August 2006 Archives

The Boston Globe: Speech codes are rare in the industrialized, Western democracies. In Germany and Austria, for instance, it is forbidden to proselytize Nazi ideology or trivialize the Holocaust. Given those countries' recent histories, that is a restraint on free expression we can live with.

More curious are our own taboos on the subject of global warming. I sat in a roomful of journalists 10 years ago while Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider lectured us on a big problem in our profession: soliciting opposing points of view. In the debate over climate change, Schneider said, there simply was no legitimate opposing view to the scientific consensus that man - made carbon emissions drive global warming. To suggest or report otherwise, he said, was irresponsible.

Nature: NMR spectroscopy has changed enormously over the years, but signal detection has stayed the same since the technique was invented. The latest thinking literally shines a new light on things

Los Alamos Monitor: A Harvard climate professor said Monday reports that the leveling off of what had been a thinning stratospheric ozone layer could be seen as a sign of recovery.

"The ozone hole over Antarctica is not getting deeper, but the issue is still controversial," said Daniel J. Jacob, a prominent professor of atmospheric chemistry and environmental engineering who spoke at a laboratory colloquium.

ABC News Online: The United States says it has carried out a subcritical nuclear experiment successfully at an underground test site in Nevada - the 23rd such test since 1997.

The New York Times: Melvin Schwartz, who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics for generating a beam of wispy particles known as neutrinos, died Monday at a nursing home in Twin Falls, Idaho. He was 73 and lived in Ketchum, Idaho.

Times Leader: U of Chicago may build particle accelerator to keep up with Europe’s science.

MSNBC: A 30-mile maze of canyons in Antarctica was carved out of bedrock by the catastrophic draining of subglacial lakes during global warming 12 million to 14 million years ago, according to university researchers who warn that a similar event today could have serious environmental consequences.

News Blaze: U.S. Department of Energy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Dennis Spurgeon announced the appointment of Dr. Paul Lisowski as Deputy Director of Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems. As Deputy Director, Dr. Lisowski will lead the day-to-day operations of the Department's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, a key element of the President's Advanced Energy Initiative.

China Daily: China will spare no efforts to fulfill its international obligations on nuclear non-proliferation and enhance international cooperation in peaceful utilization of nuclear energy,said Jin Zhuanglong, deputy director of the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (COSTIND).

Space.com: NASA Administrator Mike Griffin does not mince words when he calls the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) demonstration effort a gamble, albeit one with the potential to pay off big time if the entrepreneurial sector delivers.

ScienceNow: Oil seeping from the seafloor may have contributed to climate change long before the internal combustion engine did. The petroleum deposits are rich in the powerful greenhouse gas methane, which, according to a new study, may have played a major role in two previous episodes of global warming.

The Tartan: Advances in medical technology have changed not only the way that doctors treat patients, but also how doctors discover what, exactly, needs to be treated.

One of the most accurate forms of imaging available to doctors today is the MRI. An MRI, or magnetic resonance image, is a picture of the insides of a living organism.

Science: NASA Administrator Michael Griffin this week read the riot act to the outside scientists who advise him, accusing them of thinking more of themselves and their research than of the agency's mission. Griffin's harsh comments come on the heels of the resignation of three distinguished scientists from the NASA Advisory Council (NAC), two of whom have questioned Griffin's plan to dramatically scale back a host of science projects.

Wired: Getting published in the illustrious British scientific journal Nature is, frankly, a bitch. It's not just the years you spend designing the perfect experiment, or the hustling for grant money to collect the data. It's not even the long nights of trying to figure out how to express all that work elegantly in the cold language of scientific communication. No – the real trick is getting the editors at Nature to like it.

Russianforces.org: It looks like Russia is preparing the ground for pulling out of the INF Treaty. For about two years now it has been trying to get the United States to agree to terminate the treaty, but apparently without success. Today most Russian news agencies quoted an unnamed Ministry of Defense official who said in an interview to RIA Novosti that "if necessary, Russia will withdraw from the INF Treaty unilaterally." No points for guessing what kind of precedent was mentioned in this regard - he said, "We've seen precedents like this before - the United States withdrew from the ABM Treaty."

