February 2009 Archives

The News, an English-language newspaper in Pakistan, decided to dig up the truth, so they went to the best source they could find: Google Earth.

Science: Harvard University hit the brakes last week as it was getting ready to build one of the country's largest new academic science centers--flagging another possible casualty of the economic downturn.

WRS: The post of Director General of CERN would have looked very different a year ago when Prof. Rolf Heuer accepted the job. Although he now finds himself charged with rebuilding the world largest particle collider and, hopefully, discovering the secrets of the universe he found time to drop in and chat with Pete Forster about his hopes and fears for the months ahead.

NatureNews: The deadly bacterial spores mailed to victims in the US anthrax attacks, scientists say, share a chemical 'fingerprint' that is not found in bacteria from the flask linked to Bruce Ivins, the biodefence researcher implicated in the crime.

At a biodefence meeting on 24 February in Baltimore, Maryland, Joseph Michael, a materials scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, presented analyses of three letters sent to the New York Post and to the offices of Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. Spores from two of those show a distinct chemical signature that includes silicon, oxygen, iron, and tin; the third letter had silicon, oxygen, iron and possibly also tin, says Michael. Bacteria from Ivins' RMR-1029 flask did not contain any of those four elements.

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ScienceNow: Billions of years ago, the four biggest planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—lurched through the solar system, tearing out large chunks of the main asteroid belt, according to new computer simulations. The findings explain why the belt contains several gaps, and they support the increasingly popular hypothesis that planets tend to migrate in their orbits for a long time after a solar system is formed.

The New York Times: Bush administration standards for pollutants like soot are "contrary to law and unsupported by adequately reasoned decisionmaking," a federal appeals court said Tuesday.

Space.com: NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has suffered an apparent glitch that has left the spacecraft in a protective safe mode and stalled science observations as it circles the red planet, the space agency announced
late Wednesday.

The malfunction occurred on Monday when the orbiter unexpectedly rebooted its main computer and entered safe mode, an automatic safeguard designed to protect the spacecraft from further damage when it detects a glitch.

The New York Times: Nine years of work disappeared in five minutes yesterday when a NASA satellite crashed into the icy waters near Antarctica. Now climate scientists who worked on the ambitious effort to map the world's carbon dioxide are trying to figure out what comes next.

CNN: Iran tested its first nuclear power plant Wednesday, a stride that prompted one Iranian technician to declare it was "independence day" for the Islamic republic.

BBC: Scientists and policymakers marked the official end of the International Polar Year (IPY) on Wednesday at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva.

India eNews: Did Homi Bhabha, father of Indian atomic energy programme, make a mistake by showing off India's nuclear achievements to Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai during his visit to Trombay in 1960?

The New York Times: When President Obama signed the $787 billion stimulus measure last Tuesday, one of the law's most surprising provisions was a 36 percent increase in the budget for the National Institutes of Health. The law gives the health institutes $10.4 billion in addition to its annual budget of $29 billion, and the new money must be allocated by September 2010 on grants and other projects that can extend no more than two years.

The law gives the National Science Foundation $2 billion in stimulus financing for research grants, and the foundation also has until September 2010 to spend the money. But the foundation will act much faster, pushing nearly all of that money out to scientists within 120 days, said Jeffrey Nesbit, an N.S.F. spokesman. (Last year, the science foundation's $6.1 billion budget included $4.8 billion for research grants; Congress has not finished work on the budget for the current fiscal year.)

The spending increase comes after six years of nearly flat research budgets at the N.I.H., the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and other agencies, and growing desperation at research universities, which depend on the agencies to underwrite much of their scientific faculty and laboratory infrastructure.

To speed the process, the science foundation will not put out any new calls for proposals from researchers, but will instead use the money to finance a higher fraction of proposals already under review and to finance old ones that were judged meritorious last year but were rejected for lack of funds.

Ars Technica: In a sign that the appointment of Steven Chu means that the DOE will not be taking a business-as-usual approach, the Department announced a series of steps that will streamline the process of using the stimulus money to get projects started.

NPR: An all-star cast of politicians, business people and activists sat down Monday in Washington, D.C., to discuss how to transform the nation's energy supply from dirty to clean. The consensus was that it will take a much better system for distributing electricity coast to coast. Participants agreed there are plenty of challenges to doing that.

NPR: NASA plans to launch a satellite on Tuesday that will help measure carbon dioxide on a global basis. Carbon dioxide is the single most important gas involved in global warming, so understanding where it comes from -- and where it goes -- is essential.

The New York Times: After a tsunami in the Indian Ocean killed hundreds of thousands of people in 2004, the American government moved to improve the nation's tsunami warning systems. But some of the upgrades are temporary and have not been made to the highest standards. Bureaucracy has delayed others.

Guardian Unlimited : Environment ministers overcame seven years of obstacles today and committed to reducing the world's mercury pollution.

MSNBC: No money available for program given current military commitments

"Iran has enough nuclear fuel to build a bomb if it decides to take the drastic steps of violating its international treaty obligations, kicking out inspectors and further refining its supply."

