New York Times: Not long ago in this space, I spoke with Michio Kaku, the author of “Physics of the Impossible” and a professor of theoretical physics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, about science-fiction-inspired technological breakthroughs that might actually occur within our own lifetimes. This week, Kaku talks about three long dreamt-of technologies that he categorizes as class I, class II and class III impossibilities — in other words, things you’ll simply never see during your time on earth. (Unless, like me, you plan to live forever.)
Nature: The University of Toronto's David Dunlap Observatory, which houses a 1.88-metre reflecting telescope in the town of Richmond Hill, Ontario, may see last light as soon as 30 June. The university is negotiating the sale of the observatory and 77 hectares of surrounding land, estimated to be worth Can$100 million (US$98 million).
New York Times: Back in 2002, astronomers from Wesleyan University concluded that a star brightening and waning in an unusual 48-day rhythm was dipping in and out of stuff swirling around the star in a so-called protoplanetary disk. At the time one astronomer called the system “a Rosetta stone,” for understanding how planets form.
Now, after six more years of observation with an international group of astronomers, led by William Herbst of Wesleyan, researchers say they know what the stuff in this disk is. In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Nature, they report that it is made of sand-size grains, roughly a millimeter in diameter, which must have grown from infinitesimal dust particles over the three million years that the star, known as KH 15D, has been in existence.
New Scientist: Long ago, antimatter all but vanished from existence, allowing matter to predominate and form the stars and planets of the universe. Exactly why this happened has been a mystery, but a particle accelerator in Japan may have found a new clue, and one that does not seem to fit the standard model of particle physics.
Nature: Alan Stern stepped down as head of science programmes at NASA on Tuesday.
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin has named Edward Weiler, currently director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, as Stern's interim replacement. Weiler held Stern's post, of associate administrator for science, from 1998 to 2004.
Physics Update: A new study shows how a region of space could be rendered invisible to matter waves. In recent years the possibility of optical cloaking has become a hot topic (e.g., Science, 8 Sept 2006). Even cloaking with sound waves has been proposed. Now physicists in Xiang Zhang’s group at the University of California, Berkeley, are trying to extend the cloaking idea to atom waves (chilled atoms whose quantum wavelike properties are more important than their particle-like properties) moving through a medium.
The “medium” in question here is a concentric optical lattice, generated by standing electromagnetic waves with spatially controlled amplitudes and phases. Cloaking of an object bathed in light works by modulating the effective mass and potential of atom waves traversing the shell surrounding the object. The shell is analogous to the metamaterials (tailored materials often consisting of arrays of tiny rods and ring-shaped metal structures) used in the optical case.
One of the Berkeley researchers, Shuang Zhang says that the atom-wave equivalent of an index of refraction would be the modulation of the effective atomic mass inside the optical lattice. Zhang says that apart from cloaking, the creation of a metamaterial for atom waves might also help in focusing atom waves into tiny spot (super-lensing) or for steering particle beams at will. (Zhang et al., Physical Review Letters, 28 March 2008.
NPR: Along Florida's "Space Coast," people are worrying about what the end of the shuttle program will mean for workers and the region's economy.
For many who live and work here, the looming end of the space shuttle brings back memories of the 1970s. Within just a few years of men landing on the Moon, the workforce at the Kennedy Space Center was cut from 25,000 employees to less than half that.
The ripple effects from those layoffs, Koller recalls, devastated Florida communities from Titusville to Melbourne.
The replacement for the space shuttle, Constellation, and the other future NASA programs at Cape Canaveral will require far fewer people than those needed for the space shuttle.
Lynda Weatherman, of the area's economic development commission, says it's important that Florida's Space Coast diversify its aerospace industry and the role it plays in the nation's space program.
"We don't want to rely on launch. We can't afford to rely on launch," she says.
The Guardian: Gordon Brown is preparing for a battle with the European Union over biofuels after one of the government's leading scientists warned they could exacerbate climate change rather than combat it.
In an outspoken attack on a policy which comes into force next week, Professor Bob Watson, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said it would be wrong to introduce compulsory quotas for the use of biofuels in petrol and diesel before their effects had been properly assessed.
"If one started to use biofuels ... and in reality that policy led to an increase in greenhouse gases rather than a decrease, that would obviously be insane," Watson said. "It would certainly be a perverse outcome.
New York Times: Mikki M. Osterloo of the University of Hawaii and colleagues have found evidence of chloride-bearing materials — in other words, salts — in the Martian southern highlands. The deposits are small and in some cases are fractured into polygonal shapes, suggesting that they consist of salts that precipitated out of saline water as it evaporated, which is how salt flats form in deserts on earth.
