Los Angeles Times: The $900-million effort, scheduled for launch Oct. 8, will be the fifth and last Hubble servicing mission, and engineers and scientists on the ground in Maryland have great hopes for the upgrade to one of the world's best-known scientific instruments.
"I think it will put Hubble at the apex of its capabilities," said David Leckrone, senior project scientist for the Hubble. Leckrone and other NASA scientists geared up for the launch at NASA Goddard, which manages Hubble's day-to-day operations. Scientific operations are based at the Space Telescope Science Institute on the John Hopkins University campus in Baltimore.
Scientists at Goddard tested sensitive scientific equipment in an acoustic chamber to make sure that what goes into space can withstand the violent shaking that characterizes every shuttle launch and the eight-minute ride into orbit.
Science: Images are superb conveyors of information. Recent research has shown how subtle quantum mechanical aspects of light can profoundly influence the nature of image formation.In the July 25 issue of Science, two important advances in this emerging area of quantum imaging are presented. Wagner et al. report on the behavior of two beams of light that are quantum mechanically entangled in position and direction of propagation--that is, the outcome of measurements on one beam depends on what sort of measurements have been performed on the other beam. Boyer et al. show that two image-bearing light beams can be entangled such that strong quantum correlations exist both between the two beams and between individual image features within each beam. They find two sorts of quantum correlations: The intensities of the two beams fluctuate in unison, at a level not permitted by classical statistics, and the noise in one part of the light field can be reduced, or "squeezed," at the expense of another part.
SpaceRef : NASA, in partnership with the Exploratorium Science Center, San Francisco, Calif., and the University of California at Berkeley, will transmit live images of the Aug. 1, 2008, total eclipse of the sun.
Updated 01 August 2008: The Ellipse is now over, and Reuters reports that
thousands watched the ellipse in awe.
The Associated Press: At least one of many large, lake-like features on Saturn's moon Titan studied by the international Cassini spacecraft contains liquid hydrocarbons, making it the only body in the solar system besides Earth known to have liquid on its surface, NASA said Wednesday.
New York Times: By lighting all of the building’s exterior and most of its interior with L.E.D.’s, Sentry Equipment Corporation in Oconomowoc, Wis. spent $12,000 more than the $6,000 needed to light the facility with a mixture of incandescent and fluorescent bulbs. But using L.E.D.’s, the company is saving $7,000 a year in energy costs, will not need to change a bulb for 20 years and will recoup its additional investment in less than two years.
Nature News: Can the Chinese government meet its ambitious targets on space, the environment, research, energy and health? David Cyranoski takes a look at China today and what it hopes to be tomorrow.
Nature: Could the end of US world dominance over research mark the passing of national science giants, ask J. Rogers Hollingsworth, Karl H. Müller and Ellen Jane Hollingsworth.
Xinhua: Chinese mainland and China's Taiwan won five gold medals each, finishing first at the 39th International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) that ended in Vietnam's Hanoi capital on Monday.
San Diego Union Tribune: The morning's 5.4 earthquake was centered well north, in San Bernardino County, but it still made buildings sway and pulses race throughout the San Diego region.
Wall Street Journal: Around the world, the night sky is vanishing in a fog of artificial light, which a coalition of naturalists, astronomers and medical researchers consider one of the fastest growing forms of pollution, with consequences for wildlife, people's health -- and the human spirit.
Government Computer News: A project funded by the National Science Foundation will use Iridium satellites to study weather patterns in space.
Wired: A moderately powerful earthquake struck southern California today. Though originating from the Chino Hills, it shook buildings 30 miles away in Los Angeles.
According to the United States Geological Survey, the quake initially measured 5.8 on the Richter scale -- comparable to the aftershocks of the massive earthquake that hit central China in May.
Wall Street Journal: China has gone to Olympian lengths to try to ensure that its skies are clear for the Summer Games, which formally kick off in 10 days. It has spent $17 billion on antipollution measures in recent years. Last week, it forced more than a million cars off the streets, halted construction in and around the city, and temporarily closed hundreds of factories in surrounding provinces.
