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September 29, 2007The Race Against Warming
Washington Post: "It's the oldest and most cliched of metaphors, but when it comes to global warming, it's the only one that really works: We're in a desperate race. Politics is chasing reality, and the gap between them isn't closing nearly fast enough," says Bill McKibben in the Washington Post.
Scientist reworks star distances
BBC: The most accurate catalogue of the distances to more than 100,000 stars has just been released.
September 28, 2007U.S. Says No to Next Global Test of Advanced Math, Science StudentsScience: After U.S. high school students did poorly on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study in 1995, the government has decided not to participate in another version to be given next year. At Its Session on Warming, U.S. Is Seen to Stand ApartThe New York Times: The White House convened a two-day conference of the world’s major greenhouse-gas-emitting nations here on Thursday that served to highlight how isolated the Bush administration is on the issue of global warming. Chemists poke holes in ozone theoryNature: Reaction data of crucial chloride compounds called into question. Nuclear physics: A non-disappearing magic trickNature: Well-established models of nuclei describe properties such as shells and magic numbers. But how do these predictions stand up to scrutiny for exotic, unstable nuclei? Pretty well, according to the latest study. September 27, 2007Scientists Feel Miscast in Film on Life’s OriginThe New York Times: A group of scientists are upset about their inclusion in a film that makes the case for intelligent design. NASA launches probe to explore dwarf planetThe Baltimore Sun: Scientists hope Dawn will shed light on early solar system Are sunspots prime suspects in global warming?The Christian Science Monitor: Climate-change 'optimists' say complex natural cycles may be at the heart of global warming. Glass-blowing UCSD chemist preserves an art lost to most scientistsSan Diego Union-Tribune: In a darkened laboratory on the UCSD campus, Mark Thiemens peers intently into the blue flame of a blowtorch, directing its fierce, fusing heat at the glowing orange ends of two glass tubes, each a piece of a larger latticework of interconnected beakers, flasks and bulbs. September 26, 2007Europe plots course for funding navigation systemNature: Money raised to salvage Galileo. Power harnessed one step at a timeThe Christian Science Monitor: Engineers call it 'crowd farming.' If it works, you could help power city lights just by taking a stroll. Sputnik's anniversary raises questions about future of space explorationUSA Today: Fifty years ago next week, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I — little more than a beeping metal ball — into space. Never before had an artificial object orbited the Earth. That achievement on Oct. 4, 1957, stunned and alarmed America. It also triggered an epic space race between the world's superpowers that would culminate nearly 12 years later, when Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. The Soviets never made it there. Lovelock urges ocean climate fixBBC: Two of Britain's leading environmental thinkers say it is time to develop a quick technical fix for climate change. September 25, 2007U.S. negotiator describes progress on North Korea nuclear talks
NPR (audio): Ambassador Christopher Hill, lead U.S. negotiator on the dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear arms program, is headed to Beijing this week for talks that will also include Russia, China, Japan, and South Korea.
As Hill tells NPR's Melissa Block, his immediate focus is getting North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear reactor disabled for "many months...maybe a year." He also intends to push for a complete declaration of North Korea's nuclear programs. What western science owes the launch of sputnik
Various: Fifty years ago on October 4, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik-1, the first artificial satellite to reach orbit. As New York Times reporter John Noble Wilford reports "nothing would ever quite be the same--in geopolitics, in science and technology, in everyday life and the capacity of the human species."
