Physics Today: The magnitude-7.9 earthquake that struck near Chengdu city yesterday has caused thousands to lose their lives and made millions homeless. It is the largest earthquake to hit China since 1976. According to the US Geological Survey the quake occurred as the result of motion on a northeast striking reverse fault or thrust fault on the northwestern margin of the Sichuan Basin. The earthquake's epicenter and focal-mechanism are consistent with it having occurred as the result of movement on the Longmenshan fault or a tectonically related fault. The earthquake reflects tectonic stresses resulting from the convergence of crustal material slowly moving from the high Tibetan Plateau, to the west, against strong crust underlying the Sichuan Basin and southeastern China (see maps below). "Earthquakes in this part of China are infrequent but no unexpected" says Harley Benz, Scientist-in-Charge with the National Earthquake Information Center with the USGS.
The city of Chengdu has a population of 2 million, with another 9 million in the surrounding urban area, is about 90 km southeast of the epicenter. Many western companies such as IBM, Symantec, Microsoft, Intel, Fujitsu, NEC, Motorola, and Nokia have factories and offices in the region due to Chengdu's High-Tech Industrial Development Zone. None of these companies are reporting major damage to their staff or facilities. The sina web site has photos of the damage done in the city and surrounding towns.
View Larger Map
On a continental scale, the seismicity of central and eastern Asia is a result of northward convergence of the India plate against the Eurasia plate with a velocity of about 50 mm/y. The convergence of the two plates is broadly accommodated by the uplift of the Asian highlands and by the motion of crustal material to the east away from the uplifted Tibetan Plateau.
"For this earthquake, because of its size, we should expect to see lots of aftershocks," says Benz. "In the first few hours following the magnitude 7.8, we recorded more than 13 earthquakes, the largest being a magnitude 6. The earthquakes are being located along a northeast trending fault, and they extend over a region about 100 kilometers or 60 miles, which is consistent with the size of this earthquake."
"In terms of the total number of aftershocks, aftershocks form an earthquake, typically this size, will be occurring weeks and months from now, but typically with time, the number of earthquakes will go down, and the size of the earthquakes will go down, but there are chances of having other large, damaging earthquakes as part of this sequence occurring in the new few days and weeks."
SFGate.com: Micosoft has launch a competitor to google sky, the popular software program that lets computer users fly through the universe, viewing stars, planets and celestial bodies. The new product is called Worldwide Telescope. The virtual service combines images and databases from every major telescope and astronomical organization in the world. Microsoft says it is providing the resource for free in memory of Jim Gray, the Microsoft researcher who disappeared last year while sailing his boat to the Farallon Islands on a trip to scatter his mother's ashes. The project is an extension of Gray's work. "I never imagined (the telescope) would be so beautiful," said Alexander Szalay, an astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University who worked with Gray on astronomy projects for more than a decade. Gray was an expert in databases, and he came to be accepted as "a card-carrying member" of the astronomical community for his work in bringing astronomical data online, Szalay said. A special version of the product is being developed for astronomers, and it's being considered as one way to visualize data in the Virtual Observatory, a project by the National Science Foundation to integrate all astronomical data online.
Related news pickGoogle launches virtual observatory
The Tech: Eight MIT graduate students with student visas were denied a key credential by the Department of Homeland Security. After their department appealed the decisions on their behalf, the DHS declared at least two of the students “security threats.” The troubles stem from a new homeland security program called the Transportation Worker Identification Credential, a plastic card which, like an MIT ID, contains personally identifying information and can be read wirelessly. Without the credential, the students will soon have a harder time boarding and leaving ships at U.S. ports, including the three research ships at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, where the students work. The situation was well-known to WHOI, but it only came to MIT’s attention yesterday, when a German student forwarded to colleagues in the Earth, Atmosphere, and Planetary Sciences Department a letter from the Department of Homeland Security. The letter said in part: “I have personally reviewed the Initial Determination of Threat Assessment, your reply, accompanying information, and all other information and materials available to the TSA. Based upon this review, I have determined that you pose a security threat and you do not meet the eligibility requirements to hold a Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC).” A British graduate student received a similar letter, said James A. Yoder, dean of WHOI.
