Emilie du Chatelet (1706 – 1749)

Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, the daughter of the French court’s chief of protocol, married the marquis du Chatelet in 1725. She lived the life of a courtier and bore three children. But at age 27, she began studying mathematics seriously and then branched into physics. This interest intensified as she began an affair with the philosopher Voltaire, who also had a love of science. Their scientific collaborations—they outfitted a laboratory at du Chatelet’s home, Chateau de Cirey, and, in a bit of a competition, each entered an essay into a contest on the nature of fire (neither won)—outlasted their romance. Du Chatelet’s most lasting contribution to science was her French translation of Isaac Newton’s Principia, which is still in use today. At age 43, she fell in love with a young military officer and became pregnant; she died following complications during the birth of their child.

Caroline Herschel (1750 – 1848)

Herschel was little more than the household drudge for her parents in Hanover, Germany (she would later describe herself as the “Cinderella of the family”), when her older brother, William, brought her to England in 1772 to run his household in Bath. After she mastered the art of singing—to accompany William, who was the organist for the Octagon Chapel—her brother switched careers and went into astronomy. Caroline followed. In addition to assisting her brother in his observations and in the building of telescopes, Caroline became a brilliant astronomer in her own right, discovering new nebulae and star clusters. She was the first woman to discover a comet (she discovered eight in total) and the first to have her work published by the Royal Society. She was also the first British woman to get paid for her scientific work, when William, who had been named the king’s personal astronomer after his discovery of Uranus in 1781, persuaded his patron to reward his assistant with an annual salary. After William’s death in 1822, Caroline retired to Hanover. There she continued her astronomical work, compiling a catalogue of nebulae—the Herschels’ work had increased the number of known star clusters from 100 to 2,500. She died in 1848 at age 97 after receiving many honors in her field, including a gold medal from the Royal Astronomical Society.

Mary Anning (1799 – 1847)

In 1811, Mary Anning’s brother spotted what he thought was a crocodile skeleton in a seaside cliff near the family’s Lyme Regis, England, home. He charged his 11-year-old sister with its recovery, and she eventually dug out a skull and 60 vertebrae, selling them to a private collector for £23. This find was no croc, though, and was eventually named Ichthyosaurus, the “fish-lizard.” Thus began Anning’s long career as a fossil hunter. In addition to ichthyosaurs, she found long-necked plesiosaurs, a pterodactyl and hundreds, possibly thousands, of other fossils that helped scientists to draw a picture of the marine world 200 million to 140 million years ago during the Jurassic. She had little formal education and so taught herself anatomy, geology, paleontology and scientific illustration. Scientists of the time traveled from as far away as New York City to Lyme Regis to consult and hunt for fossils with Anning.

Mary Somerville (1780 – 1872)

Intrigued by the x’s and y’s in the answer to a math question in a ladies’ fashion magazine, 14-year-old Mary Fairfax of Scotland delved into the study of algebra and mathematics, defying her father’s injunction against such pursuits. Her studies were sidetracked by a marriage, in 1804, to a Russian Navy captain, but after his death she returned to Edinburgh and became involved in intellectual circles, associating with people such as the writer Sir Walter Scott and the scientist John Playfair, and resumed her studies in math and science. Her next husband, William Somerville, whom she wed in 1812, supported these efforts, and after they moved to London, Mary became host to her own intellectual circle, which included the astronomer John Herschel and the inventor Charles Babbage. She began experimenting on magnetism and produced a series of writings on astronomy, chemistry, physics and mathematics. She translated astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace’s The Mechanism of the Heavens into English, and although she was unsatisfied with the result, it was used as a textbook for much of the next century. Somerville was one of the first two women, along with Caroline Herschel, to be named honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Maria Mitchell (1818 – 1889)

Young Maria Mitchell learned to observe the stars from her father, who used stellar observations to check the accuracy of chronometers for Nantucket, Massachusetts, whalers and taught his children to use a sextant and reflecting telescope. When Mitchell was 12, she helped her father record the time of an eclipse. And at 17, she had already begun her own school for girls, teaching them science and math. But Mitchell rocketed to the forefront of American astronomy in 1847 when she spotted a blurry streak—a comet—through her telescope. She was honored around the world, earning a medal from the king of Denmark, and became the first woman to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1857 Mitchell traveled to Europe, where she visited observatories and met with intellectuals, including Mary Somerville. Mitchell would write: “I could not help but admire [her] as a woman. The ascent of the steep and rugged path of science has not unfitted her for the drawing room circle; the hours of devotion to close study have not been incompatible with the duties of wife and mother.” Mitchell became the first female astronomy professor in the United States, when she was hired by Vassar College in 1865. There she continued her observations, particularly those of the Sun, traveling up to 2,000 miles to witness an eclipse.

Lise Meitner (1878 – 1968)

When Lise Meitner finished school at age 14, she was barred from higher education, as were all girls in Austria. But, inspired by the discoveries of William Röntgen and Henri Becquerel, she was determined to study radioactivity. When she turned 21, women were finally allowed into Austrian universities. Two years of tutoring preceded her enrollment at the University of Vienna; there she excelled in math and physics and earned her doctorate in 1906. She wrote to Marie Curie, but there was no room for her in the Paris lab and so Meitner made her way to Berlin. There she collaborated with Otto Hahn on the study of radioactive elements, but as an Austrian Jewish woman (all three qualities were strikes against her), she was excluded from the main labs and lectures and allowed to work only in the basement. In 1912, the pair moved to a new university and Meitner had better lab facilities. Though their partnership was split up physically when she was forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1938, they continued to collaborate. Meitner continued her work in Sweden and after Hahn discovered that uranium atoms were split when bombarded with neutrons, she calculated the energy released in the reaction and named the phenomenon “nuclear fission.” The discovery—which eventually led to the atomic bomb (“You must not blame scientists for the use to which war technicians have put our discoveries,” Meitner would say in 1945)—won Hahn the Nobel Prize in 1944. Meitner, overlooked by the Nobel committee, refused to return to Germany after the war and continued her atomic research in Stockholm into her 80s.

Irène Curie-Joliot (1897 – 1956)

The elder daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, Irène followed her parents’ footsteps into the lab. The thesis for her 1925 doctor of science was on the alpha rays of polonium, one of the two elements her mother discovered. The next year, she married Frédéric Joliot, one of her mother’s assistants at the Radium Institute in Paris. Irène and Frédéric continued their collaboration inside the laboratory, pursuing research on the structure of the atom. In 1934, they discovered artificial radioactivity by bombarding aluminum, boron and magnesium with alpha particles to produce isotopes of nitrogen, phosphorus, silicon and aluminum. They received the Nobel Prize in chemistry the next year, making Marie and Irène the first parent-child couple to have independently won Nobels. All those years working with radioactivity took a toll, however, and Irène died of leukemia in 1956.

Barbara McClintock (1902 – 1992)

While studying botany at Cornell University in the 1920s, Barbara McClintock got her first taste of genetics and was hooked. As she earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees and moved into postdoctoral work, she pioneered the study of genetics of maize (corn) cells. She pursued her research at universities in California, Missouri and Germany before finding a permanent home at Cold Spring Harbor in New York. It was there that, after observing the patterns of coloration of maize kernels over generations of plants, she determined that genes could move within and between chromosomes. The finding didn’t fit in with conventional thinking on genetics, however, and was largely ignored; McClintock began studying the origins of maize in South America. But after improved molecular techniques that became available in the 1970s and early 1980s confirmed her theory and these “jumping genes” were found in microorganisms, insects and even humans, McClintock was awarded a Lasker Prize in 1981 and Nobel Prize in 1983.

Dorothy Hodgkin (1910 – 1994)

Dorothy Crowfoot (Hodgkin, after her 1937 marriage) was born in Cairo, Egypt, to a pair of British archaeologists. She was sent home to England for school, where she was one of only two girls who were allowed to study chemistry with the boys. At 18, she enrolled in one of Oxford’s women’s colleges and studied chemistry and then moved to Cambridge to study X-ray crystallography, a type of imaging that uses X-rays to determine a molecule’s three-dimensional structure. She returned to Oxford in 1934, where she would spend most of her working life, teaching chemistry and using X-ray crystallography to study interesting biological molecules. She spent years perfecting the technique, for which she was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1964, and determined the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin. In 2010, 16 years after her death, the British Royal Mail celebrated the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society by issuing stamps with the likenesses of 10 of the society’s most illustrious members, including Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin; Hodgkin was the only woman in the group.

Rosalind Franklin (1920 – 1958)

James Watson and Francis Crick get credit for determining the structure of DNA, but their discovery relied on the work of Rosalind Franklin. As a teenager in the 1930s, Franklin attended one of the few girls’ schools in London that taught physics and chemistry, but when she told her father that she wanted to be a scientist, he rejected the idea. He eventually relented and she enrolled at Cambridge University, receiving a doctorate in physical chemistry. She learned techniques for X-ray crystallography while in Paris, returning to England in 1951 to work in the laboratory of John Randall at King’s College, London. There she made X-ray images of DNA. She had nearly figured out the molecule’s structure when Maurice Wilkins, another researcher in Randall’s lab who was also studying DNA, showed one of Franklin’s X-ray images to James Watson. Watson quickly figured out the structure was a double helix and, with Francis Crick, published the finding in the journal Nature. Watson, Crick and Wilkins won a Nobel Prize in 1962 for their discovery. Franklin, however, had died of ovarian cancer in 1958.

The slogan was: “Mars or Bust.”

This may sound dramatic, but as highlighted by Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin during his closing speech, human spaceflight is at a crossroads and it’s anyone’s guess as to whether U.S. manned exploration beyond low-Earth orbit will ever become more than a Cold War memory.

Zubrin blames manned spaceflight stagnation squarely on a lack of leadership in space. Many other speakers echoed this criticism.

