Nature: Speedy snapshots captured using laser light.
April 2009 Archives
Wired: American spacecraft had to dodge space debris four times in 2008, NASA revealed Tuesday, a fact that highlights both the extent of the space junk problem and the primary mitigation option open to NASA.
Nature: Some ten billion dollars and two decades into the project, the proposed US nuclear waste dump at Nevada's Yucca Mountain has hit a major and possibly decisive stumbling block: President Barack Obama has proposed eliminating all funding for scientific research on the deep-rock repository, 140 kilometres northwest of Las Vegas. As Yucca Mountain has been the United States' only potential long-term repository since 1987, the decision once again raises the issue of what to do with the country's high-level nuclear waste.
MSNBC: Gamma-ray burst came from about 13 billion light-years away
Forbes.com: Kansas has the potential to become a major exporter of renewable energy, producing many new jobs and new tax revenue, a national study found.
The Associated Press: A ghost from the nuclear industry's early years has reappeared.
It is not public apprehension about safety or disposal issues this time, but the staggering cost of building nuclear reactors.
A wave of new reactors now in the works is intended to solve at least part of the nation's energy problems as it attempts to shift away from fossil fuels. But cost is likely to plague every upcoming nuclear project.
The New York Times: In a speech on Monday at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, President Obama presented a vision of a new era in research financing comparable to the Sputnik-period space race, in which intensified scientific inquiry, and development of the intellectual capacity to pursue it, are a top national priority.
The Boston Globe: Vice President Biden hit the road today to tout the economic stimulus package's help for weatherization and energy efficiency programs.
ABC News: Japan says it will back US President Barack Obama's drive for a nuclear-free world by holding a global disarmament summit.
Bloomberg.com: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his government is preparing to offer the US and European nations an updated version of a one-year-old proposal for talks about its nuclear program.
Nature: A fresh look at the sticky problem of Moon dust may help the next generation of lunar explorers.
The New York Times: General Electric says it has achieved a breakthrough in digital storage technology that will allow standard-size disks to hold the equivalent of 100 DVDs.
Science: During the 1990s, physicists flocked to Wall Street and other financial hubs, eager to turn their analytical skills and phenomenological mindset to the problem of making a killing. Now that the world's stock markets are in retreat, they've turned to explaining why markets crash. According to one new analysis, leverage—the practice by hedge funds and other investors of borrowing money to buy investments—is the root of many nettlesome properties of financial markets that classical economics cannot explain, including a propensity to crash.
The New York Times: For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.
The Associated Press: Former Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia says dealing with climate change is a national security issue that must be addressed.
AFP: The European Union will urge Iran to take advantage of a change in US policy to seal a deal and end the standoff over Tehran's nuclear ambitions, according to a draft document Friday.
Nature News: When Martin Lukac felt a small earthquake rattle his Los Angeles apartment, he immediately thought of the mobile phone lying on his desk. Two weeks earlier, he had programmed the phone to capture readings from its built-in accelerometer, a sensor originally intended to support features such as games. Now, Lukac — a doctoral student in computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles — transferred the phone's data to his computer and saw the readings plotted as a series of tell-tale spikes. Success! His phone had become a mobile seismometer.
Such moments are happening more and more often these days, as researchers seek out innovative ways to exploit mobile phones. The opportunities are tantalizing. Phones are increasingly being equipped with not only accelerometers, but also cameras, Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers and Internet connectivity. Many of them can support programs devised by anyone, not just the phone's manufacturer, which means that digitally savvy scientists can write and distribute mobile-phone software for everything from monitoring traffic to reporting invasive species.
MSNBC : But the space agency still has no chief to make the $230 billion call.
The New York Times: Obama administration officials said Wednesday that an ambitious energy and climate-change proposal sponsored by House Democrats could help create jobs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but they stopped short of endorsing it.
Wired.com: In most people's minds, Biosphere 2 was a fabulously expensive failure, a $200 million earth-in-a-bottle that choked on carbon dioxide and was overrun by ants. But not everybody feels that way.
"In our view, Biosphere 2 was a tremendous success," said Bill Dempster, the project's engineering systems director and designer of the sphere's remarkable lungs. "Many people don't realize that hundreds of papers were written about it."
The Daily Beast: Theoretical physicist and bestselling author Michio Kaku talks about time travel, invisibility coats, why celebrities are hurting America’s technological edge—and how Obama may be the next savior of science.
Washington Post: The old rover was supposed to work for only 90 days, enough time to crawl two-thirds of a mile across the Martian desert. More than five years later, Spirit has put five miles on its odometer and is still rolling along -- but getting mighty cranky.
The rover, one of two NASA vehicles operating on Mars, has a broken right wheel. It has dust on its solar panels. It's operating at about 30 percent of normal power. Various sensors and software programs have gone screwy.
