The New York Times: Soaring above the Mississippi River just east of downtown Minneapolis is one remarkable concrete job.
There on Interstate 35W, the St. Anthony Falls Bridge carries 10 lanes of traffic on box girders borne by massive arching piers, which are supported, in turn, by footings and deep pilings.
BBC: The US has finished constructing a huge physics experiment aimed at recreating conditions at the heart of our Sun.
Edmunds.com: As President Obama was criticizing General Motors Corp. and Chrysler this morning for falling short on their efforts to produce viable survival plans, we turned up a new report on the health of various automakers' patent portfolios - a report that underscores both companies' problems, particularly in the area of green car technologies.
Nature: Stimulus packages must focus more resources on clean energy and averting climate change, report says.
Wired: An American solider was blinded in one eye and three others required medical evacuation out of Iraq in a series of laser "friendly fire" incidents, the US military has disclosed. These injuries could be the result of the misuse of green laser dazzlers — and because the lasers being used are dangerous.
Since November 2008, a single unit in Iraq "has experienced 12 green laser incidents involving 14 soldiers and varying degrees of injury. Three soldiers required medical evacuation out of Iraq and one soldier is now blind in one eye," writes Sgt. Crystal Reidy, from the 3rd Sustainment Command (Expeditionary), or ESC.
Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists since he came to the US at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory.
Among Dyson's gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do. His thoughts about how science works appear in a series of lucid, elegant books for nonspecialists that have made him a trusted arbiter of ideas ranging far beyond physics.
Formed in a heretical and broad-thinking tradition of British public intellectuals, Dyson left behind a brooding England still stricken by two bloody world wars to become an optimistic American immigrant with tremendous faith in the creative imagination's ability to invent technologies that would overcome any predicament. And according to the physicist and former Caltech president Marvin Goldberger, Dyson is himself the living embodiment of that kind of ingenuity. "You point Freeman at a problem and he'll solve it," Goldberger says. "He's extraordinarily powerful." Dyson seems to see the world as an interdisciplinary set of problems out there for him to evaluate.
Climate change is the big scientific issue of our time, so naturally he finds it irresistible. But to Dyson this is really only one more charged conundrum attracting his interest just as nuclear weapons and rural poverty have. That is to say, he is a great problem-solver who is not convinced that climate change is a great problem.
Forty years later, UCS has 80,000 members and a staff of 130 working in four cities. The organization campaigns to shrink nuclear arsenals, fight global warming, and reduce agriculture's harm to the environment. For 8 years, it was a thorn in the side of the Bush Administration, criticizing White House policies and zinging its appointees for "politicizing science." That aggressive approach raised its visibility and helped triple its budget this decade, to almost $20 million.
But just as some MIT faculty members of yesteryear ignored the teach-ins and went ahead with their normal duties, some scientists believe that UCS cannot claim to be the conscience of the scientific community. "Many of its statements and conclusions … were perverse oversimplifications of complex issues," says John Marburger III, science adviser to President George W. Bush and a frequent target of UCS attacks. "I think it's hard, maybe impossible, for an advocacy organization to be entirely science-based.
The Associated Press : The nation's worst nuclear power plant accident was unfolding on Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island when an industry economist took the rostrum at a nearby business luncheon.
USA Today: So much for gangsters or communists infiltrating Hollywood. The real invisible menace turns out to be scientists.
Science: Too much of the mysterious quantum connection called entanglement is bad for a quantum computer and makes it run only marginally faster than a conventional one, a new analysis shows.
The New York Times: In an evenly split vote, the State Board of Education on Thursday upheld teaching evolution as accepted mainstream science.
This deserves celebration, but it should also serve as a wake-up call to the European Union. When comparing ourselves with the recalcitrant Bush administration, it wasn't hard to look good. Europe could justly claim to be leading the world with its sound scientific basis for policies on such vital matters as climate change, food, water and energy.
The Associated Press: An Alaska volcano continued to rumble Tuesday amid new concerns that eruptions and mud flows will damage a nearby oil terminal where about 6 million gallons of crude are stored. The 10,200-foot Mount Redoubt volcano, about 100 miles southwest of Anchorage, erupted Sunday night. Since then there have been five more explosions; the latest, on Monday night, shot an ash plume into the air that was 40,000 to 50,000 feet high.