Science: The rise of nanotechnology is garnering much attention for its ability to construct objects with individual atoms and molecules, at a scale roughly a billion times smaller than the objects we encounter in our everyday lives. In parallel to nanotechnology's often astonishing achievements, scientists have started to build a capacity to do useful work on an even more minute scale. During the past decade, chemists and physicists have begun a fabrication process at the scale of the atomic nuclei. It is an emergent means of producing, in sufficient quantities, "designer" atomic nuclei, which are new, rare isotopes with unusual numbers of neutrons or protons, or unusual decay modes (1). There are several reasons why a latent demand exists within the scientific community for new isotopes. One is that the properties of particular isotopes often hold the key to understanding some aspect of nuclear science. Another is that the rate of certain nuclear reactions involving rare isotopes can be important for modeling astronomical objects. Finally, the pursuit of ever more exotic isotopes sometimes advances basic understanding of the nuclear landscape, along with unexpected areas of application.
New Scientist: Flakes of iron snow could be falling inside the planet Mercury, according to a new experiment. This hot metal snowfall might help generate Mercury's puzzling magnetic field. Researchers in the US have attempted to recreate the likely conditions within Mercury's liquid outer core, which is thought to be a mixture of iron and sulphur. They used an arrangement of magnesium-oxide blocks, called a multi-anvil cell, to squeeze their iron and sulphur mixture to immense pressures, at temperatures above 2000 °Celsius. Iron crystals formed in the mixture. "We saw iron crystals gathered at the bottom of the sample, while the liquid phase stayed on top," says team member Jie Li of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Mercury's iron snow should form simple cubic crystals, rather than the intricate hexagonal patterns of water-ice snowflakes on Earth.
Related article
Non-ideal liquidus curve in the Fe-S system and Mercury's snowing core, Geo. Rev. Lett 35, L077201
Nature: Fifteen-year oscillations in Saturn's equatorial stratosphere bear a striking resemblance to the shorter-term oscillations seen on Earth and Jupiter — akin to notes played on a cello, a violin and a viola.
Washington Post: At least 40 developing countries from the Persian Gulf region to Latin America have recently approached U.N. officials here to signal interest in starting nuclear power programs, a trend that concerned proliferation experts say could provide the building blocks of nuclear arsenals in some of those nations. At least half a dozen countries have also said in the past four years that they are specifically planning to conduct enrichment or reprocessing of nuclear fuel, a prospect that could dramatically expand the global supply of plutonium and enriched uranium, according to U.S. and international nuclear officials and arms-control experts. Much of the new interest is driven by economic considerations, particularly the soaring cost of fossil fuels. But for some Middle Eastern states with ready access to huge stocks of oil or natural gas, such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the investment in nuclear power appears to be linked partly to concerns about a future regional arms race stoked in part by Iran's alleged interest in such an arsenal, the officials said.
newsobserver.com: Daniel Suson has a doctorate in astrophysics and has worked on the superconducting super collider and a coming NASA probe. Now he's heading back to school to take on an even trickier task -- getting elected to public office. He is among a growing number of scientists who feel slighted and abused in the public debate in recent years and are mobilizing to inject "evidence-based decision making" into public policy. Today, Suson, dean of engineering, mathematics and science at Purdue University Calumet, will join more than 70 other scientists, engineers and students at a hotel at Georgetown University for a crash course on elective politics.
London Review of Books: John Lanchester, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books reviews a series a books on global warming and ends his review with the following paragraphs:
The remarkable thing is that most of the things we need to do to prevent climate change are clear in their outline, even though one can argue over details. We need to insulate our houses, on a massive scale; find an effective form of taxing the output of carbon (rather than just giving tradeable credits to the largest polluters, which is what the EU did – a policy that amounted to a 30 billion euro grant to the continent’s biggest polluters); spend a fortune on both building and researching renewable energy and DC power; spend another fortune on nuclear power; double or treble our spending on public transport; do everything possible to curb the growth of air travel; and investigate what we need to do to defend ourselves if the sea rises, or if food imports collapse. If we do that we may find that we develop the technologies that China and India will need. If we can show that it is possible to cut carbon output dramatically without trashing our economy – well, that might be the single most important thing we could do, far outweighing the actual impact of our emission reductions.
