its initiative on energy and international development.

Kees deBlok of Aster Thermoakoestische Systemen in the Netherlands and Scott Backhaus of Los Alamos International Laboratories are acting as consultants to the Score project.

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City bees are all the buzz

2009-07-20T12:48:00.000-07:00

Veteran beekeeper Jim Fischer consults with a newcomer.

(Mary Knox Merrill/Staff/The Christian Science Monitor)

Enlarge

By Bridget Huber

Mary Knox Merrill/Staff/The Christian Science Monitor

A new beekeeper inspects a hive at her Manhattan home. Beekeeping is illegal in the city and can carry a $2,000 fine. But urban gardeners are pushing for passage of a bill, introduced by a city councilor, that would lift the ban – and boost pollination and honey production. Some other cities allow the practice.

New York

Honeybees may not be the first thing that come to mind when you think of Brooklyn. Yet here’s Yeshwant Chitalkar, high on a rooftop in the Red Hook section of the New York borough, opening a bright blue hive to check on its queen. The vista is a mix of parks, light industrial areas, and housing projects. Dr. Chitalkar works methodically, barehanded, carefully lifting out the hive’s frames, which are covered in a velvety, undulating layer of bees.

He is one of a growing number of urbanites who keep bees in cities across the country. Their motivations vary: Some are worried about the environmental impact of fewer bees to pollinate food crops. And some are urban gardeners who want to make their gardens more productive. Others say beekeeping is a way to connect with nature even in the heart of the concrete jungle.

Oh, and there’s the honey, too. Counterintuitive as it might seem, urban hives are generally as productive and healthy as rural ones. In a good year, one hive can produce up to 200 pounds of honey.

Urban beekeeping isn’t all sweet, though. It can be hard, dirty work and the challenges are many: jittery neighbors; vandals; city ordinances banning the activity; and problems, such as mites and parasites, that vex beekeepers everywhere.

But that doesn’t daunt those who want to keep bees. This year there are at least 30 new hives in community gardens, on rooftops, and in backyards across New York. Most are the result of a series of beekeeping classes taught last winter by Jim Fischer, a veteran beekeeper who lives in Manhattan.

Mr. Fischer and some of his students formed the Gotham City Honey Co-op to buy beekeeping equipment in bulk, and hope eventually to set up a site where members can extract and bottle their honey. The co-op also plans to brand its honey and sell it to specialty stores.

The only hitch: Beekeeping is illegal in New York City.

Mr. Fischer and other Big Apple beekeepers are confident that the honeybee ban will be lifted soon. A city councilor has introduced a bill to legalize it, and urban gardening groups are pushing for it to be passed.

The situation is quite different in Chicago, where City Hall’s green roof boasts a beehive. Michael Thompson, who helped install the city-owned hive, has been keeping bees within the city limits since the 1970s.

Today he is the farm manager at the Chicago Honey Co-op, which has about a hundred hives on the city’s West Side. Many belong to people who give half their honey to the co-op in exchange for keeping their hives at the site.

The city is an ideal spot for bees, Mr. Thompson learned when he moved there from a rural area where he kept bees.

“It’s much better to keep bees in a city,” he says. In rural and suburban areas, pesticides sprayed for agriculture and mosquito control can also harm bees. But in the city, the use of these kinds of pesticides is less widespread.

“People have the perception that a hive in the city can’t make any honey at all,” Fischer says. “That’s just not true.”

Honeybees can find abundant nectar in parks and along tree-lined boulevards. Also, urban areas often have extensive ornamental gardens in bloom throughout the growing season.

But Nick Calderone, associate professor of entomology at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., injects a note of caution. He says that hives can thrive in cities only if they’re near green spaces or gardens.

Many of the beekeepers Fischer knows are urban gardeners who began keeping bees because they wanted to increase their crops’ productivity. “If you want local food, you need local bees,” he says.

That’s why Roger Repohl of the Bronx became a beekeeper 10 years ago. Although his plants had plenty of flowers, they produced few vegetables. When he asked for advice from someone in the city’s Parks Department, he was told: “ ‘Oh, we don’t have pollinators in the South Bronx,’ ” he relates.

Although “some pollination is done by wind and rain, the majority is done by insects – including beetles, flies, butterflies, and, most significantly, by bees,” says Dr. Calderone. Many native species of bees are important pollinators, but their numbers have declined as their habitat has disappeared to development and large-scale agriculture.

Honeybees, which aren’t native to the United States, are used as pollinators on large farms as well as in personal gardens. But they are struggling, too.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US has dropped from 5 million to 2.5 million since the 1940s, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

And two mites that appeared in the US in the 1980s have been wreaking havoc on honeybee colonies since, says Calderone. Before their advent, home beekeepers might have lost 5 percent of their colonies per year and a migratory beekeeper 10 to 15 percent. Now, during bad years, beekeepers may lose five times that many colonies.

Then there’s the little-understood but much-publicized disease known as colony collapse disorder (CCD), which causes the mysterious disappearance of adult bees from colonies. While CCD’s cause is still not understood, “it’s certainly real and it’s certainly killing lots of bees, but exactly what it is, is hard to say,” says Calderone.

In urban areas, these problems haven’t discouraged gardeners from becoming beekeepers, And that’s good for all residents of the city, says Calderone. “Unless you want a totally sterile environment that’s devoid of all life other than people, you’re going to need plants. And to keep them functioning, you’re going to need pollinators.”

Toni Burnham, who blogs about urban beekeeping (City Bees), was inspired to start hives after hearing about London beekeepers. She has established several hives and was a consultant on the successful effort to put beehives on the White House lawn.

