Science News: Undergoing a virtual colonoscopy might be just the ticket for people at high risk of colorectal cancer who need screening every few years, a new study finds. By spotting 85 percent of polyps, computed tomography scans offer a way to detect the precancerous growths in a way that is less invasive than a conventional colonoscopy, a European team of researchers reports in the 17 June Journal of the American Medical Association.
June 2009 Archives
The Independent: The most powerful camera that has ever been used to survey another planet is capturing spectacular pictures of the surface of Mars to reveal a rich tapestry of geological features.
Located on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a Nasa probe launched in 2005, the HiRise camera has already taken detailed images of the outlines of ancient extra-terrestrial seas and rivers—the first unambiguous evidence that shorelines once existed on the Red Planet.
The camera has also witnessed in high-resolution detail the moment when the warmth of the Martian spring forced puffs of dust through the thin polar caps of dry ice—solid carbon dioxide—to form weird "starburst" patterns on the surface of the planet.
"Spring on Mars is quite different from spring on Earth because Mars has not just permanent ice caps, but also seasonal polar caps of carbon dioxide," said Candice Hansen-Koharcheck, of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Various: Cosmologist Adrian Melott has been researching for some time mass extinctions in the Earth's fossil records and linking them to astrophysical events.
Recently, Melott and Brian Thomas looked at the Ordovician extinction, which occurred 450 million years ago and resulted in the loss of 60% of marine invertebrates.
According to computer simulations and matched with the fossil record, they find that their data suggests that photons from a gamma-ray burst approximately over the South Pole (and no further than -75 degrees) caused the atmosphere's chemistry to change, doubling the level of ultraviolet-B solar radiation reaching the surface.
In this scenario parts of north China, Laurentia, and New Guinea—which lay north of the equator—should be a refuge from the ultraviolet effects, and show a different pattern of extinction in the "first strike" of the end-Ordovician extinction, if it was induced by such a radiation event.
Melott cautions that gamma-rays or x-rays may not be the main cause for extinction events but could be the trigger for tipping an already stressed environment into a catastrophic event.
In a broader article in SEED magazine Melott talks about his earlier research on cyclic mass extinctions.
There are at least 20 mass extinctions throughout the fossil record that fit a 62-million year cycle. Sometime ago Melott suggested that the solar-system's orbit around the Milky Way's center—which oscillates through the galactic plane with a period of around 65 million years, is the key—the galactic magnetic field protects the solar-system from extragalactic cosmic rays.
As the solar system "bobs" out of the galactic plane it becomes exposed to these cosmic rays which can cause enhanced cloud formation and depletion of the ozone layer, killing off many small organisms at the base of the food chain and potentially leading to a population crash.
Related Links
The Extinction Oscillator
Do Extragalactic Cosmic Rays Induce Cycles in Fossil Diversity?
Related Physics Today article
Recent Nearby Supernovae May Have Left Their Marks on Earth May 2002
Carnegie Institution for Science: Emergency plans to counteract global warming by artificially shading the Earth from incoming sunlight might lower the planet’s temperature a few degrees, but such “geoengineering” solutions would do little to stop the acidification of the world oceans that threatens coral reefs and other marine life, report the authors of a new study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The culprit is atmospheric carbon dioxide, which even in a cooler globe will continue to be absorbed by seawater, creating acidic conditions.
Related Link
Sensitivity of ocean acidification to geoengineered climate stabilization
Nature: LaHaye and colleagues have taken an important step towards the observation of quantum phenomena in nearly macroscopic moving objects.
They report experimental evidence of an intriguing interplay between a superconducting artificial atom and a micrometre-size mechanical resonator. Remarkably, their findings can be described using the 'language' of radiation–matter interactions, which has also been successful in explaining the coupling of a superconducting artificial atom to microwave photon.
Related Link
Nanomechanical measurements of a superconducting qubit
UC Santa Cruz: Astronomers Bülent Kiziltan and Stephen Thorsett of the University of California, Santa Cruz, have come up with a more accurate way to peg the ages of millisecond pulsars.
The standard method for estimating pulsar ages is known to yield unreliable results, especially for the fast-spinning millisecond pulsars, says Kiziltan.
"An accurate determination of pulsar ages is of fundamental importance, because it has ramifications for understanding the formation and evolution of pulsars, the physics of neutron stars, and other areas," he adds.
The standard approach to determine the "characteristic" or "spin-down" age of a pulsar is based on two parameters: the period between pulses and the rate at which they slow down. Kiziltan and Thorsett showed that this method may over- or under-estimate the age of a pulsar by a factor of 10 when applied to millisecond pulsars.
To improve the accuracy of the standard technique, they incorporated additional constraints that arise from the spin-up process and physical limits on the maximum spin period. "We modified the age calculations to be consistent with these constraints and showed that this approach can achieve estimates closer to the true age of the pulsar," Kiziltan says.
By including in their model previously ignored features such as the maximum possible rate of rotation and subtle shifts in the observed radio frequency due to a pulsar’s motion across the sky, the team finds that some millisecond pulsars are up to 10 times younger or 10 times older than earlier estimates suggest.
Washington Post: Federal investigators at the GAO say the next generation radiation detectors—that are scheduled to be bought by the Department of Homeland Security—are only marginally better at detecting hidden nuclear material in cargo containers than monitors already at US ports, but would cost more than twice as much.
The monitors now in use can detect the presence of radiation, but they cannot distinguish between threatening and nonthreatening material. Radioactive material can be found naturally in ceramics and kitty litter, but would be of no use in making a bomb, for instance.