BBC: The first European-built receiver for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (Alma) is due to leave the UK for its permanent home in Chile.
Nature: Jane Lubchenco takes the helm at oceanic and atmospheric agency.
Los Angeles Times: In a move that could pit environmentalists and alternative energy industries against each other, the senator wants hundreds of thousands of acres in California designated as a national monument.
Nature: Researchers work to put changing ice types into climate models.
BBC: There is an increased risk terrorists could get hold of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons to attack the UK, the Home Office has said.
NPR: After months of rumblings, Mount Redoubt in Alaska is erupting. The volcano is sending plumes of ash as high as 9 miles into the sky, and scientists say the explosions could go on for weeks. Communities across the central part of the state are bracing for ash fall and flight disruptions.
"Leadership in science remains vital to America's economic prosperity, energy security, and global competitiveness," said Chu at a lunchtime press conference. "These projects not only provide critically needed short-term economic relief but also represent a strategic investment in our nation's future. They will create thousands of jobs and breathe new life into many local economies, while helping to accelerate new technology development, renew our scientific and engineering workforce, and modernize our nation's scientific infrastructure."
The money will mainly be directed to the 10 national laboratories run by DOE. The package also provides substantial support for both university- and DOE-based researchers, working on problems in fields ranging from particle and plasma physics to biofuels, solar energy, superconductivity, solid-state lighting, electricity storage, and materials science, among others.
The news came days after the Obama administration announced that current BP chief scientist Steve Koonin will serve as undersecretary of science at DOE. He would replace Ray Orbach once the position receives Senate confirmation.
Included among the approved projects are the following:
In addition, the Recovery Act funding provides $125 million for needed infrastructure improvements across nine DOE national laboratories: Ames Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, LBNL, ORNL, PNNL, SNAL, and TJNAF.
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Further information
The Christian Science Monitor: Since sunlight and wind can be unreliable, renewable utilities install big backups.
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Control of Graphene's Properties by Reversible Hydrogenation: Evidence for Graphane
They eventually came to the attention of Nancy Evans, a no-nonsense archivist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Evans was at her desk in the 1970s when a clerk walked into her office, asking what he should do with a truck-sized heap of data tapes that had been released from storage.
"What do you usually do with things like that?" she asked.
"We usually destroy them," he replied.
"Do not destroy those tapes," Evans commanded.
She talked her bosses at JPL into storing them in a lab warehouse. "I could not morally get rid of this stuff," said Evans.
The full collection of Lunar Orbiter data, NASA's first mission to successfully visit the Moon, amounted to 2,500 tapes. Assembled on pallets, they constituted an imposing monolith 10 feet wide, 20 feet long and 6 feet high.
There was an additional problem, the rare machines that could read the tapes, were each 7 feet tall and weighing nearly a ton, and NASA didn't have one.
More than forty years later, a group of volunteers working at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA, have restored some of these early tape machines, and published the first of more than 2000 images from these early NASA missions (see above left).
Related Links
Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project
Photonics.com: High-frequency sounds have been converted into light for the first time, according to scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Science: Eleven universities convened the Copenhagen Climate Congress last week in hopes of providing a comprehensive picture of the status of world climate science before another set of delegates meets here in December to hammer out a follow-up to the 1997 Kyoto Accords, which expire in 2012.
Nature: Electricity flexes strong, bendy aerogel.
Various: As the global recession deepens, and the price of oil remains around $40 per barrel compared with $150 per barrel last summer, the renewable energy sector is in crisis as it awaits the impact of the Obama administration's stimulus bill and the 2010 budget, which has yet to pass Congress. Both bills include heavy investment in or subsidies to the renewable energy sector. However, as Reuters reporter Ayesha Rascoe has discovered, although the US solar energy industry expanded in 2008 by more than 1200 MW (9%), the housing crisis has led to a 3 % decline in solar pool heating systems, the main-stay of the consumer solar market. Despite tax credits worth 30% of the cost of installing solar equipment in a home, the collapse of the credit market and falling house prices means that consumers can't afford the $10,000 –$75,000 it costs to install such a system.