As Carl Welser recounts, when he heard Sputnik-1 on the radio, there was no "beep" that is frequently played in the documentaries, just a few seconds of "hiss-hiss-hiss" as Sputnik passed over St. Louis, MI. Only when his radio operator turned on a beat frequency oscillator, which converted the hisses into a few fading beeps did the tell tale signal appear. It was a trick used by Morse code operators to send a signal signal using a simple continuous wave an extrmely long distance. The simple message that amateur radio operators could pick up plunged the West, particularly the US, into a crisis of self-confidence over the capability of scientists and engineers. As historian Alex Roland, space policy analyst John M. Logsdon tell Wilford, if the first satellite had been launched by Americans, it would have merely confirmed their reputation for technological superiority and “there would probably not have been Apollo.” But as William J. Broad points out, from the start, the space race was an arms race. Nearly all the major expansion in the physics community can be tied to this one event (see the statistical research reports at the American Institute of Physics) as Cornelia Dean recounts in When Science Suddenly Mattered, in Space and in Class. Gary Anthes at Computer World looks at the impact Sputnik has had on the computer industry, the vast computational demands of the space program helped dramatically reduce the cost of mainframe computers and provided large incentives to develop innovative integrated circuit designs. It also pushed the creation of Advanced Research Projects Agency, now known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Wilford reviews as part of his New York Times story some of the books and movies that recount the glory days of the Appollo program such as the new documentary "In the Shadow of the Moon" and Walter A. McDouagll's 1985 book "The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age." Reporter Claudia Dreifus also asks scientists and others who lived through it (and a few who were yet to be born) to reflect on what Sputnik meant to them John Schwartz also looks in the New York Times at what the next fifty years might hold in terms of spaceflight, and Mike O'Sullivan at Voice of America attended a meeting of scientists and engineers at Caltech last week to talk about milestones of the past and future possibilities for space exploration. MacArthur Fellows awards announced, seven physical scientists among winners MacArthur Foundation Awards 24 Grants,
Physics Today: The $500,000 fellowships were announced today by the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. This years awards include technologist Paul Rothemund whose research focuses on the fabrication of large molecules that reliably self-assemble into complex, arbitrary, programmable shapes; Los Alamos National Laboratory chemist My Hang Huynh who is working at the boundary of organic and inorganic chemistry to devise novel techniques for synthesizing highly energetic compounds. Technologist and co-founder of Squid Labs Saul Griffithwho designed while at MIT a unique membrane-based molding system that can produce a variety of common lenses from a single pair of flexible molding surfaces, which could be invaluable to rural communities around the world; University of Maryland environmental geographer Ruth DeFries who uses remotely sensed satellite imagery to explore the relationship between the Earth’s vegetative cover, human modifications of the landscape, and the biochemical processes that regulate the Earth’s habitability; University of Washington, Seattle, Prosthetic engineer Yoky Matsuoka, who creates sophisticated prosthetic devices and designs complementary rehabilitation strategies; Caltech molecular biologist Michael Elowitz who is designing artificial genetic “circuits,” first modeling them computationally and then introducing the elements in vivo to test their activity; and finally, Environmental Engineer Marc Edwards who is is playing a vital role in ensuring the safety of drinking water and in exposing deteriorating water-delivery infrastructure in America’s largest cities.
Bid to Build Reactors Is First in Three Decades
NPR (audio): NRG Energy will request permission to build two new nuclear reactors. It's the first request to build a new nuclear power plant in the U.S. in three decades. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has geared up for a flood of applications. NRG's press release.
Fermilab races to find the Higgs Boson as CERN prepares for data overload
Various: 30 feet under Chicago's suburbs, the Tevatron is colliding protons and antiprotons, smashing beams together at energies of up to 1.8 TeV (the acronym that gave the Tevatron its name). The Tevatron will soon be replaced by CERN's 14 TeV Large Hadron Collider that should easily see the Higgs Boson, one of the founding blocks of the Standard Model of particle physics. But rumors are flying around that the Tevatron's DZero detector has seen something interesting, maybe a fleeting hint of the Higgs Boson, something interesting enough to extend operations into 2009 and maybe into 2010. "It's a good story now for physics," Pier Oddone, Fermilab's director, told MSNBC's Alan Boyle last week. John Ellis for one, is not so sure that the Tevatron will see the Higgs, as he stated in a recent Nature article. Meanwhile CERN is preparing for the vast qualities of data the LHC will produce when it starts engineering trials next year. . The data generated during the project is expected to dwarf every other scientific experiment in history, amounting to 15 petabytes a year. Chris Mellor at Techworld magazine looks at how CERN will manage and analyze the vast qualities of data produced. There are also rumors flying around that experiments with the LHC will be delayed until 2009, one year later than currently scheduled due to engineering difficulties.