We know all this, but whether any of it will actually happen is a different question. It is easy for politicians to stick wind turbines on their houses and ride bicycles, but effective action on climate change is about to require doing things that are not popular. In his eponymous report, Nicholas Stern has argued that it would cost about 1 per cent of global GDP now to prevent a loss of 5 per cent of global GDP in the future. The calculation is tweaked to make the cost now sound manageably small – but it is not yet clear whether Western electorates are willing to pay it. One per cent of global GDP is 600 billion dollars, most of which would be paid by the developed world. The idea is that by paying it now we would be keeping the world’s economy on track so that by 2050 the developed world would be 200 per cent richer and the developing world 400 per cent, while our emissions decline by 60 to 90 per cent and theirs increase by 25 to 50. (One problem is that 17 per cent of that growth in developing world emissions has already been used up.) The promised economic growth is jam tomorrow; we would be paying for it today, in the form of increased taxes and lost jobs. These things are all real to voters in ways that climate change perhaps is not. Are people going to give things up in the present in order to prevent things that computer models tell them are going to happen in 25 years’ time? If they – we – aren’t, then we’re heading for breeding pairs, and camels in the Arctic.
ScienceNOW: The heavens may be strewn with stars, galaxies, and nebulae, but the fact is astronomers don't know precisely where most of the ordinary matter in the universe is hiding. A new x-ray observation could help untangle that mystery: Astronomers have located a filament of hot gas stretching all the way from one cluster of galaxies to another. The filament is thought to be one thread in a vast web containing the missing ordinary matter, and, if confirmed, it could give scientists a better idea of where the rest of the stuff is lurking.
Nature: At the heart of any scientific explanation of music is an understanding of how and why it affects us. In the first of a nine-part essay series, Philip Ball explores just how far we can hope to achieve a full scientific theory of music
BBC News: Nasa is making a bid to join the elite group using supercomputers whose power is measured in petaflops. By 2009 the US space agency aims to be running a petaflop supercomputer that will be able to do 1,000 trillion calculations per second. By 2012 it hopes to have boosted the power of this machine to 10 petaflops, to help with modelling and simulation. The new supercomputer will be at the Ames research center at Moffet Field, California.
Science: Last October, the American TV network CBS premiered the now popular sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. Centering on two male physics postdocs and the blonde girl who moves in next door, The Big Bang Theory follows the sitcom formula of placing quirky, exaggerated characters in situations both odd and mundane.
The Big Bang Theory is the first time a prime-time comedy has taken science this seriously--partly in thanks to experimental particle physicist David Saltzberg of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Freelancer Karen Heyman recently spoke with Saltzberg and one of the show's creators Bill Prady for Science magazine, and paid a visit to the set of The Big Bang Theory, to learn how cutting-edge research gets injected into the show.
Christian Science Monitor: Unlike most of MIT, Amy Smith's workshop is far from cutting-edge. There are no next-gen computers, no vials of polysyllabic chemicals, no fancy equipment. The space is decidedly low-tech – and that's the point. D-Lab students pinpoint practical problems in the developing countries and then brainstorm and build solutions. Because the people they are trying to help are below the poverty line, the class's inventions must be simple, effective, and most important, inexpensive. "What people need is usually completely different from what we imagine sitting here in America," says Jodie Wu, a mechanical engineering junior, whose group went on a school-sponsored trip to Tanzania over winter break. The D in D-Lab stands for three things – development, design, and dissemination – and each is the theme of a different semester-long class.
ENN: The once-green Sahara turned to desert over thousands of years rather than in an abrupt shift as previously believed, according to a study on Thursday that may help understanding of future climate changes. And there are now signs of a tiny shift back towards greener conditions in parts of the Sahara, apparently because of global warming, said the lead author of the report about the desert's history published in the journal Science.
Related news story
Sahara gradually dried up over 6000 years NPR
csmonitor.com: Scientists around the world are scrambling to unlock the secrets behind a new group of materials that act as autobahns for electricity – conducting current with virtually no wasteful resistance.
The discovery establishes a third major group of so-called high-temperature superconductors – a broad category that scientists first uncovered in 1986. Such materials hold the promise of making everything from computers to electric motors far more efficient, as scientists boost the temperature frontiers at which the materials work.