Shell Oil, which has invested a considerable number of resources into wind, solar, and hydro power technologies announced on Tuesday that it was pulling out of these sectors because they are not economic. Instead it plans to invest in biofuels, says the Guardian's Tim Webb. Shell, already the world's largest buyer and blender of crop-based biofuels, would use the extra resources to invest in developing a new generation of biofuels that are less harmful to the environment, and in carbon capture and
sequestration technologies to make energy-intensive projects such as extracting oil from the oil sands in Canada more environmentally friendly (see this month's Physics Today). Biofuels are seen as one way oil-resource-poor countries can become energy producers. NPR Marketplace reporter Gretchen Wilson looks at some of the local skepticism in Africa that biofuel investment could improve their lives.
It is not all doom and gloom for the renewable energy sector. California utility PG&E is still committed to investing heavily in two competing forms of solar energy: photovoltaic and concentrating solar power (CSP) systems. CNet's Martin LaMonica writes that the utility is still committed to "a five-year program to install 500 megawatts worth of solar power in California, one of the biggest programs in the country." The state has mandates that require utilities to get 20% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2010, which could be increased to 33% by 2020.
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Physics in the oil sands of Alberta
The New York Times: President Obama has made clean and efficient energy a top priority, and Congress has obliged with more than $32 billion in stimulus money mostly for conservation and alternative energy technologies like wind, solar and biofuel. Sadly, the Energy Department is too weighed down by nuclear energy programs to devote itself to bringing about the revolution Mr. Obama envisions, writes Stephanie Cooke in the New York Times.
The only good news here is the catastrophe isn't likely to unfold quickly.
Related LinkIt is a dire scene being echoed at campuses across the United States as public universities struggle through the annual legislative budget processes in the worsening economic downturn. Private universities are facing their own challenges, including plummeting endowments1 and shrinking philanthropic gifts. The problem for public universities (see graphic), though, is especially acute in the sunbelt states such as Arizona, where the burst of the housing bubble has hit tax revenues hard and slashed the budgets of universities that, until recently, had ambitious expansion plans.
But burgeoning new economies abroad and flagging prospects in the United States have changed everything. And as opportunities pull immigrants home, the lumbering U.S. immigration bureaucracy helps push them away
Science: The westerlies are the prevailing winds in the middle latitudes of Earth's atmosphere, blowing from west to east between the high-pressure areas of the subtropics and the low-pressure areas over the poles. They have strengthened and shifted poleward over the past 50 years, possibly in response to warming from rising concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Something similar appears to have happened 17,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age: Earth warmed, atmospheric CO2 increased, and the Southern Hemisphere westerlies seem to have shifted toward Antarctica. Data reported by R. F. Anderson and colleagues suggest that the shift
17,000 years ago occurred before the warming and that it caused the CO2 increase.
The CO2 that appeared in the atmosphere 17,000 years ago came from the
oceans rather than from anthropogenic emissions. It was vented from the deep ocean up to the atmosphere in the vicinity of Antarctica. The southern westerlies are important in this context because they can alter the oceanic circulation in a way that vents CO2 from the ocean interior up to the atmosphere.
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Wind-Driven Upwelling in the Southern Ocean and the Deglacial Rise in Atmospheric CO2
NPR: President Obama loosened restrictions on stem-cell research this week and mandated that science should inform policy. Nobel laureate Peter Agre offers insights on how scientists can guide smart policy decisions, how to engage the public on science and what science could do for diplomacy abroad.
Los Angeles Times: Abdul Samad Minty and Yukiya Amano are the front-runners to take over the International Atomic Energy Agency when Mohamed ElBaradei's term ends. The two officials could not be more different.
Information Week: The increase represents a significant turnaround from a multiyear trend of American students shying away from computer-related degrees.
Examiner.com: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has selected United Launch Alliance of Littleton, Colo. to launch the agency's Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) space physics mission.
ScienceNews: New mass limits could even the playing field for finding key elementary particle
The New York Times: While President Obama's plan to find alternatives to storing high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nev., is grabbing headlines, another problem has begun threatening license applications for new reactors.
Nature: Online system has high risk of failure, officials say.