The DHS has said the new machines it is developing can distinguish between kitty litter and dangerous radioactive material and produce fewer false alarms than the current ones.
The new one are also better at detecting lightly shielded material. But the machines perform at about the same level when detecting radiological and nuclear materials hidden in a lead box or casing, the most likely way a terrorist would try to sneak the materials into this country.
Physics Today: On Friday, the Democrats narrowly won passage in the House for the 1200-page American Clean Energy and Security Act by a 219–212 vote—two votes more than required.
The bill calls on the US to cut production of greenhouse gases by 17% of 1990 levels by 2020 and 83% by mid-century. Currently US greenhouse gas emissions are rising on average by 1% each year.
Despite statements on both sides of the aisle insisting that they want to combat climate change, a number of Republicans and Democrats have been mounting a rear-guard action to weaken the bill, particularly in its long and convoluted passage through the House Energy and Commerce committee.
The outcome depended on locking in the so-called "Blue Dog Democrats" and the number of moderate Republicans—despite pressure from Republican leadership to kill the bill (more).
In his weekly address President Obama hailed the bill and stated that he was looking forward to the Senate clearing passage "so that we can say, at long last, that this was the moment when we decided to confront America's energy challenge and reclaim America's future."
"As this legislation moves to the Senate, it is also important to consider its international implications," says Eileen Claussen of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change . "Enactment of a comprehensive energy and climate bill along the lines of the ACES Act will finally allow the US to help lead the efforts toward a global agreement in which the major economies of the world, both developed and developing, play their part to address the climate challenge."
Related Links
House narrowly passes climate change bill Physics Today
House Passes Bill to Address Threat of Climate Change New York Times
Climate Change Activists Dismayed by Some of Bill's Provisions Washington Post
ScienceNOW: Scientists probing the outer reaches of our solar system have hit upon an unusual phenomenon much closer to home. Instruments aboard a NASA spacecraft have detected fast-moving hydrogen atoms emanating from the Moon. The atoms, which originated as protons from the Sun, may help scientists study the lunar surface and other solar system objects in greater detail than believed possible.
The Guardian: America's emerging clean energy economy created new jobs at twice the rate as more traditional industries in the years leading up to the economic downturn, a new study released today claimed.
The report by the Pew Charitable Trusts provides the first hard evidence of jobs created by the rising demand for environmentally friendly services, and in the new clean energy sectors like wind and solar.
It said such jobs grew at a rate of 9.1% from 1998–2007, easily outstripping job growth in traditional areas of the economy, which was 3.7%.
The study stopped before the economic downturn, which has caused steep job losses in the traditional economy. Some 347,000 Americans were put out of work in May alone.
However, its authors also noted that the rapid growth came at a time when there was little or no federal government support for clean energy—unlike today when Barack Obama has committed to greening the economy.
Nature News: The US automobile industry is in the midst of a historic makeover as the Obama administration ushers General Motors (GM) and Chrysler, two of the erstwhile "big three" car manufacturers, through bankruptcy. Nature News takes a look at the implications for corporate research and development (R&D), including the future of electric transport.
Physics Today: Cambridge Consultants Ltd have developed the world's first virtually waterless washing machine in conjunction with Stephen Burkinshaw, from the University of Leeds who came up with the technique, and a university startup company called Xeros Ltd.
The prototype washing machine saves 90% more efficient in water use than a conventional machine.
The water is replaced by reusable nylon polymer beads which can clean the clothes faster, using 30% less energy and just a drop of detergent.
The machine consists of two drums—an inner drum containing the clothes and the outer drum containing the beads. During the wash both drums rotate, mixing the beads and clothes together. At the end of the cycle, the outer drum stops rotating to that the beads are spun out and captured by centrifugal force, leaving the clothes behind. Nearly 99.95% of the beads are caught using this method, and a vacuum trap that is pulled out of the machine before unloading captures the majority of the remaining beads.
“Whilst we are still at a relatively early stage of this development, we have demonstrated that it is possible to develop a commercially viable washing machine that is capable of delivering all the benefits that Xeros expects from its revolutionary technology,” says Nathan Wrench, programme manager at Cambridge Consultants.
Xeros aims to have a commercially viable product in production by the end of 2010. The company’s first target will be the commercial washing market, including hotels, care homes, and high street washing outlets.
Calgary Herald: It's a little-known natural wonder along Baffin Island's rugged east coast, a spectacular, 110-km-long channel lined by towering cliffs that — despite its extreme remoteness — is a mecca for base-jumping enthusiasts from around the world.
But U.S. scientists who have reconstructed a cataclysmic glacial meltdown in prehistoric Canada say Nunavut's Sam Ford Fiord is also a sentinel of danger in the age of climate change, showing just how quickly the planet's massive coastal glaciers could disappear and send global sea levels surging.
Their study, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, says the rapid melting of the fiord's colossal, kilometre-deep glacier about 9,500 years ago is proof that similar features found today in Greenland, Canada and Antarctica could be lost "in a geologic instant."
Related Link
Rapid early Holocene retreat of a Laurentide outlet glacier through an Arctic fjord
Science: Descending into the limestone valley where China has chosen to build its paramount telescope is a treacherous hike. So steep and vast is the depression that the few dozen villagers who live at the bottom rarely leave.
Scale is precisely what China is going for with the 500-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), a massive instrument that the government hopes will thrust China to the forefront of radio astronomy.
This month, engineers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing will drill into this remote corner of Guizhou Province for a final round of geo-engineering studies before breaking ground later this year.