September 24, 2007Nations agree to speed up climate talks, except for the USThe New York Times: A UN meeting to discuss how to fight global warming after the Kyoto Protocol expires will have dozens of world leaders attend today, except for President Bush, who will miss the discussions but will turn up for dinner later tonight says New York Times reporter Steven Lee Myers. The President instead will focus on an alternative meeting later this week that will propose voluntarily emission caps by individual countries instead of a binding international treaty. Mr. Bush’s approach sets the stage for a new round of diplomatic confrontation says Myers, and once again raises the prospect that the US will be accused of objecting to any binding international agreement intended to slow or reverse the emissions linked to rising temperatures. In a related Reuters story published in the same section of the New York Times, a UN conference in Montreal on Friday showed the value of binding treaties by declaring that the production and use of hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) will be phased out for developed countries to 2020 from 2030 and to 2030 from 2040 for developing nations; 10 years ahead of schedule. HCFCs destroy the ozone layer and also have a significant global warming effect, the equivalent to billions of tones in greenhouse gas emissions. "It (the deal) ... will stand out as a pivotal moment in the international fight against global warming," says Canadian Environment Minister John Baird. Caves spotted on MarsThe Register: The Mars Odyssey orbiter has beamed back pictures of what appear to be cave entrances on the slopes of a Martian volcano. Nuclear revival a mix of hope and fearThe Baltimore Sun: or a decade, Dorthe Matowitz worked as a piping inspector at nuclear power plants, but tired of all the travel and switched occupations three years ago. She is now in demand by a revitalized nuclear power industry scrambling for skilled help.
Breathing Life Into the Lecture HallThe Washington Post: Nearly 200 students sat in the large lecture hall, staring down at their professor, Edward F. Redish, holding pencils at the ready to take notes in Fundamentals of Physics. It looked like a traditional lecture course, but appearance is where the tradition ended. Instead of spending 50 minutes putting students to sleep by lecturing about position, velocity and acceleration, Redish, a University of Maryland professor, kept the students awake by getting them actively involved in the lesson -- all 192 of them. September 22, 2007Palestinian nanotech institute crosses religious, political divide
New York Times: TECHNOLOGY is its own nation whose citizens can work together amicably and profitably even when the geographic neighborhoods where they live are bloodily divided.
Consider the career of Mukhles Sowwan, who founded the Nanotechnology Research Laboratory at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem. The lab is the first nanotech center in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, according to Dr. Sowwan, a Palestinian who has a doctorate in solid-state nanophysics. He also believes that it is the first such lab at an Arab institution in the Middle East. The lab pursues ground-breaking research under conditions that would bewilder most American and European technologists. But although Dr. Sowwan is its guiding spirit, it would not exist except for the generosity of European donors, the stubborn internationalism of a United Nations organization and the help of Dr. Sowwan’s mentor, who happens to be an Israeli physicist at Hebrew University in West Jerusalem. September 21, 2007Physicist shows how steroids can fuel home runsReuters: Steroids can help batters hit 50 percent more home runs by boosting their muscle mass by just 10 percent, a U.S. physicist said on Thursday. NASA to launch Gammy-ray telescopeThe Boston Globe: A new NASA space telescope will give scientists a peek at some of the most energetic objects and events in the universe. The new Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope to be launched next spring doesn't see visible light like our eyes, but gamma rays, the most energetic photons in the electromagnetic spectrum. Continuing Indonesian Quakes Putting Seismologists on EdgeScience: The recent run of large quakes off the Indonesian island of Sumatra is providing fodder for both sides in the debate over whether earthquakes behave consistently enough to be reliably anticipated. Scientists propose new zone inside EarthMSNBC: Researchers recreated crushing conditions within planet's lower mantle September 20, 2007Fusion project faces axeNature: Princeton stellarator threatened with closure. Nobel Laureate downplays NASA's Manned SpaceflightSpace.com: A physics Nobel Laureate issued a scathing critique today of NASA's manned spaceflight program and questioned the scientific usefulness of the International Space Station (ISS). Global-warming skeptics: Might warming be 'normal'?The Christian Science Monitor: Some say that today's climate change is merely part of a natural cycle. Space Based Solar Power Fuels Vision of Global Energy SecuritySpace.com: The deployment of space platforms that capture sunlight for beaming down electrical power to Earth is under review by the Pentagon, as a way to