However, as Chemist Cheryl Rofer points out, at 3.49% , the concentration of Iran's 1010 kg of enriched uranium-235 is still too low to make an atomic bomb and would have to be reprocessed for a number of months to reach the necessary enrichment level for military applications. The uranium enrichment facility would also have to be reconfigured to reach higher concentration levels of U-235.

An atomic bomb requires highly enriched uranium-235 at greater than 90% concentration. To produce enough low-enriched uranium fuel for the two nuclear reactors Iran is building it needs at minimum a cascade of 5000 centrifuges. Iran currently has 5600 known centrifuges according to the IAEA report.

The report also states that Iran has slowed down its enrichment program and that as long as the IAEA monitors their facilities, they cannot develop nuclear weapons. As IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei recently said in an interview in Süddeutsche Zeitung, "they still do not have the ingredients to make a bomb overnight."

Related coverage
Iran holds enough uranium for bomb Financial Times
Iran has enriched enough uranium to make bomb, IAEA says The Guardian
Iran Has More Enriched Uranium Than Thought The New York Times

Related Links
The gas centrifuge and nuclear weapons proliferation Physics Today

During the Q&A, an audience member asked Tyson about conservative members of the state Board of Education who want to teach the "weaknesses" of the theory of evolution in Texas high school classrooms.

Calling intelligent design theory a "philosophy of ignorance," he argued that a lack of appreciation for basic scienctific principles will hurt America's scientific output, which has been the largest economic engine in the country's history.

"If nonscience works its way into the science classroom, it marks...the beginning of the end of the economic strength this country has known," Tyson said.

This is the Mars Science Laboratory, the space agency's next big mission to the most Earth-like planet in the solar system. But it's been a magnet for controversy, and a reminder that the robotic exploration of other worlds is never a snap, especially when engineers decide to get ambitious.

The launch has been delayed for two years because of technical glitches. Approved at $1.63 billion, the mission's price tag will be at least $2.2 billion, NASA now estimates. Critics say the cost has really quadrupled since the project was first dreamed up. What no one can doubt is that ambitious missions tend to become costly ones, which jangles the nerves of officials who know how easy it is for a Mars mission to go bust.

But now with the economic crash and a silicon supply glut that's going to get worse before it gets better, the game has changed. Solar venture capitalists will lean away from innovative technologies toward sure bets closer to commercialization, according to a report released Wednesday by Lux Research.

The New York Times: The snobbish idea that pure science is in some way superior to applied science dates to antiquity, when Plutarch says of Archimedes: "Regarding the business of mechanics and every utilitarian art as ignoble and vulgar, he gave his zealous devotion only to those subjects whose elegance and subtlety are untrammeled by the necessities of life."

CNN: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted Tuesday to require any future nuclear power plants to be designed to withstand strikes from commercial jetliners, addressing a possible terrorist scenario that has haunted some people since the September 11, 2001, attacks.

FOX News: Great Britain and France have always had their cultural differences, but the latest military miscommunication between the two hardly has them shouting vive la difference! This one literally could have gone nuclear.

The New York Times: A leading scientific group has announced its intention to boycott Louisiana because of a new state law that could open the door to teaching creationism in the public schools.

Carbon dioxide and other gases added to the air by industrial and other activities have been blamed for rising temperatures, increasing worries about possible major changes in weather and climate.

Carbon emissions have been growing at 3.5% per year since 2000, up sharply from the 0.9% per year in the 1990s, Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"It is now outside the entire envelope of possibilities" considered in the 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change, he said.

The Washington Post: The United States is more than two years ahead of the schedule set under the Moscow Treaty in reducing the number of its nuclear warheads operationally deployed on strategic missiles and bombers, according to congressional and administration sources.

Reuters: The European physics laboratory that reassured us it wouldn't destroy the Earth in a "Big Bang" experiment last year is now telling people not to fret about antimatter.

Science: For better and for worse, Phoenix often wandered from its scripted mission on Mars, but there was some groundbreaking science behind the often distracting headlines.

International Herald Tribune: Steven Chu, the new secretary of energy, said Wednesday that solving the world's energy and environment problems would require Nobel-level breakthroughs in three areas: electric batteries, solar power, and the development of new crops that can be turned into fuel.

BBC: The collision between a US and a Russian satellite in space highlights the growing importance of monitoring objects in orbit.

Nature: Will the National Nuclear Security Administration leave the energy department?

Wired: NASA researchers are on a quest to take the boom out of sonic booms, a development that could lead to a new generation of supersonic aircraft and perhaps even usher in a new era of supersonic passenger flight.

The New York Times: Scientists, who were thrilled when President Obama vowed on his first day to "restore science to its proper place," have veered from excitement to dread as the stimulus bill makes its way through Congress.

NatureNews: Nonprofit university presses still seeking science books.

BBC: The Large Hadron Collider could be switched back on in September — a year after it shut down due to a malfunction and several months later than expected.

Related Links
How to avoid contaminating planetary neighbors NPR

Houston Chronicle: A longtime congressional critic of the oil and gas industry said Monday that there may be a place for expanded offshore drilling and a long future for coal in the US, but only with caution and a lot of investment.