The New York Times : It is well known that panes of stained glass in old European churches are thicker at the bottom because glass is a slow-moving liquid that flows downward over centuries.
World Nuclear News: Small advanced reactors offer enormous potential to extend the reach of nuclear power - but safety regulators in some leading nuclear nations are too busy to approve the designs.
Science: Metals are solids in which conduction electrons remain mobile even at absolute zero temperature. In a semimetal, the concentration of such mobile electrons is extremely low. Whereas in a typical metal, say copper, there is roughly one itinerant electron per atom, in bismuth, the archetypal semimetal, 100,000 atoms share a single mobile electron. On the July 25 issue of Science, Li et al. report that in the presence of a strong magnetic field, this dilute electron gas orders in a way never observed in any other material.
Science: Planetary scientists pursuing water and life on Mars must reconcile mounting evidence of a young planet awash in life-sustaining water with a growing realization that the martian surface was likely almost always dry
San Francisco Chronicle: Stanford's famed high-energy physics laboratory is in a tussle with the U.S. Department of Energy over naming rights to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, better known as SLAC.
The Hindu: A team of scientists led by researchers from Princeton University has discovered a new way that electrons behave in materials. The discovery could lead to new kinds of electronic device, says eurekalert press release.
ScienceNews: Physicists have created a rudimentary prototype of a machine that simulates quantum phenomena using quantum physics, rather than using data kept in a classical computer. Tobias Schätz of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany and his collaborators built a model of the smallest solid object imaginable — one made of two atoms — by suspending two ions in a vacuum. The researchers used laser light to vary the electrical repulsion of the ions in order to simulate the magnetic interaction of atoms. Essentially, the machine could use one force of nature to simulate the other. In a paper published online by Nature Physics on July 27, the researchers describe how their system reproduced the magnetic alignment of atoms that takes place when certain materials are exposed to magnetic fields.
USA Today: Semiconductor companies are rushing into the solar power business faster than a Pentium-driven computer, promising to turn a niche form of renewable energy into a mass-market product.
Since May, computer powerhouses Intel, IBM and National Semiconductor have barreled into solar energy, joining hundreds of fellow technology mainstays. Virtually every chipmaker is weighing a solar play, says Rhone Resch, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association.
The New York Times: Health physicists and radiation experts agree that most granite countertops emit radiation and radon at extremely low levels. They say these emissions are insignificant compared with so-called background radiation that is constantly raining down from outer space or seeping up from the earth’s crust, not to mention emanating from manmade sources like X-rays, luminous watches and smoke detectors.
But with increasing regularity in recent months, the Environmental Protection Agency has been receiving calls from radon inspectors as well as from concerned homeowners about granite countertops with radiation measurements several times above background levels. “We’ve been hearing from people all over the country concerned about high readings,” said Lou Witt, a program analyst with the agency’s Indoor Environments Division.
Nature News: Many of the research projects launched as part of the International Polar Year (IPY), which runs from March 2007 to March 2009, are under threat because of the steep rise in marine-fuel costs. Hundreds of Arctic and Antarctic scientists face uncertainty as polar science programmes worldwide are curtailed, postponed or cancelled.
Washington Post: The mysterious sudden brightening and wavelike movements of the aurora borealis, also called the Northern Lights, are caused by periodic explosions of magnetic energy 80,000 miles above Earth, NASA researchers reported
People's Daily Online: A Beijing-based electron-positron accelerator -- China's biggest scientific experimental device -- called BEPCII has been retooled successfully for trial operation, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said here on Tuesday.
The Guardian: Speaking at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona, Arnulf Jaeger-Waldau of the European commission's Institute for Energy, said that the Middle East could supply Europe's energy needs by building solar power farms that would the capture of just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle East deserts on roughly an area the size of Wales.