When FAST sees first light in 2014, it will measure more than five football fields in diameter, making it the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world.
Related Link
FAST web site (in Chinese)
SPACE.com: The inner workings of sunspots—those dark blotches that mark intense magnetic activity on the sun's surface—have long been a mystery, but a new computer simulation is providing a more realistic look inside them.
Understanding the complex dynamics that drive sunspots could help scientists better understand and predict the potential impacts on communications systems and climate patterns of the geomagnetic storms produced by these solar blights.
"This is the first time we have a model of an entire sunspot," said Matthias Rempel of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. "If you want to understand all the drivers of Earth's atmospheric system, you have to understand how sunspots emerge and evolve."
Nature News: Metrologists are on a path to redefine the unit of temperature. The freezing point of water will never be the same again, finds Nicola Jones.
Times Online: Ever since the industrial revolution, science has driven the global economy. As a scientific nation, the UK is, by most indicators, second only to the US. But this is not fully reflected in our economic strength, so where have we gone wrong?
In these tough times, we are refocusing on how best to harness this strength to our national advantage. Political responsibility for nurturing our academic talent and for unlocking its economic benefit now rests with a single “super-ministry”: the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and particularly in the hands of Lords Mandelson and Drayson.
It seems clear in retrospect that this country was precariously overdependent on its financial sector; so the new ministry's aim should be to ensure that our science and engineering strength enables us to emerge from the downturn with a more diversified economy. There should plainly be special boosts for sectors ripe for exploitation—via, for instance, the Technology Strategy Board. But is important that long-term prospects—and the strength and breadth of the UK's academic base—should not be jeopardised.
Science News: Scientists say they have seen the first direct evidence of lightning on Mars, in the form of electrical discharges during a Martian dust storm.
The finding has implications for human travel to the Red Planet and for studying possible origins of life on Mars, the authors say in a paper to appear in Geophysical Research Letters.
It has been thought that lightning might be possible on Mars. Bits of dust rubbing against each other in one of the planet’s famous dust devils could charge up the particles the same way that running on a carpet charges up socks. All that charge could then be discharged in a zap, either as lightning or a shock.
But catching Martian lightning in the act was difficult: The lightning bursts were too small to distinguish from the energy emanating from the planet itself. And the dust storms themselves obscured the faint glow that might have been visible from just above the red planet.
Related Link
Emission of non-thermal microwave radiation by a Martian dust storm
Caltech/JPL: In this spoof of old TV action shows, Sean Astin, Osa Wallander, and Betty White search for a way to help the Spitzer Space Telescope after it runs out of coolant. The video was produced with the assistance of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Spitzer ran out of coolant on May 15 and as the video suggests, some of the instruments on the observatory will still be able to operate normally.
NPR: WolframAlpha, the website developed by the British-born scientist Stephen Wolfram, is billed as a computational knowledge engine.
The search engine that is brimming with data can answer all sorts of questions.
Wolfram, who has a background in mathematics and physics, says the concept is to take the systematic knowledge accumulated in the history of civilization and try and make it computable.
"One of the things we're trying to do is to get it so that if science, engineering have made it possible to compute something, we want to make it easy to compute something for anybody," he says.
The Observer: It is 40 years since the words, "The Eagle has landed," sent a thrill around the world. The Apollo moon missions were to herald a new dawn of space exploration, of lunar bases, manned missions to Mars, and more. But in the decades since—and after the shuttle disasters—America's appetite for interplanetary flight dwindled. The Moon landings marked not the beginning, but the end, of our space dreams, argues Robin McKie.
Nature: Jupiter's moon Io is about the same size as our Moon, but the similarities end there.
Its motion around Jupiter is tightly constrained by its gravitational interactions with the giant planet and with two of Jupiter's other moons, Europa and Ganymede.
Io's orbital imprisonment is the cause of its spectacular volcanism. But Valéry Lainey, Jean-Eudes Arlot, Özgür Karatekin, and Tim Van Hoolst have provided evidence that Io is loosening the bonds that hold it in its unexpectedly elliptical path around Jupiter. If it eventually breaks free, the most volcanically active object in our Solar System will become dormant.
Related Link
Strong tidal dissipation in Io and Jupiter from astrometric observations
Physics Today: The Large Hadron Collider is on schedule to restart in the fall, but running three weeks late, says CERN Director General Rolf Heuer.
The delay will push back the restart of the project until October.
A bad break
The LHC has been offline since an incident on 19 September, caused by a faulty splice in the high-current superconducting cable between two superconducting magnets in sector 3-4.
There are more than 10,000 similar splices in the LHC, all of which are currently being checked for flaws.
The incident caused CERN to develop some noninvasive techniques to check for bad joints in the system while the collider is cooled down below 80 kelvin.
More than 39 dipole and 14 quadrupole magnets were taken to the surface for repairs.
Heuer told the CERN council last week that these tests indicate there could be another faulty splice in Sector 4-5.
CERN has also modified and conducted a major upgrade of the magnets' safety system to limit the damage another break could cause if a similar incident happens again.
14 TeV?
Meanwhile, the LHC may not run at full capacity for sometime. The existing repairs will allow the device to run at a collision energy of 8 TeV, but further modifications will be required to run at 10 TeV collision energy or higher.
According to reports of a talk given by Jörg Wenninger—who is from CERN Beams department's operation group—there are problems with quenching the magnets from one of the three firms that supplied CERN. This new quality control issue could mean that the LHC may not be able to go above 10 TeV collisions.
Related Link
Status of the LHC Machine
Science News: Betelgeuse, one of the brightest stars visible to the naked eye, has shrunk in diameter by more than 15 percent since 1993.