Related Physics Today article
New family of quaternary iron-based compounds superconducts at tens of kelvin May 2008
Baltimore Sun: NASA has awarded the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab $750 million to develop an Solar Probe mission, which will study the streams of charged particles the sun hurls into space from a vantage point within the sun’s corona – its outer atmosphere – where the processes that heat the corona and produce solar wind occur. At closest approach Solar Probe would zip past the sun at 125 miles per second, protected by a carbon-composite heat shield that must withstand up to 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit and survive blasts of radiation and energized dust at levels not experienced by any previous spacecraft. Launch is planned for 2015, with the craft's first solar flyby just three months later - thanks to a boost from the sun's gravity.
Washingtonpost.com: The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday proposed tightening the federal limits for lead in the air, but the proposal fell short of what its own scientists said is required to protect public health.
Space.com: In a distant galaxy, a star orbiting a massive central black hole strays too close to the insatiable giant and is torn apart. But before it can be devoured, the star lets out one last scream in a flare of light that slowly echoes across the galaxy.
 Astronomers on Earth pick up this faint call and use it to map the nucleus of the galaxy from which it emanated.
This scenario is no bit of science fiction--a team of astronomers discovered one of these rare and dramatic events while combing through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey last December. Their observations are detailed in the May issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Chronicle.com: Advocates for scientists have lost their bid to persuade Congress to raise spending on physical-sciences research during the remainder of the 2008 fiscal year. The money is not contained in a war-spending bill that the U.S. House of Representatives is to consider on Thursday.
New York Times: The world’s major powers agreed in London on Friday to offer Iran modest new incentives to coax it to freeze important nuclear activities. The agreement was reached at a meeting that brought together Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and senior officials from Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany. “We’ve got an agreement on an offer that will be made to the government of Iran,” David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, said for the six governments. The offer underscores a growing consensus that the current policy of punishing Iran into submission with sanctions has failed.
Physics Today: The European Space Agency has released images of Cyclone Nargis making its way across the Bay of Bengal just south of Myanmar on 1 May 2008.
 The cyclone hit the coastal region and ripped through the heart of Myanmar on Saturday, devastating the country. The picture (right) is from the Envisat's Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument working in Reduced Resolution mode to deliver a spatial resolution of 1200 meters.
Under an international charter founded by ESA, the French space agency (CNES) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) eight years ago, the agencies provide satellite data free of charge to those affected by disasters anywhere in the world. On 4 May, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) asked for support.
With inundated areas typically visible from space, Earth Observation (EO) is increasingly being used for flood response and mitigation. One of the biggest problems during flooding emergencies is obtaining an overall view of the phenomenon, with a clear idea of the extent of the flooded area.
These Envisat radar images above highlight the extent of flooding in the Irrawaddy delta caused by the cyclone Nargis that hit Myanmar on May 3, 2008, devastating the country. The left image, acquired on Feb. 5, 2007, shows the situation approximately one year ago. The black and dark areas in the image on the right, acquired on May 5, 2008, indicate areas potentially still flooded two days after the event. Envisat's Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar data are especially well suited for delivering information on floods, which are usually accompanied by rain and therefore cloudy conditions. Radar sensors can peer through clouds, rain or local darkness and are especially sensitive to moisture on the ground. Both images have a 75 m pixel grid on the ground and show an area approximately 100 km wide.
New York Times: Kodak, which once considered itself the Bell Labs of chemistry, has embraced the digital world and the researchers who understand it. “The shift in research focus has been just tremendous,” said John D. Ward, a lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology who worked for Kodak for 20 years. Indeed, physicists, electrical engineers and all sorts of people who are more comfortable with binary code than molecules are wending their way up through Kodak’s research labs.
Nature News: Researchers are buzzing about a new type of software that allows them to manage their research paper downloads from online journals much more effectively. One of the most popular programs is Papers, a commercial offering released last year with a similar interface to iTunes, Apple's successful music-file organizer. Papers and similar programs are able to read a file's 'metadata' so that a batch of PDF (portable document format) files can be sorted by, for example, author, journal name or year. Users can add new files to their hard drives by 'dragging and dropping' or use the program to search and download directly from databases such as PubMed, IEEE Xplore and the arXiv preprint server.