Physics Update: Light can be thought of as a series of waves or, in the dualistic view of reality prescribed by quantum science, as a collection of quanta, particle-like parcels of light energy referred to as photons. At any place along a light beam there may be many photons present or in special cases just one. Creating single photons is not easy to do. It is possible to make photons in pairs by sending laser light through special crystals. Even a pure-color laser beam will consist of many photons; but occasionally one of these photons will be “down converted,” that is, will turn into two photons each with half the energy of the original photon. When a pair has been created, the detection of one of these half-energy photons heralds the presence of its twin.
Furthermore, these photons are entangled, meaning that the properties of one photon are inextricably linked to those of its partner and detecting one can ruin the quantum state of the other. By minimizing these quantum correlations, the researchers obtained heralded photons with exceptionally high quality and short duration.
In the experiment the pairs of photons made had a central wavelength of about 830 nm, at the border between visible and near-infrared light. Each of these photons was (in units of time) about 65 femtoseconds (65 x 10-15 sec) long. In units of space, they were about 20 microns long. The shortest previously produced single photon was about 1picosecond (10-12 sec) long. Even shorter pulses of light—stretching only hundreds of attoseconds—have been made, but these pulses consist of many photons. One of the researchers, Peter Mosley of Oxford Universty, says that this new experiment represents the first time that textbook photons-identical, localized wavepackets containing a single quantum of energy-have been produced in a lab.
BBC: A chunk of ice the size of the Isle of Man has started to break away from Antarctica in what scientists say is further evidence of a warming climate.
CNN: NASA officials have directed the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) program to cut $4 million dollars from its $approximately 20 million dollar budget this year, and principal investigator Steve Squyres tells CNN that will likely mean science operations will have to be suspended for Spirit. The rover would be put in hibernation mode, and if all goes well it could be reactivated in the future in the event funding is restored.
Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell
NASA Headquarters spokesman Dwayne Brown confirmed the budget directive has been issued. He said the reason behind the cut is to offset cost overruns with the Mars Science Laboratory, a follow-on rover set to launch next year.
The Guardian: Bob Cernik likes using x-rays to probe the nature of materials. The Manchester University professor has been working at the Diamond Light Source synchrotron in Oxfordshire to develop a prototype 3D colour x-ray system to detect hidden explosives, drugs, or even cancer. Cernik's system uses "tomographic energy dispersive diffraction imaging" - or TEDDI.
TEDDI requires an x-ray source with a pencil-thin beam, a collimator (to put the radiation into parallel beams), a detector, and significant data analysis. The synchrotron provides high energies to penetrate dense metal objects, although Cernik will eventually use compact x-ray sources like the ones used in hospitals.
The end result will be a scanner that should be able to display a false color result of interior of a suitcase in under a minute.
Washington Post: Since astronomers identified the first planet outside our solar system 13 years ago there are now, according to the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, 277 confirmed "extrasolar" planets, and quite a few more on the list of those suspected but not yet confirmed.
This explosion in planetary discoveries is taking place at such speed that even those most intimately involved are often amazed.
"This is an absolutely astounding time for this field," said Mark Swain of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who last week reported finding the first "exoplanet" to have organic methane in its atmosphere.
The Washington Post conducted a discussion forum with MIT's Sara Seager on the state of extra planetary research on Monday afternoon.
The Guardian: Soot produced by burning coal, diesel, wood and dung causes significantly more damage to the environment than previously thought, according to research published today in Nature Geosciences (doi:10.1038/ngeo156). So-called "black carbon" could cause up to 60% of the current warming effect of carbon dioxide, according to the US researchers, making it an important target for efforts to slow global warming.
 Around 400,000 people are estimated to die each year due to inhaling soot particles, particularly because of indoor cooking on wood and dung stoves in developing countries. These deaths are mainly among women and children. Greg Carmichael, of the University of Iowa, one of the two authors of the study, said: "Trying to develop strategies that really go after black carbon is really a very good short-term strategy and a win-win strategy for both climate and air pollution perspectives."
Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required): Two-thirds of academic earmarks ($1.6-billion) was directed to scientific research at almost 500 institutions says a new report from the Chronicle of Higher Education. For 2008, the median earmark was $462,000, down from $497,000 in 2003.
Since 2003, it has been harder to win peer-reviewed federal research grants as the budget of the NIH and NSF declined in real terms. In 2008 each agency expects to approve about one in five grant applications, down from one in three in 2001. The drop has made earmarks more attractive to institutions says Chronicle reporters Jeffrey Brainard and JJ Hermes, who report on a 25-percent increase in the number of colleges and universities receiving earmarks compared to the last time the newspaper ran a similar survey in 2003.
The numbers and names show "a system that's out of control," says Michael S. Lubell, director of public affairs at the American Physical Society.
