Boston Globe: The Foundational Questions Institute, which is funded by the John Templeton Foundation, launched today an ambitious international effort to fund physics research with potential theological implications. The first round of $2,2 million grants will go to 30 physicists at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and other top institutions.
The institute will not tackle explicitly religious questions like "Does God exist?" but will instead focus on deep questions in physics that may be too speculative or philosophical for government funding such as whether the fundamental laws of nature seem specially designed to allow life, and whether there are truths about the universe which physics is inherently incapable of proving says the Boston Globe.
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The Daily Telegraph: The answer to a question thousands of students ask their parents during their first week at university "how do I boil an egg?" , may soon have an electronic answer thanks to new "self timing" eggs. The new eggs, which will appear in UK supermarkets, have "thermochromic" invisible ink, printed on the shell. When the egg reaches a certain temperature, the ink becomes visible, letting the cook know that the eggs are ready. The eggs will come in cartons marked soft (three minutes), medium (four minutes) or hard (seven minutes).
Alternately, Exeter physicist Charles D.H. Williams, has created a web site for his students entitled The Science of Boiling an Egg which explains how you can use a formula to calculate the boiling time for a soft-boiled egg, given its weight and initial temperature.
The Science of Boiling an Egg
The egg that will tell you when it's perfectly boiled
NPR (audio): The "Archimedes Palimpsest", a 12th century prayer book that has the only known references to some of archimedes mathenmatical research hidden in its pages, has revealed a few more secrets thanks to Stanford physicist Uwe Bergmann's interest in spinach. The palimpsest is extremely fragile and most of the Archimedes text can only be read by photographing the pages at different infrared wavelengths (see Physics Today June 2000 page 32). Bergmann realized that X-ray pulses produced by the Stanford Linear Accelerator should be able to pick up the iron in the ink, just as they pick up concentrations of iron in leaves of spinach. After placing the book in the accelerator, scientists and historians discovered a whole new batch of writings from Archimedes that were previously unknown. They also discovered the name of the scribe who over wrote the text: Johannes Myronas.
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Update: Science magazine says that although Stanford's analysis hasn't yet revealed any obvious revolutionary surprises, researchers did find a new geometric drawing as well as several previously missing passages.
LA Times: Cost over runs and delays of projects managed by the National Nuclear Safety Adminstration, which manages the US nuclear weapons program and the associated Department of Energy laboratories, is upsetting some members of Congress. In particular, the National Ignition Facility at Lawerence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which jumped from $1 billion to $3.4 billion, and the Dual Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test Facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico which jumped from $10-million to $360 million are causing lawmakers to question NNSA competence. Officials from the national labs say that cost overs should have not come as a surprise considering the technically difficult nature of the two programs, and that scientific benefits for the stockpile stewardship program (which help maintains the safety and capability of the US nuclear weapons program), will outweigh any of the costs.
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New York Times: Coal-burning utilities are contributing money University of Virginia professor, Patrick J. Michaels, one of the few remaining climate scientists openly critical of the broad consensus that fossil fuel emissions are intensifying global warming.
Dr. Michaels told Western business leaders last year that he was running out of money for his analyses of other scientists’ global warming research. So a Colorado utility organized a collection campaign for him last week and has raised at least $150,000 in donations and pledges.
Michaels is part of a group of well known global warming skeptics that receive money from the fossil fuel industry. Their public campaign against man-made climate change has helped some politicans decry the general science consensus that climate change is happening.
Nature: Is it possible to always replicate scientific results asks Jim Giles in Nature. In 2002, at least two papers in the journals 4 July issue contained result that may not be replicable. There is nothing suspicious about the papers, nor any suggestion that their authors are anything other than excellent scientists. Nor was that week particularly odd, and there is no reason to think that other journals publish fewer problematic papers. It is simply the case that the replication of results, a process absolutely central to science, is not always possible.
"If you want to know whether a duck is crossing the street, you look twice," says Harry Collins, a social scientist at Cardiff University, UK, who cheerfully describes himself as the world expert on replication. Replication in science, he says, is the same: it is a way of being sure that something really exists, and the process by which tentative discoveries acquire textbook status. If, on the other hand, attempts to replicate a result meet failure again and again, that result will end up being discounted.