Science: As climate-change skeptics like to point out, worldwide temperatures haven't risen much in the past decade. If global warming is such hot stuff, they ask, why hasn't it soared beyond the El Niño-driven global warmth of 1998? Mainstream climate researchers reply that greenhouse warming isn't the only factor at work. And in a new paper, they put some numbers on that rebuttal. They show that regional and even global temperatures are being held down by a natural jostling of the climate system, driven in large part by vacillating ocean currents. The study "shows how natural climate variability can mask the global warming effect of greenhouse gases," says climate researcher Adam Scaife of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, U.K., "but only for a few years."
Argus Leader: Most South Dakotans probably don't either, but as the Sanford Underground Lab at Homestake takes the first concrete steps toward operations, people in the Black Hills and the rest of the state might get better acquainted with scientific concepts such as "dark matter." About 350 scientists gathered in Lead recently to begin outlining some of the first groups of experiments.
San Francisco Chronicle: General Motors, the nation's largest automaker, is working to reinvent itself as a green company but still opposes California's efforts to set its own global warming emissions standards for cars, Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner said Thursday in San Francisco. In a speech before the Commonwealth Club, Wagoner touted his company's efforts to design and sell cars powered by electricity or alternative fuels.
Nature: After 20 years of hard labour, squeezed states — light and matter whose quantum fluctuations have been arduously suppressed below standard levels of quantum noise — are coming of age and are ripe for application.
NPR (audio): James Kakalios, author of The Physics of Superheroes, talks about the science of the action flick Iron Man.
American Journal of Physics: String theorist Moataz H. Emam briefly discusses the accomplishments of string theory that would survive a complete falsification of the theory as a model of nature; and argues that such an event suggests that string theory should become its own discipline, independent of both physics and mathematics.
Nature: The origin of the cosmic rays that bombard Earth has troubled physicists for nigh on a century. Supernova remnants are a favoured source — but we should keep our minds open to alternatives.
Science: In 2001, mathematical physicist Neil Turok went back for the first time in 25 years to his childhood home, South Africa, to visit his parents. Dismayed by the lack of opportunities for math graduates in Africa and motivated by his father, a former antiapartheid activist, the University of Cambridge researcher took action. Over the next 2 years, Turok had a derelict building near Cape Town renovated into a new institute, enrolled 29 math graduates from 11 African nations, and persuaded mathematician colleagues to teach there for 3-week shifts. "It's a very inspirational venture, … a real flagship project," says Britain's Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, who has visited the institute.
The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) continues to grow (see sidebar, p. 605), but Turok isn't stopping there. He's leading the effort to replicate it at 15 centers across the continent, each focusing on a different area of applied math, such as economics. "When people hear about AIMS, they get very excited," Turok says, "and people see the spark of something much, much bigger."
Related Physics Today article
Institute nurtures African math and science graduate students April 2008
Science News: Bats using sound to find their way in the dark boom louder than home fire alarms and rock concerts, according to new measurements.
Fortunately all that noise stays at frequencies too high for human hearing reports Annemarie Surlykke of University of Southern Denmark in Odense. She and Elisabeth K.V. Kalko of the University of Ulm in Germany recorded and analyzed the yells bats emitted while hunting outdoors at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s field station on Barro Colorado Island in Panama.
One of the two loudest bats on record, the bulldog bat (Noctilio leporinus) blasted out echolocation sounds in the range of 137 decibels, compared to 108 decibels for home smoke detectors.
Species from four bat families made sounds that, at a distance of 10 centimeters, ranged between 122 and 134 decibels (measured on a scale that sets the threshold of human hearing at 0 decibels), the researchers say in the April PLoS One. Two species flying over open water made the loudest sounds yet recorded for any bat, averaging around 137 decibels and even hitting 140.
Related Article
Echolocating Bats Cry Out Loud to Detect Their Prey, PLoS One
Technorati Tags: acoustics
New Scientist: A normal digital camera can take snaps of objects not directly visible to its lens, US researchers have shown. The "ghost imaging" technique could help satellites take snapshots through clouds or smoke.
Physicists have known for more than a decade that ghost imaging is possible. But, until now, experiments had only imaged the holes in stencil-like masks, which limited its potential applications.
Now Yanhua Shih of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and colleagues at the US Army Research Laboratory, also in Maryland, have now taken the first ghost images of an opaque object - a toy soldier.