Then, on April 9, Spirit refused to wake up. The rover is designed to sleep at night, when there is no sunlight hitting the solar panels. But Spirit snoozed right through its wake-up call. It happened three times in succession. Finally a backup timer got Spirit up and moving again after a 27-hour slumber.
Science: Quantum mechanical systems may exhibit correlations between their parts that are stronger than those permitted by classical physics. These correlations have challenged our understanding of the concepts of locality and reality in quantum mechanics (1). It was the crucial insight that entanglement actually represents a resource that has led to the rapid development of modern quantum information science, in which entanglement is used to realize novel information processing tasks. Unfortunately, the current experimental realizations are still imperfect and noisy. For the development of practical quantum technologies, it is therefore necessary to be able to verify quantitatively the presence of entanglement, as well as the quality of that entanglement and of the quantum information processors. Recent advances toward this goal have been made.
The Christian Science Monitor: At first glance, Sixth Sense seems disarmingly simple: a Web cam, projector, and battery pack hang around user's neck on a lanyard. The components, which together cost about $350, plug into an Internet-enabled mobile phone that rests in the wearer's pocket.
As the device's name suggests, this straightforward design aims at a rather lofty goal: to make accessing the Internet seamless in ordinary life. People take in sights and smells without a conscious series of instructions. So why should we reach into our pockets to look up information online?
Environmental News Network: US President Barack Obama is heading to the state of Iowa Wednesday to give an Earth Day message that pitches his plan for alternative energy development.
Nature: Cosmic rays are charged particles arriving at the Earth from space. Those at the highest energies are particularly interesting because the physical processes that could create or accelerate them are at the limit of our present knowledge. They also open the window to particle astronomy, as the magnetic fields along their paths are not strong enough to deflect their trajectories much from a straight line. The Pierre Auger Observatory is the largest cosmic-ray detector on Earth, and as such is beginning to resolve past observational disagreements regarding the origin and propagation of these particles.
Science: If the National Ignition Facility (NIF) reaches its goal of ignition--a self-sustaining fusion burn that produces more energy than was put in to create it--researchers will celebrate a triumph of plasma science. But they will still be far from showing that inertial confinement fusion (ICF) is a viable energy source for the future.
One key stumbling block for an ICF energy reactor is laser technology. NIF managers hope to perform about two shots a day because of the time needed to let optical elements cool down, check for damage, replace any damaged parts, and install a new fuel capsule. At that rate, with each shot producing fusion burns of 20 megajoules--its initial target--NIF will barely generate enough power to keep a single light bulb glowing. According to Steven Cowley, director of the Culham Science Centre, Britain's fusion research lab near Oxford, "laser fusion has all the problems of magnetic fusion, but ICF also has to find a laser that can fire many times per second and is 20% to 30% efficient, plus how to make fuel pellets at low cost."
The Berkeley Seismo blog: The European satellite "Envisat," which carries a "Side Aperture Radar" sensor, flew over the Abruzzo region of Central Italy on February 1, 2009 and then again six weeks later on April 12. In the mean time, a devastating earthquake occurred near the town of L'Aquila, killing more than 260 people.
Using interferometry--subtracting one picture from the other--Italian scientists overlaid the two radar pictures of the region to produce a map of colored waves.
Each colored ring is a measure of how much the ground has moved as a result of the earthquake.
The large green square represents the location of the main shock; the smaller green squares show large aftershocks. Along the yellow line east of L’Aquila geologists found an alignment of surface breaks after the quake, which indicate the orientation of the rupture. The colored wave pattern follows those breaks exactly, indicating that the ground had moved a few inches down to the left side of the yellow line. This movement is also represented by the black and white fault plane solution on the left.
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Business Week: Given the potential inconvenience and 'Big Brother' aspect of utilities controlling home appliances, it's time to convince energy users
The New York Times: When Ed Shadle was growing up, you could buy a junker for a couple hundred dollars, pound out the dents, drop a big engine in it, paint it candy apple red, take it to the outskirts of town and race from stoplight to stoplight until the cops told you to go home.
ESO News: Well-known exoplanet researcher Michel Mayor today announced the discovery of the lightest exoplanet found so far. The planet, "e", in the famous system Gliese 581, is only about twice the mass of our Earth. The team also refined the orbit of the planet Gliese 581 d, first discovered in 2007, placing it well within the habitable zone, where liquid water oceans could exist. These amazing discoveries are the outcome of more than four years of observations using the most successful low-mass-exoplanet hunter in the world, the HARPS spectrograph attached to the 3.6-metre ESO telescope at La Silla, Chile.