Honolulu Advertiser: With oil topping $70 a barrel and fuel costs soaring, engineers and scientists are again focusing on how to wring power from the world's largest reservoir of renewable energy — the oceans.

PTStaff: Members of the International Astronomical Union have finally voted on Pluto's status as a planet. Four competing proposals, one of which would have introduced four new planets called "plutons" to the solar system, and another in which a new sub-class of planets called dwarf planets, caused controversy in the astronomical and geophysical communities, as scientists argued over the new definitions. About 5% of the world's astronomers voted at IAU, to decide the new definition of a planet.

Under the new guidelines, a celestial body must have "cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit" to be called a planet. Pluto has an elliptical orbit that overlaps with Neptune, so is disqualified full planet status.

The Hindu: Super-hot atoms in space hold the key to an astronomical mystery, and an Ohio State University astronomer is leading an effort to study those atoms here on Earth.

Wired: The Department of Homeland Security announced plans last month to bolster U.S. port defenses with radiation scanners. The program, primarily aimed at detecting nukes smuggled by terrorists in shipping containers, will cost an estimated $1.15 billion, but won't be completed until 2011.

MSNBC: Some experiments run well after scientists who began them are gone

Nature: Plasma physics comes under scrutiny in new breed of tokamak.

The New York Times: Evolutionary biology has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students.

BBC: Leading scientists in the United States say the hole in the ozone layer of the Earth's atmosphere above the Antarctic appears to have stopped widening.

ScienceNow: The stuff of pencil lead may display bizarre behavior thought to occur only around superheavy atoms and black holes. That's the implication of a new study, which suggests that the material can shoot electrons through other materials as if they're invisible. The effect could be useful for designing new kinds of transistors for electronics.

Guardian Unlimited: Efforts to stop the hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic from growing have worked, leading US scientists said today.

Chicago Tribune: For more than 20 years Fermilab in Batavia has held bragging rights both impressive and arcane: It is home to the world's most powerful atomic particle accelerator, the Tevatron.

But Fermilab will lose that title next year when a new machine in Switzerland and France fires up. Moreover, with the Tevatron scheduled to shut down in 2010 it means that America's longstanding leadership in particle physics will slip away to Europe and Asia. It also signals the likely end of Fermilab and its 2,000 jobs and $315 million annual operating budget.

The Christian Science Monitor: Much of scientific research and development is funded by congressional earmarks - a troubling trend.

Space.com: The biggest astronomical debate of the young millennium culminates this Thursday at International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) meeting in Prague, where national representatives will give thumbs up or down to IAU’s latest planet definition proposal.

BBC: US astronomers say they have found the first direct evidence for the mysterious stuff called dark matter.

The New York Times: For decades, Xu Liangying has been Albert Einstein’s man in China, intertwining revolution and physics to speak up for the value of scientific curiosity.

The New York Times: One of those honored was Grigory Perelman, who solved a key piece in a puzzle known as the Poincaré conjecture.

Washington Post: The Bush administration has begun designating as secret some information that the US government long provided: the numbers of strategic weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War. The Pentagon and the Department of Energy are treating as national security secrets the historical totals of Minuteman, Titan II and other missiles, blacking out the information on previously public documents, according to a new report by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research library housed at George Washington University.

Despite the censorship from the DoE and DoD, the missile numbers can still be easily obtained from the public hearings mentioned in Congressional Record, or from the Russians and the UN, as the data was made public as part of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START) and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). "They are only making themselves look ridiculous," says Robert S. Norris, a senior research associate at the Natural Resources Defense Council to Post reporter Christopher Lee.

Read it

Space.com: Wesley Huntress, Charles Kennel and Eugene Levy, who served on the NASA Advisory Council's science committee have resigned after speaking publicly against budget cuts in NASA's science program. Kennel resigned by choice but Huntress and Levy were asked to leave by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin. Levy is quoted as saying that a commitment to a broad science program at NASA "didn't comport with the kind of advice that the administrator and the chairman of the committee were looking for." Science programs at NASA have been heavily affected with budget cuts as NASA attempts to get the Space Shuttle back on track, and the President's Moon/Mars vision implemented.