Space Review: Two letters in Space Review debate whether the risks associated with the hydrazine fuel tank were fully understood by the public and the US Defense Department (DoD) before the US Navy shot down a disabled US spy satellite (see Broken spy satellite hit by US missile). The US was concerned that the fuel tank might survive reentry into the atmosphere and contaminate a wide area with the toxic hydrazine fuel.
 Andrew Higgins of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, suggests that critics of the decision to shoot down the satellite, have not fully grasped hydrazine's burn rate at the pressure contained in the tank or calculated the tank's reentry survivability.
In independent computer simulations of the reentry of the USA 193 satellite, Geoff Forden of MIT and Higgins, found that the maximum deceleration of the tank would have been about 8 to 10 g’s. "This is similar to the g-loading the fully fueled tank is designed to withstand upon launch," says Higgins. "Thus, it is unlikely that a similar loading would have destroyed the tank on reentry."
Yousaf Butt of the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University points out that questions should be raised about the overall quality of the DoD's reentry simulation models, because the DoD did not predict the hydrazine explosion that occurred during the interception.
"It would serve NASA/NRO/DoD well to immediately publicize the unclassified portions of their studies so that the US public can ascertain whether the putative public health concern of the hydrazine surviving reentry was indeed well-founded," says Butt. "As technical details of hydrazine tanks are freely available online, it is difficult to comprehend what is so classified about these studies."
Related links
Broken spy satellite hit by US missile (Physics Today Online)
North Canada, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans likely path of spy satellite debris (Physics Today Online)
More doubts surface over Pentagon’s explanation for shooting down spy satellite (Physics Today Online)
The Independent: A fear that sea levels will rise far faster than predicted this century has led to a revision of the plan to protect London from a devastating flood caused by the sort of storm surge in the North Sea that resulted in the closure of the Thames Barrier yesterday.
 It was the 108th time that the barrier had to be closed since it became operational in 1982 but scientists are concerned that rapidly rising sea levels could significantly shorten the expected lifespan of one of the world's biggest anti-flood structures.
When the Thames Barrier was being designed in the 1970s, global average sea levels were rising at about 1.8 millimetres a year and global warming was not seen as a threat, but in the past 15 years the rate has nearly doubled to about 3.1mm a year and many scientists expect it to accelerate still further.
A report on the options open to the UK government if sea levels rise faster than expected is due to be completed next year. If sea levels are forecast to rise by two metres or more, a bigger and more expensive barrage will have to be built and raised permanently.
The Daily Telegraph: The brightest burst of light ever seen - which peaked at a few hundred million billion times the brightness of our Sun - has been witnessed by the Swift satellite. The 50 second burst was so bright it was visible to the naked eye, even though it was seven thousand times further away than the Andromeda galaxy, in the constellation of Bootes.
Swift typically finds two gamma-ray bursts a week; but for the first time Swift found five bursts within 24 hours. The second burst of the day is the new record holder.
The enormous energy released in the explosion - brighter than the light from all of the stars in five million Milky Way Galaxies - was caused by the death of a massive star which collapsed to form a black hole.
Related links
Movie showing the visible light burst of GRB080319B (Las Campanas Observatory, Chile)
Associated press release related to visible observation (Las Campanas Observatory, Chile)
NASA Satellite Detects Record Gamma Ray Burst Explosion Halfway Across Universe (NASA Press release)
Swift satellite
Gamma-Ray Bursts (Wikipedia)
New York Times: A new book, “Unknown Waters,” recounts the 1970 voyage of a submarine, the Queenfish, on a pioneering dive beneath the ice pack to map the Siberian continental shelf. The United States did so as part of a clandestine effort to prepare for Arctic submarine operations and to win any military showdown with the Soviet Union.
In great secrecy, moving as quietly as possible below treacherous ice, the Queenfish, under the command of Alfred S. McLaren, mapped thousands of miles of previously uncharted seabed in search of safe submarine routes. New York Times reporter William J. Broad talks to McLaren about his year-long voyage and the dangers of submarining under the Arctic pack ice.
Related links
Scientist at work: Alfred McLaren; Explorer of Arctic Depths Plans Another Trip North (New York Times October 29, 2002)
NPR (audio): With the price of oil, gold and other metals at near record levels, these are heady times at the Colorado School of Mines. Employers are falling all over themselves to hire new graduates. Who'd have thought that being a geologist would make you so popular — and bring you $80,000 a year to start?
The Guardian: Britain and France are to sign a deal to construct a new generation of nuclear power stations and export the technology around the world in an effort to combat climate change.
The pact is to be announced at the "Arsenal summit" next week when prime ministers Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy will meet at the Emirates stadium in north London.