Scientists are calling for the creation of these series of huge solar farms as part of a plan to share Europe's renewable energy resources across the continent.
The vision for the renewable energy grid comes as the EU commission's joint research centre (JRC) published its strategic energy technology plan, highlighting solar PV as one of eight technologies that need to be championed for the short- to medium-term future.
The JRC plan includes fuel cells and hydrogen, clean coal, second generation biofuels, nuclear fusion, wind, nuclear fission and smart grids. The plan is designed to help Europe to meet its commitments to reduce overall energy consumption by 20% by 2020, while reducing CO² emissions by 20% in the same time and increasing to 20% the proportion of energy generated from renewable sources.
Nature News: The Tibetan plateau gets a lot less attention than the Arctic or Antarctic, but after them it is Earth's largest store of ice. And the store is melting fast. In the past half-century, 82% of the plateau's glaciers have retreated. In the past decade, 10% of its permafrost has degraded. As the changes continue, or even accelerate, their effects will resonate far beyond the isolated plateau, changing the water supply for billions of people and altering the atmospheric circulation over half the planet.
The proximate cause of the changes now being felt on the plateau is a rise in temperature of up to 0.3 °C a decade that has been going on for fifty years — approximately three times the global warming rate. The questions are how much more change to expect in the future, and how severe the effects will be on the planet's climate as a whole.
SPACE.com: An orbiting X-ray observatory has discovered an exploding star in the Milky Way which somehow escaped notice by the usual crowd of star gazers.
Calculations show that the star’s sudden brightness was clearly visible to the naked eye, but no one reported anything until the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton telescope spotted an unexpected burst of cosmic X-rays.
The Guardian: The French electricity group EDF is ready to unveil a £12bn deal for the takeover of the UK's nuclear power generator British Energy as early as next week.
An agreement - widely expected by those close to the talks - will raise questions about a French takeover of the sector after the French group Areva this month became preferred bidder with two others to takeover management of the Sellafield nuclear complex in Cumbria.
British Energy is attractive to EDF because the sites could be used to build a new generation of nuclear stations.
Investor's Business Daily: A report released yesterday from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars contends that the White House should direct federal agencies to apply existing laws more effectively and strengthen nanotech oversight.
The study's lead author, J. Clarence "Terry" Davies, is a scientific adviser to the Washington, D.C., group who served as an administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency under the first President Bush.
He says clearer oversight would not only help to protect health and the environment, but also drive more nanotech investment.
Thanh Nien Daily: Four hundred secondary students from different countries around the world Tuesday took part in the first part of the 39th International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) in Hanoi.
Wired.com: The Pentagon's storied research and development arm turned 50 years old this year, and its birthday present appears to be another $100 million in budget cuts, according to a Defense Department document. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is having a tumultuous financial year: in June, DARPA faced a $32 million cut because it was "underexecuting", leading the agency's director, Tony Tether, to strike back by saying the Pentagon's "comptroller apparently does not believe in accountability."
Cognitive computing systems, which has previously been hit by congressional cuts, will lose another $13 million, while Network Centric Technology is sliced by $19 million. Another $18 million is being diced from biological warfare defense, and a big cut is taken out of DARPA's Electronics Technology program, which loses $26 million. The cuts also indicate that DARPA's high power fiber laser program has apparently been canceled.
The Guardian: An internal audit undertaken by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR) of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has found significant financial risk that were exacerbated by misunderstandings, unminuted meetings and lack of sufficiently trained staff which has led to embarrassing cost overruns that forced the department to find £400m worth of emergency funds from other budgets to balance the books.
ScienceNow: Who needs a GPS when you have, well, whatever migratory birds and sea turtles have? For centuries, humans have marveled at the ability of these and other animals to navigate the globe, in some cases returning to the same breeding spot year after year from as far as 15,000 kilometers away. How they find their way remains a mystery, but new research suggests their prowess may depend on the ability to "see" Earth's magnetic field.