The star, a red supergiant, has a radius exceeding the distance between the sun and Jupiter. The shrinkage corresponds to the star contracting by a distance equal to that between Venus and the sun, researchers reported June 9 at an American Astronomical Society meeting and in the June 1 Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Related Link
A systematic change with time in the size of Betelgeuse
Yale Environment 360: Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson has been roundly criticized for insisting global warming is not an urgent problem, with many climate scientists dismissing him as woefully ill-informed. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Dyson explains his iconoclastic views and why he believes they have stirred such controversy.
ScienceNOW: New research shows that the smaller droplets in a rainstorm often surpass what appears to be the speed limit for rain. The findings should help scientists devise models that could lead to more accurate weather forecasts.
Los Angeles Times: Cosmologist Wendy Freedman of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena explains her work on the Hubble constant, used to measure the universe's expansion, to LA Times reporter John Johnson Jr. She was named a recipient of the Gruber Prize.
CNET News: General Motors opened the doors to a battery research and development plant in Michigan on Monday, a facility the company says will accelerate its move to electric vehicles.
The Global Battery Systems Lab in Warren, Mich., will be used to test the lithium ion batteries planned for the Chevy Volt as well as other energy storage systems such as ultracapacitors, GM said.
The facility, at 33,000 square feet, is four times larger than GM's existing testing operation and will be used by 1,000 engineers, according to the company which hosted a ceremony with Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm and GM CEO Fritz Henderson.
Chronicle.com: The research output of faculty members at American colleges appears to be suffering at least in part as a result of declining financial support and scholars’ unwillingness to engage in collaborations with their peers abroad, according to a new analysis of international survey data.
The data analysis, discussed this month at the annual conference of the Association for Institutional Research, also concludes that US scholars have less time for and less interest in research than they did before, which is probably contributing to their productivity decline.
A rise in the share of US faculty members who are untenured or work part time also may be playing a role because academics who have shaky employment status or are part time probably do not accomplish as much in research as do their tenured or full-time peers.
SPACE.com: There have been raging debates over the years as to whether there is frozen water on the moon or not.
Earlier today two NASA spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the LCROSS impactor, blasted off on NASA's first mission to the moon in more than a decade.
Any ice they discover could not only answer some challenging questions about the geological history of the Moon, but also to support further space exploration.
Times Higher Education: The use of citations to determine the quality of academic work in the hard sciences is to be abandoned in favour of peer review in the new system being designed to replace the research assessment exercise.
However, information about the number of citations a scholar's work accrues could be provided to assessment panels to help "inform" their judgments in a range of subjects.
At a conference on the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF) this week, the Higher Education Funding Council for England sketched out how it intends to assess the quality of research outputs in the system, which will determine the allocation of $2.9 billion of annual research funding from 2014.
"We just don't think bibliometrics are sufficiently mature at this stage to be used in a formulaic way or, indeed, to replace expert review," said Graeme Rosenberg, Hefce's REF project manager. "However, there is still scope for bibliometrics to inform the assessment process."
Nature News: Beijing spent the run-up to last year's Olympic Games claiming that the city's air had been drastically cleaned up, but those measurements are now being called into question.
Using an air pollution index (API) in which a score of 100 or lower indicates air quality as 'good', all 17 days of Olympic events in Beijing made the grade. Overall, the city hit an all-time high of 274 good air days in 2008.
APIs can be calculated in various different ways; Beijing's includes measurements of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and particles smaller than 10 micrometres across — dubbed PM10. Controversially, it has not previously used low-level ozone measurements to calculate APIs, and it does not report on the level of particles smaller than 2.5 micrometres across (known as PM2.5). Both ozone and PM2.5 have potential negative impacts on health.
Now, Jian Wang of the Chinese environment ministry's pollution-prevention division has admitted that visibility in eastern cities in China is deteriorating. He says that the cause is ozone pollution and, especially, PM2.5.
Related Link
Inconsistencies in air quality metrics: 'Blue Sky' days and PM10 concentrations in Beijing
COSMOS magazine: Light pollution has caused 20% of the world's population —mostly in Europe, Britain and the US—to lose their ability to see the Milky Way in the night sky.
"The arc of the Milky Way seen from a truly dark location is part of our planet's natural heritage," said Connie Walker, and astronomer from the US National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.
Yet "more than one fifth of the world population, two thirds of the U.S. population and one half of the European Union population have already lost naked eye visibility of the Milky Way."
ScienceNOW: The first electric motor whirred to life nearly 2 centuries ago, and in recent decades scientists and engineers have worked to build ever-smaller ones.
Now, a team of theoretical physicists has proposed a fully quantum-mechanical version of the classic spinning electric motor that consists of just two atoms trapped in a ring of light.
Experimenters might be able to construct the thing now, the researchers say, even though they themselves don't have an intuitive explanation of exactly how it works.
The Economist: Chunqi Jiang, a physicist at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and her colleagues have come up with a way to kill bacterial infections that appear as a biofilm on the roots of teeth: use of a "cold" plasma torch.
Plasmas are gases in which the molecules have been stripped of some or all of their electrons, to create positive ions. Cold plasmas can be made using high electrical voltages.
The team report in Plasma Processes and Polymers that when their plasma plume was directed into the infected interiors of teeth, it succeeded in clearing up well-established infections completely.
Related Link
Nanosecond Pulsed Plasma Dental Probe
Exploration magazine: Vanderbilt University physicists have found a way to make nanoparticle films strong enough so they don't disintegrate at the slightest touch.