She sees beekeeping as a key part of maintaining a healthy city. “If those plants that are the bottom line for ecological health in my town can produce adequate fruit and leaves, there’s a whole range of bugs, snakes, and birds that can survive,” she says.

One of the biggest challenges for urban beekeepers is neighbors who are unhappy about living near beehives. Many people are afraid of bees, and much of that fear is rooted in misunderstanding, says Fischer.

Since bee populations have declined, people understand them less, says Fischer, who as a child spent the summers playing baseball barefoot. Back then, grass-seed mixes included red clover, a bee favorite. Inevitably, children stepped on bees. There were tears, but parents took it in stride – “the response was a hug and a cookie,” he says.

Today, many people mistake one bodily response to a bee sting – some swelling and itching – for an allergic reaction and take their children to the emergency room, Fischer says.

If their nests are threatened, bees will sting. But, Calderone says, they don’t generally do so when away from their nests.

Still, bee swarms, which occur when part or all of a colony leaves its home en masse to find a new one, make headlines. Fischer, who is frequently called to remove them in New York, once was called to a site where a swarm had landed on a newspaper box. When he got there, police had closed the intersection and cordoned off the area with yellow crime scene tape. Several television crews were filming. “Swarms scare the civilians,” he says.

But swarms aren’t particularly dangerous, he says. The bees may number in the thousands, but lack a hive to defend and are focused on finding a new home, although they will sting if provoked. Fischer calls them “the most docile configuration of bees.”

Still, “it’s important to cultivate respect for [honeybees]. They’re not chickens, cats, or dogs,” says Mr. Repohl, whose community garden regularly hosts school groups.

Keeping bees may have another benefit for busy city dwellers – encouraging them to slow down. Ms. Burnham, who says she’s the type of person who drinks too much coffee and waves her hands around when she’s talking, likens beekeeping to yoga: “I plan my movements, and I do them deliberately. I’m thinking about the effect of my motions on these creatures. I have to be in a different way,” she says.

Michaela Hayes, who has a new hive in Brooklyn, agrees. “I love the bees; they’re so peaceful,” she says. Ms. Hayes dreams of the day when she’ll make ginger beer from her honey, but for now she’s content to watch the bees as they go about their business. “They’re fascinating to me. It’s kind of like a big science experiment for adults.”

Original here

Top 10 DIY Projects that Harness the Power of the Sun

2009-07-20T12:45:00.000-07:00

By Kevin Purdy

Cheap, powerful, and available almost everywhere—solar energy is a truly great thing. With these 10 sun-powered projects, you can turn a sunny day off into some brag-worthy, possibly money-saving backyard tech.

Photo by david.nikonvscanon.

10. Engrave wood with a "sun laser"

Leave them alone long enough, and nearly every kid will investigate, or at least hear about, the devastating effects of magnifying glasses and clear, sunny weather on insects. Route that fascination with concentrated sunlight into some wood engraving. Aluminum foil (or, preferably, foil tape), sunglasses, a razor blade, and a magnifying glass are all you need to get creative with an old piece of wood or other dark objects. You'll need to provide supervision, lest bad aim turn into a kindling incident, but it's a great project for kids, as well as a unique way to leave your mark with style. (Original post)

9. Heat water in your backyard

It's not an efficient way to keep your hot tub filled, but the kind of solar-powered water heater detailed at the Instructables link above can get a big batch of water up to 170F without requiring any work from your water heater, and the kit costs around $5 with the right parts suppliers. Even if you pay a bit more, think about how often the backyard grill, deck, or pool could use a little cleaning with some hot, soapy water. This project gets you a free source of ever-ready cleaning water, and at a pretty neat price. (Original post)

8. Start a fire with a soda can and chocolate

This little project is the most reliant on a strong bit of sunlight, but totally worth the effort when you pull it off. The chocolate polishes the bottom of a soda can, which better focuses and intensifies sunlight reflections, creating a cone of fire-starting power that leaves your fellow campers impressed—or the other attendees at the park picnic grateful you were there when they forgot the matches. (Original post)

7. Convert a lawnmower to solar power

If you've got a small-ish lawn, a battery-powered mower is much easier on your and your neighbors' ears, and it saves you the hassle and cost of gas refills. Take those eco-benefits to the next level by converting a gas-guzzling push mower to use a solar-charged battery. Appropedia's version is a definite weekend project for an older model, but if you've got a newer battery mower, it's not too hard to simply start charging it with a solar panel instead of your wall socket, and this guide will help get you there. (Original post)

6. Estimate your home's solar potential

A solar-powered house sounds like a neat idea in abstract, but how would you know if your house's roof could really sustain worthwhile energy? Luckily, a big search company has overhead images of just about every house out there, and mashup tool RoofRay can use that image, plus your location's average sunlight and some roof details, to get a starting estimate on whether you can use the sun to push back on your power meter a bit. (Original post)

5. Extend Wi-Fi to your backyard

Probably the least practical and most expensive of the projects listed here, the solar-powered Wi-Fi extender is definitely the most rewarding from a geek cred and green power perspective. Popular Science explains in great detail how to solder and network together a semi-standard Linksys Wi-Fi router, range extender, solar panel, battery, and higher-powered antenna, and then set it up to grab Wi-Fi from your household's main network and expand it to the great outdoors—or, at least, the outdoors behind your house. That leaves you with regular web access anywhere around your property, without having to worry about running cables across the lawn. (Original post)

4. Cook with a cardboard box

There's an entire realm of recipes and cookbooks that purport to help you get cooking done in the summer without turning on your oven. Skip the gazpacho and the house-warming heat with an oven built from aluminum foil, construction paper, plastic, and a few other household items, including a firm cardboard box. It's great for saving energy, saving time, and feeling like you really made the most of a warm, sunny day. Want to get a bit more efficient and physics-y with your outdoor oven? Try a parabolic solar cooker. Photo by thescarletmanuka. (Original post)