offer global energy and security benefits – including the prospect of short-circuiting future resource wars between increasingly energy-starved nations. September 19, 2007Ozone treaty could form the basis of new climate talksThe New York Times; In 1985, scientists studying the air over Antarctica stumbled on a gaping breach in the billion-year-old atmospheric radiation shield that makes Earth’s surface habitable. Next Rover $75M Over BudgetPhotonics.com: In light of a Mars Science Laboratory budget overrun estimated at $75 million, NASA has cut off funding for some instruments, capped funding for others or eliminated them from the mission entirely. Among those no longer receiving space agency money is the ChemCam, a combination laser-telescope unit under construction at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) that is more than 90 percent complete. Arctic sea ice at record lowNature: Open waters in northern ocean highlight massive melting. Blackswift Aircraft is Born; But Will it Survive?Wired: The Pentagon's effort to build a hypersonic vehicle that takes off and lands like an aircraft -- the proverbial "SR-72" -- took a hesitant step out of the closet last week when the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on the new project. September 18, 2007Mars 'life marker' test orbits EarthMSNBC: Chip contains samples that glow if they encounter life-critical compounds Humans implicated in rising water vaporSan Jose Mercury News: The case implicating humans' role in climate change was bolstered this week by another fingerprint, this one on water vapor in the atmosphere. Chernobyl to get $505m metal cover to stop radiationGuardian Unlimited: Ukraine is to cover the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor with a vast metal shelter in a long overdue operation designed to prevent the further leak of deadly radiation. Officials in Kiev yesterday said they had hired a French firm to replace the crumbling concrete sarcophagus that has stood at Chernobyl since 1986 - when it was the scene of the world's worst ever nuclear disaster. Lunar mysteries still baffle scientistsMSNBC: Despite close proximity to Earth, much about moon is still unknown September 17, 2007Iran 'war' warning overshadows UN nuclear talksAFP: A French warning that the Iran nuclear crisis could lead to war heightened diplomatic tensions and overshadowed a key UN atomic watchdog meeting here Monday.
Photos: Stanford's X-ray visionZDNet: The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center is home to breakthroughs in particle physics and astrophysics, including the discovery of quarks, one of the two smallest known components of matter. More progress urged on ozone holeBBC: Faster progress is needed to safeguard the ozone layer, according to one of the scientists who discovered the "ozone hole" over Antarctica. From Japan and L.A., moon ventures seek to tread familiar turf: the moonThe Christian Science Monitor: After the first Apollo mission, funding appears for a resurgence in moon exploration. September 14, 2007Silicon chips for extreme conditionsNetworkWorld: NASA researchers have designed and built a new circuit chip that can take the heat of a blast furnace and keep on performing. Scientists Fear Curbs on Access to Satellite DataScience: Atomic physics: A whiff of antimatter soupNature: A molecule consisting of two electrons and two anti-electrons is similar to, but different from, the familiar hydrogen molecule H2. Its creation heralds a new chapter in the formation of matter–antimatter states. Japan launches lunar probeGuardian Unlimited: Japan's space agency today launched its much-delayed lunar probe in the most ambitious mission to the moon since the US Apollo space flights. September 13, 2007Wobbles of Mars Produced 40 Ice AgesSpace.com: Wobbles in the rotation of Mars swung the planet into about 40 extreme ice ages in the past 5 million years and allowed thick ice layers to remain far away from the poles, an astronomer says. Shrinking Kilogram Bewilders PhysicistsAP: A kilogram just isn't what it used to be. The 118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the metric mass, kept tightly under lock and key outside Paris, is mysteriously losing weight - if ever so slightly. Accelerator physics: The plasma revolutionNature: Particle accelerators that use plasma technology promise to shake up the fields of high-energy particle physics and cancer treatment. Challenges remain, but smaller, cheaper machines are within reach. Can string theory accommodate inflation?New Scientist: String theory is having trouble producing inflation – the rapid expansion of space thought to have occurred in the early universe – at least in some of the theory's simplest incarnations, according to a new study. India building nuclear sub, says top scientistGuardian Unlimited: India has kept its efforts to build a nuclear submarine under wraps for more than 30 years, but a top Indian scientist has confirmed that the ongoing project at the Kalpakkam nuclear facility near Chennai to develop a nuclear reactor fuelled by enriched uranium was in fact intended to power the country's first indigenously built submarine. Planet survives star's expansionBBC: Astronomers have found a planet that appears to have survived the death throes of its parent star. |