The Politics of Space

As we all know, U.S. spaceflight is dominated by politics — political agendas wax and wane with each administration that takes office — it’s little wonder NASA is currently suffering from a serious bout of confusion. Projects are funded, cut and then canceled on a shockingly frequent cycle (e.g. The James Webb Space Telescope is still being eyed for cancellation). The economy has slumped, only adding to the political pressure to do very little in the way of investment for manned spaceflight.

But despite the pessimism at the convention, overwhelming hope shone through.

From the plenary talks to the track sessions to the panel debates, ideas were shared and concepts taught by engineers, scientists and enthusiasts. Presentations included: Massive surface-to-space “guns” to launch cargo into orbit; techniques to store rocket fuel in orbital depots; space navigation using X-ray pulsars; even how to grow tomatoes in Martian greenhouses using Martian soil. The topics were as varied as they were immersive.

Although there were a fair number of advanced concepts (our friend Richard Obousy was even there to give a talk about the awesome Project Icarus), most of the presentations applied technology we have access to today, furthering humankind’s reach into the Cosmos.

Heated debates about how a Martian society might function erupted in the corridors. Spirited discussions were held at impromptu meetings in the venue’s bar and restaurant. Everyone was buzzing with the excitement that the next few years could (could) see an injection of global interest in sending a manned mission to Mars.

Why? For starters, representatives from Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) were there discussing the private sector’s plans to develop the means to send humans to the Red Planet.

This comes hot on the heels of Musk’s grand announcement that SpaceX has its sights set on Mars. Naturally, enthusiasts have latched onto SpaceX’s dreams, and for the first time I heard serious discussions about using commercial heavy lift rockets to take habitats to the Red Planet’s surface.

Whether or not this goal is achieved in the near-term isn’t important at this stage — after all, the private sector has yet to begin sending cargo to the International Space Station, let alone begin launching astronauts — just the fact the subject is on the table is silver lining enough.

Asteroid or Mars?

Also, the end of the Shuttle Program was seen by many as overdue — perhaps NASA can now focus on pushing the human spaceflight envelope beyond low-Earth orbit?

Unfortunately, President Obama’s direction for NASA’s next big “envelope-pushing” manned mission was met with skepticism at best. At worst, the plan to send astronauts to an asteroid “by the mid-2020′s” was met with outright hostility.

One convention delegate, associated with a NASA contractor, went so far to tell me that he thought a manned mission to an asteroid was “reckless” and the very notion that astronauts docking with a near-Earth asteroid would be useful was “a complete lie” and “just a way to distract the people from wanting a lunar or Mars goal.”

Along similar lines, Zubrin remains outspoken about his criticism for the space propulsion “silver bullet” that promises Earth-Mars transits of 39 days. I am, of course, referring to the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) being developed by former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz. Before this year’s convention, Zubrin challenged Chang-Diaz to attend a debate on the technologies behind VASIMR. Alas, a public debate didn’t happen.

The sticking point with VASIMR is that it would require so much energy to function, it would need a space-based nuclear power source vastly bigger than anything we’ve seen in space before. The technology may be there, but this form of plasma propulsion appears to be bolted firmly to the laboratory floor. Therefore, according to Zubrin and other critics, until some as-yet to be imagined alternative power source is invented, VASIMR is a project that will suck up funds with no hope of actually making a difference in space, let alone facilitating a manned mission to Mars.

The Life Incentive

The fundamental question being asked during the convention was: “Why send humans to Mars?” After all, it would be an expensive, high-risk endeavor; why put the lives of men and women on the line to begin an extended human presence on, what appears to be, a dead planet?

First and foremost — and potentially the sole reason (in my opinion) why we might see a sudden political interest for a manned expedition to Mars — is that we don’t know if the Red Planet is dead. Even if it doesn’t host life now, did it in the past?

And this is one thing the space community (mainly) agrees on; robotic missions are not going to find definitive proof that there are, or were, basic lifeforms on Mars. Human ingenuity will be invaluable for an extended and expansive Mars biology-hunting mission.

Coincidentally, Mars was thrust into the mainstream media when, right in the middle of the convention, news about observations of suspected salty water flowing across the Martian surface was announced. Once again, the potential for Mars to spawn its own form of life (or is it a shared form of life?) became the key topic for discussion. Local media seized the opportunity and descended on the Mars Society Convention to see what the experts thought.

Despite the pessimism, criticisms, concerns and frustration focused on the current state of the space program in the U.S., there was a moment when everyone in the convention was united in excitement.

Speaking at the convention banquet, NASA’s Ashwin Vasavada, Deputy Project Scientist on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), presented a fantastic overview of the next flagship mission to Mars. Called “Curiosity,” the MSL will be a Mars mission like no other.

The nuclear-powered car-sized rover will land inside Gale Crater to explore a landscape never before seen through robotic eyes. It is thought that Gale may answer some important questions about the life-giving qualities Mars might have offered and Curiosity will be on the lookout for life’s signature.

Vasavada also confirmed Curiosity’s time of arrival on the Red Planet: Aug. 6, 2012 — exactly a year (to the day) from his presentation.

Pinnacle of Human Experience

Can Curiosity invigorate Mars science and provide the impetus for an extended manned presence on Mars? Well, that remains to be seen.

But if you asked me “why send man to Mars?” my answer wouldn’t depend on whether or not Martian life exists (or existed). I wouldn’t even say a political motivation — like competing with China to be the first to land a man on Mars — is a good reason to do so; I’d simply say that seeing bootprints on Mars is imperative for the long-term survival of our species.

Not only is it human nature to explore strange new worlds, should the worst happen to Earth, at least our gene pool will extend beyond terrestrial shores. But the Martian goal needs to be set in stone now, and not referred to as something that we can do in the distant, undefined future — these uncertainties fracture public support and, ultimately, undermine any manned space program.

Manned space exploration can invigorate society in ways we’ll never fully appreciate. A Mars mission would be the pinnacle of human experience, inspiring generations and developing technologies we didn’t know we even needed. And the ultimate goal of actually settling a community on Mars? Well, that could ensure the survival of mankind.

As Stephen Hawking would say: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. But to get those eggs to Mars, we’d better start planning now; the endeavor might just make mankind great again.

Via : Discovery

This is the brightest supernova in Britain’s sky for at least 18 years, but it was shining (and may still be shining) at magnitude 10, beyond the grasp of any but the largest of binoculars, even without the bright moonlight at present. In fact, we probably need a telescope and a decent chart just to glimpse it near the galaxy’s SSW fringe. To suggest otherwise is misleading and has probably left many people frustrated.

Sometimes astronomy is misrepresented in support of silly fringe ideas. One of the strands of nonsense associated with the claims of an impending catastrophe in 2012 is that an object, sometimes called Planet X or Nibiru, will collide with the Earth, or sweep close enough to trigger a cataclysm. Astronomers know this to be fiction, but when the Russian amateur observer Leonid Elenin discovered a comet last December the catastrophists soon linked it with the Nibiru story.

Comet Elenin was beyond Jupiter when it was found, but tracking inwards towards a perihelion 72 million km from the Sun, which it passed on Saturday. It is now tracking outwards and will pass a safe 35 million km from the Earth on 16 October. Despite the claims to the contrary, there is no chance of a collision or of any of the other dire effects we read about. Indeed, the comet’s nucleus was only ever a small icy body and observations suggest that it may have disintegrated as it neared perihelion, as others have done before.

Our chart shows the lower half of our eastern sky at 05:30 BST tomorrow, but is valid also for 03:30 BST in mid-October. Mercury is just visible tomorrow, very low in the twilight at mag -1.1, but is likely to disappear by next weekend.

The diagonal lines show the paths of Mars and of Comet Elenin, with tick marks to show the positions of Mars and the comet every 10 and five days respectively. Mars is unmistakable below Castor and Pollux at present, reddish in hue and brightening from mag 1.4 tomorrow to 1.0 on 10 November when it passes 1.4° N of Regulus in Leo. On the way, it passes in front of the Praesepe star cluster on 1 October and lies near the waning Moon on 23 September and 22 October. If enough remains of the comet, it may still be visible during October and perhaps even through binoculars, though I fear we will be disappointed.

It was first Zecharia Sitchin, a scholar who studied ancient Sumerian legends, that hinted at the existence of a 10th planet in our solar system. According to legend, and its various interpretations, the earth was populated by a people from planet Nibiru that arrived on spaceships to mine gold. Why gold? Because it’s an ingredient for an elixir of immortality that made these beings the gods they were. The human race was genetically engineered by cloning monkeys and god material to work as slaves and worship their creators and the semi-gods they appointed to shepherd the slaves. That part of it is obvious.

According to conspiracy theorists NASA, the U.S. Government and others know about Nibiru that intrudes into our solar system every 3600 years, but cover it up to prevent panic or for other ulterior motives. Nibiru is said to be about 2-5 times the size of the earth with its own moons and a strong gravitational pull, a mini solar system. In other words, it could create havoc with the earth’s axis, cause enormous tidal waves, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, and all the catastrophes you’ve seen in the movie 2012. The tsunami in 2005, the Chile earthquake, and the recent earthquake-tsunami in Japan, are attributed to planetary alignments that disturbed the gravitational balance in the solar system.
The 3600 years will be up in 2012 if not earlier. The theory is supported by ancient Mayan, Egyptian and American Indian prophecies that predict the end of the world in 2012. The Hopi Indian Prophecy and the science behind it is explained in detail by Marshall Masters of Phoenix, Arizona, host of Your Own World Radio. Masters says the world elite and America’s rich are preparing for a global cataclysm by building underground shelters, and you can also prepare in your own way. If you look at what’s been happening around the world, he says, it’s only prudent to do that. (see second video below)

According to RSE, a Gnostic school that studies paranormal phenomena in Yelm, Washington, the Comet Elenin conceals a darker secret, the 10th planet Nibiru, which will start threatening the earth sometime this September when it intrudes into the earth’s orbit around the sun. The school advised its students around the world to be prepared and to seek a safe place by September 15th. School’s director JZ Knight says they hope they’re wrong, but they’d rather err on the side of caution.