3. Build a greenhouse for $50

If you're lucky enough to live where plants and food grow all year, you already know the power of photosynthesis. For those who could use a little more prep time for their seedlings, a longer growing season, or just a buffer against the occasional plant-punching dry spell, The Door Garden explains how to take some light construction materials—$50 if you happen to have most of it lying around, about $150 purchased new—and build a greenhouse that will withstand most winters and thrive in every other season. Just got a few plants you want to get started with condensed solar power? Try the mini-greenhouse made from a window. (Original post)

2. Charge an iPhone/iPod with the sun

We're big fans of the MintyBoost DIY USB charger kit, a great project for electronic beginners and pros alike. It was only a matter of time, then, until someone switched the power source from AA batteries in an Altoids case to a lithium-ion battery with solar charging capabilities. Completing the modified kit isn't a great leap more difficult than the original, and once you do, you'll be glad to get a lot more use out of your windowsills, and hand over a lot less money at the grocery store every few weeks. It's not necessarily the most effective method of charging, but it's undeniably cool. (Original post)

1. Sun jar garden light

The solar-powered outdoor lights they sell at your local garden/home improvement store can be subtle or original-looking—if you want to pay a premium. Otherwise, you're stuck with painted plastic and models that hold a pretty weak charge. The sun jars constructed by our own Jason, on the other hand, cost only about $11 each—less if you have jars or batteries on hand—and give off a pretty neat glow, powered entirely by solar energy from earlier that day.

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Severn tidal power scheme should not go ahead, warns Environment Agency

2009-07-20T12:38:00.000-07:00

John Vidal

The Weston barrage, running 10 miles across the Severn estuary between Weston-super-Mare and Cardiff, is the largest of four tidal power schemes being considered by government Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

A giant tidal energy scheme which the government is counting on to meet ambitious new green energy targets set this week should not be built because it would be so ecologically destructive, the chair of the Environment Agency has warned ministers.

The government's roadmap to a low-carbon UK called for a 34% cut in emissions by 2020, with the power sector contributing the bulk of that saving. The Weston barrage, running 10 miles across the Severn estuary between Weston-super-Mare and Cardiff, is by far the largest of four tidal power schemes being considered by government and would be the centrepiece of the nation's renewable energy plan.

It could generate 8.6 gigawatts of zero-carbon electricity from the Severn – the equivalent of eight large coal-fired power stations – and would be the single largest renewable energy project in Europe.

But the £5bn flagship scheme would permanently flood nearly 35,000 hectares (86,000 acres) of internationally protected wetlands. It would also destroy some of Britain's most important fisheries in the Severn, Wye and Usk catchment areas, said Lord Smith in an interview with the Guardian.

"The great wall across the Severn channel poses the classic environmental dilemma. It would generate 5% of all the UK's electricity needs but at a huge cost in terms of fishing and habitats. These immense environmental impacts outweigh the carbon reduction benefits which you would get. We are advising the government on this pretty strongly," said the government's chief environmental adviser.

"There must be ways of harnessing tidal power from the estuary without the gross impacts that the Weston scheme would have. I regret that we are not putting as much effort as we could into tidal reefs and defences. We should be addressing the possibility of tidal power around the country. Tidal energy should be one of the key ways of generating electricity", he said.

Smith's comments will not be welcomed by the government which this week committed itself to generating 20% of the UK's energy from renewable sources within only 11 years, but it is meeting technical and planning delays with wind power.

A decision on the barrage will be given next year but ministers are keen to see it started because it would contribute more to emission cuts than any other scheme. The energy minister, Lord Hunt, said this week: "The Cardiff-Weston barrage has the potential to save the equivalent of the yearly CO2 emissions from all homes in Wales."

The barrage, which would be a huge engineering feat on the scale of some of the world's biggest construction projects, is shaping up to be one the most contentious environmental issues of the decade. The National Trust, the RSPB and WWF, together representing more than 5 million people, have said that a barrage would be "economically dubious" and "ecologically disastrous".

They have also argued that 5m tonnes of CO2 would be emitted during construction and another 5m tonnes during transport of the materials, undermining claims that the barrage would help reduce emissions.

Smith also warned the nuclear industry, another part of the energy and climate change secretary, Ed Miliband's "trinity" of low-carbon electricity plans, that climate change could seriously affect their costs. He said the agency would demand that nuclear power companies build major sea defences to protect nuclear power against the sea level rises expected over the next 100 years.

"Virtually all the new [nuclear] stations are by the sea. We will look at them on a case-by-case basis but all sites must be fully defensible. The power companies know that they will have to defend them on a very large scale. Protection against flood risk must be absolute."

Smith also questioned Miliband's intention to preserve low-cost mass air travel, revealed in the Guardian this week. Calling for a debate on the future of aviation, he argued that climate change made it doubtful people could fly so much in 40 years' time. "By 2050 we should have reduced greenhouse gases by 80%, which means we will have 20% left. How much of that 20% should be taken by aviation?

"Aeroplanes will get more efficient but they will not be able to completely remove their carbon emissions. By 2050 we will need to have decided how much flying we can do. "

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Orchards may vanish by the end of the century, conservationists warn

2009-04-29T08:07:00.000-07:00

An apple crop being harvested in Somerset. Their price is set to rise this year. Photograph: Mark Bolton/Corbis

Small traditional orchards could vanish from the British landscape by the end of the century unless action is taken to save them, environmental experts and campaigners warned yesterday.