Wired: This summer, dozens of workers at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant in central California will carry out an interment. They'll carefully begin moving 133 tons of spent fuel from temporary cooling ponds into a nuclear necropolis of eight cement-and-steel tombs in a field adjacent to the plant. If all goes according to plan, they won't have to worry about the radioactive detritus for another 100 years.
BBC: Europe is set to launch one of its most challenging space missions to date.
The New York Times: A French physicist and philosopher of science was named Monday as winner of a religion award described as the world's richest annual prize given to an individual.
Science: Superconductors, materials that carry electricity without resistance, can be divided into two broad groups depending on how they react to a magnetic field—or so physicists thought. New experiments show that one well-studied superconductor actually belongs to both groups at the same time. "If the experiment is true, this would add a whole new class of superconductors," says Egor Babaev, a theorist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The advance may not immediately lead to new gadgets and applications, but it suggests that superconductivity, which has already netted four Nobel Prizes, may be an even richer phenomenon than previously thought.
Reuters: Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Thursday countries must agree on carbon cut targets at the UN climate conference in December in Copenhagen. "Recent observations confirm that the worst-case scenario is being realised," Rasmussen told scientists at the Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen. "The longer we wait the worse it gets."
The Wall Street Journal: "White House Buries Yucca," read the headlines last week after Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said the proposed storage of nuclear waste in a Nevada mountain is "no longer an option."
Instead, Mr. Chu told a Senate hearing, the Obama administration will cut all but the most rudimentary funding to Yucca and be content to allow spent fuel rods to sit in storage pools and dry casks at reactor sites "while the administration devises a new strategy toward nuclear waste disposal."
The New York Times: Solar cells adorn the roofs of many homes and warehouses across Germany, while the bright white blades of wind turbines are a frequent sight against the sky in Spain.
AFP: Iran could produce an atomic weapon in "one or two years," a Russian strategic arms control expert said Thursday, calling a nuclear-armed Tehran a "significant threat."
The New York Times: The space shuttle Discovery will remain on the ground until at least Sunday after a hydrogen leak scrubbed a launch attempt on Wednesday.
The Register: New battery technology developed at MIT has made a big media splash today, supposedly offering lithium-ion energy storage which could charge up fully "in seconds." However, no such capability has been demonstrated: in fact the kit doesn't seem very important.
Chicago Tribune: A University of Chicago physicist and senior administrator at Argonne National Laboratory has been named its next director. Eric Isaacs—who currently serves as Argonne's deputy laboratory director for programs—will start his new job in May, replacing current director Robert Rosner, 61.
Nature: When is a metal not a metal? When it is under high pressure, if it's lithium or sodium. The strange behavior of dense forms of these elements exposes difficulties with commonly used models of electronic structure.
LA Times: His move to kill the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada renews nagging questions about what should be done with the radioactive waste steadily accumulating in 35 states.
Nature: Analysis offers fresh perspective on role of humanities and social sciences.
The Economist: The good news is reality exists. The bad is it's even stranger than people thought.
Chicago Public Radio:
Scientists at the west-suburban Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have discovered a missing link in particle physics.
New York Times: They are known as "quants", physicists who have moved to Wall Street to do quantitative finance. Seduced by a vision of mathematical elegance underlying some of the messiest of human activities, they apply skills they once hoped to use to untangle string theory or the nervous system to making money.
This flood seems to be continuing, unabated by the ongoing economic collapse in this country and abroad. Some quants analyze the stock market. Others churn out the computer models that analyze otherwise unmeasurable risks and profits of arcane deals, or run their own hedge funds and sift through vast universes of data for the slight disparities that can give them an edge.
Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, said, "What is amazing to me as I learn about this is how flimsy was the theoretical basis of the claims that derivatives and other complex financial instruments reduced risk, when their use in fact brought on instabilities."
Quants say that they should not be blamed for the actions of traders. They say they have been in the forefront of pointing out the shortcomings OF modern economics.
"I regard quants to be the good guys," said Eric R. Weinstein, a mathematical physicist who runs the Natron Group, a hedge fund in Manhattan. "We did try to warn people," he said. "This is a crisis caused by business decisions. This isn't the result of pointy-headed guys from fancy schools who didn't understand volatility or correlation."