Comet Elenin was discovered last year by Leonard Elenin, a Russian astronomer , but even his findings are a subject of controversy.

We’ll see soon if there’s a big pudding in the sky.

Shot at 2500fps (100x slower than real time)

“The 2MASS Redshift Survey is a wonderfully complete new look at the local universe — particularly near the Galactic plane,” Masters said. “We’re also honoring the legacy of the late John Huchra, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was a guiding force behind this and earlier galaxy redshift surveys.”

A galaxy’s light is redshifted, or stretched to longer wavelengths, by the expansion of the universe. The farther the galaxy, the greater its redshift, so redshift measurements yield galaxy distances — the vital third dimension in a 3-D map.

2MRS chose galaxies to map from images made by the Two-Micron All-SkySurvey (2MASS). This survey scanned the entire sky in three near-infrared wavelength bands. Near-infrared light penetrates intervening dust better than visible light, allowing astronomers to see more of the sky. But without adding redshifts, 2MASS makes only a 2-D image. Some of the galaxies mapped had previously-measured redshifts, and Huchra started painstakingly measuring redshifts for the others in the late 1990s using mainly two telescopes: one at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory on Mt. Hopkins, AZ, and one at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The last observations were completed by 2MRS observers on these telescopes shortly after Huchra’s death in October 2010.

Robert Kirshner, Huchra’s colleague at the Center for Astrophysics (CfA), said, “John loved doing redshift surveys and he loved the infrared. He had the insight to tell when infrared technology, formerly the province of the experts, was ripe for routine use in a big project.”

“John was instrumental in setting up the 2MASS telescope at Mount Hopkins, seeing the infrared side of the project through, and making a much more complete survey of the local universe. It’s a wonderful tribute to John that his colleagues have finished the infrared-selected galaxy redshift survey that John started,” he added.

The 2MRS mapped in detail areas previously hidden behind our Milky Way to better understand the impact they have on our motion. The motion of the Milky Way with respect to the rest of the universe has been a puzzle ever since astronomers were first able to measure it and found it couldn’t be explained by the gravitational attraction from any visible matter. Massive local structures, like the Hydra-Centaurus region (the “Great Attractor”) were previously hidden almost behind the Milky Way but are now shown in great detail by 2MRS.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.

Via: ScienceDaily

By observing interactions in ant colonies, University of Arizona researcher Anna Dornhaus and doctoral candidate Benjamin Blonder have uncovered new evidence that challenges the assumption that all interaction networks have the same properties that maximize their efficiency. The National Science Foundation-funded study was published in the Public Library of Science on May 20.

“Many people who have studied interaction networks in the past have found them to be very efficient at transferring resources,” said Blonder. “The dominant paradigm has been that most self-organized networks tend to have this universal structure and that one should look for this structure and make predictions based on this structure. Our study challenges that and demonstrates that there are some interaction networks that don’t have these properties yet are still clearly functional.”

“There are a huge number of systems that are composed of interacting parts, and we really don’t have a good sense of how these systems are organized,” said Blonder. “Think of a city with many people or the Internet with many computers. You have all these parts doing their own thing and somehow achieving some greater function.”

The researchers chose to use ant colonies as models for self-directed networks because they are composed of many individual components — the ants — with no apparent central organization and yet are able to function as a colony.

“We think no individual ant has a sense of purpose,” said Blonder. “It doesn’t go out one day and say: ‘I’m going to move this pebble for the greater good of the society.’ It has a behavioral program where if it sees a pebble, then it’s likely to move it. The reason that contributes to the good of the colony is an evolutionary argument where the ants’ behavior is shaped over thousands or millions of generations.”

Dornhaus and Blonder studied colonies of Temnothorax rugatulus, an ant species that is common in southern Arizona.

“These ants like to live in little rock crevices such as underneath a rock or in a split in the rock,” said Blonder. “The trick is convincing them to go from their nice little home on Mount Lemmon to the lab.”

Which raises an interesting question: How does one collect an ant colony?

“It isn’t easy,” said Blonder. “You get an aspirator, which is a tube with a fine mesh on the end of it so you don’t inhale the ants, and you put the tube down in the colony and you suck. And the ants come up and you blow them out into a container to transport them to the lab.”

“Of course, once you flip the rock over, the ants are upset. You have to get them before they all run off somewhere. And you also have to get the queen because without the queen the colony will die.”

The queen, the mother ultimatum among ants, is the only member of the colony that reproduces. Without her, there would be no new ant workers and the colony would die.

“There is evidence that the queen secretes a chemical that makes the other workers recognize that she is the queen,” said Blonder. “But there’s not much evidence for the queen communicating with the workers in ways beyond that.”

Back in the lab, the ants were placed in artificial nests. “The nice thing about this species is that because they like to live in rock crevices, they’re also completely happy to live between glass slides. All we have to do is take two large glass slides, put a cardboard spacer in between them and the ants happily walk into that very nice thin space and live out their lives in this artificial nest,” said Blonder.

Having secured and relocated several ant colonies, the researchers tackled their second challenge: How to tell two ants apart.

“To understand an interaction network, you need to know who all the individuals are,” said Blonder. “You need to be able to tell any two individuals apart. We accomplished it by painting each ant with a unique color code.”

The researchers filmed the ants with high-definition video and recorded roughly 9,000 interactions between 300 to 400 individual ants. “We watched every single video repeatedly to make sure we didn’t miss any interactions and correctly identified every ant,” said Blonder.

Dornhaus and Blonder recorded every interaction that involved one ant touching another. “We didn’t use visual interactions in this study, and that gave us some ability to standardize,” said Blonder. “There could be many more meaningless visual interactions than meaningless touch interactions because touch definitely conveys some chemical data about the other ant.”

While the ants do have limited vision, it’s thought that most of their sensory input comes through direct chemosensory touch.

Ants antennate, or touch each other with their antennae, for a variety of reasons such as to get another ant to move out of the way, to prod a particularly lazy individual into action or to solicit food. “Not all ants go out and forage for food,” said Blonder. “Often the ants that forage will have whatever they found in their guts and food is transferred from one ant’s stomach through mouth-to-mouth contact to the other ant. It’s called trophallaxis.”

Contrary to predictions that ant networks would spread information efficiently in the same way as other self-directed networks, the researchers found that the ants actually are inefficient at spreading information.

The finding challenges the notion of six degrees of separation, the idea that all individuals in a network are related by six other individuals. For example, I know someone who knows someone who knows someone and so on, and by the sixth person or less I am connected to every person in the world.

This would represent a very efficient network, where it only takes six interactions for information to spread to all of the components. Ant interaction networks apparently function quite differently, indicating that other networks also might not be as efficient as previously thought.

“You could come up with a second simple expectation about how ants might behave,” said Blonder. “They could be just walking around completely randomly bumping into each other. We were able to show that the real ants consistently had rates of information flow that were lower than even that expectation. Not only are they not efficient, they’re also slower than random. They’re actually avoiding each other.”

“So this raises a big question: If you have this ant colony that is presumably very good at surviving and persisting, and there are a lot of good reasons to think it’s optimal to get messages from one part to the other, how come they don’t do it?”

One possible explanation is a concept most of us already are familiar with: “If you spend too much time interacting, then you’re not actually getting anything done,” said Blonder.

Another possibility is that individual ants are responsible for only their region and only need to communicate with other ants in that region.

The research also illustrates the importance of knowing when interactions occur. If two individuals interact and later one of them interacts with a third, then information from the first interaction could be passed to the third individual, but the third individual could not relay information back to the first. “That’s the ordering of events perspective that we’re bringing to this study and we’re hoping is going to catch on with other network studies. We think this is a real opportunity,” said Blonder.

“In some contexts it’s clearly better not to spread information as quickly and then the question becomes understanding in what context it’s good to be efficient and in what context it’s not good to be efficient.”

Understanding how interaction networks function could have applications from allowing us to build self-directed networks to perform specific functions, such as unmanned drones to explore other planets, to preventing the spread of disease.

“Many of these ant species have been on the planet for millions of years, so clearly they’re doing something right,” said Blonder. “Perhaps we could learn from that.”

Doctoral candidate Tuan Cao and undergraduate students Milan Curry, Han Jing, Kayla Lauger and Daniel Wolf assisted with this study.

Via : ScienceDaily

“Today’s driving population is older, managing more chronic disease, and balancing competing demands on their attention,” says Reimer, a research scientist at MIT’s AgeLab, an engineering lab dedicated to developing new ideas to improve the quality of life of older people and those who care for them. “Developing safety technologies for these drivers requires that we understand their behaviors and decision making much better,” Reimer says.

Their so-called Aware Car project is an effort to engineer an automobile that senses the driver’s capacity to be behind the wheel and helps him or her reduce impairment from fatigue, stress, and distraction to improve driving performance. The current prototype is a Lincoln MKS tricked out with cameras and sensors that can track eye movements, heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate, among other variables. “Now we are working on ways to use that data to motivate the driver to improve his or her performance,” he says.

Reimer, 36, has a unique approach to engineering, which comes from his interest in incorporating the human element into his work. “Cars of the future are going to have a lot more technology, but just because you have technology doesn’t mean that you have unlimited capacity to use and understand it,” says Linda Ng Boyle, associate professor of engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, who has collaborated with Reimer. “There is a balance between being able to design appropriately and understand the limits associated with being human. Bryan truly gets that.”

Learning the human element

Reimer’s path to MIT began in the undergraduate pharmacy department of the University of Rhode Island, where he planned to become a pharmacist. However, as he watched his classmates struggle with the program, he rethought his choice. Deciding that he liked to build things, he switched his major to industrial engineering.

Reimer stayed at the University of Rhode Island to get his master’s degree when one of his professors, Manbir Sodhi, professor of systems and industrial engineering, offered to take him into his lab. After supporting Reimer through a degree in manufacturing engineering focused on logistics modeling for recycling, Sodhi had another proposition for his student.