Nanoparticles—ultrafine particles with diameters less than 100 nanometers—typically consist of an inorganic core coated with a thin layer of organic molecules.
These particles are not very sticky so they don't form coherent thin films unless they are encapsulated in a polymer coating or mixed with molecules called chemical "cross-linkers" that act like glue to stick the nanoparticles together. This makes the film expensive.
The Vanderbilt University physicists added a spun-cast layer of polymer to the electrodes that serves as a pattern that organizes the nanoparticles as they are deposited in a technique called electrophoretic deposition. Then, after the deposition process is completed, they dissolve (sacrifice) the polymer layer to free the nanoparticle film.
Related Link
Sacrificial layer electrophoretic deposition of freestanding multilayered nanoparticle films
ScienceNOW: Taming the infamous San Andreas fault with buried nuclear bombs or deep grease injections is the stuff of science fiction, but Mother Nature herself may be defusing a major fault in Taiwan, China.
Researchers are now showing that typhoons passing over the island have been triggering quakes that harmlessly release fault strain over hours and days rather than destructively over seconds or minutes. And these slow earthquakes, they speculate, may be staving off a big one.
Nature News: Nanocrystals called quantum dots have promised to revolutionize display technologies, solar power and biological imaging for more than a decade. Yet the quantum-dot market has remained small, with a handful of companies selling dots directly to researchers, using the particles to develop their own products or licensing their technologies to partners.
"Quantum dots have been around for quite a while, but they're taking a really long time to mature," says David Hwang of the market-analysis company Lux Research in New York. A key barrier is price: quantum dots can cost anywhere from US$3,000 to $10,000 per gram, restricting their use to highly specialized applications.
But industry analysts are now predicting extremely rapid growth for the market over the next few years, driven by demand for energy-efficient displays and lighting, and enabled by cheaper, more efficient manufacturing processes. In September 2008, market-research company BCC Research of Wellesley, Massachusetts, predicted that the market for products relying on quantum dots would grow from $28.6 million in 2008 to $721 million by 2013, with particularly rapid growth in the optoelectronics sector from 2010.
SPACE.com: Cosmic debris stripped away from the wreck of colliding galaxies has been found by the Subaru telescope atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
The debris fields could shed light on galaxy formation and starburst activity in the early universe by allowing astronomers to retrace the paths of the colliding galaxies before they merged.
"This is equivalent to finally being able to trace the skid marks on the road when investigating a car wreck," said team member Nick Scoville of the California Institute of Technology.
New York Times: The prospects for women who are scientists and engineers at major research universities have improved, although women continue to face inequalities in salary and access to some other resources, a panel of the National Research Council concludes in a new report.
Walking Randomly: Back in 1997 Mike Croucher was a second-year undergraduate of physics. He was taught how to program in Fortran, a language that has survived over 40 years due to several facts including
- It is very good at what it does.
- There are millions of lines of legacy code still being used in the wild. If you end up doing research in subjects such as chemistry, physics, or engineering then you will almost certainly bump into Fortran code.
- A beginner's course in Fortran has been part of the staple diet in degrees in physics, chemistry, and various engineering disciplines (among others) for decades.
- It constantly reinvents itself to include new features. Croucher was taught Fortran 77 (despite it being 1997) but you can now also have your pick of Fortran 90, 95, 2003, and soon 2008.
"Almost everyone I knew hated that 1997 Fortran course and the reasons for the hatred essentially boiled down to one of two points depending on your past experience," he says.
- Fortran was too hard! So much work for such small gains. (First-time programmers)
- The course was far too easy. It was just a matter of learning Fortran syntax and blitzing through the exercises. (people with prior experience)
The course was followed by a numerical methods course which culminated in a set of projects that had to be solved in Fortran. People hated the follow-on course for one of two reasons
- They didn't have a clue what was going on in the first course and now they were completely lost.
- The problems given were very dull and could be solved too easily. In Excel! Fortran was then used to pass the course.
Croucher continues, "Fast forward to 2009 and I see that Fortran is still being taught to many undergraduates all over the world as their first ever introduction to programming."
"Students can solve problems infinitely more complicated then the ones I was faced with in even my most advanced Fortran courses with just a couple of lines of code using Mathematica, Maple, or MATLAB."
"Which suggests why learn Fortran at all? And would another language such as Python be a better fit for students?"
Related Link
Walking Randomly
Science News: Astronomers report at an 8 June meeting of the American Astronomical Society that some of the biggest supermassive black holes in nearby galaxies are at least twice and possibly four times as heavy as previously estimated.
The findings come from new simulations by two independent teams of researchers, as well as new observations of stars whipping around a handful of supermassive black holes at the centers of massive galaxies no more than a few hundred million light-years from Earth.
New Scientist: Studies over several decades have shown that market fluctuations have a lot in common with processes such as earthquakes that originate in systems that are very much out of equilibrium and naturally subject to abrupt upheavals (Physica A, vol 387, p 3967).
This means price fluctuations on the stock market do not have a bell-shaped "normal" distribution, with the bulk in the mid-range and a steady decline towards each extreme.
In fact, the distribution has a much fatter tail of large price fluctuations, subverting a crucial assumption that underlies much of economic theory.
The implication is that extreme market events, such as a one-day crash capable of wiping out millions of investors, occur naturally in financial markets even in the absence of any extraordinary circumstances.
By contrast, most economists and financial analysts regard such events as strange and unpredictable outliers. "This is, at least in part, because basic market theories can't explain these large fluctuations in any natural way," says physicist Gene Stanley of Boston University, a leader in such analyses.