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Reuters:After three years of continual cuts in its budget, US research on the International Space Station may be completely killed off to fix a $100 million shortfall in NASA's budget. When ISS was originally proposed twenty years ago, nearly 27 hours of astronaut time per week was set aside by NASA to conduct scientific experiments. However, since ISS has had three instead of the proposed seven astronauts in orbit at any one time, the amount of time set aside for science has dropped to 2.5 hours per week. Delays and cost over-runs has also led to many of the proposed scientific instruments for ISS to remain stuck on the ground. A $350 million cut in NASA's life science budget last year helped bring the research program to the point of collapse. Fixing the budget shortfall by cancelling the remainging ISS research budget would bring NASA's proposed Moon-Mars program back on track say NASA officials.
Florida Today: This August NOAA is to repeat a research project from the 1970s to try and find out why one in 10 of the tropical waves that come off Africa turns into hurricane. The 2006 program will use better instruments than the earlier project, and combine ground observations, aircraft and satellites to study these stormy systems. Hurriances are receiving more attention this year after hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans almost a year ago. "Katrina's a great example of a system that was not doing very well in the eastern and central Atlantic, and then it managed to blossom into a very strong, major hurricane," said Jason Dunion of NOAA's Hurricane Research Division.
BBC: Indian PM Manmohan Singh has said India will not accept any new conditions in the bilateral US-India nuclear technology agreement which will share US civilian nuclear technology with India. Prime minister Singh statement was released when the US House of Representatives began debating whether to ratify the agreement. Critics of the accord say it will damage non-proliferation efforts, help generate an nuclear arms race in the region, and free up some India's existing reactors solely to produce warheads for the military. Proponents for the agreement say it will help India put some of its reactors under international safeguards, and help the US nuclear industry. The deal also has implications for India's science community. Pakistan has ramped up efforts for producing its own plutonium stockpile since the deal was announced. The US Congress is expected to ratify the US-India agreement before the end of July.
The Christian Science Monitor: The Department of Energy has finally announced a timeline for Nevada's Yucca mountain nuclear waste storge site to start receiving the 50,000 tons of radioactive spent fuel rods from the US nuclear industry. The date, 2017, is 19 years behind the facility's original schedule. The delays have caused frustration in the nuclear industry, as well as among state governments, who recently sued the DoE to take the waste that has been piling up near power stations. An added urgency to opening Yucca mountain is the expected increase in building new US nuclear power plants over the next few years, as power demands, the high price of oil, and concerns about global warming, make nuclear power more attractive as a energy source.
ENN: The Department of Energy and a consortium of 10 energy companies from the United States, China and Australia, have selected the final two sites that will compete for the $1 billion FutureGen project--a coal-fired power plant that will have near zero carbon dioxide emissions.
Sites in Mattoon and Tuscola in Illinois and near Odessa and in Jewett in Texas, beat out eight other candidates to get through to the final round. The winner will be announced in September 2007 with construction to start almost immediately afterwards. The proposed power plant will turn the coal into a hydrogen-rich gas to produce electricity for about 275,000 single-family homes. The US currently has one of the world's largest coal reserves that could provide energy for the next 250 years.
Nature: The Nigerian goverment is condemplating a $5 billion endowment fund for science and technology based on surplus oil revenue. President Olusegun Obasanjo gave his backing to the proposal three months ago, and a final decision wil be made before Obasanjo leaves office next spring. In an surprising move, grants will be awarded through peer review. South Africa is currently the only African country to award the majority of grants through peer review.
The return on the endowment could provide Nigerian science will $500 million per year. Outside observers are worried however, of the effect of the notorious amount of corruption in the country will have on the scheme says Nature's Jim Giles.
Stanford Report: Science now stands at the edge of not only finally understanding the principles of quantum mechanics but utilizing those principles to benefit humankind, according to a report issued Monday by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Authored by a panel of top U.S. physicists, the report, titled AMO2010: Controlling the Quantum World, puts forth a vision for America's research future in the cutting-edge field of atomic, molecular and optical (AMO) science. The study details priorities for deepening our understanding of quantum mechanics and exploiting those findings.