Natural England and the National Trust claimed 60% of England's orchards had isappeared since the 1950s as they launched a £500,000 project aimed at halting the decline. The crisis has been even worse in some areas, such as Devon, which has lost almost 90% of its orchards.

The organisations argued that if nothing was done, a focal point for communities across the country and a crucial habitat for flora and fauna could be wiped out forever.

The loss of orchards would be accompanied by a huge loss of apple varieties, some unique to just a few square miles, and many of them with wonderfully eccentric names such as the Hangy Down, the Oaken Pin and Polly White Hair.

Steve Morris: 'Sixty per cent of smaller orchards have vanished' Link to this audio

David Bullock, the head of nature conservation at the National Trust, said: "Traditional orchards have been disappearing at an alarming rate. We are in real danger of losing these unique habitats."

Bullock also said that unless more was done to map the many disused orchards in England, rare varieties would be lost, with no records kept of them ever having existed.

In a blossom-filled apple orchard at Killerton, a National Trust estate in Devon, the scale of the crisis was spelled out.

Though cider has grown in popularity over the last few years, it tends to be made from apples grown intensively and treated with chemicals. Many smaller traditional orchards have been built on, or uprooted to make way for arable crops and pony paddocks.

That meant the loss of habitats for birds, beetles including the threatened Noble Chafer, mammals — such as long-eared bats — moths, lichens and fungi.

For the purposes of the new £500,000 project, traditional orchards are defined as having at least five trees widely spaced and allowed to grow gnarled, hollowed and eventually fall where they stand . They are not intensively managed, are treated with few or no chemicals and are often grazed by animals such as sheep or geese or cut for hay.

Lucy Cordrey, the project manager, said: "Traditional orchards have become an extremely rare and precious habitat. We need to do something to stop this decline. Orchards bring people and wildlife together. It's about food, the culture behind them, the heritage. They are magical places to be in."

Under the two-year project old orchards are being restored and long forgotten or neglected ones rediscovered and mapped. Workshops are being set up to train people in skills such as pruning and grafting and communities are being told how they can revive old orchards, plant new ones and market the fruit they produce.

Sue Clifford, director of the environmental charity Common Ground, said she was confident the traditional orchard would be saved.

Clifford, whose favourite apple is the west country's Slack-ma-Girdle, said: "The interest is escalating. In the last two or three years we've seen a change in people's attitudes.

"We've been trying to excite people since the late eighties about traditional orchards. We've tried to say to them, look there's 2,300 varieties of eating and cooking apples, several hundred more of cider apples. And that's just apples. Think of the pears and the plums and the

damsons. And I think people are starting to realise that orchards are beautiful places. They are fantastic for wildlife and they are good for community spirit. "

Traditional orchards, traditional apples

Here are just a few of the varieties of apples to be found in the orchards of the Killerton estate in Devon:

Killerton Sweet

Unique to Killerton, a pale green cider apple. One of the varieties used in the estate's popular 6% cider.

Killerton Sharp

Also found only at Killerton. A little drier and sharper than the sweet, and gives the cider a bit of bite. Ripens in October.

Philbert Nut Bush

A bright red Somerset apple. Excellent in chutney but also makes a tasty desert apple.

Star of Devon

Originally from the village of Broadclyst just a few miles away from Killerton. A pale yellowy-green pithy apple.

Ten Commandments

Split it in two and you find 10 brown dots - hence the name. Pale green and yellow, becoming red as it ripens in late September and early October.

Kids Curb Marital Satisfaction

2009-04-10T00:37:00.000-07:00

Parents all know that children make it harder to do some of the most enjoyable adult things. Bluntly put, kids can get between you.

Now scientists have attached some numbers to the situation.

An eight-year study of 218 couples found 90 percent experienced a decrease in marital satisfaction once the first child was born.

"Couples who do not have children also show diminished marital quality over time," says Scott Stanley, research professor of psychology at University of Denver. "However, having a baby accelerates the deterioration, especially seen during periods of adjustment right after the birth of a child."

An unrelated study in 2006 of 13,000 people found parents are more depressed than non-parents. Scientists speculate that the problem is partly a modern one, because parents don't get as much help at home as they did in previous generations.

There are key variables to note in the new study.

Couples who lived together before marriage experienced more problems after the birth of a child than those who lived separately before marriage, as did those whose parents fought or divorced.

However, some couples said their relationships were stronger post-birth. They tended to have been married longer or had higher incomes.

Children don't ruin everything, Stanley points out.

"There are different types of happiness in life and that while some luster may be off marital happiness for at least a time during this period of life, there is a whole dimension of family happiness and contentment based on the family that couples are building," he said. "This type of happiness can be powerful and positive but it has not been the focus of research."

The new research, funded by a grant to the University of Denver from the National Institutes of Health, is detailed in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Original Story: Kids Curb Marital Satisfaction

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Cambridge University Unveiled Solar Car

2009-04-10T00:35:00.000-07:00

Cambridge University Eco Racing’s (CUER) new solar racing car demonstrates cutting-edge environmentally-friendly technology, applicable to the next generation of electric vehicles.

The vehicle, currently codenamed ‘Bethany‘, will compete in the World Solar Challenge in Australia in October 2009. This vehicle is capable of cruising at 60mph using the same power as a hairdryer. The car will weigh just 160kg and sports 6m2 of the world’s highest efficiency silicon solar cells.

In order to achieve the car’s extraordinary performance, CUER’s engineering team has systematically reduced energy usage for each part of the car. Aerodynamics, rolling resistance, weight and electrical efficiency have all been optimised to create a vehicle that uses up to 50 times less power than a normal petrol car and has potentially infinite range.