ScienceNow: In a faraway corner of the universe, a crash of cosmic proportions is under way, cramming more than 1000 galaxies into a space normally reserved for a handful. It's also compressing and heating enormous quantities of intergalactic gas. Astronomers studying the phenomenon say what they learn about the pileup should improve their understanding about how the largest structures in the cosmos have evolved.
BBC: The first stage of the switch-on of one of the world's most powerful stargazing systems has got under way.
Washington Post: The SunZia transmission line that would link sun and wind power from central New Mexico with cities in Arizona is just the sort of energy project an environmentalist could love -- or hate. And it is just the sort of line the Interior Department has been tasked with promoting -- or guarding against.
If built, the 460-mile line would carry about 3,000 megawatts of power, enough to avoid the need for a handful of coal-fired plants and to help utilities meet mandated targets for use of renewable fuel. "We have to connect the sun of the deserts and the winds of the plains to places where people live," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said recently.
But the line would also cross grasslands, skirt two national wildlife refuges and traverse the Rio Grande, all habitat areas rich in wildlife. The graceful sandhill crane, for example, makes its winter home in the wetlands of New Mexico's Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, right next to the path of the proposed power line. And much of the area falls under the protection of the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
BBC: On 10 February this year, a defunct Russian communications satellite crashed into an American commercial spacecraft, generating thousands of pieces of orbiting debris.
At the time, some observers put the odds of such an event occurring at millions, maybe billions, to one.
But experts had been warning for years that useable space was becoming crowded, boosting the possibility of a serious collision
Science: The Moon is our closest planetary neighbor and the only extraterrestrial body to which humans have traveled, yet many questions about its origin and early history remain unanswered. Four papers published in this issue by scientific teams of the Japanese SELENE (Kaguya) mission in Science offer a new global view of the Moon that helps to elucidate how the Moon evolved to its present state.
Nature: The handedness of chiral molecules can be probed spectroscopically, but acquiring data can take hours, which is a problem for time-resolved studies. The latest method records such data in a flash.
Science: The United Kingdom has canceled a cosmology experiment that would have been Europe's prime contender in the race to trace the gravitational waves that rippled through the infant universe. U.K. physicists complain that, to save less than £3 million, the nation's cash-strapped Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is abandoning a most promising field of inquiry. But the project--a suite of microwave telescopes called CLOVER--was 50% over budget and 3 years behind schedule, and scientists not associated with the project say they are not entirely surprised that STFC axed it
New York Times: The competitive edge of the United States economy has eroded sharply over the last decade, according to a new study by a nonpartisan research group.
SPACE.com: The vast spaces between galaxies might seem pretty empty. But they are actually littered with clouds of cosmic dust that were likely ejected from the galaxies themselves. And the dust scatters farther into intergalactic space than astronomers expected, a new study finds.
The discovery was made by watching subtle shifts in the light emanating from radio sources that sit at the hearts of far-away galaxie
BBC: Scientists have completed their mission to map one of the most extraordinary mountain ranges on Earth.
Nature News: Contrary to some expectations in the world of nuclear physics, researchers have found that a radioactive nucleus of sulphur oscillates between two different shapes, sometimes appearing like a sphere and other times like an American football. The result, reported this month by researchers in France, is causing nuclear physicists to rethink prevailing theories about what makes some nuclei stable and others prone to splitting apart.
Science: Entanglement, a seemingly impossible link between distant particles, is key to physicists' plans for revolutionary quantum computers and uncrackable quantum communications systems. Creating entangled pairs of light particles, or photons, is a delicate business. Now, physicists from Japan and the United Kingdom have found a way to do it by simply passing ordinary photons through a novel optical filter.
"This is pretty cool," says Alan Migdall of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. "I haven't seen an approach like this before." Still, he and others say it's too soon to tell whether the new method, described on page 483 in Science, will outshine techniques that generate pairs of photons entangled from "birth."
Related Link
An entanglement filter
BBC: Neil Turok, chair of mathematical physics at Cambridge University, says governments are following the wrong policy when it comes to African aid.
Focusing on basic healthcare and primary education is stopping Africa developing, Professor Turok suggests.
The founder of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) says investment in higher education is key.
Science: The National Science Foundation (NSF) is using its $2 billion windfall from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to fund more proposals already in the pipeline, reducing what officials say is a $2-billion-a-year backlog of good ideas.
CNET: On Thursday, NASA released an initial set of images from the Kepler mission, showing the "star-rich sky" where the telescope will soon begin searching for Earth-like planets.
The Washington Post: A study, led by Tyson Hedrick and published last week in the journal Science last week, has deconstructed one basic flying maneuver — a turning motion — and discovered that multiple creatures seem to employ the same principle. Indeed, it may be a universal principle of animal flight, independently derived by countless species over millions of years.