Not everyone agrees that quantum effects are at work in ghost imaging, though. Baris Erkmen and Jeffrey Shapiro of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, US, point out in a recent paper that classical physics says light sources produce numbers of uncoordinated photons, not correlated quantum pairs.
They suspect ghost images might be produced without a quantum link between photon pairs, purely because some photons are just similar.
Related Link
Physical Review A (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.77.041801)
Science News: Astronomers are honing measurements of a familiar cosmic parameter to shed new light on dark energy, the mysterious entity that’s accelerating the universe’s rate of expansion. Known as the Hubble constant, this parameter indicates the current rate at which distant astronomical objects are receding, a number that can be used to estimate the age of the universe. A new measuring method has reduced uncertainty in the constant’s value by more than half, to 4.8 percent, Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore reported May 5, at the beginning of a four-day Space Telescope symposium on dark energy. The method relies on laserlike radio emissions from water molecules that lie within the swirling disk of gas that surrounds a supermassive black hole at the heart of a relatively nearby galaxy, NGC 4258.
New York Times: Daphne Koller, a researcher at Stanford whose work has led to advances in artificial intelligence, sees the world as a web of probabilities. A mathematical theoretician, she has made contributions in areas like robotics and biology. Her biggest accomplishment — and at age 39, she is expected to make more — is creating a set of computational tools for artificial intelligence that can be used by scientists and engineers to do things like predict traffic jams, improve machine vision and understand the way cancer spreads.
Space.com: NASA has pushed back the planned launch of the final flight to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope by up to five weeks due to external fuel tank delays, mission managers said Thursday. Space shuttle program manager John Shannon said that the additional time required to include post-Columbia safety improvements in two shuttle fuel tanks supporting the Hubble servicing mission have delayed the spaceflight to no earlier than late September. A seven-astronaut crew was slated to launch toward Hubble aboard NASA's shuttle Atlantis on Aug. 28. "We really cannot make that date with the external tank processing," Shannon told reporters in a briefing here at NASA's Johnson Space Center. "I really think it's a small price to pay, to tell you the truth, four to five weeks for all the improvements that we're getting on this tank."
Science: Laser technology is present in our daily lives through literally thousands of applications, including surgical instruments, CD and DVD players, optical fiber communications, and even supermarket barcode readers. Despite the fast pace of laser research, the design of most laser devices relies on assumptions in the underlying theory that have barely changed since the early days of laser theory (1). However, this situation is problematic for two reasons. First, the rapid advance of nanofabrication techniques has led to the development of completely new lasing systems whose description falls outside the scope of conventional laser theory. Of these, random lasers (2) are perhaps the most challenging example. Second, more general models could enable the design of substantially different classes of lasers. With their contribution in this week's Science magazine, Türeci, Rotter and Stone have substantially changed this picture. By developing a new theory in which the main properties of a laser can be physically understood as the result of strong nonlinear interactions between lasing modes, they have provided a substantially broader perspective of laser physics that unifies the physical description of many possible laser structures.
Related Article
Strong Interactions in Multimode Random Lasers Science 2 May 2008: Vol. 320. no. 5876, pp. 643 - 646
The New Yorker:In 1999, when physicist and millionaire Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He hired the smartest people he knew. It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights—that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. Myhrvold wanted to make insights—to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies.
The original expectation was that I.V. would file a hundred patents a year. Currently, it’s filing five hundred a year. It has a backlog of three thousand ideas. Physicist Lowell Wood said that he once attended a two-day invention session presided over by biologist Edward Jung, and after the first day the group went out to dinner. “So Edward took his people out, plus me,” Wood said. “And the eight of us sat down at a table and the attorney said, ‘Do you mind if I record the evening?’ And we all said no, of course not. We sat there. It was a long dinner. I thought we were lightly chewing the rag. But the next day the attorney comes up with eight single-spaced pages flagging thirty-six different inventions from dinner.”
Physics Today: Faster moving ships hit the whales, causing injury or death, say scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Yet for over a year the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has blocked the National Marine Fisheries Service from issuing a rule based on scientific research that limits the speed of ships near US ports to protect the endangered right whale.