“He told me that he would pay for my Ph.D., but said, ‘You are going to have to teach me about something that I’m not working in,’ ” Reimer says. That challenge came at the right time: It was the late 1990s and the field of human factors in transportation was gaining traction. In particular, people were just beginning to consider the impact of cell phone conversations on driver distraction.

“I really got into transportation because I wanted to explore the human component — how humans interact with technology,” Reimer says. Using sensors that track eye movements to detect drivers’ focus on the road, he found that a cell phone conversation increases the cognitive demands on drivers. While “drivers may appear to be focused forward, they cannot attend to things in the periphery the way they can when they aren’t chatting on the phone,” he says.

What’s more, age plays very little role in the degree of distraction, Reimer’s research found. “They may have been distracted for different reasons, but all drivers talking on the phone were distracted,” Reimer says.

When Reimer finished his Ph.D. in 2003, he joined the AgeLab as a research scientist to work on developing sophisticated driving simulators that modeled driving behavior in real time. Shortly after arriving at MIT, he began developing the monitoring system for the Aware Car.

Credit: Melanie Gonick/MIT
Cameras and sensors in this Lincoln MKS track a driver’s eye movements, heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate, among other variables. Bryan Reimer and colleagues in MIT’s AgeLab are using this data to develop technology that can assist drivers when their attention fades.

Understanding the driver

Creating a robust data collection system is critical to helping aging drivers assess and improve their skills. Aging isn’t a binary event; people aren’t young one day and old the next. Changes in your ability to perceive your surroundings and react to them happen slowly. And, they are accelerated by changes in your health condition; for example, Reimer’s work shows that a healthy 70-year-old is more capable than a 60-year-old with diabetes and high blood pressure who takes three medications to control those conditions.

“If we look at the boomer population as they age, many of the problems that are going to face the youth of today are facing the boomers now,” Reimer says. “Older adults often think, ‘Why should I change? I’ve been all right so far.’ ”

The Aware Car’s technologies may provide concrete reasons why. Reimer has developed “a really robust data acquisition system” for the car, he says. The challenge now is to develop a way for the car to alert the driver that he or she is driving poorly and provide motivation to improve performance. For example, the car may alert the driver when he or she is drifting out of the lane, or perhaps even sense when a driver is feeling drowsy and change the temperature in the passenger compartment to keep the driver alert.

“Our behaviors are so ingrained that it’s really hard to break through the mental model we have about how things work in order to deal with new technology,” Reimer says. “We have to literally retrain our brains. That means that sometimes the optimal interface for a technology isn’t the best one for the user.”

Working with industry

The driver state detection system Reimer developed for the Aware Car concept has provided him with many opportunities to work with industry. For example, in a collaboration with Ford, he examined whether the company’s automated parking system reduced stress for drivers. ( It did). He is also working with several pharmaceutical companies to study driving behaviors in adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and adults with autism.

“Working with industry really requires you to consider how research can be transitioned into products,” Reimer says. “While I find my sponsors to be very supportive of the academic research they support, their primary interest is the applied learning that is transferred into product development.” That emphasis also means that academic researchers must adapt their communication styles because “at different times you are required to provide high-level executive overviews and formative data-driven details,” he notes. Perhaps the most valuable thing his work with industry colleagues has taught him is how “to adapt research to constraints such as feasibility of mass production, market support, and consumers’ experience,” Reimer says.

Real-world engineering

Reimer’s work is driven by his curiosity about human cognition and decision-making. In fact, he says that if he were to go back to the beginning with his training, he would be interested in studying cognitive psychology. “I find the decision making process in real environments — not in the laboratory — to be fascinating,” he says. “There are lots of laboratory experiments predicting how the brain juggles complex demands. When you get out in the real world, you discover what really plays.”

It’s a focus that is appreciated by colleagues around the world. “A lot of researchers are very technology-oriented and they end up producing solutions that no one can make use of,” says collaborator Klaus Bengler, professor of ergonomics at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, who spent 10 years at BMW research labs. “This is the difference both at the AgeLab and in Bryan’s work: They take into account demographic information, physiologic information, behavioral information and generate solutions very tailored to this population.”

Via: ScienceCareers

By combining high pressure with high temperature, Livermore researchers have created a nanocyrstalline diamond aerogel that could improve the optics for something as big as a telescope or as small as the lenses in eyeglasses.

Aerogels are a class of materials that exhibit the lowest density, thermal conductivity, refractive index and sound velocity of any bulk solid. Aerogels are among the most versatile materials available for technical applications due to their many exceptional properties. This material has chemists, physicists, astronomers, and materials scientists utilizing its properties in myriad applications, from a water purifier for desalinizing seawater to installation on a NASA satellite as a meteorite particle collector.

In new research appearing in the May 9-13 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a Livermore team created a diamond aerogel from a standard carbon-based aerogel precursor using a laser-heated diamond anvil cell.

A diamond anvil cell consists of two opposing diamonds with the sample compressed between them. It can compress a small piece of material (tens of micrometers or smaller) to extreme pressures, which can exceed 3 million atmospheres. The device has been used to recreate the pressure existing deep inside planets, creating materials and phases not observed under normal conditions. Since diamonds are transparent, intense laser light also can be focused onto the sample to simultaneously heat it to thousands of degrees.

The new form of diamond has a very low density similar to that of the precursor of around 40 milligrams per cubic centimeter, which is only about 40 times denser than air.

The diamond aerogel could have applications in antireflection coatings, a type of optical coating applied to the surface of lenses and other optical devices to reduce reflection. Less light is lost, improving the efficiency of the system. It can be applied to telescopes, binoculars, eyeglasses or any other device that may require reflection reduction. It also has potential applications in enhanced or modified biocompatibility, chemical doping, thermal conduction and electrical field emission.

In creating diamond aergoels, lead researcher Peter Pauzauskie, a former Lawrence fellow now at the University of Washington, infused the pores of a standard, carbon-based aerogel with neon, preventing the entire aerogel from collapsing on itself.

At that point, the team subjected the aerogel sample to tremendous pressures and temperatures (above 200,000 atmospheres and in excess of 2,240 degrees Fahrenheit), forcing the carbon atoms within to shift their arrangement and create crystalline diamonds.

Via: ScienceDaily
The success of this work also leads the team to speculate that additional novel forms of diamond may be obtained by exposing appropriate precursors to the right combination of high pressure and temperature.

In an article titled, “Butterflies Across Europe Face Crisis as Climate Change Looms,” researchers warn that Europe will lose much of its biodiversity due to global warming as indicated by a study of butterfly distribution conducted by the Climatic Risk Atlas of European Butterflies, which involves hundreds of European scientists. One of the authors of the study, Dr Josef Settele, said: “The Atlas shows for the first time how the majority of European butterflies might respond to climate change. Most species will have to shift their distribution radically.”

In Great Britain, declines in butterflies led researchers to consider saving the butterflies by moving them to cooler areas. Researchers at Durham University caught Marbled White and Small Skipper butterflies in North Yorkshire, and transplanted them to County Durham and Northumberland where, eight years later, the species were found to be thriving. Professor Brian Huntley of Durham University hailed this experiment in “assisted colonisation” as a possible role in wildlife conservation.
This idea is also being pondered among conservation biologists in the United States. Known as “assisted migration” moving a butterfly to a more congenial place presents many problems. Will a butterfly fit in the new home? What about the plants it depends on or other aspects of its habitat? Which butterflies should be moved?

At UC Davis, California, Arthur Shapiro, professor of evolution and ecology for 35 years, monitored fixed routes for butterfly populations twice a month at ten sites from Suisun Bay to the Sierra Nevada in central California, accumulating data on over 150 species of butterflies. On April 18, 2005, Shapiro counted 21 species and 378 individual butterflies in Gates Canyon near Vacaville.
On April 18 of the following year, 2006, Shapiro counted just 10 species and 43 individual butterflies. “Butterflies,” Shapiro notes in 2010, “are being hit hard by the combination of lower temperatures and habitat loss.”

“I used to be able to walk 15 minutes from my lab and find common sootywing larvae. Now I know of only one permanent colony in the whole county,” Shapiro says. “Butterflies that were once considered utterly common, including willow hairstreak, large marble and West Coast lady, are going into a tailspin.”

Shapiro reported three major findings: Butterfly diversity is being lost at sea level but is increasing at tree line as butterflies migrate to cooler areas. High elevation butterflies are being lost since they cannot move higher. When an area changes from rural to urban or suburban, the greatest butterfly losses occur.

At the University of Melbourne, Australia, butterflies are found to be emerging 10 days earlier than they did 65 years ago. This led researchers to establish, for the first time, a causal link between “increasing greenhouse gases, regional warming, and the change in timing of a natural event.” Researchers found that air temperature around the city of Melbourne has been increasing incrementally every decade, and, over the 65 year period, the Common Brown butterfly (Heteronympha merope) has shifted its emergence date 1.6 days earlier per decade.
Via : NaturalNews

The new process involved is called capillary condensation, and as Debusk told MSNBC, the set-up resembles a “hollow … tube with porous walls.”
As the exhaust funnels through an array of porous ceramic tubes, the microscopic pores on the side of the tube condense the water via capillary action.
As liquid water is extracted from outside the tube, it frees up room for the pores to fill up again, allowing a person to continue producing water.

The military has experimented with producing water from exhaust before, but they only tried thermodynamic condensation, wherein you have to cool the exhaust in order to condense it. They ditched this method because the equipment required to cool the exhaust was too bulky and heavy, defeating the purpose of finding a lighter alternative to lugging water.
Since the capillaries separate the water from water-soluble gases, the process results in water that’s pure enough that upwards of 85% of it is potable, say the researchers.
On average, a U.S. soldier requires seven gallons of water a day. A single Humvee’s 25-gallon gas tank could potentially provide “enough water for about three soldiers per tank of fuel burned.”

Via : DiscoverMagzine

In the past, lasers strong enough to ignite an engine’s air-fuel mixtures were too large to fit under an automobile’s hood. At this year’s Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics (CLEO: 2011), to be held in Baltimore May 1-6, researchers from Japan will describe the first multibeam laser system small enough to screw into an engine’s cylinder head.