NPR: A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine published a cover story on the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson and his unconventional view on global warming. The article generated a lot of attention - much of it unfavorable. Joe Romm, physicist and fellow at the Center for American Progress says publishing Dyson's views gives too much credence to what he deems pseudoscience. Author Nicholas Dawidoff, who wrote the piece, says Dyson is much too interesting and serious a thinker to be ignored.
CNN: The International Atomic Energy Agency said its inspectors left North Korea on Thursday after being ordered out by the reclusive nation.
Nature: The conventional approach to flipping electron spins in a semiconductor requires an external alternating field. It seems that the same job can be accomplished without external excitation of any kind.
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Ballistic spin resonance
space.com: During its stint in the Martian Arctic, NASA's Phoenix Mars lander made an impressive array of measurements and discoveries that will help fine-tune scientists' understanding of the chemistry and environment of the red planet.
Perhaps no discovery was more surprising than the detection of an odd type of salt that Phoenix scientists think could have an important impact on the Martian water cycle and the planet's ability to support life.
In a set of papers presented last week at the 40th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in The Woodlands, Texas, several Phoenix team members put forth their ideas on how the class of salts, called perchlorates, might affect Mars's water cycle; how it might boost or inhibit potential Martian life; how it might form a sludge underneath Mars' polar cap, lubricating them and allowing them to flow, as glaciers do on Earth; and how the salt even got there in the first place.
DISCOVER: It is no accident that the quark--the building block of protons and neutrons and, by extension, of you and everything around you--has such a strange and charming name. The physicist who discovered it, Murray Gell-Mann, loves words as much as he loves physics. He is known to correct a stranger's pronunciation of his or her own last name (which doesn't always go over well) and is more than happy to give names to objects or ideas that do not have one yet. Thus came the word quark for his most famous discovery. It sounds like "kwork" and got its spelling from a whimsical poem in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. This highly scientific term is clever and jokey and gruff all at once, much like the man who coined it.
New York Times: John Grunsfeld was sitting in an astronomical meeting in Atlanta in January of 2004 when he got a message to come back to headquarters in Washington to talk about the Hubble Space Telescope.
To say that he was excited would be an understatement. As an astronaut, Dr. Grunsfeld had twice journeyed to space to make repairs on humanity’s most vaunted eye on the cosmos, experiences he had described to a high-level panel pondering Hubble’s fate only a few months before as the most meaningful in his life. He was looking forward to leading the third and final servicing mission, which had been delayed by the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew the year before.
Thinking that the mission was now being scheduled, Dr. Grunsfeld raced to Washington, only to learn that Sean O’Keefe, NASA’s administrator, had canceled it on the ground that it was too risky. Wearing his other hat as NASA’s chief scientist, Dr. Grunsfeld now had the job of telling the world that the space agency was basically abandoning its greatest scientific instrument at the same time that it was laying plans for the even riskier and more expensive effort to return humans to the Moon.
He said he felt as if he had been hit by a two-by-four.
“Being an astronaut, there are not a lot of things that have really shocked me in my life,” Dr. Grunsfeld said in a recent interview. But, he added, “I don’t think anybody could ever prepare themselves for, you know, trying to bury something that they have said, ‘Hey, this is worth risking my life for.’ ”
He went home that January night and wondered whether he should resign.
On May 12, he and six other astronauts commanded by Scott Altman are scheduled to ride to the telescope’s rescue one last time aboard the shuttle Atlantis. This will be the fifth and last time astronauts visit Hubble. When the telescope’s batteries and gyros finally run out of juice sometime in the middle of the next decade, NASA plans to send a rocket and drop it into the ocean.
If all goes well in what Dr. Grunsfeld described as “brain surgery” in space, Hubble will be left at the apex of its scientific capability. As chief Hubble repairman for the past 18 years, he has been intertwined with the Hubble telescope physically, as well as intellectually and emotionally. “He might be the only person on Earth who has observed with Hubble and touched Hubble,” said Bruce Margon, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and former deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute.
The Guardian: Caterina Doglioni is one of the "very, very best" PhD students Oxford University physics lecturer Todd Huffman says he has ever come across. "She's up there in the top 10," he says.
And yet, Oxford's particle physics department has not awarded her a research council grant for her studies. Instead, the grant has gone to a British student, as has been the case for the last four years, give or take the few times when British students have turned down places at Oxford.
Meanwhile, Doglioni has spent months trying to secure funds from charities and other sources to see her through her PhD - months that the 24-year-old Italian could have been spending on her research into why we are made of matter.
This year - her first - Rotary International has funded her fees and the majority of her living expenses. Next year, she has secured an Oxford University scholarship to cover her costs. But she has no idea yet how she is going to fund her third year. "You have to prepare yourself for a graceful fall," she says.