Science News: The length of bonds connecting water molecules could demonstrate quantum effects and help explain some of water’s weirdness.
Slate.com: Airlines are suffering because of high fuel prices in the worst downturn the industry has seen in 8 years. In the short therm the airlines are raising prices and canceling routes, but over the longer haul, they need to start looking at two kinds of changes: a different kind of plane and a different kind of fuel says reporter Christopher Flavelle.
Financial Times: The world's biggest scientific experiment, designed to recreate in miniature the conditions of the early universe shortly after the Big Bang 14bn years ago, is scheduled to start in late August.
The Register: This week the first annual Lunar Science Conference is being held at the NASA/AMES Research Center in Mountain View, California. It's being run by the newly-formed NASA Lunar Science Institute — whose job it will be make dust vapor studies look sexy while doling out $2m grants to teams of lucky researchers. Reporter Austin Modine irreverently
summarizes some of the discussions held at the conference over why NASA should head back to the Moon.
ENN: The Alberta government is surging ahead on its climate change action plan with two new funds totalling $4 billion to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions equal to taking more than a million cars off the road each year. The province will create a $2-billion fund to advance carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects while a second $2-billion fund will propel energy-saving public transit in Alberta.
Science: The US Department of Energy (DOE) will accept proposals this week for a Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), an accelerator to make fleeting nuclei never before produced outside stellar explosions. Gelbke and colleagues want to build FRIB at Michigan State's National
Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, a facility already pursuing such work with 300 employees and an annual budget of $20 million from the US National Science Foundation (NSF). But researchers from Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois also want to host the machine. Argonne is a DOE lab with a staff of 2800 and a $530 million budget. DOE says
it will decide by year's end.
Associated Press: Texas officials gave preliminary approval Thursday to the nation's largest wind-power project, a plan to build billions of dollars worth of new transmission lines to bring wind energy from gusty West Texas to urban areas.
Science: The international acoustics meeting recently held in Paris, France has had a number of stories picked up by science magazine that appeared in last week's issue. Speech can betray fatigue according to a new software program that analyzes the phonetic features of each person's speech.
Tigers and polar bears have had their hearing tested: The bears had a hearing range similar to that of humans, between 125 and 20,000 hertz; Tiger have hearing sensitive to infrasound, sound of lower frequency than most mammals perceive.
Acoustic instruments in the Indian ocean designed to detect nuclear explosions are now being put to use detecting ice cracking in Antarctic thousands of miles away. Getting a statistical handle on the numerous small ice cracks that are not visible from space will help determine whether the rate of ice-shelf degradation stays within natural bounds or steadily increases due to mechanisms such as climate change.
New ultrasound-based technologies are poised to probe the inner structure of bones and treat otherwise incurable cancers but the hype surrounding these techniques may be minimizing some of the risks associated with the techniques.
FInally, the newest generation of archaeologists may be wielding sensitive microphones and recorders to map hidden and abandoned structures according to several sessions in Paris devoted to archaeological acoustics.
Various: The final report into the allegations of scientific miscount concerning Purdue University nuclear engineering professor Rusi Taleyarkhan has been released. Taleyarkhan had published papers in which he reported seeing evidence of nuclear fusion in the collapse of tiny bubbles in a liquid subjected to ultrasonic excitation in a process called sonoluminance. This has not been replicated by other researchers. The allegations, which were issued in 2006, and conclusions are summarized in the local newspaper, the Journal and Courier.
Of the nine specific allegations, two were found to comprise scientific misconduct. The committee "could not find any other instances of scientists being able to replicate Taleyarkhan's results without Taleyarkhan having direct involvement with the experiments," but notes that this comes "just short of questioning whether Taleyarkhan's results were fraudulent."