 According to documents obtained by the House of representative committee on oversight and government reform (OGR), the delay appears to be based on objections raised by Whitehouse officials and the Vice President's office. Under Executive order 12866, the OIRA is supposed to complete their review of rule changes within 90 days and can only extend the review period by an additional 30 days.
According to Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), who recently sent a letter to the administration requesting an explanation, the Vice President's office is objecting to NOAA's research as the Vice President's staff "contends that we have no evidence that lowering the speeds of 'large ships' will actually make a difference."
In a memo obtained by the OGR committee NOAA rejected these objections, stating that both a statistical analysis of ship strike records and the peer-reviewed literature justified the final rule. NOAA reported that there is "no basis to overturn our previous conclusion that imposing a speed limit on large vessels would be beneficial to whales."
Waxman says that he questions "why White House economic advisors are apparently conducting their own research on right whales and why the Vice President's staff is challenging the conclusions of the government's scientific experts. The appearance is that the White House rejects the conclusions of its own scientists and peer-reviewed scientific studies because it does not like the policy implications of the data. This is not how the review process is supposed to work."
Mother Jones: The search for the perfect battery is fraught with obstacles—namely the laws of physics.
Nature News: How does our classical world emerge from the counterintuitive principles of quantum theory? Can we even be sure that the world doesn't 'go quantum' when no one is watching? Philip Ball talks to the theorists and experimentalists trying to find out
Wired News: The Arctic will remain on thinning ice, and climate warming is expected to begin affecting the Antarctic also, scientists said Friday. "The long-term prognosis is not very optimistic," atmospheric scientist Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University said at a briefing. Last summer sea ice in the North shrank to a record low, a change many attribute to global warming. But while solar radiation and amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are similar at the poles, to date the regions have responded differently, with little change in the South, explained oceanographer James Overland of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. What researchers have concluded was happening, was that in the North, global warming and natural variability of climate were reinforcing one another, sending the Arctic into a new state with much less sea ice than in the past.
The Sunday Times: A fusion laboratory designed to recreate the temperatures and pressures inside the sun could be built in Oxfordshire under plans being drawn up by British scientists The aim is to build the world’s most powerful lasers and use them to blast tiny pellets of hydrogen fuel to create energy. The process could, say the researchers, be a partial solution to the world’s energy crisis, offering a source of safe, carbon-free power with a minimum of radio-active waste. “The aim is to destroy matter by turning it into pure energy,” said Dr John Collier, head of the high power laser programme (HiPER) at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, which was launched last week. “This is the same process that powers the stars. Our task is to find how to control it to offer humanity a new source of energy.” HiPER, would place Britain at the forefront of research on nuclear fusion, now enjoying a global revival after decades of neglect. The Rutherford laboratory, in Harwell, Oxfordshire, is seen as the most likely site.
msnbc.com: One of the nation's top fusion researchers is worried that America is already falling behind in an energy race that won't start for 30 or 40 years.
Nature News: A dozen of cosmology’s brightest minds, including British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, descended on the Cook’s Branch Conservancy in Montgomery County, Texas, last week to discuss the tricky problems of the early Universe. These physicists, most of whom are connected in some way to Hawking, either as collaborators or past graduate students at the University of Cambridge, UK, arrived for the invitation-only retreat, which, in its second year, has become one of the most exclusive — and pampered — workshops in physics. The 23-square-kilometre property is owned by George Mitchell, an 88-year-old developer and oilman worth US$3.2 billion. Late in life, Mitchell has cultivated a love for astrophysics, bestowing $50 million on Texas A&M University in College Station. “I am trying to see how our top universities can have as much influence in high-level physics as, say, Caltech and the University of California, Berkeley, or Harvard or Yale,” Mitchell explains. “And I am trying to see how we can get in on the act, because this state is big enough and wealthy enough to get it done.”