It's a situation Huffman deeply regrets, but can do little about. Research councils - non-departmental governmental bodies that fund thousands of PhDs every year - stipulate that only UK PhD students can receive a grant that covers their living expenses as well as their tuition fees. PhD students from the EU, like Doglioni, are only entitled to a grant that covers their tuition fees.
Vincenzo Raimo, director of the international office of the University of Nottingham, says: "If the UK is prioritising research, particularly in maths and science, which we claim to be doing, we ought to be getting the best people irrespective of where they come from. It would also make us much more competitive.A pool of excellent students from the EU may be going elsewhere because they cannot afford to live and study for a PhD in the UK.
The Washington Post: Fuming at the UN Security Council for condemning its recent missile launch, North Korea said Tuesday it will restart its plutonium factory, junk all its disarmament agreements, and "never participate" again in six-country nuclear negotiations.
The New York Times: Nanotechnology's image is sleek, modern, and clean. But that's not its reality.
Turns out that designing and manufacturing materials so small that 100,000 of them can fit comfortably on the width of a hair strand absorbs tremendous amounts of energy and is anything but neat.
The Guardian: Almost nine out of 10 climate scientists do not believe political efforts to restrict global warming to 2o C will succeed, a Guardian poll (of attendees of an international climate conference in Copenhagen) reveals today. An average rise of 4–5o C by the end of this century is more likely, they say, given soaring carbon emissions and political constraints.
The poll of those who follow global warming most closely exposes a widening gulf between political rhetoric and scientific opinions on climate change. While policymakers and campaigners focus on the 2o C target, 86% of the experts told the survey they did not think it would be achieved. A continued focus on an unrealistic 2oC rise, which the EU defines as dangerous, could even undermine essential efforts to adapt to inevitable higher temperature rises in the coming decades, they warned.
The Guardian contacted all 1,756 people who registered to attend the Copenhagen conference—which presented evidence that that suggested global warming could strike harder and faster than realized—and asked for their opinions on the likely course of global warming. Of 261 experts who responded, 200 were researchers in climate science and related fields. The rest were drawn from industry or worked in areas such as economics and social and political science.
The 261 respondents represented 26 countries and included dozens of senior figures, including laboratory directors, heads of university departments, and authors of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Many of the experts stressed that an inability to hit the 2o C target did not mean that efforts to tackle global warming should be abandoned, but that the emphasis is now on damage limitation.
Nature: President Barack Obama's appointment of academic scientists and economists to positions of high authority in his administration has created the sort of excitement in universities and among researchers that has not been seen for eight years. Certainly, after George W. Bush's grudging agreement to a constricted program of stem-cell research and his politicization of scientific findings about the environment, Obama's choice of prominent scholars is a breath of fresh air.
Yet before the country's, or indeed the world's, academics become too excited about the latest professors at the White House, they would do well to recall that US presidents have repeatedly turned to academic stars for advice during the past century, with mixed results. That academics have an imperfect record as presidential advisers is not to doubt that their expertise has considerable value. But no one should assume that an impressive academic track record guarantees good policy. Far more important is an ability to remain independent and offer advice based on sound evidence.
NASA blogs: (opinion expressed by Wayne Hale).
Education is one of the most important topics to Americans. As a nation we devote huge resources to educating our children, local school boards and state government last year spent over $800 billion on education. At the federal level, the Department of Education's budget last year was just over $57 billion. This represents substantially more money than the nation spent on national defense in all its aspects including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, national intelligence, and the department of homeland security.
In fact, the national average secondary schooling expenditure per child in the United States is third in the world, behind only Switzerland and Finland and well ahead of Germany, Japan, South Korea, and China.
Yet, by all objective measures, American students are significantly lagging in almost every area to their foreign counterparts. Math, Science, even language testing scores lag significantly behind other modern industrialized nations.
Equally troubling is the decline in college graduates in engineering, mathematics, and science.
During the 20th century, there were two significant periods of growth in the training of American engineers, mathematicians, and scientists. The first was World War II and its immediate aftermath. Certainly we would rather not expand our capability based on a war, and the circumstances of the GI bill may not be applicable. The other period of expansion was shortly after Sputnik and the decline started with the end of Apollo. Is there a lesson here?
If you really want students to learn, they must be interested; more than that students must be excited, they must be inspired.
We need inspiration, [and] what NASA has provided in the past, NASA can provide again: inspiration.
BBC: Iran has welcomed an offer of talks with six world powers over its nuclear program, state television says.
Los Angeles Times: A research team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore used the Spitzer infrared telescope to search for hydrogen cyanide in the dust and gas swirling around 61 young stars. Hydrogen cyanide is a component of a compound basic to DNA, which is found in every living creature on Earth.