Britain hopes to take advantage of French expertise to build the power stations that do not rely on fossil fuels. Nearly 79% of France's electricity comes from its highly-developed nuclear power industry. The UK's ageing nuclear plants are ready for decommissioning and supply 20% of its energy needs.
Brown hopes the partnership will create a skilled British labour force who would then work in partnership with France to sell nuclear power stations to other countries over the next 15 years.
Science: Since 2004 the Cassini-Huygens mission has been observing Saturn's moon Titan. The satellite moon, which is covered in a dense methane-based atmosphere, is unobservable in the visible spectrum, but based on the size of the moon and the pressure reached at the surface, for years it was generally believed to have a liquid hydrocarbon-based ocean. The radar on Cassini spacecraft, and the descent of the Huygens probe to the surface in January 2005 radically changed our perspective of the moon, to that of a planetary body that consisted of a solid surface, full of geological features such as dunes, channels, lakes, impact craters.
Now a research team led by Ralph D. Lorenz at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, have announced a new startling conclusion. The features researchers saw three years ago have drifted position, which leads them to conclude that Titan has an ocean buried below several tens of kilometers of ice.
“I think the paper is basically sound,” said David J. Stevenson from the California Institute of Technology to the New York Times reporter Kenneth Chang. “They have data to support the idea that the outer shell of Titan is moving relative to the deeper part, and the cause of this movement is a stress exerted on the shell.”
Related Links
Report: Titan's Rotation Reveals an Internal Ocean and Changing Zonal Winds (Science)
Perspective: Titan's Hidden Ocean (Science)
Surf’s down on Titan, 50 miles below the surface, scientists say (New York Times)
Associated Press: Avraham Trakhtman, a mathematician at Bar-Ilan University who worked as a labourer after emigrating from Russia to Israel, has succeeded in solving the elusive so-called road colouring problem.
The conjecture, posed by Adler, Goodwiyn and Weiss over 38 years ago, assumes that it is possible to create a "universal map" that would direct people to arrive at a certain destination, at the same time, regardless of their original location.
Related Links
Avraham Trakhtman
The road coloring problem, Israel J. of Math
The road coloring problem (ArXiv)
A history of the Road coloring conjecture (Wikipedia)
BBC: President Nicolas Sarkozy has said France will reduce its number of airborne nuclear weapons by one third.
Sarkozy said the reduction to fewer than 300 missiles would leave France with "half the maximum number of warheads we had during the Cold War".
But he also insisted he was committed to France's nuclear deterrent, saying it was its "life-insurance policy".
Sarkozy appealed for other nations to scale back their nuclear arsenals and called on China and the US to finally ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, which they signed in 1996.
He also called for an international treaty banning banning the manufacture of fissile material for nuclear weapons.
Nature: UK physicists, received more bad news this week when the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) announced a 15% cut worth $260 million (£130 million) money awarded as research grants.
"It is unclear what the impact will be on EPSRC's future ability to fund computing research," says Steve Furber of the British Computer Society. "The government seems to be signalling to potential science applicants that computing research is not accorded a high priority."
The EPSRC scale-back is expected to lead to job losses,and comes after the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council announced funding cuts of around £80 million and a 25% reduction in grant money.
Related Links
UK science research council under fire over cuts
UK Physicists go online to protest funding cuts
No cash rescue for UK physics funding crisis
UK physics has bright future says science chief; physicists disagree
UK physics funding under review, but outcome looks unhopeful
UK reviews physics funding in light of proposed job cuts
Science: For the last twelve years it has been clear that girls' interest, participation, and achievement in science decline as they advance through the school education system says Sheryl A. Tucker, Deborah L. Hanuscin and Constance J. Bearnes in this week's Science magazine. For example at age 10, the number of girls and boys who like math and science is about the same, but by age 14, twice as many boys as girls show an interest in these subjects.
Many career decisions are influenced at this early age and this interest deficit among girls may contribute to the continuing gender gap in science, particularly in terms of labor market outcomes say the researchers.
The solution could be informal out-of-school workshop programs adds Tucker and colleagues, such as the "Magic of Chemistry" program sponsored by the University of Missouri and the Girl Scouts-Heart of Missouri Council. On average, 81% (range 66 to 88%) of participants wanted, after the workshops, to learn more about science and science careers.
Related links
Magic of Chemistry
Igniting Girls' Interest in Science (Science)
Nature: An unexpected imbalance in how particles containing the heaviest quarks decay might reveal exotic influences — and perhaps help to explain why matter, rather than antimatter, dominates the Universe.
Related Link
Difference in direct charge-parity violation between charged and neutral B meson decays (Nature)
New York Times: Utility executives in Kansas were shocked last fall when a state environmental official rejected two coal-fired power plants because of the millions of tons of carbon-dioxide emissions they could produce. In a state where coal generates 73 percent of the electricity, the pro-coal forces were unable to work their will.