Read it

Nature: Electrons confined to the interface between two semiconductors form what is known as a two-dimensional electron gas - essentially, a two-dimensional metal. These materials provide a playground for the exploration of fundamental physics. Writing in Physical Review Letters, M. A. Zudov, R. R. Du, L. N. Pfeiffer, and K. W. West describe a experiment designed to shed light on one such phenomenon: 'zero-resistance' states induced by the application of a magnetic field and microwave radiation.

Read it

Science: This summer, radio astronomers will recommend a location for the planned International Square Kilometer Array (SKA), a network of 4000 radio dishes spread over an area several thousand kilometers across. SKA will be 100 times as sensitive as today's best radio telescopes. There are four sites competing to host the telescope: one in the Karoo region in South Africa, another in an arid plain in Western Australia; the third in Argentina on a high, dry plateau; the fourth is between the angular karst hills of southeastern China. The SKA's international steering committee is looking for a stable ionosphere, predictable weather, and good infrastructure. But the main priority is for the region selected to maintain radio silence, as many current radio telescope sites suffer from radio interference brought about by the expansion of urban centers.

Read it

Nature: Quantum computers could solve problems insurmountable to conventional computers. The missing ingredient for quantum computing with electron spins is now available — the rotation of a single spin.

The Register: Engineers at the University of Southampton have set a new world speed record for silicon performance by adding a little fluorine to the mix.

Science: Congressional staffers are working through the dog days of August on legislation to bolster U.S. competitiveness that both parties and the White House can agree upon.

BBC: Researchers peering at the Universe's first-born stars have uncovered the key to predicting a star's destiny.

Nature: Russian physicist Oskar Kaibyshev was given a six-year suspended prison sentence last week for exporting technologies with possible military use to South Korea. Human-rights advocates say the accusation is baseless and part of a series of prosecutions unjustly targeting Russian scientists.

Space.com: Following a recent demonstration of a 10-dish element of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), the United States Navy has signed off on a $1.5 million agreement to use the array along with another 10-dish installation to be developed in the near future.

Technology Review: HP researchers have developed a cheap way to make nanoparticle arrays that could lead to precise chemical sensors.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Voyager 1, already the most distant human-made object in the cosmos, reaches 100 astronomical units from the sun on Tuesday, August 15 at 5:13 p.m. Eastern time (2:13 p.m. Pacific time). That means the spacecraft, which launched nearly three decades ago, will be 100 times more distant from the sun than Earth is.

MSNBC: The controversy over whether Pluto is really a planet reached a new milestone today, as a committee of the International Astronomical Union released a copy of report recommending a new class of planets for the solar system. Unlike predictions made last week astronomers will not call this new classification dwarf planets, but plutons instead, to highlight Pluto's special position in this new classification. Under the new classification, which can basically be described as round objects that orbit the sun, more than 40 other objects in the solar system could be classed as Plutons. Astronomers will vote on the proposal on the 25 August. It is unknown whether the IAU has enough votes to pass the measure.

The Christian Science Monitor: At MIT's student-led 'vehicle design summit,' engineering students from around the world unite to build super-efficient commuter cars.

Environmental News Network: Global warming is affecting the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes, according to a new study by a university professor in Florida who says his research provides the first direct link between climate change and storm strength.

The New York Times: Batteries have not improved at the same rate as the electronic devices they power, but recent advances in lithium polymer batteries, popular with cell phone and computer manufacturers, have led to a new host of problems as Dell's $400 million recall of more than 4 million batteries can attest. Companies are now looking not only to meet these increasing power demands, but are trying to figure out how to create safer, more stable batteries. DAMON DARLIN and BARNABY J. FEDER of the New York Times investigate three of the most promising battery technologies and explain why a Dell laptop battery could catch fire and explode.

The New York Times: Grisha Perelman has quite possibly solved one of mathematics biggest mysteries, Poincaré’s conjecture, but has since disappeared.

Update: Slate magazine also explains the importance of Poincaré’s conjecture using a more visual description than the Times.