After breaking down the light of these stars with a spectrograph, the researchers found hydrogen cyanide in 30% of the yellow, sun-like stars. They found none around cooler, smaller stars, such as M-dwarfs and brown dwarfs.
Assuming that life, if it forms, is based on DNA, "around cooler stars, there might not be enough hydrogen cyanide" to kick-start the complex chemical reactions necessary to form life, said Ilaria Pascucci of Johns Hopkins, lead author of the research, which is appearing this week in the Astrophysical Journal.
Wired: Size matters in particle physics: The bigger the machine, the more violently physicists can smash atoms together and break open the deepest mysteries of the subatomic world. But a revolutionary new technology could eventually render some gargantuan particle accelerators passé.
The Washington Post: Days after the Obama administration unveiled a push to combat climate change, Indian officials said it was unlikely to prompt them to agree to binding emission cuts, a position among emerging economies that many say derails effective action.
The Washington Post: Surojit Sarkar thought he would be in New Delhi for just a few weeks. Now, more than three months later, Sarkar is still here, trapped in administrative limbo over his US work visa status. He says consular agents flagged his visa renewal application for security reasons.
Sarkar is one of thousands of highly skilled scientists, professors and technology workers from Beijing to Belarus who have been stranded in their home countries in recent months, upsetting their lives, their jobs and their children's schooling. Many wonder whether the United States still wants its foreign scientists.
The New York Times: More than any nation I've ever visited, Costa Rica is insisting that economic growth and environmentalism work together. It has created a holistic strategy to think about growth, one that demands that everything gets counted. So if a chemical factory sells tons of fertilizer but pollutes a river -- or a farm sells bananas but destroys a carbon-absorbing and species-preserving forest -- this is not honest growth. You have to pay for using nature. It is called "payment for environmental services" -- nobody gets to treat climate, water, coral, fish and forests as free anymore.
Nature: North Korean rocket trajectory may be too shallow for satellite launch.
Los Angeles Times: On a day marking its first enrichment of uranium, Iran announces two new types of centrifuges and a nuclear fuel production plant.
The Daily Telegraph: Geologists studying how molten metal coagulates at the centre of planets while they are forming have discovered that their research can also be used to investigate blood flow in the human heart.
Their work has already helped surgeons find the location of a potentially life-threatening blood clot in a patient's heart.
Using sophisticated computer modelling developed to explore the flow of liquid metal through rocks, the scientists were able to show doctors where the patient's blood was gathering in a pool in their heart due to a blood clot.
The Guardian: Here's a puzzle. Bristol boy – slightly older contemporary of Bristol's other boy Cary Grant – has an unhappy childhood, but doesn't mention it for 50 years; learns to speak French, German and Russian, but becomes famous for his long silences; embarks on the wrong career; gets interested in mathematics and ends up at Cambridge, where he becomes famous for his even longer silences; hears about Einstein and gets into advanced physics; and then goes to Copenhagen to meet Niels Bohr, who grumbles to Ernest Rutherford, "This Dirac, he seems to know a lot of physics, but he never says anything."
Science: Tight budgets are pushing the U.S. and European space agencies to consider a truly collaborative series of missions to Mars. What would it mean for science?
Did Mars ever harbor life? The multibillion-dollar quest to find out faces an uncertain future on both sides of the Atlantic. The European Space Agency (ESA) lacks the money to carry out its ambitious blueprint for putting a sophisticated lander and rover on Mars's surface in 2016. And NASA is grappling with major cost increases and delays in its Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) that are eating up funding for future missions.
Did Mars ever harbor life? The multibillion-dollar quest to find out faces an uncertain future on both sides of the Atlantic. The European Space Agency (ESA) lacks the money to carry out its ambitious blueprint for putting a sophisticated lander and rover on Mars's surface in 2016. And NASA is grappling with major cost increases and delays in its Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) that are eating up funding for future missions.
To avoid hanging separately, say scientists and managers in the United States and Europe, the two agencies must agree to hang together in an unprecedented partnership. This summer they intend to unveil a sweeping plan for a decade of collaboration that could kick off with a joint 2016 mission and culminate a decade later in the return of a martian sample to Earth. "This is a big change," says David Southwood, ESA science chief. "But we have to think about Mars differently." Adds his counterpart at NASA, Edward Weiler: "We've got to do this together."
Nature: Understanding the mechanisms by which matter flows into black-hole systems is pivotal to elucidating how such systems work. It seems that a 'quiet' mass outflow can play a hitherto-unknown part in the process.
BBC: The "baby-boomer Universe" has been seen in unprecedented detail by a telescope slung beneath a balloon.
ScienceNow: Three weeks into his job as head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, presidential science adviser John Holdren has laid out clear positions on myriad issues facing the Obama Administration.