That ineffectiveness will be underscored as early as Friday if Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, as expected, vetoes an effort by the Kansas State Legislature to ensure the plants are approved. A handful of lawmakers seeking a new energy policy are blocking the attempt to override.
The struggle over those plants is an example of a growing trend in climate-change politics. In the absence of clear federal mandates for emissions from smokestack industries, states that have been proving grounds for new environmental approaches to energy are becoming battlegrounds as well
NPR (audio): Over the last five years an ocean observation system called Argo has sent home a puzzling result. Argo, which consists of some 3,000 scientific robots that dive to a depth of nearly a 1 km to measure ocean temperature, suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what Argo is telling them.
 This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Joshua Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.
In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can.
"There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. "Global warming doesn't mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming."
In recent years, heat has actually been flowing out of the ocean and into the air. This is a feature of the weather phenomenon known as El Nino. So it is indeed possible the air has warmed but the ocean has not. But it's also possible that something more mysterious is going on.
Alternately, the data could be misinterpreted, which happened with earlier results from Argo.
Die Welt: The idea of bringing the production and storage of nuclear fuel under international control is gaining support once again argues Matt Dupuis. The US should take the lead in creating a global fuel bank which would make it possible to test countries’ intentions while limiting their access to nuclear technology.
The Guardian: British Energy is in talks with a number of rivals, which could lead to a tie-up or a takeover offer that some say would value the country's main nuclear power generator at more than US$14 billion.
Shares in the British company soared by nearly 20% after it confirmed the discussions but declined to identify any of the potential partners or predators.
EDF of France, E.ON of Germany and Centrica, owner of British Gas, are among the key players known to have been holding partnership talks that have turned into something more substantial.
British Energy is in demand because it generates about a sixth of Britain's electricity but, more importantly ,has the most attractive potential sites to build a new generation of nuclear plants.
The move comes as the UK government announced that the four new designs being considered for future nuclear reactors in the UK (the European Pressurised Reactor, Westinghouse's AP1000, ESBWR and Atomic Energy of Canada's ACR1000) have all passed initial safety tests.
Physics Today: Opportunities for amateur astronomers to observe the night sky are becoming rare as light pollution fades the night sky away. Yet, thanks to a new product called Google Sky, a simple desktop computer can provide some unprecedented views of the universe that were previously available only to professional astronomers. Google Sky is based on the same technology as Google Earth and displays the visible universe based on a mosaic of images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Digitized Sky Survey and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Thumbnail images at the bottom of Google Sky's display can bring up high resolution images of the planets, the constellations, highlights from the Hubble Space Telescope, famous stars, galaxies and nebulae, and views of the universe in the x-ray, ultraviolet and infrared. Other items available through Google Sky include:
* Infrared - An infrared view of the sky from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). Change the transparency of this layer by moving the slide bar to blend the optical and infrared.
* Microwave - A view of the microwave sky from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which shows the universe as it was 380,000 years after the big bang.
* Historical - The sky as drawn by Giovanni Maria Cassini (printed in 1792) showing the constellations in their classical form from the collections of David Rumsey.
Other online observatories
Bradford Robotic Telescope
Micro-Observatory
Seeing in the Dark
Slooh
Science: In 2000, when Vijayalakshmi Ravindranath was appointed director of the National Brain Research Centre in Gurgaon, the neuroscientist made history. Ravin-dranath became the first woman to lead any of the 65 institutes under India's Ministry of Science and Technology--and today she is one of only two women who have broken the ministry's glass ceiling. When it comes to promoting women scientists in India, she says, "our record is dismal."
It may be surprising that women scientists are struggling in the nation that elected Indira Gandhi prime minister in 1966. But at a conference in New Delhi to mark International Women's Day on 8 March, more than 1000 scientists spoke of barriers to advancement and debated how to attract more women into research careers. At the meeting, science minister Kapil Sibal announced what he calls "fledgling steps to … empower women to have their rightful role in science," including new regulations to allow women with young children to work more flexible hours.
Various: An near-infrared transmission spectrum of the planet HD 189733b indicates traces of methane. The research from Mark R. Swain, Gautam Vasisht, and Giovanna Tinetti, which was published in Nature today has led to wild speculation in the press that scientists will soon discover planets capable of supporting life.
 HD 189733b is about 63 light years from Earth. In their paper the researchers confirmed an earlier observation that the planet also shows traces of water molecules. Tinetti from University College, London, told BBC News: "This planet is a gas giant very similar to our own Jupiter, but orbiting very close to its star." Swain of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif said in a press conference on Wednesday, “The big news is that we were able to do this at all.”