The Independent: Today, Britain's astronomers table plans for future missions, each vying for £450m from the European Space Agency. So will the quest for Earth's sister planet win? Or will it be the voyage to Jupiter's icy moon? Helen Brown profiles the top contenders
MSNBC: Scientists said Monday they have found the first widespread evidence of giant hydrocarbon lakes on the surface of Saturn's planet-size moon Titan.
Guardian Unlimited: Britain is facing a chronic shortage of geophysicists as fewer students choose to study geophysical science at university and leading scientists in the field retire, a new study reveals.
The New York Times: A new exhibition at Indiana University features many world-class specimens of mathematical and physics-based puzzles.
MSNBC: Newly detected dust found around the burst remains of a dead star could help reveal how planets and stars formed and how life began.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: About one-fifth of scientists who have helped write scientific reports for the National Academies had direct financial ties to industry groups with a stake in the findings, a watchdog group reported on Monday. Many of the ties were not disclosed publicly, and some of the panels had few or no members representing consumer or health advocates, the group said.
The San Francisco Chronicle: Thousands of tons of deadly radioactive rods of spent nuclear fuel and waste have accumulated at three California nuclear power plants because the federal government has failed to open a permanent nuclear burial site in Nevada that was supposed to be ready eight years ago.
The Independent: Stephen Hawking, the world's best-known living scientist, has attacked "reactionary" forces in Europe and America which are trying to ban research into stem cells from human embryos.
ISIS: David Albright and Paul Brannan of the Institute for Science and International Security have analysed new satellite pictures of the Khushab nuclear site, the home to Pakistan's only plutonuim production reactor. They have concluded that a new reactor is being built that could increase Pakistan nuclear weapon capability by a factor of 20. Pakistan currently relies on 30-50 uranium warheads for its nuclear security which would be delivered to their targets by aircraft. Weapons made with plutonium warheads however, would be easier to mount on Pakistan's medium and long range missiles, increasing the effectiveness of the country's nuclear response. The size of the new reactor, which is twice the size of the existing reactor, suggests it could produce enough plutoium for 40 to 50 warheads per year. "South Asia may be heading for a nuclear arms race that could lead to arsenals growing into the hundreds of nuclear weapons, or at minimum, vastly expanded stockpiles of military fissile material," says Albright and Brannan. The Washington Post also has some analysis of the report.
Science: Last week, a Senate spending panel added $70 million to the Administration's budget request for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to start up the Integrated Ocean Observation System. But lobbyists for ocean science are worried that NOAA may not be in it for the long haul.
The Register: A group of US physicists funded by the US Department of Energy have made a material capable of making light travel backwards, at speeds "that appear faster than the speed of light", at the smallest wavelength ever.
Science: After announcing a year ago that only two locations remained in the running to house the proposed Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, last month, the National Science Foundation reopened the site competition to all comers.
Environmental News Network: Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev on Friday urged the United States and Australia to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, saying the world's "reservoir of life" was rapidly shrinking.
Wired: A used bullet tells many tales. The grooves and striations it picks up as it blasts down a gun barrel can link weapons to crimes and help prosecutors put criminals behind bars. But the stories have always been two-dimensional. Until now.
FoodNavigator.com: Nestlé Research Center, in collaboration with the University of Bristol, are pushing back the boundaries of scientific knowledge for the food industry by using molecular physics to explore the properties of carbohydrates in food.
Nature: As a way to resolve a scientific dispute, it was always likely to be fraught. In March 2005, nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana — known for his controversial claims to have achieved 'bubble fusion' — formally joined forces with one of his most prominent critics, physicist Seth Putterman of the University of California, Los Angeles.
Space.com: It’s been 46 years since Frank Drake aimed an antenna at the stars in the first modern SETI experiment. His hope was to hear a deliberate signal – guided into space by intelligent beings – rather than the natural, noisy dance of hot electrons.
Columbia Journalism Review: Like many beat reporters, science journalists spend a great deal of time educating their editors about the peculiarities of their fields, and by and large those exchanges are not only illuminating but ultimately lead to better stories. But there’s one place we hit a wall.