Associated Press: Watchdog groups want the U.S. to reduce its nuclear weapons complex to just three sites as a step toward the nuclear arms-free world that President Barack Obama envisioned in a speech days ago in Prague.
Environmental News Network: The US Environmental Protection Agency is adding nine new hazardous waste sites that pose risks to human health and the environment to the National Priorities List of Superfund sites. Also, EPA is proposing to add 13 other sites to the list. Superfund is the federal program that investigates and cleans up the most complex, uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites in the country.
NPR: It all started with the Big Bang, but then what? In a special broadcast from the Origins Symposium at Arizona State University, physicists Larence Krauss, Brian Greene, Michael Turner, and Steven Weinberg discuss the origin of the universe, how the Large Hadron Collider research fits in and what particle physics can explain about how the universe began.
Scientific Blogging: Unless you are a true baseball fan, you have probably never heard of Bob Feller. Maybe you have heard of Nolan Ryan. They were classic power pitchers. They threw hard and they threw for strikes.
Even if you are a baseball fan, unless you live and breathe the Detroit Tigers, you have probably never heard of Joel Zumaya.
Nature: Efforts intensify after eruptions in Alaska and Chile.
Physics Today: Eugenio Coccia, the director of Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory is, reporting that the facility is undamaged by the recent earthquake.
Gran Sasso is the world's largest underground laboratory for experiments in particle physics, particle astrophysics, and nuclear astrophysics. The laboratory consists of three large halls, each 100 m long and 20 m wide, inside a 10 km-long tunnel cut into Gran Sasso mountain, which shields the experiments from most cosmic and local radiation. More than 750 scientists work at the facility.
In an e-mail sent to members of the physics community, Coccia said, "All the experiments are working smoothly, and the external buildings have been essentially untouched."
Coccia thanked the community for the messages of solidarity and sympathy.
As a precaution, access to the laboratory will be limited for the following week.
Related News Pick
2009 L'Aquila Earthquake
Nature News: The fundamental asymmetry in the laws of physics called charge-parity violation is tiny, yet it looms large enough in physics to have led to Nobel prizes on three occasions. A persistent puzzle is why the asymmetry is so small -- some theories imply that it could, and perhaps should, be much bigger. Now, research is bolstering a previous suggestion that the smallness is not a mystery but rather an inevitable consequence of another basic fact in physics: that the three known families of quarks have the masses that they do.
The New York Times: For the first time, countries bound by separate international agreements managing human affairs at the two poles met together Monday in a special session at State Department headquarters in Washington.
Nature: Third time unlucky as payload plunges into the Pacific.
Physics Today: Updated 4/8/2009 An earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale hit central Italy at 1:32 GMT. last night causing thousands of people to lose their homes more than 250 deaths (see USGS map below). "It was felt across the whole of Italy, but most strongly in central Italy," said Stuart Sipkin, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey's (USGS's) National Earthquake Information Center.
The region had experienced a large number of minor tremors over the past four months, including a 4.0-magnitude event on 30 March.
Most of the damage surrounds the city of L'Aquila, which includes one of the oldest centers of learning in Europe, the University of L'Aquila. More than 4,000 buildings in the city have collapsed.
"We did know there would be quite a lot of damage because of the USGS Pager (Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response) system," said Sipkin. "We can take our estimates of ground shaking and basically overlay this on a population density map, and we could see that [with the earthquake] a lot of people were exposed to large ground shaking," he added.
Enzo Boschi, the chairman of Italy's National Institute for Geophysics and Vulcanology, (INGV) told ANSA, an Italian news service, that the damage was extensive because the buildings were not designed to withstand earthquakes.
According to the New York Times, one of the four-story-high student dormitories collapsed, with one person dead and several missing. "This shouldn't have happened," said Gabriele Magrini, a physics student at the university. He told the New York Times that he was lucky enough to have been at a friend's house when the quake struck and that he had been waiting at the university since 4am, adding, "We've only seen two people come out. We're still waiting for 10."
Geographical history
Italy is a well-known complex earthquake zone, said Sipkin. "It's not a simple area like the West Coast of California where you have two large plates sliding against each other along the San Andreas fault.... You have the collision of Africa and Europe, its highly fractured and broken up, there's a lot of microplates moving around, which creates a lot of different types of fault action. This particular fault zone usually gives extensional earthquakes, but there's lots of different types of earthquakes that could happen."
There is a major fault line that runs north–south along Italy's Apennine Mountain Range and a minor east–west faultline that runs across the center of the country that produces frequent small earthquakes.
According to the US Geological Survey, the earthquake struck at a depth of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles), with an epicenter approximately 95 kilometers (60 mi) north–east of Rome, close to L'Aquila. The city has experienced major earthquakes in the past, but nothing on this scale since 1703.