The methane signature was found by using the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the planet passing in front the star. As the star's light passes through the planet's atmosphere, the gases imprinted their chemical signatures on the transmitted light (see video from ESA and NASA).
Although the results are considered a breakthrough, as Sara Seager, a planetary theorist at M.I.T., said at the press conference, the findings still needed to be duplicated. “Hubble was never been designed to make measurements like this,” she said. “This is pushing the telescope to its limits.”
Related Links
The presence of methane in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet (Nature)
Mark R. Swain
Gautam Vasisht
Giovanna Tinetti
Google Sky image of HD 189733b
Hubble finds first organic molecule on extrasolar planet
Methane found on distant world (BBC)
Methane gas find raises hopes of life beyond Earth (The Independent)
Stuff of Life (but Not Life Itself) Is Detected on a Distant Planet (New York Times)
Key Organic Molecule Detected at Extrasolar Planet (space.com)
Hubble camera spots traces of life-forming gas (LA Times)
Various: Nearly one in ten troops who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq are on disability because of damaged hearing.
Currently most troops rely on a pair of double-sided earplugs worth $7.40 to protect their hearing in war zones writes Chelsea J. Carter for the associated press. One side of the ear plug is designed to protect from weapons fire and explosions, the other from aircraft and tank noise. But the Marines were not given instructions in how to use the earplugs, and some cut them in half, while others used the wrong sides, making the devices virtually useless.
In any case, hearing protection has its limits. While damage can occur at 80 to 85 decibels — the noise level of a moving tank — the best protection cuts that by only 20 to 25 decibels. That is not enough to protect the ears against an explosion or a firefight, which can range upwards of 183 decibels, said Dr. Ben Balough, a Navy captain and chairman of otolaryngology at the Balboa Navy Medical Center in San Diego.
Nearly 70,000 of the more than 1.3 million troops who have served in the two war zones are collecting disability for tinnitus, a potentially debilitating ringing in the ears, and more than 58,000 are on disability for hearing loss, says the Department of Veterans Affairs, costing the department nearly $805 million annually. The powerful roadside bombs detonated in Iraq cause violent changes in air pressure that can rupture the eardrum and break bones inside the ear. Sixty percent of U.S. personnel exposed to blasts suffer from permanent hearing loss, and 49 percent also suffer from tinnitus, according to military audiology reports. The hearing damage ranges from mild, such as an inability to hear whispers or low pitches, to severe, including total deafness or a constant loud ringing that destroys the ability to concentrate. There is no known cure for tinnitus or hearing loss.
The Navy and Marines have begun buying and distributing state-of-the-art earplugs, known as QuietPro, that contain digital processors that block out damaging sound waves from gunshots and explosions and still allow users to hear everyday noises. They cost about $600 a pair. According to Andrew Tilghman at Marine Times the QuietPro looks like an pod and is integrated into the users radio system, allowing troops to hear their radios and the sounds around them. A digital processor locks up at any sign of a blast that could damage the inner ear, and opens up again immediately after a blast to permit normal sound. The Marines have ordered 48,000 devices to be deployed over the next two years.
The Army also has equipped every soldier being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan with newly developed one-sided earplugs that cost about $8.50, and it has begun testing QuietPro with some troops.
In addition, the Navy is working with San Diego-based American BioHealth Group to develop a “hearing pill” that could protect troops’ ears. An early study in 2003 on 566 recruits showed a 25 to 27 percent reduction in permanent hearing loss. But further testing is planned.
And for the first time in American warfare, for the past three years, hearing specialists or hearing-trained medics have been put on the front lines instead of just at field hospitals, Hoffer said.
The main difficulty however, lies with the troops, who worry that ear plugs and other protection devices might limit awareness of their surroundings, and get them killed. “I think these soldiers are choosing between hearing damage and their lives, in their mind. And that may not literally be true.” said David Fagerlie, head of the American Tinnitus Association.
Related links
Hearing problems a constant reminder of Iraq duty (Stars & Stripes)
Hearing Loss Rises Among U.S. Soldiers in Iraq (American Speech-Language Hearing Association)
High-tech ear gear offers more protection (Marine Times)
The Independent: So much water is now stored in dams that it's having a profound influence on the rate at which sea levels are rising says a new paper by Chao, Wu, and Li of the National Central University in Taiwan. Their research was recently published in Science Express.
The new research suggests that, over the past 50 years, new dams and reservoirs have held back some 10,800 cubic kilometres of water, which would have been enough to raise global sea levels by about 30mm says Steve Connor, the Independent's science reporter. In other words, the rises we have seen so far due to global warming might have been considerably larger if it were not for the huge numbers of dams and reservoirs built from the 1950s onwards.