Equally significant, the new laser system is made from ceramics, and could be produced inexpensively in large volumes, according to one of the presentation’s authors, Takunori Taira of Japan’s National Institutes of Natural Sciences.

According to Taira, conventional spark plugs pose a barrier to improving fuel economy and reducing emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx), a key component of smog.

Spark plugs work by sending small, high-voltage electrical sparks across a gap between two metal electrodes. The spark ignites the air-fuel mixture in the engine’s cylinder — producing a controlled explosion that forces the piston down to the bottom of the cylinder, generating the horsepower needed to move the vehicle.

Engines make NOx as a byproduct of combustion. If engines ran leaner — burnt more air and less fuel — they would produce significantly smaller NOx emissions.

Spark plugs can ignite leaner fuel mixtures, but only by increasing spark energy. Unfortunately, these high voltages erode spark plug electrodes so fast, the solution is not economical. By contrast, lasers, which ignite the air-fuel mixture with concentrated optical energy, have no electrodes and are not affected.

Lasers also improve efficiency. Conventional spark plugs sit on top of the cylinder and only ignite the air-fuel mixture close to them. The relatively cold metal of nearby electrodes and cylinder walls absorbs heat from the explosion, quenching the flame front just as it starts to expand.

Lasers, Taira explains, can focus their beams directly into the center of the mixture. Without quenching, the flame front expands more symmetrically and up to three times faster than those produced by spark plugs.

Equally important, he says, lasers inject their energy within nanoseconds, compared with milliseconds for spark plugs. “Timing — quick combustion — is very important. The more precise the timing, the more efficient the combustion and the better the fuel economy,” he says.

Lasers promise less pollution and greater fuel efficiency, but making small, powerful lasers has, until now, proven hard. To ignite combustion, a laser must focus light to approximately 100 gigawatts per square centimeter with short pulses of more than 10 millijoules each.

“In the past, lasers that could meet those requirements were limited to basic research because they were big, inefficient, and unstable,” Taira says. Nor could they be located away from the engine, because their powerful beams would destroy any optical fibers that delivered light to the cylinders.

Taira’s research team overcame this problem by making composite lasers from ceramic powders. The team heats the powders to fuse them into optically transparent solids and embeds metal ions in them to tune their properties.

Ceramics are easier to tune optically than conventional crystals. They are also much stronger, more durable, and thermally conductive, so they can dissipate the heat from an engine without breaking down.

Taira’s team built its laser from two yttrium-aluminum-gallium (YAG) segments, one doped with neodymium, the other with chromium. They bonded the two sections together to form a powerful laser only 9 millimeters in diameter and 11 millimeters long (a bit less than half an inch).

The composite generates two laser beams that can ignite fuel in two separate locations at the same time. This would produce a flame wall that grows faster and more uniformly than one lit by a single laser.

The laser is not strong enough to light the leanest fuel mixtures with a single pulse. By using several 800-picosecond-long pulses, however, they can inject enough energy to ignite the mixture completely.

A commercial automotive engine will require 60 Hz (or pulse trains per second), Taira says. He has already tested the new dual-beam laser at 100 Hz. The team is also at work on a three-beam laser that will enable even faster and more uniform combustion.

The laser-ignition system, although highly promising, is not yet being installed into actual automobiles made in a factory. Taira’s team is, however, working with a large spark-plug company and with DENSO Corporation, a member of the Toyota Group.

Via : ScienceDaily

New technology is revolutionizing the precise recording of history at an ancient, lost city, bucking a tradition that has been in place for centuries. University of Cincinnati researchers will present “The Paperless Project: The Use of iPads in the Excavations at Pompeii”* at the 39th annual international conference of Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA). The conference takes place April 12-16 in Beijing, China.

UC teams of archaeologists have spent more than a decade at the site of the Roman city that was buried under a volcano in 79 AD. The project is producing a complete archaeological analysis of homes, shops and businesses at a forgotten area inside one of the busiest gates of Pompeii, the Porta Stabia.

Through years of painstaking recording of their excavations, the researchers are exploring the social and cultural scene of a lost city and how the middle class neighborhood influenced Pompeian and Roman culture.

The standard archaeological approach to recording this history — a 300-year tradition — involves taking precise measurements, drawings and notes, all recorded on paper with pencil. But last summer, the researchers found that the handheld computers and their ability to digitally record and immediately communicate information held many advantages over a centuries-honed tradition of archaeological recording.

“There’s a common, archival nature to what we’re doing. There’s a precious timelessness, a priceless sort of quality to the data that we’re gathering, so we have made an industry of being very, very careful about how we record things,” explains Ellis. “Once we’ve excavated through it, it’s gone, so ever since our undergraduate years, we’ve become very, very good and consistent at recording. We’re excited about discovering there’s another way,” Ellis says.

“Because the trench supervisor is so busy, it can take days to share handwritten notes between trenches,” explains Wallrodt. “Now, we can give them an (electronic) notebook every day if they want it.”

Wallrodt says one of the biggest concerns of adopting the new technology was switching from drawing on a large sheet of paper to sticking one’s finger on the iPad’s glass. “With the iPad, there’s also a lot less to carry. There’s no big board for drawing, no ruler and no calculator.”

The researchers say they plan to pack even more iPads on their trip to Pompeii this June. The research project is funded by the Louise Taft Semple Fund through the UC Department of Classics.

*The iPad research experiment, led by Steven Ellis, UC assistant professor of classics, and John Wallrodt, a senior research associate for the Department of Classics, has been featured on the National Geographic Channel as well as Apple’s website. That’s after the researchers took six iPads to UC’s excavation site at Pompeii last summer. The iPads themselves were just being introduced at the time.

Via : Science Daily

Cities worldwide are failing to take necessary steps to protect residents from the likely impacts of climate change, even though billions of urban dwellers are vulnerable to heat waves, sea level rise and other changes associated with warming temperatures.

A new examination of urban policies by Patricia Romero Lankao at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., in conjunction with an international research project on cities and climate change, warns that many of the world’s fast-growing urban areas, especially in developing countries, will likely suffer disproportionately from the impacts of changing climate.

Her work also concludes that most cities are failing to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that affect the atmosphere.

“Climate change is a deeply local issue and poses profound threats to the growing cities of the world,” says Romero Lankao. “But too few cities are developing effective strategies to safeguard their residents.”

Romero Lankao’s studies appear this month in a special issue of Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability and in a synthesis article in an upcoming issue of European Planning Studies.

The research was conducted in association with the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NCAR’s sponsor.

“Cities are major sources of greenhouse gases, yet at the same time urban populations are likely to be among those most severely affected by future climate change,” says Sarah Ruth, program director in NSF’s Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, which funds NCAR.

“The findings highlight ways in which city-dwellers are particularly vulnerable, and suggest policy interventions that could offer immediate and longer-term benefits.”

Romero Lankao, a sociologist specializing in climate change and urban development, surveyed policies in cities worldwide while drawing on a number of recent studies of climate change and cities.

She concluded that cities are falling short in two areas: preparing for the likely impacts of climate change and cutting their own greenhouse gas emissions by reducing fossil fuel use.

With more than half the world’s population living in cities, scientists are increasingly focusing on the potential impacts of climate change on these areas.

The locations and dense construction patterns of cities often place their populations at greater risk for natural disasters, including those expected to worsen with climate change.

Potential threats associated with climate include storm surges that can inundate coastal areas and prolonged hot weather that can heat heavily paved cities more than surrounding areas.

The impacts of such natural events can be magnified in an urban environment.

For example, a prolonged heat wave can exacerbate existing levels of air pollution, causing widespread health problems.

Poorer neighborhoods that may lack basic facilities such as reliable sanitation, drinking water or a dependable network of roads, are especially vulnerable to natural disasters.

Moreover, populations are increasing most quickly in small- and medium-sized urban areas, which often lack the services and infrastructure to manage the rapid influx, according to Romero Lankao.

The number of urban residents worldwide has quadrupled since 1950, and cities are continuing to grow rapidly, especially in developing nations.

Romero Lankao cites projections that, by 2020, there will be more than 500 urban areas with 1 million or more residents.

Many residents in poorer countries live in substandard housing without access to reliable drinking water, roads and basic services. Neighborhoods sometimes spring up on steep hillsides or floodplains, leaving them vulnerable to storms.

But even on the heels of deadly catastrophes that scientists say will become more common with climate change, such as flash floods in Rio de Janeiro or heat waves in Europe, leaders are often failing to reinforce their defenses against natural disasters.

Romero Lankao cites three reasons for the failure to prepare: fast-growing cities are overwhelmed with other needs, city leaders are often under pressure to downplay the need for health and safety standards in order to foster economic growth and climate projections are rarely fine-scale enough to predict impacts on individual cities.

“Local authorities tend to move towards rhetoric rather than meaningful responses,” Romero Lankao writes.

“What is at stake, of course, is the very existence of many human institutions, and the safety and well-being of masses of humans.”

Cities are also failing in many cases to curb their own emissions of greenhouse gases, the study finds.

Instead of imposing construction standards that could reduce heating and air conditioning needs or guiding development to emphasize mass transit and reduce automobile use, many local governments are taking a hands-off approach.

“Cities can have an enormous influence on emissions by focusing on mass transit systems and energy efficient structures,” Romero Lankao says. “But local leaders face pressures to build more roads and relax regulations that could reduce energy use.”

The study also cites efforts in some cities to reduce emissions as part of a larger strategy to ease traffic and other problems.

For example, central London’s Congestion Charging Zone is intended to encourage more use of mass transit. And several Latin American cities, such as Curitiba, Brazil, and Bogota, Colombia, are integrating new development with mass transit systems.

As cities attempt to meet the needs of their low-income residents, some strategies-including moving residents away from risk-prone areas and improving housing and services-may also improve their readiness for a changing climate.

“As hubs of development, cities have shown that they can become sources of innovation,” Romero Lankao says.