ScienceNow: For any robot that keeps getting stuck in the sand, help is on the way. Scientists have engineered a droid that mimics the locomotion of desert animals, allowing it to traverse loose terrain with ease. If perfected, the new design should keep the next wave of robots—earthbound and planetary explorers alike—rolling across dunes at a good clip.

"It's been a superb flight," says David Pierce, chief of NASA's balloon programm at Goddard Space Flight Center's Wallops facility in Virginia. "We're proving this is a viable platform." Balloon flights are a lot cheaper than satellites for conducting experiments, but the short time they remain aloft has been a drawback to long-term cosmic-ray and high- altitude atmospheric experiments.

This new balloon design suggests that a $50,000 balloon could replace a million-dollar spacecraft for short-to-medium-term research experiments.

ScienceBlogs.com: It's fairly common knowledge that the Earth's magnetic field periodically reverses its polarity. At the moment, magnetic field lines run from the South Pole to the North Pole, and point up in the southern hemisphere and down in the northern hemisphere. But at many points in the past, the field lines (and compasses, if they'd been invented) pointed south were directed upward in the northern hemisphere and downward in the southern hemisphere.

NatureNews: The best observatories ranked by their scientific impact.

ScienceNow: Climate change is bringing mixed news to the ozone layer. Thanks to increasing CO₂ concentrations and shifting air currents, the mid-northern hemisphere, including the United States, Canada, and Europe, will likely see its ozone restored ahead of schedule, according to a new study. Meanwhile, areas throughout the tropics and the mid-southern hemisphere, such as Australia, New Zealand, and Peru, may experience a delay in their ozone recovery.

NPR: This year marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, and to say Darwin mania is gripping England does not overstate the case.

Guardian Unlimited: High court rules Abdul Qadeer Khan was not involved in selling nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea, and Libya.

MSNBC: New Mexico's US senators oppose the idea of moving the nation's nuclear weapons complex from the Department of Energy to the Department of Defense.

The Associated Press: The Obama administration, reversing the Bush administration's limited interest in nuclear disarmament, is gearing up for early negotiations with Russia on a new treaty that would sharply reduce stockpiles of nuclear warheads.

The New York Times: Nearly nine months after a devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, left 80,000 people dead or missing, a growing number of American and Chinese scientists are suggesting that the calamity was triggered by a four-year-old reservoir built close to the earthquake's geological fault line.

BBC: The Swedish government plans to overturn a nearly 30-year-old decision to phase out nuclear power and lift a ban on building new reactors.

BusinessWeek: BusinessWeek reader L. J. Furman sees alternative fuels as common sense for the common good.

Environmental News Network: The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the first multinational agency focused solely on spreading clean energy across the globe, officially launched this week.

In a study published today in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, earth systems scientist Tim Lenton of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom and a graduate student analyzed 17 schemes for cooling the planet.

The New York Times: Wind and solar power have been growing at a blistering pace in recent years, and that growth seemed likely to accelerate under the green-minded Obama administration. But because of the credit crisis and the broader economic downturn, the opposite is happening: installation of wind and solar power is plummeting.

Environmental News Network: The US overtook Germany as the biggest producer of wind power last year, new figures showed, and will likely take the lead in solar power this year, analysts said on Monday.

Xinhua: Diplomats representing the United Nations Security Council's five permanent members and Germany met Wednesday to discuss Iran's nuclear issue.

ScienceNow: Astronomers today reported the discovery of a planet beyond our solar system that's just twice the diameter of Earth. But this new neighbor is far from habitable: CoRoT-Exo-7b is either a hellish world of erupting volcanoes and sizzling temperatures, or it's covered by a scalding ocean. Either way, the discovery could pave the way toward finding more Earth-sized alien worlds, some of which may actually be habitable.

CNet: Google Earth upped the cartographic ante again today with Google Earth 5 for Windows and Mac. As CNET News reported back in April 2008, the latest version incorporates even more data from NASA, the BBC, National Geographic, and other proprietary sources to create one of the most unique map offerings ever, meshing comprehensive real-time data on Earth's surface with information on the oceans, the stars that we see, historical maps, and topographical information on Mars.

Guardian Unlimited: Tehran claims to be joining the space race but the west has its suspicions

The New York Times: Without quite the drama of Alexander Graham Bell calling out, "Mr. Watson, come here!" or the charm of the original "Star Trek" television show, scientists have nonetheless achieved a milestone in communication: teleporting the quantum identity of one atom to another a few feet away.

US News & World Report: The Argonaut laments the possibility of 41 academic programs being cut from the University of Idaho lineup in April. One of those programs is the undergraduate physics program. The cuts are part of a strategic plan launched in 2005 to "increase the overall financial and academic efficiency," according to Dean Scott Wood of the college of science

The New York Times: Isaac Newton's apple hurt considerably less than Ryan Clark's coconut. But they did have a few things in common.

BBC: The world's marine ecosystems risk being severely damaged by ocean acidification unless there are dramatic cuts in CO2 emissions, warn scientists.

Nature News: Nations have begun to hammer out the mandate for the International Renewable Energy Agency.