Extensive computer modelling and simulation have been necessary to achieve this, using Dassault Systèmes’ SolidWorks and Simulia packages for mechanical design, ANSYS’s Fluent for aerodynamic simulation, as well as National Instrument’s LabVIEW and The MathWorks’ MatLab and Simulink for systems modelling. Under its solar skin, the racing car is simply an ultra-efficient electric vehicle.

The technologies used are therefore applicable to the commercial electric cars that are beginning to appear on our roads. Technologies used include a 98% efficient electric hub motor, control systems providing battery management (supplied by REAPsystems) and regenerative braking, lightweight mechanical design, and carbon fibre composite bodywork.

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Aerosols May Drive a Significant Portion of Arctic Warming

2009-04-10T00:33:00.000-07:00

Aerosols can influence climate directly by either reflecting or absorbing the sun's radiation as it moves through the atmosphere. The tiny airborne particles enter the atmosphere from sources such as industrial pollution, volcanoes and residential cooking stoves. Credit: NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio
> Larger image

Though greenhouse gases are invariably at the center of discussions about global climate change, new NASA research suggests that much of the atmospheric warming observed in the Arctic since 1976 may be due to changes in tiny airborne particles called aerosols.

Emitted by natural and human sources, aerosols can directly influence climate by reflecting or absorbing the sun's radiation. The small particles also affect climate indirectly by seeding clouds and changing cloud properties, such as reflectivity.

A new study, led by climate scientist Drew Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, used a coupled ocean-atmosphere model to investigate how sensitive different regional climates are to changes in levels of carbon dioxide, ozone, and aerosols.

The researchers found that the mid and high latitudes are especially responsive to changes in the level of aerosols. Indeed, the model suggests aerosols likely account for 45 percent or more of the warming that has occurred in the Arctic during the last three decades. The results were published in the April issue of Nature Geoscience.

Though there are several varieties of aerosols, previous research has shown that two types -- sulfates and black carbon -- play an especially critical role in regulating climate change. Both are products of human activity.

Sulfates, which come primarily from the burning of coal and oil, scatter incoming solar radiation and have a net cooling effect on climate. Over the past three decades, the United States and European countries have passed a series of laws that have reduced sulfate emissions by 50 percent. While improving air quality and aiding public health, the result has been less atmospheric cooling from sulfates.

Researchers used an electron microscope to capture these images of black carbon attached to sulfate particles. The spherical structures in image A are sulfates; the arrows point to smaller chains of black carbon. Black carbon is shown in detail in image B. Image C shows fly ash, a product of coal-combustion, that's often found in association with black carbon. While black carbon absorbs radiation and contributes to warming, sulfates reflect it and tend to cool Earth. Credit: Peter Buseck, Arizona State University
> Larger image At the same time, black carbon emissions have steadily risen, largely because of increasing emissions from Asia. Black carbon -- small, soot-like particles produced by industrial processes and the combustion of diesel and biofuels -- absorb incoming solar radiation and have a strong warming influence on the atmosphere.

In the modeling experiment, Shindell and colleagues compiled detailed, quantitative information about the relative roles of various components of the climate system, such as solar variations, volcanic events, and changes in greenhouse gas levels. They then ran through various scenarios of how temperatures would change as the levels of ozone and aerosols -- including sulfates and black carbon -- varied in different regions of the world. Finally, they teased out the amount of warming that could be attributed to different climate variables. Aerosols loomed large.

The regions of Earth that showed the strongest responses to aerosols in the model are the same regions that have witnessed the greatest real-world temperature increases since 1976. The Arctic region has seen its surface air temperatures increase by 1.5 C (2.7 F) since the mid-1970s. In the Antarctic, where aerosols play less of a role, the surface air temperature has increased about 0.35 C (0.6 F).

That makes sense, Shindell explained, because of the Arctic's proximity to North America and Europe. The two highly industrialized regions have produced most of the world's aerosol emissions over the last century, and some of those aerosols drift northward and collect in the Arctic. Precipitation, which normally flushes aerosols out of the atmosphere, is minimal there, so the particles remain in the air longer and have a stronger impact than in other parts of the world.

Since decreasing amounts of sulfates and increasing amounts of black carbon both encourage warming, temperature increases can be especially rapid. The build-up of aerosols also triggers positive feedback cycles that further accelerate warming as snow and ice cover retreat.

In the Antarctic, in contrast, the impact of sulfates and black carbon is minimized because of the continent’s isolation from major population centers and the emissions they produce.

"There's a tendency to think of aerosols as small players, but they're not," said Shindell. "Right now, in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere and in the Arctic, the impact of aerosols is just as strong as that of the greenhouse gases."

Since the 1890s, surface temperatures have risen faster in the Arctic than in other regions of the world. In part, these rapid changes could be due to changes in aerosol levels. Clean air regulations passed in the 1970s, for example, have likely accelerated warming by diminishing the cooling effect of sulfates. Credit: Drew Shindell, Goddard Institute for Space Studies
> Larger image (pdf) The growing recognition that aerosols may play a larger climate role can have implications for policymakers.

"We will have very little leverage over climate in the next couple of decades if we're just looking at carbon dioxide," Shindell said. "If we want to try to stop the Arctic summer sea ice from melting completely over the next few decades, we're much better off looking at aerosols and ozone."

Aerosols tend to be quite-short lived, residing in the atmosphere for just a few days or weeks. Greenhouses gases, by contrast, can persist for hundreds of years. Atmospheric chemists theorize that the climate system may be more responsive to changes in aerosol levels over the next few decades than to changes in greenhouse gas levels, which will have the more powerful effect in coming centuries.

"This is an important model study, raising lots of great questions that will need to be investigated with field research," said Loretta Mickley, an atmospheric chemist from Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. who was not directly involved in the research. Understanding how aerosols behave in the atmosphere is still very much a work-in-progress, she noted, and every model needs to be compared rigorously to real life observations. But the science behind Shindell’s results should be taken seriously.