Continue reading Are stock market crashes built into the financial system?.
Science: Last month, US Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that the Department of Energy (DOE) was putting the brakes on research into automotive hydrogen fuel cells.
Chu cites the cost and durability of vehicle fuel cells, the inability to store large volumes of hydrogen fuel, the absence of a carbon-free way of generating the hydrogen, and the need to build a nationwide refueling infrastructure.
The issue came down to a simple question, says Chu: "Is it likely in the next 10 or 15 or even 20 years that we will convert to a hydrogen-car economy? The answer, we felt, was no."
But many scientists and energy experts believe Chu asked the wrong question and, therefore, made the wrong call.
No alternative-vehicle technology will make a major impact on carbon emissions, petroleum use, or anything else within the next 20 years, they say, because it takes longer than that for a new technology to displace what is already on the road.
In the long run, they say only two technologies—hydrogen fuel cells and electric vehicles—are capable of getting the job done. And only one variation, plug-in hybrids, will be on the market anytime soon.
"There are uncertainties with both these technologies," says Joan Ogden, who heads the sustainable transportation energy program at the University of California, Davis. "So the idea of taking one off the table seems shortsighted."
New York Times: David Lentink, with Michael H. Dickinson of the California Institute of Technology and colleagues, reports in Science that the wings of a maple seed generate a leading edge vortex—a spinning horizontal tunnel of air along the wing—as they descend. This vortex is stable, Dr. Lentink said, because it has a low-pressure core that reduces the air pressure over the wing, causing the wing to be sucked up. “It really increases the lift,” he said.
Related Link
Leading-Edge Vortices Elevate Lift of Autorotating Plant Seeds
NPR: NASA scientists Paul Goldsmith and Charles Lawrence discuss the space telescopes Herschel and Planck, which the European Space Agency launched last month. Herschel will investigate star and galaxy formation, and Planck will observe the residual glow of the newborn universe.
Washington Post: Two weeks ago a robot called Nereus became the world's deepest-diving unmanned submersible.
Nereus dived to a portion of the Challenger Deep, 10,902 meters down in the Mariana Trench, a gash in the Earth's crust in the volcanic Pacific Ring of Fire where the Pacific tectonic plate collides with a smaller plate and plunges into the mantle.
Scientists hope Nereus will let them open new worlds of discovery in one of the last unexplored realms of Earth—ocean depths below 6,500 meters that are home to a complex web of creatures that get their energy from methane rather than sunlight.
USA Today: After decades decrying nuclear power, some environmentalists are re-evaluating thier position on the power source because it emits zero greenhouse gases. "You can't just write nuclear off," says Judi Greenwald of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. "I think everybody feels you have to at least look again" at nuclear power.
New Scientist: Although image special effects are largely done by computers nowadays, sound special effects are still based on physical props.
Doug James and Changxi Zheng at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have discovered how to reproduce the sound of flowing and dripping by modeling the way water creates sound in the real world (see video, above).
CNET News: IBM already had technology that could measure extremely subtle forces among atoms, but a nanotechnology development at the company's Zurich Research Laboratory shows a new level of sensitivity: the ability to distinguish positively charged atoms from those that are neutral or negatively charged.
The atomic force microscope maps what's below by detecting subtle changes in forces of attraction.
Researchers at the Zurich lab, along with colleagues at the University of Regensburg and Utrecht University, used an atomic force microscope (AFM) with a tuning-fork detector arrangement on the tip of its probe to distinguish among gold atoms that were positively charged, neutral, or negatively charged. The researchers describe their approach in the June 12 issue of Science.
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Science: The ability to observe individual chemical reactions in real time is reshaping our understanding of molecular processes, revealing subtleties previously hidden in ensemble averages. For example, single-molecule fluorescence detection methods have revolutionized optical microscopy and in situ studies of chemical and biological systems. Liquid cell in situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is poised to write a new chapter in the solution synthesis and processing of materials. Haimei Zheng and colleagues use a TEM liquid cell that allows liquids to be examined within the vacuum environment of a TEM in an elegant experiment that uncovers dynamic processes in the growth of platinum (Pt) nanocrystals.
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Observation of Single Colloidal Platinum Nanocrystal Growth Trajectories
The Register: Despite the Taser being one of the most heavily researched less-lethal weapons in the world, its operational mechanism remains a mystery, a conference on non-lethal weapons was told.
Explanations for the electro stun weapon's apparent ability to stiffen the whole of the human body without (usually) causing any physiological damage remain unclear, inconsistent and contradictory, and it might be that psychological factors play a more important role in its effect than previously thought.
These were the conclusions of researchers at the Bundeswehr Medical Centre, who presented their research at the 5th Symposium on Non Lethal Weapons in Ettlingen, Germany earlier last month.
SPACE.com: Astronomers have directly measured the distance to a faraway galaxy, providing them with a yardstick that could help determine just how fast the universe around us is expanding.
"Measuring precise distances is one of the oldest problems in astronomy, and applying a relatively new radio astronomy technique to this old problem is vital to solving one of the greatest challenges of 21st century astrophysics," said team member Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
Using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) in New Mexico, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Effelsberg Radio Telescope in Germany, the astronomers determined that the galaxy UGC 3789 is 160 million light-years from Earth.
Related Link
The megamaser cosmology project. I. very long baseline interferometric observations of UGC 3789 M. J. Reid et al 2009 ApJ 695 287-291
Wired.com: Take a jet engine hooked up to some big magnets, add some steam pipes, and what do you have? The comeback of some old-school technologies that could help solve our modern energy problem.