“The good news is that policymakers can discover ways to improve sanitation, health and safety as they try to reduce emissions and adapt to climate impacts.”

Courtesy : Science Daily

The planet, which is 1.25 times as massive as Jupiter, lies 2300 light years from Earth and orbits a bloated, ageing star slightly less massive than the sun. Johny Setiawan of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, and colleagues found the planet by the way its gravity caused its host star to wobble.

The host star, called HIP 13044, is a member of a group of stars called the Helmi stream that have unusual, elongated orbits that bring them far above and below the disc of the galaxy, where the sun and most other Milky Way stars reside. The Helmi stars are thought to be remnants of a small galaxy torn apart by the Milky Way 6 billion to 9 billion years ago.

Dearth of metals

Astronomers announced a possible planet in the nearby Andromeda galaxy in 2009, but its presence has not yet been confirmed. So this makes the newly found planet, called HIP 13044 b, the first to be discovered around a star apparently from another galaxy.

“This cosmic merger has brought an extragalactic planet within our reach,” says team member Rainer Klement, also of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.

In addition to its unusual origins, the host star is puzzling because it has fewer elements heavier than hydrogen and helium than any other star known to host a planet. Its light spectrum suggests it has just 10 per cent as much iron as the previous record holder, and only 1 per cent as much as the sun.

Planets are thought to form from discs of gas and dust left over from the formation of the parent star. In the prevailing theory of planet formation, called core accretion, dust grains stick together to form rocky worlds, and some of these rocky bodies then grow massive enough to attract surrounding gas, becoming gas giants like Jupiter.

Alternative scenario

Dust is made up of heavy elements, so stars depleted in these elements would have a hard time making planets in this scenario.

This suggests the planet formed another way, says Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, DC, who was not a member of the team.

He proposes an alternative mechanism that he has long championed, in which dense regions of the planet-forming disc simply collapse under their own gravity to form planets. In this scenario, planets could form mainly from gas, without first forming a rocky core.

He adds: “The fact that the star is also likely to have come from somewhere other than the disc of our galaxy makes it even more remarkable, and supports the suspicion that planetary systems are rife in the universe.”

The idea of melting the Arctic ice cap dates at least to the 1870s, when Harvard geologist Nathaniel Shaler suggested channeling more of the warm Kuroshio Current through the Bering Strait:

Whenever the Alaskan gates to the pole are unbarred, the whole of the ice-cap of the circumpolar regions must at once melt away; all the plants of the northern continents, now kept in narrow bounds by the arctic cold, would begin their march towards the pole…It is not too much to say that the life-sustaining power of the lands north of forty degrees of latitude would be doubled by the breaking down of the barrier which cuts off the Japanese current from the pole.

In 1912 Carroll Livingston Riker, an engineer, inventor, and industrialist, proposed a scheme to change the climate of polar regions by tinkering with the ocean currents of the Atlantic. This was to be accomplished by preventing the cold Labrador Current from colliding with the Gulf Stream. To do this, he proposed building a 200-mile causeway extending east from Cape Race off the coast of Newfoundland. The theory was that the causeway could be built by suspending a long rope cable, or “obstructor,” in the ocean that would act to slow the southward flow of the Labrador Current, causing it to deposit its sediment load. Potential benefits of diverting the Gulf Stream farther east (shades of Thomas Jefferson) included fewer fogs and a general warming of northern climates. Riker’s proposal was inspired by recently completed mega-projects such as Henry Flagler’s railroad bridge from Key West, Florida, to the mainland and the ongoing excavation of the Panama Canal. The tragic sinking of the Titanic also lent urgency to his proposal, since his causeway might help remove icebergs from shipping lanes. Riker was supported in Congress by Representative William Musgrave Calder (R-New York), who proposed the creation of a Commission on the Labrador Current and Gulf Stream. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels was not at all convinced by the proposal, but thought that a general survey of the currents of the Grand Banks would be useful.

An ice-free Arctic Ocean was one of the largest-scale and most widely discussed climate-engineering projects of the time. Jules Verne’s story The Purchase of the North Pole (1889) may have been inspired by such ideas. Ironically, an ice-free Arctic ocean is something we may actually see sooner or later through a combination of natural and anthropogenic influences. In 1957 Soviet academician Borisov, alluding to the centuries-old quest of the Russian people to overcome the Northland cold, proposed building a dam across the Bering Strait to melt the Arctic sea ice. In numerous articles and then again in his book Can Man Change the Climate? (1973), Borisov detailed his vision of a dam 50 miles long and almost 200 feet high with shipping locks and pumping stations. He proposed that the dam be built in 820-foot sections made of prefabricated freeze-resistance ferroconcrete that could be floated to the construction site and anchored to the sea bottom with pilings. He further suggested that the top of the dam be shaped so that ice floes would ride up over the dam and break off on the southern side. An alternative design included an intercontinental highway and railroad. According to Borisov, “What mankind needs is war against cold, rather than a ‘cold war.’”

To liquidate Arctic sea ice, Borisov wanted to pump cold seawater out of the Arctic Ocean, across the dam, and into the Bering Sea and the North Pacific. This displacement would allow the inflow of warmer water from the North Atlantic, eliminate fresh water in the surface layer in several years, and thus prevent the formation of ice in the Arctic Basin, creating warmer climate conditions:

In this day and age, with mankind’s expanding powers of transforming the natural environment, the project we are advancing does not present any technical difficulties. The pumping of the warm Atlantic water across into the Pacific ocean will take the Arctic ocean out of its present state of a dead-end basin for the Atlantic water [and] drive the Arctic surface water out into the Pacific ocean through the Bering Strait.

His goal was to remove a 200-foot layer of cold surface water, which would be replaced by warmer, saltier water that would not freeze. Inspired by Markin’s popular book Soviet Electric Power, Borisov also assumed that huge amounts of electricity would soon be available to run the pumps, perhaps from hydroelectric generators or nuclear reactors.

The dam was, of course, never built, but if it had been attempted, would the nations of the world have confronted the Russians? The net climatic effect of the project, if it had been carried out, is still highly uncertain. A good argument can be made that the effect would be less than that of naturally occurring variations in the Atlantic influx, but none of the computer models at the time were sophisticated enough to show any robust results. Other ocean-engineering schemes included installing giant turbines in the Strait of Florida to generate electricity and adding a thin film of alcohol to the northern branch of the Gulf Stream to decrease surface water evaporation and warm the water by several degrees, although the cod might become rather tipsy.

In Japan, engineers imagined that the icy Sea of Okhotsk could be tamed by deflecting the warm Kuroshio Current with a dam or one-way water valve built at the Tatarsk Strait. And in a 1970 geo-engineering experiment thought suitable only for testing on a computer model (aren’t they all?), the Japanese geo-scientific speculator Keiji Higuichi wondered what would happen to the global atmospheric and oceanic circulation and thus the world’s climate if the Drake Passage, between the tip of South America and Antarctica, was blocked by an ice dam. One possibility was the onset of a new ice age.

Russian scientists warned of possible climate disruption from such mega-projects. Borisov admitted that the large-scale climatic and ecological effects of his Bering Strait dam could not be fully predicted, nor could they be confined within the borders of any one national state; rather, they would directly involve the national interests of the Soviet Union, Canada, Denmark, and the United States and indirectly affect many countries in other areas that might experience climate change caused by the project. With such a dam in place, the middle-latitude winters would be milder due to the warming of Arctic and polar air masses. He thought areas such as the Sahara would be much better watered and would perhaps turn into steppe land or savannah. Direct benefits of an ice-free Arctic ocean would include new, more-direct shipping routes between East Asia and Europe, while, by his overly optimistic calculations, sea-level rise would be modest, even with the melting of the Greenland ice cap. Yet such climatic changes elsewhere were of little concern to the Soviets. Larisa R. Rakipova noted that a substantial Arctic warming could cool the winters in Africa by 5oC (9oF), “leading to a complete disruption of the living conditions for people, animals, and plants,” and Oleg A. Drozdov warned that the warming of the Arctic would lead to a total breakdown of moisture exchange between the oceans and continents with excess rain in the Far East and great aridity in Europe. The resulting drastic changes in the soils, vegetation, water regime, and other natural conditions would have widespread negative ecological, economic, and social consequences. As in the fictional case described earlier in The Evacuation of England, Rusin and Flit also wondered what might happen if the Americans implemented one of their projects and turned the Gulf Stream toward the shores of America: “In Europe the temperature would drop sharply and glaciers would begin to advance rapidly”. In his book The Gulf Stream (1973), T. F. Gaskell pointed out, “This is why such natural phenomena as the Gulf Stream have political implications.”37 Geo-engineers should realize that the same is true of a wide range of natural phenomena.

In addition to sea ice, the Soviets were also battling the “curse of the Siberians” – permafrost as thick as 1,600 feet in places. one suggestion to remove it involved applying soot to the snowfields to absorb more sunlight; or perhaps cheaper materials such as ash or peat could do the job. Reminding their readers that “everyone knows what permafrost is,” Rusin and Flit recounted its horrors: “A newly constructed house unexpectedly begins to shift, a Russian stove suddenly begins to sink into the ground, deeply driven piles spring from the ground,” and when it melts and refreezes, the trees of the mysterious “drunken forests” lean akilter, like a Siberian full of vodka. In the twenty-first century, permafrost has reemerged not as a local curse but as something to be saved, in part to preserve the migration patterns of the reindeer and caribou, and as a global environmental issue because of its high methane gas content. In 1962 Rusin and Flit opined, “Much has been learned, but it has been impossible to completely eliminate permafrost.”

James Rodger Fleming is a historian of science and technology and professor of science, technology and society at Colby College. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He recently held the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History at the Smithsonian Institution.

Fixing the Sky: the Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control is available at Amazon.