"It appears that aerosols have quite a powerful effect on climate, but there's still a lot more that we need to sort out," said Shindell.

NASA’s upcoming Glory satellite is designed to enhance our current aerosol measurement capabilities to help scientists reduce uncertainties about aerosols by measuring the distribution and microphysical properties of the particles.

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Brazilian faces retrial over murder of environmental activist nun in Amazon

2009-04-10T00:32:00.000-07:00

David Batty

Dorothy Stang was shot to death at point-blank range. Photograph: Reuters

A Brazilian court has ordered the arrest and retrial of an Amazon rancher acquitted of orchestrating the murder of American nun and rainforest activist, Dorothy Stang.

Para state's highest court threw out last year's verdict, which found Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura not guilty of the 2005 shooting of Stang, 73, who campaigned for 30 years to save the Amazon rainforest from the interests of wealthy landlords.

"We're elated and we are convinced we will get a guilty verdict in the new trial," said prosecutor Edson Souza.

Souza said Moura was charged with ordering Stang's murder but he had yet to be arrested.

Stang was shot six times at close range with a revolver in the small jungle city of Anapu. The nun, from Dayton, Ohio, spent three decades on the Amazon's wild frontier, working to preserve the rainforest and defend the rights of poor settlers whose lands were seized by powerful ranchers.

Her death prompted Amazon activists – more than 1,000 of whom have been murdered in the last 20 years – to demand Brazil's government crack down on the illegal seizure and clearance of the rainforest to graze cattle, raise soy crops and harvest timber.

"I am excited that perhaps Dorothy will find justice," David Stang, the nun's brother, wrote in an email to the Associated Press.

He has travelled from his home in Palmer Lake, Colorado, to Brazil several times to witness the trials. "All of us who love Brazil today are so proud of this great country, as would Dorothy be proud today," he wrote.

Prosecutors said Moura and rancher Regivaldo Galvao hired gunmen to kill Stang over a disputed plot of land.

Galvao, who denies the charge, was arrested in 2005 but was freed on bail in 2006.

Moura has already been tried twice in the case as Brazil has no double jeopardy law. He was found guilty by a state court in 2007 and sentenced to 30 years in prison.That ruling was overturned last year after the man who confessed to shooting Stang recanted his earlier testimony, insisting he had acted alone. Gunman Rayfran das Neves Sales was sentenced to 28 years in prison.

The court ruled yesterday that Moura and Sales must be retried because a video that Moura's defence showed the jury was inadmissible.

That video depicting Amair Feijoli da Cunha, who was jailed for 17 years for acting as the middleman between the gunman and the ranchers, was made while he was in prison and without a judge's approval.

The video, made by the defence team, showed Cunha saying that Moura had nothing to do with the case. He had testified earlier that Moura paid the hired gunmen.

Para court officials said no date had been set for the trials of Moura or Sales.

More than 1,100 activists, small farmers, judges, priests and other rural workers have been killed in land disputes in the last two decades, according to the Catholic Land Pastoral, a Brazilian watchdog group.

Of those killings, fewer than 100 cases have gone to court. About 80 convicted suspects were hired gunmen for powerful ranchers and loggers seeking to expand their lands, according to federal prosecutors and the watchdog.

About 15 of the men who hired them were found guilty but none of them are serving a sentence today.

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A Solar-Powered Solution to Florida Sprawl

2009-04-10T00:30:00.000-07:00

By Michael Grunwald

An architect's rendering of Babcock Ranch, which plans to provide for its electricity needs on site with solar energy

Coming soon to the Sunshine State: the sunshine city.

An NFL lineman turned visionary developer today is unveiling startlingly ambitious plans for a solar-powered city of tomorrow in southwest Florida's outback, featuring the world's largest photovoltaic solar plant, a truly smart power grid, recharging stations for electric vehicles and a variety of other green innovations. The community of Babcock Ranch is designed to break new frontiers in sustainable development, quite a shift for a state that has never been sustainable and lately hasn't had much development. (Read "Is Florida the Sunset State?")

"Some people think I got hit in the head a few too many times," quips developer Syd Kitson, who spent six years in the trenches for the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys before entering the real estate business in the mid-1980s. "But I still believe deeply in Florida. And the time has come for something completely different." (See the top 10 green stories of 2008.)

To anyone familiar with southern Florida's planning-nightmare sprawl of golf courses, strip malls and cookie-cutter subdivisions named after the plants and animals they replaced, Kitson's vision for his solar-powered, smart-growth, live-where-you-work city of 45,000 people east of Fort Myers is breathtakingly different. That's why the press conference held today to reveal his development plans for the historic Babcock Ranch property will feature representatives from the Audubon Society, the World Wildlife Fund and the Sierra Club.

The history of Florida is littered with spectacular landscape-changing proposals that never made it past the drawing board. The watery wisp of Everglades National Park known as Flamingo — population zero — was once touted as the next Chicago. Kitson's financial partner, Morgan Stanley, has had a rough time lately, and some locals remain skeptical that he can turn his $2 billion green vision into reality. "We've been hearing a lot of very exciting ideas, but we have no idea how this is actually going to happen," says Conservancy of Southwest Florida CEO Andrew McElwaine.

Then again, Kitson has already cleared two of his most difficult hurdles: getting the land and the right to build on it. In 2006 he engineered a deal with then governor Jeb Bush and the previous owners of the 91,000-acre ranch in which the state spent $350 million to purchase 73,000 of the most environmentally sensitive acres — it was the largest preservation buy in Florida history. Kitson paid about the same amount for the remaining 18,000 acres, and he says half of that will remain green space within the new community.