Dr. Shkumatava, who ended up traveling to Moscow for a visa, is among the several hundred thousand students who need a visa to study in the United States. People at universities and scientific organizations who study the issue say they have heard increasing complaints of visa delays since last fall, particularly for students in science engineering and other technical fields.
A State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that delays of two or three months were common and attributed the problem to "an unfortunate staffing shortage."
The issue matters because American universities rely on foreign students to fill slots in graduate and postdoctoral science and engineering programs. Foreign talent also fuels scientific and technical innovation in American labs. And the United States can no longer assume that this country is everyone's first choice for undergraduate, graduate or postgraduate work.
The twin announcements marked a clear departure from former President George W. Bush's approach to science, which had caused a rift between that administration and a large segment of the nation's research community. Many complained that scientific data had been ignored or skewed as the Bush administration set policy on climate change, oil and gas drilling, and other aspects of environmental and health policy. According to Stephanie Condon at CNet news, it also "reopens the debate over how well science and politics should mix"
Richard Jones of the American Institute of Physics says Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, who was at the President’s side as the Memorandum was signed, released a statement that in part said, “President Obama also made clear today that his commitment to decisions based on science instead of ideology extends beyond stem cell research -- tasking every agency to ensure that sound science is at the heart of decisions we make. From energy to environmental protection to health care reform, Americans will be well served by this approach.”
The research, currently available on arXiv, has been submitted to Nature for peer-review, but not everyone is convinced the group has found a supernova chemical fingerprint in the ice.
“The basic idea is an interesting one, but it’s way premature to accept these findings” at face value, comments Eric Wolff of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England. “If the authors could show convincingly that they had supernovas, this would be exciting...But I think we are a long way from that.”
The New York Times: More than 600 self-professed climate skeptics are meeting in a Times Square hotel this week to challenge what has become a broad scientific and political consensus: that without big changes in energy choices, humans will dangerously heat up the planet.
Times Online: The long-lost sounds of the epigonion, the salpinx and the kithara could be about to form the strangest musical group yet, thanks to the world's largest physics project.
The Washington Post: When President Obama lifts restrictions on funding for human embryonic stem cell research today, he will also issue a presidential memorandum aimed at insulating scientific decisions across the federal government from political influence, officials said yesterday.
Guardian Unlimited: A British physicist has revealed his plan to launch a new internet search engine so powerful that one expert has suggested it "could be as important as Google".
The indictment accuses Stadd of steering money from an earth science appropriation to Mississippi State University, which was paying him as a consultant. Stadd is also accused of lying to NASA ethics officials investigating the matter.
He faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted on all three charges. NASA officials on Friday declined to comment on the indictment.
NPR: The US satellites that monitor climate change are aging, and replacements are years away, thanks to more than a decade of budget cuts and squabbling about which federal agency should run the climate satellite program.
Voice of America: A decades-old physics laboratory in the central US state of Illinois has found itself in the race to help scientists unlock the secrets of the universe. The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory was conceived more than 40 years ago to explore the outer reaches of physics. A much newer atom smasher at European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, was built to make the ultimate discovery, what some call the "God article."
Wired: Swedish supercar builder Koenigsegg brought a model of its solar-electric Quant concept car to the Geneva Motor Show and said the production model would have a range of 300 miles and a recharge time of less than 20 minutes.
The Washington Post: The nation's nuclear weapons laboratories would be spun out of the Energy Department and become the center of an independent Agency for National Security Applications under a proposal to be released today by a bipartisan task force formed by the Stimson Center, a research organization devoted to security issues.
Nature: The observed growth of galaxies suggests that the black holes thought to lurk at their centres may find each other and merge. A large survey of galaxies has finally netted two black holes in a tight pairing.
The Engineer: The world's first utility-grade solar power plant with central tower and thermal molten salt storage technology is set for construction in Spain.
In keeping with a pledge President Obama made during the campaign, the budget released last week cuts off almost all funding for creating a permanent burial site for a large portion of the nation's radioactive nuclear waste at the site in the Nevada desert. Congress selected the location in 1987 and reaffirmed the choice in 2002. About $7.7 billion has been sunk into the project since its inception.