Sacramento Bee: Rising temperatures will increase the risk of forest fires, droughts and flooding over the next two centuries, UK climate scientists have warned.

BBC: Rising temperatures will increase the risk of forest fires, droughts and flooding over the next two centuries, UK climate scientists have warned.

USA Today: Jim Snoddy and other NASA engineers didn't just go to the drawing board or a warehouse when they needed ideas — and parts — for America's next lunar rocket. They went to space museums.

NPR: An International Astronomical Union panel, which helps define the classification of planetary bodies in the solar system, has unanimously recommended that Pluto retain its title as a planet. Since the discovery of a large number of Kuiper-size objects such as Xena (which are smaller than planets but bigger than most asteroids), some of which are similar in size to Pluto, some astronomers have argued that Pluto should be reclassified as a Kuiper object and not be called a planet. The IAU panel, which deliberated over the summer in Paris, will make its findings known in Prague at the annual IAU meeting later this week. As part of the panels suggested reclassification, planets are going to be turned into three separate categories: terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars), giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) and a third class that would include Pluto, which may be called dwarf planets. Pluto may be joined by several more objects in this new category says NPR's David Kestenbaum.

NPR article
2006 IAU meeting
News from the IAU meeting
Official site for IAU planet definition news
The discovery of Xena

Science: Six months into a Department of Energy (DOE) program to recycle spent nuclear fuel by means of an experimental method, the agency has announced plans to use more established technology to help reach its objective. Using standard techniques, currently used mainly by the French and Japanese nuclear industries, would be cheaper in the short term than the proposed UREX1a experimental method that breaks down used fuel into reusable chemical parts. However, UREX1a has a number of safeguards that limit proliferation risks. DOE is abandoning "enhanced proliferation resistance in the interest of building a reprocessing plant quickly," says Frank von Hippel, a Princeton physicist who studies security issues related to the civil nuclear industry.

Global Nuclear Energy Partnership: Proliferation Resistant Recycling
Science article

The Independent: James Lovelock, the inventor of the microwave oven and the Electron Capture Detector, a useful instrument for measuring atmospheric trace compounds in the field, answers questions from the public on nuclear waste, the environment, and the links between science, lobbying, and politics.

James Lovelock wikipedia entry

Personal web site

The Guardian: The study of physics in UK schools and universities is spiraling into decline as many teenagers believe it is too difficult, says a report from the University of Buckingham. The number of A-level exam entries in the subject has halved since 1982 and one in four universities which had significant numbers studying physics have stopped teaching the subject since 1994. Even in the 26 top universities with the highest ratings for research, the trend has been downwards. A similar article in the independent asks does it really matter if the number of students studying physics is falling? The newspaper points out that physics contributes a vast amount to the UK economy, with physics-based industries employing over 1.79 million people in the UK and contributing over £130bn in export value to the UK economy. Says Sir Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, "It is crucial that we get more specialist physics teachers into our classrooms if we are to inspire more young people to study physics at A-level and beyond. Teachers who are both enthused and knowledgeable about their subjects are key to breaking the cycle of decline that physics is experiencing."

PT Online staff

Passengers are told by the Transportation Security Administration start ditching liquids, gels and lotions from their carry-on luggage, due to the risks of liquid explosives being activated and assembled on board aircraft. GlobalSecurity.org explains in detail how liquid explosives work, while National Public Radio has a concsise summary. Some airports, such as Tampa's TIA have "trace portal" machines, that detect whether a passengers has handled explosives. Only a few passenagers are selected to go through the machines, which cannot detect traces in sealed containers.

X-ray scanners can't detect explosive liquids. X-ray scanners examine density, not volatility.

Newsday reports that, until recently, most explosive detection efforts have focused on solid explosives, rather than liquids.

According to William Martel, a professor of international security studies at Tufts University, the most common explosive test -- a swipe test where a cloth or tape is wiped over luggage and put through a sensor -- is specifically designed to pick up residue from solid explosives. "We didn't start looking aggressively for liquids until a few years ago," he said. Some, but not all, can be picked up by "sniffer" sensors using a technique called neutron activation analysis.