Kitson has been promising unprecedented sustainability all along, but today's shocker was the announcement of Florida Power & Light's plan to provide electricity for Babcock Ranch with a 75-megawatt photovoltaic plant nearly twice as big as the current record holder in Germany. Solar power has been slow to catch on in the gas-powered Sunshine State, but FPL hopes to start construction on the 400-acre, $300 million plant by year's end. The utility expects it will provide enough power for Babcock Ranch and beyond. At $4 million per megawatt — FPL estimates the cost to its customers at about 31� per month over the life of the project — it should be more than four times as cost-effective as the nuclear reactors FPL is trying to build near the Florida Keys.

Kitson's slick website also promises "groundbreaking" strategies to promote energy efficiency for all Babcock Ranch buildings. And that's not all: "Ultramodern electric vehicles will glide along avenues beneath the glow of solar-powered street lamps, plugging in to recharge at convenient community-wide recharging stations. Revolutionary smart-grid technologies will monitor and manage energy use, while smart-home technology will allow residents to operate their homes at maximum efficiency." Kitson's goal is to reduce carbon emissions, oil dependence and energy bills, while turning Babcock Ranch into a mecca for clean-energy research and development, attracting high-tech companies that will provide high-wage jobs.

The idea is to create a self-contained community where people can live and shop and work and go to school and have fun without long car trips. Kitson's construction plans start with a walkable and bikeable downtown that will include a magnet school, a wellness facility and sustainable retail, as well as 8,000 homes — including affordable homes for local workers. "In Florida, everyone has to drive everywhere they want to go," Kitson says. "And everyone thinks the solution to congestion is to build more roads. I think the solution is to design communities so you don't need more cars on the roads."

Of course, talk is cheap. It's no secret that growth has been Florida's primary economic engine for decades. Yet Fortune 500 companies haven't flocked to its sprawling bedroom communities with lousy schools and overpriced houses, and the paving of paradise has left the state with overtapped aquifers, overcrowded hospitals, overstretched services, traffic jams, a dying Everglades and a vanishing sense of place.

Kitson promises to avoid the mistakes of the past. "We're impressed with their commitments," says Wayne Daltry, Lee County's director of smart growth. "Now we have to pound them to keep their commitments. No plan survives contact with reality — and in this case, the reality is called the bottom line."

Given the dismal state of the economy in Florida and the dismal environmental track record of developers, it's easy to be skeptical. Kitson already had to lay off some of his southwest Florida staff. But unless the sun stops shining, the current housing collapse won't last forever. Florida is always going to be nicer than Brooklyn or Cleveland in the winter. It's about time someone tried to make growth environmentally and economically sustainable. And it's about time someone tried to use that sunshine for something other than getting a tan.

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Chicago Gets First Solar Powered EV Charging Station

2009-04-10T00:24:00.000-07:00

Written by Jerry James Stone

San Francisco and Portland might be engaged in some electric vehicle pissing contest, but I think both cities just got seriously spanked by Chicago!

Yes…Chicago!

The Windy City just unveiled the first solar-powered electric vehicle charging station during the IOC tour. The Solar Plug-In Stations will be used daily by the City of Chicago Department of Fleet Management to power the city’s electric cars.

“Carbon Day and the City of Chicago are demonstrating true innovation, ingenuity and initiative,” said Richard Lowenthal, CEO of Coulomb Technologies. “Solar energy and electric vehicles are an inevitable partnership that is one more step to reducing our dependence on foreign oil.”
Carbon Day Automotive’s Solar Plug-In Station(TM), built by Carbon Day Construction, was designed by the world renowned firm of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture.

“Without these stations it would be like driving around in traditional cars without the availability of gas stations,” said Scott Emalfarb, CEO at Carbon Day. “The day of true plug-in electric vehicles will be here sooner than most people realize and the world needs to be ready to accommodate them. Carbon Day will build them and they will come.”

Wanxiang America Corporation manufactured the solar panels that form a tree-like canopy built by Residential Steel. Pure Energy, LLC, Northbrook installed the sculpted piece and interfaced it with the concealed underground battery pack enhanced to store solar energy, specially designed and developed by ALL CELL Technologies.

“Chicago is that most American of American cities,” Obama said. Well, I hope other American cities follow suit.

So does Carbon Day Automotive as they hope to have thousands of these stations nationwide by 2011. I hope so too!

More Recent News on EV Charging Infrastructure:

Connecticut and Massachusetts Could Get EV Charging Network
It’s On! Portland and San Francisco Battle For Electric Car Domination
Raleigh, N.C. to Install Plug-in Hybrid Charging Stations
San Francisco Plugs In To the Future with Electric Vehicle Recharging Stations (by Gavin Newsom)

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Inventor turns cardboard boxes into eco-friendly oven

2009-04-10T00:22:00.000-07:00

By Saeed Ahmed

(CNN) -- When Jon Bohmer sat down with his two little girls for a simple project they could work on together, he didn't realize they'd hit upon a solution to one of the world's biggest problems for just $5: A solar-powered oven.

Inventor Jon Bohmer with the oven he has made out of a cardboard box.

The ingeniously simple design uses two cardboard boxes, one inside the other, and an acrylic cover that lets in the sun's rays and traps them.

Black paint on the inner box, and silver foil on the outer one, help concentrate the heat. The trapped rays make the inside hot enough to cook casseroles, bake bread and boil water.

What the box also does is eliminate the need in developing countries for rural residents to cut down trees for firewood. About 3 billion people around the world do so, adding to deforestation and, in turn, global warming.

By allowing users to boil water, the simple device could also potentially save the millions of children who die from drinking unclean water.