Related Links
Details of what Purdue's investigation found Journal and Courier
The Full Purdue Report (pdf)
Purdue press release
The Guardian: After a 15-month inquiry the UK's media regulator Ofcom will rule next week that the UK television broadcaster Channel 4 misrepresented some of the world's leading climate scientists in a controversial documentary that claimed global warming was a conspiracy and a fraud. Ofcom is expected to censure the network over its treatment of some scientists in the programme, The Great Global Warming Swindle.
But it is understood that Channel 4 will still claim victory because the ultimate verdict on a separate complaint about accuracy, which contained 131 specific points and ran to 270 pages, will find that it did not breach the regulator's broadcasting code and did not materially mislead viewers.
The New York Times : Former Vice President Al Gore on Thursday urged the United States to wean the nation from its entire electricity grid to carbon-free energy within 10 years, warning that drastic steps were needed to avoid a global economic and ecological cataclysm.
Science: The Department of Defense has issued a new policy directive that's meant to resolve a 7-year dispute between the Pentagon and academic institutions over the rules governing unclassified research.
Houston Chronicle: Two days after telling an online town hall meeting that NASA had "failed us miserably" and "wastes a vast amount of money," Houston Rep. John Culberson said Thursday he was weighing legislation to overhaul the structure of the space agency responsible for about 20,000 Houston-area jobs.
Environmental News Network: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, under fire for apparently discounting the impact of climate change, on Thursday said global warming poses real risk to human health and the American way of life.
The Guardian: A British company is poised to construct the world's first floating wind turbine, in a move that could herald a new generation of cheaper, less problematic wind energy.
Space.com: With assembly of the International Space Station nearing completion, the major investors — the United States, Russia, the European Space Agency (ESA), Japan and Canada — are discussing ways to ensure that neither the U.S. Vision for Space Exploration nor the ostensible 15-year design life of some early station hardware forces an early retirement of the multibillion-dollar facility.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: The experiment about to begin at CERN may be the last hurrah for big physics, at least for a generation. Given budget pressures in many countries and a host of global challenges like climate change and food shortages, governments may be unwilling to invest the money it will take to build a next-generation particle collider, say some physicists.
NPR: NASA is carefully tracking some 500 pieces of debris from a Russian intelligence satellite that may pose a hazard for the international space station. The satellite exploded in March; another piece of it broke apart in June.
Space.com: Telescope mirrors made from lunar dust could help realize dreams of stargazing from the far side of the moon.
Daily Telegraph: Professor Stephen Hawking is "mulling over" an invitation to quit Britain because Government policy is making the country the home of "dull science", colleagues have said.
The New York Times: The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Tuesday a first draft of a rule that will govern injecting carbon dioxide into underground storage.
Rockford Register Star: When Arnold Feldman graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics from Penn State University in January 1944, he was ready for violence.
"I was all hot to join the Army and kill Hitler personally," the 84-year-old Peoria resident said. "My professor said, 'No you don't. There's something more important.' That was a bit of an exaggeration. My contribution to the bomb project was not very much."
The Chronicle of Higher Education: A campaign by prominent business groups to drastically increase the number of Americans entering engineering, mathematics, the sciences, and technology-related fields is not making nearly as much progress as its leaders had hoped, according to a report released today.
The Independent: Prime Minister Gordon Brown is to fast-track the building of at least eight nuclear power stations to cut Britain's dependence on oil following the dramatic rise in its price.
Brown is quoted in a speech at the "Union for the Mediterranean" summit in Paris as saying there will be "no upper limit" on the number of nuclear plants that will be built by private companies. This would mean, despite the decommissioning of nearly all the UK's current reactors over the next 15 years, that nuclear power, which currently provides about 20 per cent of Britain's electricity, could meet a bigger share. The location for the first batch of new nuclear power plants will be announced in 2010.
The speech outlined the UK's vision of a "post-oil economy", calling for "a renaissance of nuclear power" and "massive expansion" of renewable energy in which the North Sea becomes "a vital energy resource through harnessing wind power.
Related Physics Today article
A Stronger Future for Nuclear Power (February 2006)
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