The idea is simple—generate both electricity and heat in the same place, but the potential benefits are big.
Unlike a traditional electric power plant, which can convert about 40 percent of its fuel into electricity but wastes the rest as heat, these combination plants capture that heat and use it to warm or cool buildings. The efficiency of combined heat and power plants can reach into the 80 percent range.
The Department of Energy has place $156 million of stimulus funding on these steam-age ideas. It fits with industrial, commercial and municipal interest in reducing fuel costs and environmental footprints.
Science: In the century since the first distant galaxies were recognized, astronomers have learned much about how galaxies form and evolve.
But they still don't know to what extent a galaxy's properties are determined by its inner workings or through interactions with its surroundings—such as the Milky Way's potential collision with Andromeda in 3 billion years. In short, astronomers want to know how much of a galaxy's character is set by nature and how much by nurture.
To solve that puzzle, some astronomers are searching for rare galaxies well isolated from their neighbors. By comparing these loners to their more-gregarious brethren, researchers hope to tease apart the inherent inner workings of galaxies and the effects of interactions.
USA Today: Carl Franzblau, professor and chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at Boston University Medical School, wanted to expose more young people to science. Then, he says, he had a vision, inspired by a bloodmobile.
The result — mobile science laboratories that bring science education to students—is expanding across the USA.
Mobile labs are active in at least 10 states and are an important tool in attracting young people to the so-called STEM courses—science, technology, engineering and math, Franzblau says.
The labs are buses or semis outfitted with the basics of science education: electricity, distilled water, freezers and refrigerators, scales, microscopes and even computer systems in some cases, he adds.
They are designed to travel to schools that don't have the resources to teach modern science to students, but they also are crucial in providing training to teachers in a field that can see a new discovery change curriculums overnight.
The Independent: The usual way that runways are inspected for any foreign objects or debris is by eye from a moving vehicle four times a day.
Graham Binns, chief engineer at the research company Qinetiq, says that this method is by no means ideal as it leaves large time gaps between inspections and makes it especially difficult to inspect runways at night.
Instead, Qinetiq has developed a system called Tarsier that is a camera coupled with a radar system which works throughout the day and night.
The radar sweeps the runway and looks for small changes to identify objects appearing. When an object is identified the coordinates are sent to the camera system, which accurately focuses in on the object and gives the human operator the opportunity to look at the debris and decide whether to do something, such as close the runway, or whether its debris that can be ignored.
In two years in operation at Vancouver, Tarsier has found over 400 items, including several classed as "posing significant risk."
NPR: Audio historians David Giovannoni and Patrick Feaster discuss a revision to their discovery last year of the earliest-known recorded sound from 1860. They have determined it was being played twice as fast as it needed to be.
"What we thought was the voice of a young girl was really a 'chipmunk effect,'" says Feaster.
"When I imitated the new version during a trip to Paris in April, the response I got was: 'Ah! That's how we sing "Au Clair de la Lune" as a lullaby!' So we may have to give up our romantic notion of Scott recording the voice of his young daughter, but in return we may have a record of the way he sang his children to sleep," he says.
More information can be found at the first sounds website.
Nature News: This week, in the hallways of a conference in Guiyang, China, Nicola Pirrone—the director of Italy's CNR-Institute for Atmospheric Pollution Research—will be trying to rustle up more support for a global network to monitor mercury pollution.
Such a network would underlie a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) treaty to control mercury emissions, which negotiators plan to forge by 2013.
Researchers are facing a complex task—how to monitor 2,500 tonnes of mercury every year, more than half of which comes from fossil-fuel power plants—on what may be shoestring budgets.
But so far, global monitoring endeavors have been relatively uncoordinated; hundreds of sporadic efforts can include one-time samplings from a ship cruise or aeroplane flight.
Science: Among the greatest uncertainties in future energy supply and a subject of considerable environmental concern is the amount of oil and gas yet to be found in the Arctic.
By using a probabilistic geology-based methodology, the United States Geological Survey has assessed the area north of the Arctic Circle and concluded that about 30% of the world’s undiscovered gas and 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil may be found there, mostly offshore under less than 500 meters of water.
Oil resources are probably not sufficient to substantially shift the balance of power between oil producing countries, says the report.
The USGS study had been controversial as recommendations by scientists to not allow drilling without a proper environmental impact study were ignored by the previous administration, says a story published in the Independent last year.
NPR (audio): A new multibillion-dollar facility in California houses the world's most powerful laser—the National Ignition Facility. But is it powerful enough to trigger the thermonuclear fusion reaction that occurs in stars? Some scientists are doubtful. Lab Director Edward Moses discusses the project.
ScienceNOW: Tired of dealing with those newfangled fluorescent and halogen bulbs that tend to blow out and can't quite handle dimmer switches? You might just find solace from an old and trusted source: incandescent lights. A team of physicists has discovered a way to double the efficiency of these ordinary light bulbs. All it takes is a superfast laser blast to their filaments.
Nature: Large earthquakes excite wave motion throughout the Earth, causing it to ring like a bell. The resulting ground motion, measured by seismometers, provides helpful constraints on Earth's internal structure through the study of its "normal modes"—free oscillations that occur at discrete frequencies.
Seismologically measurable oscillations have typical periods of a few minutes. But in work just published in Geophysical Journal International, Bruce A. Buffett, Jon Mound, and Andrew Jackson sound the Earth, in particular its core, through oscillations that have periods of decades.