Bohmer's invention on Thursday won the FT Climate Change Challenge, which sought to find and publicize the most innovative and practical solution to climate change.

"A lot of scientists are working on ways to send people to Mars. I was looking for something a little more grassroots, a little simpler," Bohmer said Thursday.

Bohmer's contest win notwithstanding, solar cooking with a cardboard oven isn't new. Two American women, Barbara Kerr and Sherry Cole, were the solar box cooker's first serious promoters in the 1970s. They and others joined forces to create the non-profit Solar Cookers International -- originally called Solar Box Cookers International -- in 1987.

Further, the organization's executive director, Patrick Widner, said that the plans for a solar box cooker were found in a book published by the Peace Corps in the 1960s.

"We are pleased that Mr. Bohmer has taken up the cause and interest of the 95 member organizations and 160 individuals of the Solar Cookers Worldwide Network," Widner said. "It would be a pleasure to work with Mr. Bohmer in Kenya where we have been promoting the use of solar cookers for ten years."

Bohmer, a Norwegian-born entrepreneur based in Kenya, said he also had been looking at solutions "way too complex, for way too long."

"This took me about a weekend, and it worked on the first try," Bohmer said. "It's mind-boggling how simple it is."

The contest was organized by the Forum for the Future -- a sustainable development charity -- and the Financial Times newspaper. Among the judges were British business magnate Richard Branson and environmentalist Rajendra Pachauri. The public also voted on the finalists.

Bohmer's invention beat about 300 other entries, including a machine that turns wood and other organic material into charcoal, wheel covers that make trucks more fuel efficient by reducing drag, and a feed supplement for livestock that reduces the methane they emit by 15 percent.

Bohmer named his invention the Kyoto Box, after the international environmental treaty to reduce global warming.

The box can be produced in existing cardboard factories. It has gone into production in a factory in Nairobi, Kenya, that can churn out about 2.5 million boxes a month.

Bohmer has also designed a more durable version, made from recycled plastic, which can be produced just as cheaply.

He envisions such cardboard ovens being distributed throughout rural Africa.

"In the West, we cook with electricity, so it's easy to ignore this problem," he said. "But half the world's population is still living in a stone age. The only way for them to cook is to make a fire.

"I don't want to see another 80-year-old woman carrying 20 kilos of firewood on her back. Maybe we don't have to."

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Report From Antarctica: Heaps of Trash or Historical Treasures?

2009-04-10T00:17:00.000-07:00

By Wired Science

NEKO BAY, Antarctica — On the 2 percent of Antarctica that isn't covered in ice, the juxtaposition of man-made refuse and Planet Earth-worthy wildlife tableaux is far from rare. But cleaning up that prime real estate is complicated by the nature of the debris, much of which is deemed "historical" and thus unmovable.

Geobiologist Jeff Marlow traveled to Antarctica during the past two weeks as part of an international expedition exploring conservation and environmental issues, sponsored by BP. In a series of reports for Wired.com, he shares his experience seeing the area first-hand with a number of Antarctic climate, conservation and biology experts. The journey brought a number of issues to the fore, including trash accumulation, ecosystems knocked out of balance by warming temperatures, and simmering political tensions over the region.

Marlow is from Denver and is currently earning a Ph.D. at Imperial College London, working on the European Space Agency's ExoMars rover.

There aren't exactly piles of trash covering Antarctica, but the waste’s location on biologically active shores makes it most disruptive to both wildlife and other human visitors. On a rocky outcrop overlooking Neko Bay on the Antarctic Peninsula, a sheet of red corrugated iron shares space with several hundred gentoo penguins.

Over the last few days, we’ve seen several signs of previous human activity, including a wrecked early–20th-century whaling vessel, some wooden water boats, a rusting sledge and a decrepit shack. Determining which structures hold legitimate historical or cultural value and which should be removed is a contentious task without any clear answers.

The answer for some structures is obvious. Even the strictest conservationist would concede the cultural and historical value of sites like Captain Scott’s hut on the Ross Sea or Mawson's camp in Cape Denison. But significant quantities of disused buildings and machinery dating from the last several decades are a different story.

"An old whaling station is a real mess," said Robert Swan, a stubborn Antarctic conservationist and the first man to walk to both poles. "It’s revolting, but actually it’s not, because it’s a statement saying 'Don’t think of Antarctica as pristine: We were about to come and pillage the place.'"

A few dismal landscapes may have a cautionary function "as a reminder of what could have been," had humanity not declared the Antarctic off-limits, said Graham Charles, a guide and adventurer who has worked in the Antarctic for 15 years. "The rest of them are junk piles, and it’s just abysmal."

There’s plenty of accumulated trash to ship off the continent. From 1994 to 2002, Swan helped the Russian Bellingshausen station on King George Island offload 1,500 tons of garbage that had accumulated since the Cold War. The effort cost $6 million and took eight years, but native penguins soon reclaimed their beach, and the station is a much more pleasant place to visit and live.

Retroactive efforts like the Bellingshausen cleanup will likely continue to take significant amounts of both money and time, but legal frameworks in the last 20 years have helped address waste problems at more recent bases: According to Antarctic law, any active bases must remove all trash from the continent. How each nation manages this mandate varies widely, and regulation is nearly nonexistent.

"Most bases are diligent enough to take their trash out on a ship," Charles said. "But a lot of them have just turned over the soil and buried it."

The designation of "historical" structures and sites remains uncodified and controversial, but there is still plenty of uncontroversial trash that still must be shipped out of Antarctica. Without regulation or public accountability, however, illegal Antarctic dumping is likely to continue. In the meantime, penguins, seals and human visitors alike are learning to live with wood and iron.

—Jeff Marlow for Wired.com

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