Newsday explains:

The newest form of liquid explosives are so-called "binary" formulas that were developed to clear land mines in Third World countries. They're undetectable until mixed, and also require a detonator.

There are even liquid explosive blends that don't need a detonator, though their exact composition isn't widely known. Methyl nitrate, which has been used in some types of antipersonnel mines including improvised explosive devices, explodes when mixed with another chemical.

Reuters says regular medicine-cabinet and cleaning supplies can be adapted to make explosions, and may not be detectable by airport security equipment. That does not mean they are easy to make into bombs, cautioned Neal Langerman, a San Diego consultant who is former chair of the American Chemical Society's Division of Chemical Health and Safety. "I would doubt that the average layperson would successfully make triacetone triperoxide,[one of the explosive compounds] without killing themselves," Langerman said.

Mixing the explosives on a plane would not be easy says The Times of London.

Explosives expose aviation weak spot (USA Today): Thursday's terror plot didn't succeed in blowing up planes, but it struck at the core of a fundamental weakness in aviation security around the globe: the inability to spot explosives made from seemingly harmless ingredients.

Science: A radical new interpretation of string theory raises the prospect of untold numbers of separate universes with different physical laws--an idea that some physicists say threatens the foundation of their science.

The New York Times: In an effort to make Texas a magnet for scientific and medical research, the University of Texas is planning a $2.5 billion program to expand research and teaching in the sciences, including medicine and technology.

BBC: The meltdown of Greenland's ice sheet is speeding up, satellite measurements show.

The New York Times: James A. Van Allen, the physicist who made the first major scientific discovery of the early space age, the Earth-circling radiation belts that bear his name, and sent spacecraft instruments to observe the outer reaches of the solar system, died yesterday in Iowa City. He was 91.

Space.com: A process similar to a conveyor belt transports heavy elements from the surface of stars into their interiors where they are destroyed, new observations suggest.

Nature: The use of X-rays to construct three-dimensional tomographic images is well established in medicine. The same principle is being extended to the nanoscale, bringing us startlingly accurate pictures of tiny objects.

The Christian Science Monitor: Businesses and organizations are rolling out new efforts to make engineering cool again.

United Press International: Renowned physicist James Van Allen, who helped launch the United States into the space age and for whom the Van Allen radiation belts are named, has died. He was 91.

BBC: An unpopular pigment used by artists in the 18th Century could lead to more energy efficient, faster computers.

Environmental News Network: Nevada was dealt a blow in its effort to avoid a radioactive waste dump Tuesday as a federal appeals court turned aside arguments against transportation plans.

ZDNet: Scientists have discovered a new method for detecting deadly pathogens like Anthrax or smallpox almost immediately after they've been released into the air.

The Independent: Claude Monet painted his famous pictures of a foggy London skyline by direct observation rather than from memory, a scientific analysis of his paintings has found.

The New York Times: The giant earthquake that set off a devastating tsunami across the Indian Ocean in December 2004 disrupted the earth enough to change gravity and to deflect satellites passing hundreds of miles above.

The Register: European plans to build a massive optical telescope with a 100m mirror have been scaled back in favour of a 'scope with a mere 42m main reflector after the projected construction costs for the original dish reached €1.5bn.

BBC: Storing carbon dioxide under the sea-bed could help to reduce global warming, according to US scientists.

Los Angeles Times: New findings from an Ohio State University team of astronomers are raising the possibility that the universe is larger than previously thought.

Yahoo!News: After 10 years, few believe life on Mars

Science: Last week, ceremonies marked the 30th anniversary of the deadliest earthquake in 400 years: the Tangshan earthquake, which killed at least 244,000 people in China's Hebei Province. But as the 1976 cataclysm fades into history, a scientific puzzle endures: The magnitude-7.5 temblor struck along a fault that no one knew existed.

The Independent: A cosmic event High up in the Chilean Andes, more than 5,000 metres above sea level, astronomers are building a telescopic "time machine" that promises to offer a glimpse of the moment the universe was created 13 billion years ago.

The New York Times: Hurricane researchers at Colorado State University predicted Thursday that this year’s hurricane season would not be as bad as their earlier forecast had indicated, and they said a monster storm like Hurricane Katrina was unlikely.