Related Link
Impact of Artificial Reservoir Water Impoundment on Global Sea Level (Science Express)
Science: Planetary systems are born around young stars and grow from vast clouds of dust and gas called protoplanetary disks. Models predict that as our own solar system's protoplanetary disk evolved, the dust and gas pushed each other around while constantly being stirred and jolted by magnetic fields and gravitational torques. The resulting mixing and motion set the chemical compositions of the planetesimals that formed and from which planets eventually grew. Although evidence for mixing is found in objects in our solar system, such as primitive meteorites, questions remain about the details of the processes responsible and whether this mixing was common in other protoplanetary disks. A new paper in Science on observations of the disk around the star AA Tau that suggest that we will soon be able to address these questions.
BBC: The European Space Agency (Esa) is planning to present a plan to ministers in November to send a robot rover to the Moon in 2015, in order to carry out lunar science and test important technologies for the future.
State of the news media: The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released an analysis of scientific coverage in TV and newspapers that suggests that on average five hours of cable television news produces six minutes of science, technology, health and the environment. Three minutes and 46 seconds of these minutes consist of health and health care coverage, 1 minute and 25 seconds about the environment, and finally 1 minute about science and technology.
According to the report, online news sites, spend one minute, and both newspapers and network television news spend the equivalent of two minutes on science and technology.
Wall Street Journal: Every winter since 1917, people in Nenana, a village 55 miles southwest of Fairbanks, have wagered on the exact moment that the ice breaks up on the nearby Tanana River. For the 450 townsfolk, the annual Alaska ice lottery, called the Nenana Ice Classic, is a financial lifeline that offers some their year's only employment. Winners last year shared a jackpot of $303,272.
 But for many geophysicists, the contest itself is something more valuable than any monetary prize.
The Ice Classic has given them a rare, reliable climate history that has documented to the minute the onset of the annual thaw as it shifted across 91 years. By this measure, spring comes to central Alaska 10 days earlier than in 1960, said geophysicist Martin Jeffries at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks -- and that trend is accelerating. "The Nenana Ice Classic is a pretty good proxy for climate change in the 20th century," Dr. Jeffries said.
Related Link
Ice Thaw measurements
Melting Pace of Glaciers Is Accelerating, Report Says (New York Times)
Wired: Trying to pin down how much the Defense Department is spending on space combat research -- and on what projects -- is difficult. The programs are spread across at least a dozen different accounts; much of the technology involved is "dual use" -- meaning, it could help with another military matters, too; and that's before you get into the Defense Department's "black," classified budget.
According to the Center for Defense Information, the Pentagon will spend at minimum $520 million in the 2009 budget on research that could lead to arms in space.
BBC: A pair of meteorites discovered in Antarctica are in a class all of their own, says Ryan Zeigler, from Washington University in St Louis, US at the 39th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. The paired meteorites, known as GRA 06128 and GRA 06129, were discovered in the Graves-Nunataks region of Antarctica in 2006.
The rusty, slab-shaped rocks have defied classification, not fitting into any of the existing groupings drawn up for meteorites. Researchers are pondering where in our Solar System the meteorites could have originated. The current best estimate is that they are not from a major planetary body, but from an astroid instead.
Related Link
Petrology and geochemistry of Dhofar 733 - An unusually sodic, feldspathic lunar meteorite
News.com: Nanosolar and Solyndra, which both develop copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) solar cells, are looking at raising additional funds, according to sources, and both companies have put large valuations on themselves.
According to sources, Nanosolar is telling investors it will have a valuation, after another round of funds, of around $2 billion. Solyndra says it is worth $1 billion. Not bad for companies with combined current revenues at the moment that probably would have difficulty rivaling the take of a reasonably located convenience store. Nanosolar just started shipping a few solar cells to customers at the end of 2007, and Solyndra is ramping up toward production.
University of Florida news: Confirming a decades-old prediction, the physicists with the CLEO collaboration say they observed a rare and extremely short-lived subatomic particle with the unusual name of “charmed-strange meson” decay into a proton and anti-neutron.
Detection of the event, which the collaboration made public Sunday, was attributed to John Yelton, a physicist at the University of Florida, one of many institutions that are part of the CLEO collaboration.
“It’s the sort of thing that, for many years, people have known should happen,” Yelton said. “What we have done is show that it does, and how often.”
Yelton said the latest result shows there remains much to be learned from collisions at lower energy in lower energy colliders. “It highlights the fact that there is still physics to be done at lower energy accelerators,” he said.
The CLEO collaboration has also submitted a paper on the discovery to the journal Physics Review Letters.
Washington Post: A plan by the Environmental Protection Agency to close several of its 26 research libraries did not fully account for the impact on government staffers and the public, who rely on the libraries for hard-to-find environmental data, congressional investigators reported yesterday.