Excerpted from Fixing the Sky by James Rodger Fleming. Copyright 2010 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

Gliese 581 is a red dwarf star. A starship traveling at near the speed of light would only take 20.3 years to get there, which is not that much. Until now, astronomers had discovered five planets around this star. Some of them were too close to it, making them too hot to be habitable. Others were too far and too cold. But now, a sixth planet has been discovered right on the “habitable zone”, the fourth in distance from the star: Gliese 581g.

If the discoveries from the planet hunters at University of California Santa Cruz and the Carnegie Institution of Washington are right, Gliese 581g could be habitable.

This May Very Well Be the First New Earth

Now, before you jump into the Enterprise and go there camping, roast some marshmallows, and get back leaving a lot of beer bottles and crap behind, being potentially habitable doesn’t mean that we can just go there and thrive. It doesn’t even mean that this planet is full of little green men or buxom big blue women. It just means that this is a planet that could sustain life, with liquid water and an atmosphere.

Gliese 581g has three to four times the mass of Earth, orbiting the star at an zippy 37 days. According to data gathered by the Keck I Telescope HIRES spectrometer, it’s a rocky planet with a “solid surface and enough gravity to hold to an atmosphere.”

More importantly, according to Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, not only their “findings offer a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet” but “the fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common.”

In other words, the chances of the Universe being bubbling with life of all kinds and forms just jumped beyond our most optimistic hopes.

Courtesy : NASA

“Dark matter makes up more than 80 per cent of the total mass of the universe. We know that dark matter exists but to date it has never been produced in a laboratory or directly observed in any experiment, as a result we have very little information about what it actually is. It is important that we examine all possible ways of probing the nature of dark matter and the sun could provide us with an unexpected laboratory in which to do this,” says Dr West.

Dark matter is expected to form a halo around our galaxy and since the sun is in motion around the galaxy it experiences a dark matter “wind” as it moves through this halo. Some of the dark matter particles may collide with the elements in the sun and become gravitationally captured by the sun. This could lead to a build up of dark matter particles at the centre of the sun.

The research team’s simulations show that the effect of this build up is to reduce the temperature of the solar core. The dark matter particles can absorb heat at the core and transfer it out towards the surface, decreasing the temperature of the core. This change in temperature affects the number of neutrinos produced as by-products in nuclear reactions within the Sun and it is hoped that by examining these neutrinos we can gain information about the Sun’s core temperature and whether dark matter plays an important role in solar physics. This in turn could provide information about the mass of individual dark matter particles and how they interact with the elements in the sun.

Dr West adds, “The next step in the work is to look more closely at the change in the predicted number of neutrinos produced in the sun as a result of dark matter collecting at the core and to examine the sensitivity of existing neutrino experiments to this change. In addition, an investigation of the possibility of probing this type of dark matter at the Large Hadron Collider is planned. The LHC could provide complimentary information about the properties of dark matter which along with the information from the sun may lead to a clearer picture of one of the more puzzling issues in physics.”

“The rover is experiencing the coldest temperatures it’s ever been in – equivalent to about minus 55 degrees Celsius,” NASA told Space.com. Should Spirit wake up next year, it will resume a stationary mission to help scientists determine whether Mars has a liquid core, but if not there’s always the chance it might spontaneously regain power in another decade or four. Still not on the docket: ever returning home.

If that spoiler wasn’t enough, the slightly longer explanation is that, without centrifugal force, the ocean water near the equator would migrate to where the Earth’s gravity is the strongest, the poles, leaving us with dry land in the middle.

If that’s still not enough, good for you, science geek. The even longer (best) explanation can be found here: [esri via nerdcore via neatorama]

* You know, it did happen before, in the Superman movie (1978). And if that’s not foreboding enough, I don’t know what is. Also of note, Superman only saves Lois when he goes back in time. That’s fine if there’s another Superman hanging still around from the past, fixing dams and stuff while the alternate Superman gets the girl. But what happens, like, when the deed is done. Are there perpetually two Supermen hanging around, getting up in Lois’ grill? Does one Superman have to be Clark Kent all the time? Do they flip a coin to choose identities or alternate days? I don’t think** so. I think that, when Superman went back in time, the two bodies united as one. And you know what that means? Everyone who wasn’t the esteemed Lois Lane died. Nice job, Superman. Nice job.

** I haven’t seen that movie in almost a decade. It’s possible that my facts are screwy and I’m ranting about nothing.

The head surgeon, Laurent Lantieri, described the surgery as a world first because it included a difficult and unprecedented transplant of tear ducts and eyelids.

A similar procedure carried out in Spain earlier this year replaced most of the face, but not the tear ducts.

Lantieri, who has already performed four other partial or nearly-complete face transplants, told AFP before the operation that reconnecting tear ducts and replacing eyelids was the “extremely challenging.”

“My patient is doing well. He is walking, eating, talking. His beard has started to grow back on his new face,” said Lantieri, who operated on Jerome at the Creteil Henri-Mondor hospital in the Paris suburbs.

“The first time he looked at himself in the mirror he stuck both thumbs up,” he told a local newspaper, the Parisien. “He was waiting for this transplant for two years. He is very happy.”

Lantieri’s team operated on another patient suffering from the same genetic disorder, a type of neurofibromatosis called Von Recklinghausen’s disease, in 2007.

In that case the tumour was so massive and hideous that the man could neither eat or speak properly.

Less then 13 months after the transplant, however, the man was working fulltime and considered himself to be reintegrated into society.

A face transplant involves the removal of the entire face from a corpse, including mouth and eyelids, and grafting it onto the patient. Nerves and blood vessels are connected under a microscope.

“We are the first to have done a full-face transplant including eyelids and tear ducts. I am proud because this has been done in France,” Lantieri was quoted as saying.

The surgery required a team of ten people, fewer than for previous cases, he added.

Other doctors have also claimed to have carried out a similar operation.

In April, a 30-strong team at the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona said they had conducted a full-face transplant on a young man disfigured in an accident.

There have about a dozen partial or complete face transplants recorded to date, five of them — including the first, in 2005 — in France.

In that landmark operation, 38-year-old Isabelle Dinoire received the nose, lips and chin of a donor to replace parts of her face that had been mauled by a dog.

The procedure was conducted by Bernard Devauchelle, a professor of facial surgery at a hospital in Amiens, northern France.

The first face transplant outside France took place in China in 2006 on a patient mauled by a bear. The man died two years later, after he stopped taking medication to prevent his body from rejecting the graft.

In April 2009, Lantieri and his colleagues also claimed another world first for replacing part of the face and both hands of a man in a single operation.

A face transplant is considered one of the toughest surgical tasks. It combines micro-surgery to connect nerves and blood vessels and a high risk of rejection by the recipient’s immune system.

“Beyond the grafting itself, these transplants are going to teach us a lot about numerous other areas of such as immunology,” Lantieri said.

(c) 2010 AFP

The recently declassified image was collected by Peter Kuran for his titillatingly titled documentary Nukes In Space. NPR has the full story here, but this is the juicy bit:

The plan was to send rockets hundreds of miles up, higher than the Earth’s atmosphere, and then detonate nuclear weapons to see: a) If a bomb’s radiation would make it harder to see what was up there (like incoming Russian missiles!); b) If an explosion would do any damage to objects nearby; c) If the Van Allen belts would move a blast down the bands to an earthly target (Moscow! for example); and – most peculiar – d) if a man-made explosion might “alter” the natural shape of the [Earth's magnetic] belts.

So, that’s what the government was up to in 1962. You know, normal stuff, like trying to alter the Earth’s magnetic field and seeing if we could nuke Russia from space.

In a pair of papers to be published in the journal Nature on May 27, Jack Holt and Isaac Smith of The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics and their colleagues describe how they used radar data collected by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to reveal the subsurface geology of the red planet’s northern ice cap.

On Earth, large ice sheets are shaped mainly by ice flow. But on Mars, according to this latest research, other forces have shaped, and continue to shape, the polar ice caps.

The northern ice cap is a stack of ice and dust layers up to two miles (three kilometers) deep covering an area slightly larger than Texas. Analyzing radar data on a computer, scientists can peel back the layers like an onion to reveal how the ice cap evolved over time.

One of the most distinctive features of the northern ice cap is Chasma Boreale, a canyon about as long as the Grand Canyon but deeper and wider. Some scientists have suggested Chasma Boreale was created when volcanic heat melted the bottom of the ice sheet and triggered a catastrophic flood. Others have suggested strong polar winds, called katabatics, carved the canyon out of a dome of ice.

Other enigmatic features are troughs that spiral outward from the center of the ice cap like a gigantic pinwheel. Since they were discovered in 1972, scientists have proposed several hypotheses for how they formed. One suggested that as the planet spins, ice closer to the poles moves slower than ice farther from the poles, causing the semi-fluid ice to crack. Another used an elaborate mathematical model to suggest how increased solar heating in certain areas and lateral heat conduction could cause the troughs to self assemble.

It turns out both the spiral troughs and Chasma Boreale were created and shaped primarily by wind. But rather than being cut into existing ice very recently, the features formed over millions of years as the ice sheet itself grew. By influencing wind patterns, the topography of underlying, older ice controlled where and how the features grew. Topography is the three-dimensional shape of a surface, including peaks, valleys, slopes and plains.

Before this research, conventional wisdom held that the northern ice cap of Mars was made of many relatively flat layers like a layered cake. It was assumed some climate information would be recorded in the layers, limited to what could be gained from layer thickness and dust content. This research, however, reveals many complex features — including layers that change in thickness and orientation, or abruptly disappear in some places — making it a virtual gold mine of climate information.

“Nobody realized that there would be such complex structures in the layers,” says Holt, lead author of the paper focusing on Chasma Boreale. “The layers record a history of ice accumulation, erosion and wind transport. From that, we can recover a history of climate that’s much more detailed than anybody expected.”

The spiral trough results vindicate an early explanation that had fallen out of favor in parts of the Mars scientific community. Alan Howard, a researcher at the University of Virginia, proposed just such a process in 1982 based solely on images of the surface from the Viking mission.