Science: Tiny vibrations could shake up physicists' understanding of high-temperature superconductors. In ordinary superconductors, quantized vibrations, or "phonons," provide the glue that binds electrons in pairs, and they then zip through the material unimpeded. But for various reasons, most physicists believe phonons have little to do with high-temperature superconductors' ability to conduct electricity with zero resistance at temperatures up to 138 kelvin. Now, ultraprecise measurements may nudge researchers to reconsider that assumption.

"I'm very happy that these results seem to be consistent with what we have been saying," says Zhi-Xun Shen, an experimenter at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who has reported other evidence of electron-phonon interactions in high-temperature superconductors. However, some researchers argue that the vibrations seen in the new work are an experimental artifact.

Read

space.com: One of the three antennas that make up NASA's Deep Space Network is out of commission for an extra three months due to the failure of two bearings that allow the antenna to rotate. The problem was discovered when the antenna, based in Madrid, Spain, was taken out of service for routine maintenance. The DSN network collects data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and the Cassini spacecraft which is orbiting Saturn. A sister antenna in Goldstone, California is now undergoing checks to see if its bearings are still viable. In May, the GAO issued a report which accused NASA of under funding DSN and allowing its operations to degrade.

Read
Deep space network under threat
Deep Space Network

Zeenews.com: The Atomic Testing museum in Las Vegas, Nevada, is to host an exhibition on atomic bombs and its effects on people by the Nagasaki peace hall, a Japanese organization that is devoted to abolishing weapons and remembering the two 1945 August atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "We don't care if you are pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear. If you want to come here and talk about nuclear issues, that's what we want people to do," says William Johnson, a director of the museum.

Read
Atomic Testing museum
Nagasaki peace hall
Wikipedia: Dropping the atomic bomb on Japan

New York Times: Oph1622, a small brown dwarf with a giant planet photographed by the European Southern Observatory, is raising more questions amongst astronomers and planetary physicists over what defines a planet. Oph1622 has a mass equal to 14 Jupiters, or about one-seventy-fifth that of the Sun. A brown dwarf is a failed star, one that has not reached sufficient mass to start nuclear self-ignition. The planet that orbits Oph1622, one of only three planets outside the solar system known to have been photographed by astronomers, is half as large as the star itself, with a mass of 7 Jupiters. Both Oph1622 and the planet are only 1 million years old, and cannot be explained by the standard descriptions of planetary/solar system formations. The photograph and accompanying paper were published on Science magazine's web site last night.

“It really stands out as something quite unusual and intriguing,” said Ray Jayawardhana, a professor of astronomy at the University of Toronto and an author of the Science paper. “The Oph1622 pair adds to the rich diversity of worlds that have been discovered recently, a diversity that we couldn’t really have imagined barely a decade ago.”

Read
Science paper: Discovery of a Young Planetary Mass Binary
ESO Press release

The New York Times: A group of entrepreneurs is harnessing the perpetual motion of the ocean and turning it into a commodity in high demand: energy. Right now, machines of various shapes and sizes are being tested off shores from the North Sea to the Pacific — one may even be coming to the East River in New York State this fall — to see how they capture waves and tides and create marine energy.

Nature: Some speculation always precedes the announcement of the Fields medals, the most illustrious awards in mathematics. But this year rumours have an extra dimension: one of the prizes to be awarded at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid on 22 August may be given for the solution of a century-old problem.

ScienceNow: Every night across the planet, astronomers use the most advanced instruments to tease away new details about the cosmos, and sometimes their efforts catch some rather strange goings on. Take the case of WD0137-349, a collapsed star known as a white dwarf. Based on orbital and temperature data collected by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, a research team has determined that when WD0137-349 was a much bigger red giant star, it swallowed a nearby planetlike object called a brown dwarf, which miraculously survived the experience.

The Washington Post: IN A MOVE AKIN to Dan Quayle invoking John F. Kennedy in 1988, President Bush attempted a Kennedyesque moment of his own 2 1/2 years ago when he called for a national effort to land Americans on the moon and Mars. It's not a clip they'll play on repeat in Mr. Bush's presidential library.