The report by the Government Accountability Office found that the EPA effort, begun in 2006 to comply with a $2 million funding cut sought by the White House, may have hurt access to materials and services in the 37-year-old library network.
Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, said the report reveals a "grim picture" of mismanagement at the EPA.
ASPERA: How do you ship a magnet weighing more than 1000 tons (the equivalent of the take-off weight of four Boeing 747s) from Europe to Japan? Partly by breaking it up into smaller pieces say physicists from CERN who have donated the NOMAD magnet and other related equipment to Japanese High Energy Accelerator Research Organization KEK. In January, 35 containers were filled with 150 pieces for a long voyage by truck, train and boat.
The equipment, worth millions of dollars, will be used in the T2K (Tokai to Kamiokande) experiment that will start operation in the autumn of 2009. The J-PARC accelerators at Tokai will send a 40 GeV proton beam to a target to produce an intense low-energy neutrino beam directed towards Super-Kamiokande, Japan’s neutrino observatory 300 km away. “We hope that it will be the most intense neutrino beam ever produced” says André Rubbia from the ETH Institute for particle physics of Zurich.
The beam will look to see if the neutrinos oscillate between the three types of neutrino. To date, only the first two of the three mixing angles have been measured precisely. The T2K experiment will attempt to determine the third, which is the “Holy Grail” for neutrino physicists.
USA Today: President Bush has failed to back up his broad vision to revive the nation's interest in space exploration with adequate funding or even public support, a leading scientist told lawmakers.
"The money that was promised to execute the mission has not been provided, and it's hard to say that the vision has generated much excitement, particularly among the young, who are expected to benefit the most," said Lennard Fisk, chairman of the National Research Council Space Studies Board.
The Guardian: The government's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has come under fire from the private sector for the allegedly slow speed with which it is handling the award of the second-biggest procurement contract ever - the £1bn-a-year Sellafield clean-up.
Amec, which, with Washington Group and Areva is part of one of the four consortiums shortlisted for the work, said it was increasingly assessing overseas opportunities because of delays. Final bids for the work must be in next month and the contract is expected by the end of the year.
"I am lucky," said Samir Brikho, Amec's chief executive. "This is a very small part of our business but if it was a very large part then I would be worried that it was continually delayed; that I was waiting and waiting and nothing was happening."
It was not as though the clean-up agency was having to decide on which design of reactor it should choose, he added. "What are we fighting over? How to close a plant? They need to take a decision."
Brikho speculated that the delay was a result of "turbulence" inside the NDA, with the departure of two chairmen in six months and a swathe of senior staff more recently.
The NDA said it was inevitable, with so much riding on a contract that could have a total value of well over £10bn, that there would be statements such as those of Brikho but it denied there were any significant delays.
Christian Science Monitor: Concrete, one of the most common building materials in the world, has an ugly secret: It's a major source of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which contribute to global warming.
Roughly 5 to 10 percent of global CO2 emissions are related to the manufacture and transportation of cement, a major ingredient of concrete. "There is not one single cement company on this planet that is not thinking about how to [reduce emissions]," says Franz-Josef Ulm, a professor of civil engineering who researches concrete at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
Italy's Italcemente is the world's fifth-largest cement producer. It is looking beyond reducing CO2 emissions by creating a cement that actually breaks down airborne pollutants by adding titanium dioxide, which, in the presence of sunlight, acts as a photocatalyer, hastening the decomposition of such pollutants as nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, and ozone.
Ulm points out that the structure of human bones, at the molecular level, is similar to that of concrete. While cement must be heated to 1,200 degrees C (2,200 degrees F.) before it achieves strength and structure, bone is formed at 37 degrees C (98.6 degrees F.).
"That makes one think that nature can create at 37 Celsius a material that has similar properties as cement," Ulm says. "Can we mimic that?"
Washington Post: The Environmental Protection Agency weakened one part of its new limits on smog-forming ozone after an unusual last-minute intervention by President Bush, according to documents released by the EPA.
EPA officials initially tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA's scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.
"It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA's expert scientific judgment," said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The president's order prompted a scramble by administration officials to rewrite the regulations to avoid a conflict with past EPA statements on the harm caused by ozone.
According to the Washington Post, Solicitor General Paul D. Clement warned administration officials late Tuesday night that the rules contradicted the EPA's past submissions to the Supreme Court, according to sources familiar with the conversation. As a consequence, administration lawyers hustled to craft new legal justifications for the weakened standard. On Friday, EPA Press Secretary, Jonathan Shradar said in a statement "EPA is unaware of either Paul Clement or anyone else in the Solicitor General's office ever stating or advising that "the rules contradicted the EPA's past submissions to the Supreme Court" as the Washington Post article today asserts."
Also on Friday US Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) called on EPA Administrator Stephen |