“He only had Viking images with relatively low resolution,” says Isaac Smith, doctoral student and lead author on the spiral trough paper. Holt is second author on the trough paper. “Many people proposed other hypotheses suggesting he was wrong. But when you look at a hypothetical cross section from his paper, it looks almost exactly like what we see in the radar data.”

Why are the troughs spiral shaped? First, katabatic winds are caused by relatively cold, dense air that rolls down from the poles and out over the ice cap. Second, as they blow down, they are deflected by the Coriolis force, which is caused by the planet’s spinning in space. On Earth, this is what causes hurricanes to spin opposite directions in opposite hemispheres. This force twists the winds — and the troughs they create — into spiral shapes.

These breakthroughs were made possible by a new instrument called Shallow Radar (SHARAD). Similar instruments have been used on aircraft in Antarctica and Greenland, but before its use at Mars, some scientists were skeptical it would be able to collect useful data from orbit. Holt is a Co-Investigator on SHARAD.

“These anomalous features have gone unexplained for 40 years because we have not been able to see what lies beneath the surface,” said Roberto Seu, team leader for the SHARAD instrument. “It is gratifying to me that with this new instrument we can finally explain them.”

SHARAD is provided to NASA by the Italian Space Agency. It has been designed and developed and is operated by a joint team formed by Sapienza University of Rome’s INFOCOM Department and Thales Alenia Space Italy.

Co-authors on the paper “The Construction of Chasma Boreale on Mars” include Kathryn Fishbaugh (Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum), Shane Byrne (Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona), Sarah Christian (University of Texas Institute for Geophysics and Bryn Mawr College), Kenneth Tanaka (Astrogeology Science Center, U. S. Geological Survey), Patrick Russell (Planetary Science Institute), Ken Herkenhoff (Astrogeology Science Center, U. S. Geological Survey), Ali Safaeinili (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), Nathaniel Putzig (Southwest Research Institute) and Roger Phillips (Southwest Research Institute).

Funding was provided by NASA and the Gayle White Fellowship at the Institute for Geophysics.

Scientists have used quantum mechanics to reveal that the most common mineral on Earth is relatively uncommon deep within the planet.

Using several of the largest supercomputers in the nation, a team of physicists led by Ohio State University has been able to simulate the behavior of silica in a high-temperature, high-pressure form that is particularly difficult to study firsthand in the lab.

The resulting discovery — reported in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) — could eventually benefit science and industry alike.

Silica makes up two-thirds of the Earth’s crust, and we use it to form products ranging from glass and ceramics to computer chips and fiber optic cables.

“Silica is all around us,” said Ohio State doctoral student Kevin Driver, who led this project for his doctoral thesis. “But we still don’t understand everything about it. A better understanding of silica on a quantum-mechanical level would be useful to earth science, and potentially to industry as well.”

Silica takes many different forms at different temperatures and pressures — not all of which are easy to study, Driver said.

“As you might imagine, experiments performed at pressures near those of Earth’s core can be very challenging. By using highly accurate quantum mechanical simulations, we can offer reliable insight that goes beyond the scope of the laboratory.”

Over the past century, seismology and high-pressure laboratory experiments have revealed a great deal about the general structure and composition of the earth. For example, such work has shown that the planet’s interior structure exists in three layers called the crust, mantle, and core. The outer two layers — the mantle and the crust — are largely made up of silicates, minerals containing silicon and oxygen.

Still, the detailed structure and composition of the deepest parts of the mantle remain unclear. These details are important for geodynamical modeling, which may one day predict complex geological processes such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

Even the role that the simplest silicate — silica — plays in Earth’s mantle is not well understood.

“Say you’re standing on a beach, looking out over the ocean. The sand under your feet is made of quartz, a form of silica containing one silicon atom surrounded by four oxygen atoms. But in millions of years, as the oceanic plate below becomes subducted and sinks beneath the Earth’s crust, the structure of the silica changes dramatically,” Driver said.

As pressure increases with depth, the silica molecules crowd closer together, and the silicon atoms start coming into contact with oxygen atoms from neighboring molecules. Several structural transitions occur, with low-pressure forms surrounded by four oxygen atoms and higher-pressure forms surrounded by six. With even more pressure, the structure collapses into a very dense form of the mineral, which scientists call alpha-lead oxide.

It’s this form of silica that likely resides deep within the earth, in the lower part of the mantle, just above the planet’s core, Driver said.

When scientists try to interpret seismic signals from that depth, they have no direct way of knowing what form of silica they are dealing with. So they must simulate the behavior of different forms on computer, and then compare the results to the seismic data. The simulations rely on quantum mechanics.

In PNAS, Driver, his advisor John Wilkins, and their coauthors describe how they used a quantum mechanical method to design computer algorithms that would simulate the silica structures. When they did, they found that the behavior of the dense, alpha-lead oxide form of silica did not match up with any global seismic signal detected in the lower mantle.

This result indicates that the lower mantle is relatively devoid of silica, except perhaps in localized areas where oceanic plates have subducted, Driver explained.

Wilkins, Ohio Eminent Scholar and professor of physics at Ohio State, cited Driver’s determination and resourcefulness in making this study happen. The physicists used a method called quantum Monte Carlo (QMC), which was developed during atomic bomb research in World War II. To earn his doctorate, Driver worked to show that the method could be applied to studying minerals in the planet’s deep interior.

“This work demonstrates both the superb contributions a single graduate student can make, and that the quantum Monte Carlo method can compute nearly every property of a mineral over a wide range of pressure and temperatures,” Wilkins said. He added that the study will “stimulate a broader use of quantum Monte Carlo worldwide to address vital problems.”

While these algorithms have been around for over half a century, applying them to silica was impossible until recently, Driver said. The calculations were simply too labor-intensive.

Even today, with the advent of more powerful supercomputers and fast algorithms that require less computer memory, the calculations still required using a number of the largest supercomputers in the United States, including the Ohio Supercomputer Center in Columbus.

“We used the equivalent of six million CPU hours or more, to model four different states of silica” Driver said.

He and his colleagues expect that quantum Monte Carlo will be used more often in materials science in the future, as the next generation of computers goes online.

Coauthors on the paper included Ronald Cohen of the Carnegie Institution of Washington; Zhigang Wu of the Colorado School of Mines; Burkhard Militzer of the University of California, Berkeley; and Pablo López Ríos, Michael Towler, and Richard Needs of the University of Cambridge.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. Computing resources were provided by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations, the TeraGrid, and the Ohio Supercomputer Center.

Could our universe be located within the interior of a wormhole which itself is part of a black hole that lies within a much larger universe?

Such a scenario in which the universe is born from inside a wormhole (also called an Einstein-Rosen Bridge) is suggested in a paper from Indiana University theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski in Physics Letters B. The final version of the paper was available online March 29 and will be published in the journal edition April 12.

Poplawski takes advantage of the Euclidean-based coordinate system called isotropic coordinates to describe the gravitational field of a black hole and to model the radial geodesic motion of a massive particle into a black hole.

In studying the radial motion through the event horizon (a black hole’s boundary) of two different types of black holes — Schwarzschild and Einstein-Rosen, both of which are mathematically legitimate solutions of general relativity — Poplawski admits that only experiment or observation can reveal the motion of a particle falling into an actual black hole. But he also notes that since observers can only see the outside of the black hole, the interior cannot be observed unless an observer enters or resides within.
“This condition would be satisfied if our universe were the interior of a black hole existing in a bigger universe,” he said. “Because Einstein’s general theory of relativity does not choose a time orientation, if a black hole can form from the gravitational collapse of matter through an event horizon in the future then the reverse process is also possible. Such a process would describe an exploding white hole: matter emerging from an event horizon in the past, like the expanding universe.”

A white hole is connected to a black hole by an Einstein-Rosen bridge (wormhole) and is hypothetically the time reversal of a black hole. Poplawski’s paper suggests that all astrophysical black holes, not just Schwarzschild and Einstein-Rosen black holes, may have Einstein-Rosen bridges, each with a new universe inside that formed simultaneously with the black hole.

“From that it follows that our universe could have itself formed from inside a black hole existing inside another universe,” he said.
By continuing to study the gravitational collapse of a sphere of dust in isotropic coordinates, and by applying the current research to other types of black holes, views where the universe is born from the interior of an Einstein-Rosen black hole could avoid problems seen by scientists with the Big Bang theory and the black hole information loss problem which claims all information about matter is lost as it goes over the event horizon (in turn defying the laws of quantum physics).

This model in isotropic coordinates of the universe as a black hole could explain the origin of cosmic inflation, Poplawski theorizes.
Poplawski is a research associate in the IU Department of Physics. He holds an M.S. and a Ph.D. in physics from Indiana University and a M.S. in astronomy from the University of Warsaw, Poland.

According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory, days will now be shorter because of the “quake’s hit shifted the Earth’s axis by three inches.” As you very well know, the axis determines the length of time for each day.

Thanks to computer detectors, the change will result in days that are 1.26 microseconds shorter than in the past. That’s about 0.00000126, which is honestly not that much. There have also been more visible changes like islands changing its position. Santa Maria actually was reported to have raised two meters after the earthquake.

The LHC first fired up in September 2008, but scientists feared then that it will not be able to make its way to the physics experiments they plan to begin in 2010 when the LHC reached its target energy of 7 TeV.

According to CERN Director General Rolf Heuer, they are still coming to terms with how the LHC commission is going smoothly, and they are continuing things step-by-step.

The first LHC beam was injected on November 20 while the two beams sped around the 17-mile ring in opposite directions three days later. There are four LHC detectors recorded from the data of the collision of those two beams.

For its next step, CERN will increase the intensity of the beams for about a week. The collisions then will calibrate the machine that will be carried until this month.

It’s an announcement that’s been expected for some time.

Are we talking about enough water for astronauts to actually live off? That’s what NASA is analyzing now, attempting to scale the results of the small section studied by LCROSS. But “it’s water like any other water,” NASA said, though it’d need purification to drink. I guess that whole moon bombing didn’t turn out so boring after all.

Courtesy : CNN

Learn more about this mission, click here