The Register: New radar images sent back from the Cassini spacecraft have revealed an Australia-sized land mass on Saturn's moon, Titan. The continent is in a region known as Xanadu, but readers are asked to kindly refrain from any Olivia Newton-John references.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: The U.S. Energy Department has issued its final notice to organizations and institutions that wish to bid on the contract to operate the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a particle-physics facility west of Chicago that has been run since its opening, in the 1960s, by the Universities Research Association, a consortium of 90 research universities in the United States and three other countries.
AZoBuild: When Florence was hit by disastrous floods in 1966, art conservation experts rushed to the city to save as many priceless pieces of art as they could. Now Florentine scientists have developed a tool to help restorers preserve Italy's many precious fresco paintings without causing any damage to the paint itself, an Institute of Physics journal reports today.
MSNBC: Japan is planning ultra long-range 30-year weather forecasts that will predict typhoons, storms, blizzards, droughts and other inclement weather, an official said Tuesday.
The New York Times: For the first time in decades, increasing the role of
nuclear power in the United States may be starting to make political, environmental and even economic sense.
The Baltimore Sun: Already $1 billion over budget and two years behind schedule, NASA's $4.5 billion James Webb Space Telescope has taken yet another shot from the Government Accountability Office.
BBC: A chip the size of a grain of rice that can store 100 pages of text and swaps data via wireless has been developed by Hewlett-Packard.
Science: How can biomedical researchers tell whether their work might be misused by terrorists? A U.S. government-appointed panel has come up with some broad guidance on the question and suggested that in some cases, scientists should not publish the results of such "dual-use" research.
Stereo satellites will let scientists tune in to the sun's mood music: Scientists want to create the first three-dimensional model of the sun in an effort to protect the Earth from its most violent eruptions, which can affect everything from global positioning systems to mobile phone networks. The Stereo mission, due to be launched next month, will map the sun's mood swings and the dangers they pose to the solar system.
Christian Science Monitor: HOUSTON – NASA appears to have licked the worst of its launch-debris problem, clearing the way for shuttle flights needed to finish construction of the International Space Station.
Wired News: The once difficult and obscure geek sport of observing orbiting satellites from Earth is today within reach of most anyone, thanks to the web. But a few hobbyists still take it extremes.
The Independent: World leaders at the G8 Summit in St Petersburg failed to agree common ground on nuclear energy and global warming yesterday. Tony Blair's struggle to persuade the world's eight most powerful nations to unite to end climate change produced a disappointing one-line acknowledgement that the issue matters to some countries, but not others.
Science: The German government recognizes that our future lies in a knowledge-based society founded on freedom and responsibility. This is what will enable Germany to rise to the challenges of today's world, be they national or global, or economic, social, or ecological in nature. That is why the promotion of science, research, and innovation is one of my top priorities.
The Village Voice: 'That," says the little girl, "looks like a hamster wheel." Right, except that it's 12 feet in diameter, and spins two feet off the floor. Soon the girl, her sister, and their grandparents—visitors to the Streb Lab for Action Mechanics (SLAM), the Williamsburg home of STREB Extreme Action—are watching moves beyond the wildest dreams of all hamsters and most dancers. The family's here because after out-of-town performances choreographer Elizabeth Streb invites spectators to watch rehearsals if they're in New York. The company's new show, "Streb vs. Gravity," plays tonight, Friday, and Saturday at the La Guardia Drama Theater, opening Lincoln Center Festival 2006's three-week wealth of dance events. Today, Streb's "action engineers" are rehearsing Revolution.
Environmental News Network: With oil and gas prices at record highs and fears mounting over future supplies, global energy security will take centre stage at this year’s meeting of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized nations.
Nature: Stakes raised in open-access debate.
The debate over whether research results should be freely accessible has always been fraught. Having given a lot of ground, journal publishers are determined to hang on to one last bastion: their rights to the published version of scientific articles. Now librarians and open-access advocates have set their sights on that final prize — by encouraging researchers to demand the right to distribute the published versions freely and immediately.
Nature: Last week's fiery crash of North Korea's Taepodong-2 missile has left arms control experts theorizing about what went wrong.
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