ScienceNOW: Researchers have assembled the most detailed picture of ocean currents ever produced, and in so doing they have revealed a vast array of striated currents that roughly parallel the equator. This new level of resolution should improve understanding of a wide variety of ocean-related phenomena
New York Times: The sprawling site, known as Natanz, made headlines recently because Iran is testing a new generation of centrifuges there that spin faster and, in theory, can more rapidly turn natural uranium into fuel for reactors or nuclear arms. The new machines are also meant to be more reliable than their forerunners, which often failed catastrophically. On April 8, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited the desert site, and Iran released 48 photographs of the tour, providing the first significant look inside the atomic riddle.
space.com: Sand grains stirred up by the winds of Mars are tossed higher and farther than those kicked up by winds on Earth, a new study finds. The results could help explain how dunes migrate across the Martian surface as well as what whips up dust storms that blow across the red planet. Scientists first noticed dunes on the Martian surface in pictures taken by NASA's Mariner missions in the 1970s and have seen dust storms of all sizes spread across the planet — one major storm in 2005 was even visible through a simple backyard telescope. But these features have puzzled astronomers because Mars has almost no atmosphere and very weak winds that seem unlikely to be able to sculpt dunes or whip up storms. To help solve this conundrum, a team of scientists recently conducted wind tunnel simulations of windblown sand grains under the conditions found on both Earth and Mars to figure out how the particles would behave on these planets with vastly different atmospheres. Their results are detailed in the April 28 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Guardian: Global warming is set to stall over the next 10 years as natural variations in ocean currents counteract manmade climate change. Researchers modelling the climate of Europe and North America found that a major ocean current that brings warm water northwards is set to weaken, potentially offsetting temperature rises caused by human activity.
McGraw-Hill Construction: National laboratories are losing funds in real dollars and could face as much as a 20% drop in research activities because small, incremental budget increases in recent years have fallen short of inflation.
New Scientist: Damaging funding cuts to UK physics have left the UK looking like an "unreliable" and "incompetent" partner for international science, according to a damning report by politicians. Most of the blame for the fiasco is pinned on the head of the research council behind the cuts.
The UK Parliament's Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills committee examined the causes of the physics funding crisis which emerged in December 2007. The Science and Technology Facilities Council – the UK's main funding body for physics and astronomy, and which looks after some of the largest science centres in the country – was faced with a deficit of £80m after an unfavourable government spending review last year.
To plug the hole, the STFC withdrew from key international physics projects including the International Linear Collider, the Gemini Observatory and ground-based solar terrestrial physics. The sweeping cuts also left some university physics departments in fear of closure.
The move stunned physicists, who had received little warning that UK involvement in the projects was in jeopardy. They argued that the measures were taken with little warning or consultation. Today's 55-page report, based on evidence provided by STFC bosses, civil servants and physicists at three hearings earlier this year, comes to a similar conclusion.
The report condemns the decision-making process behind the cuts as "ineffective" and "secretive" and describes the STFC's peer-review system as "weak".
Updated: 1:24 PM EST
According to a report in The Register, Keith Mason, the head of the Science and Technology Facilities Council is now under pressure to resign over his handling of the budget cuts.
New York Times: Hewlett-Packard scientists reported Wednesday in the science journal Nature that they have designed a simple circuit element that they believe will make it possible to build tiny powerful computers that could imitate biological functions.
R. Stanley Williams, Hewlett-Packard’s director of the quantum science research group, and his team designed a circuit element that may make it possible to build tiny powerful computers. The device, called a memristor, would be used to build extremely dense computer memory chips that use far less power than today’s DRAM memory chips.
The memristor, an electrical resistor with memory properties, may also make it possible to fashion advanced logic circuits, a class of reprogrammable chips known as field programmable gate arrays, that are widely used for rapid prototyping of new circuits and for custom-made chips that need to be manufactured quickly. Potentially even more tantalizing is the ability of the memristors to store and retrieve a vast array of intermediate values, not just the binary 1s and 0s conventional chips use. This allows them to function like biological synapses and makes them ideal for many artificial intelligence applications ranging from machine vision to understanding speech. Independent researchers said that it seemed likely that the memristor might relatively quickly be applied in computer memories, but that other applications could be more challenging. Typically, technology advances are not adopted unless they offer large advantages in cost or performance over the technologies they are replacing.
The Guardian: Creating a theory of everything is the greatest intellectual challenge ever attempted by scientists. But with every breakthrough comes another hurdle, says Robert Matthews.
Das Spiegel: A tiny fraction of the sun's energy that shines upon the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East could meet all of Europe's electricity demands. The technology to harness the energy already exists. So why is hardly anyone investing in it?
|
|