"The duration of ground shaking depends on where you are. If you're on a hard surface, it ends pretty quickly, but if you're in a sedimentary built-up valley, then it would last longer," said Sipkin.
Two smaller quakes—(one at 4.8 on the Ritcher scale)—had hit the region the day before, which weakened many buildings before the main earthquake hit. Smaller aftershocks, which frequently occur after a significant earthquake, are still continuing.
''It was a common tremor for the Apennine mountain chain, one which occurs when underground shelves shift by ten centimeters or so,'' said Boschi. But it is impossible to predict when such tremors will happen, Boschi told ANSA, ''because the parameter variables change constantly. However, in the near future there should be no other ones similar in magnitude to the one last night, although we can expect aftershocks to continue in addition to the over 100 we have already recorded."
Controversy has erupted over Italian television reports that Gioacchino Giuliani, a laboratory technician, had predicted the earthquake but was told by authorities to take down his findings from a website.
Giuliani used a radon gas technique to make the earthquake prediction. Ignazio Guerra of the University of Calabria said that it is impossible to rely on that technique to predict an earthquake: ''There have been earthquakes without the emission of radon gas just as there have been emissions of radon gas without earthquakes. Thus this method is far from perfect."
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Gran Sasso laboratory undamaged in L'Aquila earthquake
Related Link
Quake 'Practically Destroys' University in Italy, With Some Students Trapped or Killed Chronicle of Higher Education
The Washington Post: NASA has a space station, three space shuttles, two moon rockets under development, a fleet of robotic space probes, dozens of satellites, tens of thousands of employees and a budget that is creeping toward $20 billion a year. What it needs is a boss.
The New York Times: Theoretical physicists are not yet obsolete, but scientists have taken a couple of steps toward replacing themselves.
Nature: Science and Technology Facilities Council scraps Clover project to hunt for universe's polarization.
Wired.com: Electric cars have been getting a lot of buzz lately, but a more immediately viable transportation fuel of the future could be liquid derived from coal. Scientists have devised a new way to transform coal into gas for your car using far less energy than the current process. The advance makes scaling up the environmentally unfriendly fuel more economical than greener alternatives.
If oil prices rise again, adoption of the new coal-to-liquid technology, reported this week in Science, could undercut adoption of electric vehicles or next-generation biofuels. And that's bad news for the fight against climate change.
The Irish Times: The coefficient of restitution (Cor) of a golf club is a measure of the efficiency of energy transfer between the golf club head and the golf ball. The upper Cor limit for a golf club in competition is 0.83, which means that a golf club head striking a golf ball at 100km per hour will cause the ball to travel at 83km/h. The thinner faced titanium clubs, such as the King Cobra LD, have a greater Cor and deform more easily on impact – the “trampoline effect” – not only driving the golf ball further, but producing a louder noise than the stainless steel golf drivers.
A recent British Medical Journal paper describes a man aged 55 who presented to an eye, ear, nose and throat clinic with tinnitus and reduced hearing in his right ear. He had been playing golf three times a week for 18 months using a King Cobra LD titanium club and he described the noise of the club hitting the ball as “like a gun going off”. He found the noise so unpleasant he was forced to discard the club. After detailed examination it was concluded that his hearing impairment was due to the noise of the golf club hitting the golf ball.
Computerworld: MIT researchers say they've combined nanotechnology with genetically engineered viruses to build batteries that could power hybrid cars and cell phones.
NPR: California's utilities are in a tight spot. They're mandated to procure 20 percent of their electricity from renewable resources by the end of next year.
Nature: Astronomers revise galaxy-formation models with the discovery that early galaxies could have grown fat -- fast.
The New York Times: Martin J. Klein, a historian of modern physics and the editor of a vast collection of papers that documented the years in which Albert Einstein completed his revolutionary work on the general theory of relativity, died Saturday in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 84 and lived in Chapel Hill.
MSNBC: The wonders of outer space get a double dose of worldwide exposure starting today – first with an event called "100 Hours of Astronomy," and then with the annual Yuri's Night celebration.
BBC: Scientists have detected particles that may come from invisible "dark matter."
Science: Life could be a lot easier if every scientist had a unique identification number. The question is: Who should provide them?
San Francisco Chronicle: After more than a decade of work and an investment of $3.5 billion, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory say they have created a super laser that will enable them to build a miniature sun within the lab in the next two years.
FOXNews: President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday announced a renewed effort to cut back their stockpiles of nuclear warheads, after their first face-to-face meeting ahead of the G20 economic meetings.
The New York Times: Arizona Republican John McCain said today that he will promote amendments to a Senate energy bill that would abandon the Yucca Mountain, Nev., nuclear waste dump and refund about $16 billion in waste fees to electricity ratepayers.