California Climate Change Center: As Californian governer Arnold Schwarzenegger and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair sign an agreement for the UK and Californa to work together on reducing greenhouse gases and promoting low carbon technologies, the California Environmental Protection Agency released a report compiled by the California Climate Change Center that predicts regional temperatures would increase by as much as 10 degrees by 2100. The higher temperatures would lead to severe air pollution, dwindling water supplies and an increase in heat-related deaths. The CCCC relied on the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of California, Berkeley, and other US research institutions for scientific input into the report.

Rocky Mountain News: NASA has received more than 20 proposals for funding the next set of Mars Scout missions. Each mission must cost under $475 million and help answer basic questions about the climate and geology of Mars, or help determine whether life ever existed there. Sone of the proposals include robotic airplanes, a spacecraft that fires copper balls into the planet from orbit to make craters, and a return sample mission. A winner will be announced in January 2008, and the spacecraft must launch by Jan. 31, 2012, said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars exploration program.
Read:

Nature: Francois Béguin of the CNRS Research Centre on Divided Matter in Orléans, France, and his co-workers say that seaweed, when burned to a charcoal-like form, is just the right stuff for making the electrodes in state-of-the-art supercapacitors. The seaweed carbon performs as well as more expensive commercial devices, and can hold a charge twice as high without breaking down. They hold up well over time, too: their charge-storage capacity declines by only 15% after 10,000 cycles of charging and discharging.

Das Spiegel and The Boston Globe: Although Google Earth wasn't initially designed as a scientific tool, many scientists, such as Erik Born, a Danish biologist tracking walruses in the Artic Sea, are finding the program a cheap and effective way of visualizing their tracking data says Manfred Dworschak in Das Spiegel. The tool is also encouraging other GIS mapping software companies improve their software to compete with Google Earth.

Meanwhile, Kim-Mai Cutler of the Boston Globe reports on SIGGRAPH 2006 , a major conference on computer graphics and emerging technologies that is drawing more than 25,000 people to Boston. The Woods Hole insitute is displaying at the conference a refined technique that will allow researchers to create a three-dimensional map of the ocean of vents, shipwrecks, and more easily map the migration patterns of whales. "Until we had good maps, you could have a city the size of Manhattan or Boston sitting on the bottom of the ocean and you'd be hard-pressed to find it," says Dave Gallo, director of special projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. These new techniques will let us, "see a Coke can on the ocean floor."

Space.com: Small dust devils and planet-wide storms - combined with static electricity - may lead to the formation of hydrogen peroxide and other corrosive chemicals that fall to the Martian surface as a sort of toxic snow, say two papers recently published in Astrobiology. The presence of hydrogen peroxide or ozone in the Mars dirt could also explain why some of the instruments looking for life on the 1976 Viking lander obtained ambiguous results.

NewsDay: University of Pennsylvania physicist Nigel S. Lockyer says that the US is relinquishing leadership in high energy particle physics. Experiments at Fermilab near Chicago and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center near San Francisco are coming to an end while Europe and Asia are building new multibillion-dollar research facilities "We risk falling behind not just in pure science, but in industry, medicine and communications, all of which have benefitted from this research," Lockyer says.

The Register: Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego, has a new proposal to solve global warming. Fire thousands artillery shells into the stratosphere to release sulphur particles. In 1991 sulphur particles from the Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines is thought to have lowered the Earth's average temperature by 0.5 degrees Celsius. Crutzen's research is published in the August issue of Climate Change

The Independent: Britain's stockpile of nuclear waste should be buried in deep underground silos says the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, which is advising the UK Government on what to do with 470,000 cubic metres of nuclear waste. Yesterday, the Royal Society issued a statement which urged to the government to act on the report and not delay plans for dealing with the waste by calling for more scientific research. Said David Wallace, Vice President of the Society:

"The nature of scientific knowledge is such that there will always be levels of uncertainty associated with any method of disposing of radioactive waste.... However, there is considerably less uncertainty surrounding burying radioactive waste deep underground in stable geological formations than other options."