Court documents filed by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Tallahassee describe a criminal and civil investigation into "fraudulent" invoices that resulted in funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to Samim Anghaie, 59, his wife, Sousan, 54, and their two adult sons.
Federal officials would not talk about the details of their investigation, which UF reacted to by placing Anghaie on leave with pay. He could not be reached for comment.
Primarily based on its atomic resolution imaging capability, the STM has had phenomenal success in the field of surface science. How can a truly surface-sensitive technique be used to measure a bulk property? The key trick applied by Weismann et al. is to exploit the wave nature of the electrons in copper and study their interference patterns on the surface caused by scattering centers in the bulk of the material. Their technique opens the door to a real-space investigation of electron propagation in materials and to the scattering of electrons at defects well below the surface.
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Seeing the Fermi Surface in Real Space by Nanoscale Electron Focusing
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) has placed a "hold" that blocks votes on confirming Holdren, who is in line to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Lubchenco, Obama's nominee to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
According to the Washington Post, Menendez is using the holds as leverage to get Senate leaders' attention for a matter related to Cuba rather than questioning the nominees' credentials.
The study answers the question of why giant dunes don't grow indefinitely, says Nick Lancaster, a geomorphologist at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, who was not involved in the work.
However, as most community colleges do not have a dedicated Earth sciences department, students will not get an opportunity to get the necessary background or skills to work in this area says reporter Trina Hoaks.
The New York Times: Presently perched on a Delta 2 rocket at Cape Canaveral is a one-ton spacecraft called Kepler. If all goes well, the rocket will lift off about 10:50 Friday evening on a journey that will eventually propel Kepler into orbit around theSun. There the spacecraft's mission will be to discover Earth-like planets in Earth-like places -- that is to say, in the not-too-cold, not-too-hot, Goldilocks zones around stars where liquid water can exist.
Obama's letter, delivered to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in mid-February, "covered a number of topics" of mutual interest to the two countries, "including the issue of missile defense and how it relates to the Iranian threat," a senior administration official said.
The water level at Homestake is down 254 feet since the high-water mark was reached last August.
Homestake is 8,000 feet deep. Mining stopped in 2001, and the underground pumps were turned off just before Homestake was sealed shut in 2003. Water was slowly filling the mine until last year. Now, the South Dakota Science and Technology Authority is pumping water out to reopen Homestake as an underground laboratory, with experiments as deep as 4,850 feet underground
For that investment, the region has attracted $23.4 million in outside research grants and applied for $35.8 million more. The investment has also generated about 100 jobs and created partnerships with dozens of private fuel cell companies or industries working with the technology.
And later this month, the National Hydrogen Association will bring more than 1,000 researchers, manufacurers and government officials to Columbia for its annual conference and expo.
Boosters say that’s not bad for being in only the fourth year of a 20-year plan to turn the Columbia area into a national center of hydrogen research, part of a statewide push to make hydrogen pay.
But critics, including S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford, say that too much money has been spent on a technology that might not be the wave of the future.
"Demand is growing for credible, understandable and useful information for responding to climate change," says the report, called Restructuring Federal Climate Research to Meet the Challenges of Climate Change. The report, released Thursday, calls for "transformation" of climate science to emphasize the climate's influence on food, economics and public health.
Otherwise, there's lots of evidence that politicians will tackle such practical problems without scientists.
The sample dates to 1944 and is a relic from the infancy of the US nuclear weapons programme.
A team from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory used nuclear forensic techniques to date the sample and track down its origins.
Details appear in the latest edition of the journal Analytical Chemistry.
"We will invest more than at any time in our country's history to make the next decade a decade where British scientific genius can create the low-carbon, high-skill, digital economy that we need," said Brown, speaking at the University of Oxford.
The Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, was widely viewed as badly flawed. Many countries that signed the accord lagged far behind their targets in curbing carbon dioxide emissions. The United States refused even to ratify it. And the treaty gave a pass to major emitters in the developing world like China and India.
But within weeks of taking office, President Obama has radically shifted the global equation, placing the United States at the forefront of the international climate effort and raising hopes that an effective international accord might be possible. Mr. Obama’s chief climate negotiator, Todd Stern, said last week that the United States would be involved in the negotiation of a new treaty — to be signed in Copenhagen in December — “in a robust way.”