Related Link Inversion of torsional oscillations for the structure and dynamics of Earth's core
OrlandoSentinel: With a White House–ordered review of its next-generation Constellation rocket program just weeks away, NASA faces some unwelcome news: Key milestones for the agency's Ares I rocket and Orion crew capsule are falling further behind schedule because of design flaws and technical challenges.
An important test of the Orion's emergency escape system that was supposed to happen last year will not come off before November and could slip further.
A review of the proposed fixes for the violent shaking at liftoff that has plagued development of the Ares I has been delayed from this summer to December.
Even the first test flight of the Ares design—a mock-up rocket called the Ares I-X—has been moved from April to July to August and now possibly September.
Nature: For almost a century, physicists have had in hand "the" theoretical framework of the known world—quantum mechanics. But whereas the world clearly comprises large complex systems, quantum mechanics is usually associated with the microworld of atoms and elementary particles, and is hardly ever considered as an underlying feature in our daily life.
This is even more pronounced for some of the seemingly weird predictions of quantum mechanics, such as entanglement, which asserts that the quantum state of physically separated objects is mutually and inextricably connected.
J. D. Jost and colleagues in Nature demonstrate quantum entanglement of two spatially separated mechanical oscillators. Although the quantum nature of mechanical oscillators has been known and observed for a long time, the entanglement of their oscillating motions has not, and its demonstration adds a valuable tool to the toolbox of quantum-state engineering.
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Entangled mechanical oscillators
Science: Every June for 25 years, meteorologist William Gray and associates at Colorado State University (CSU), Fort Collins, have tried to decipher what the coming summer and fall have in store for hurricane country.
Now for the first time, the CSU group has graded itself. The researchers' statistical analysis credits their forecasts with a "modest" improvement over the baseline assumption that every season would be normal.
Others concede that the group has shown some measurable skill in forecasting—just not much.
The performance of the CSU forecasts has been "not too good" to "pretty bad," says seasonal forecaster Anthony Barnston of Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society in Palisades, New York. But then, he and colleagues have done their own seasonal hurricane forecasts, and "our skills are lousy also. No one is very good at this."
BBC NEWS: Half of England's comprehensives—a type of school that provides the majority of middle-to-high school education in England—did not offer physics, chemistry, and biology GCSEs last year.
In two regions—Islington and Slough—not a single pupil studied the separate sciences.
GCSEs are taken by all high school students in the UK around the age of 16. Pupils have to make a decision when they are 14 over which GCSE subjects to study.
In the new curriculum introduced last year, most schools do a core science GCSE with "additional science" for those who are interested.
Separate or "triple" science GCSEs have largely become the preserve of grammar schools and private schools.
The lack of specific GCSEs is having an affect on the next level of exams taken by students at 17 to 18 years old, and university lecturers worry that it will impact the level of knowledge students have when they start earning science degrees at university.
In a separate story BBC Education Editor Gary Eason says that in a lecture in February this year, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he wanted to double the number of pupils in state schools taking triple science to 100,000 a year, by 2014, but although students are entitled to be offered three GCSEs in the sciences—physics, chemistry, and biology—there is no legal requirement for schools to offer courses.
NPR: Without the telescope, astronomers would be blind to many marvels of the universe. But how did the device come to be? Science historian Albert van Helden explains how a Dutch spectacle-maker's invention made its way to Galileo, enabling him to spot Jupiter's moons.
Nature: The noble gases emitted from deep inside the Earth have been sending mixed messages to those intent on deciphering them. A model that promises to help clear up the confusion is now on offer.
Related Link
Preserving noble gases in a convecting mantle
The Register: British staff at Qinetiq, the company formed from an uneasy mixture of privatised UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) research facilities and profitable US war-tech companies, have voted to strike in protest at pay freezes and redundancies.
Prospect, which represents some 2,000 of Qinetiq's UK staff - whom it describes as "specialists" - says that a strike ballot gave a result of 72 per cent in favour of strike action after management announced a pay freeze for 2009. The union had already said its members were "outraged" after 400 British job losses were announced last month.
NPR: Students are counting down the days until the start of summer vacation, but is there a way to convince kids to do math over the break? Ira Flatow talks with Danica McKellar, Wonder Years actress turned math book author, about sharpening students' math skills.
Science: In geology textbooks, the fate of the oceanic crust seems straightforward. The ocean floor is created by upwelling of lighter magma at spreading ridges. The magma cools as it moves away from the ridge, forming a stiff layer or "plate" called the oceanic lithosphere. Having increased in density, it then descends back into the mantle in trench regions.
Precise seismic tomography studies have revealed that many descending slabs have a more complex evolution and have developed tears, detached from the surface plate, or even broken up into fragments.
In last week's Science, Obayashi and colleagues not only show clear tomographic evidence for the development of a vertical tear under southwest Japan, but have also found evidence for ongoing plate rupturing. The authors correlated the images directly with measurements of stress revealed by active seismic sources.
Related Link
Tearing of Stagnant Slab
Los Angeles Times: A decade-long effort to refurbish thousands of aging nuclear warheads built more than 20-years-ago has run into serious technical problems that have forced delays.
The $200-million-a-year refurbishment program involves a type of warhead known as the W76, which is used on the Navy's Trident missile system and makes up more than half of the deployed warheads in the US stockpile.
In February, the Energy department's National Nuclear Security Administration announced that the "first refurbished W76 nuclear warhead had been accepted into the US nuclear weapons stockpile by the Navy."
But no delivery was ever made. The warhead is still in pieces at the Energy Department's Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas, according to an engineer at the facility.
The hold-up in deploying the warhead is not connected to any missing expertise regarding how to build a nuclear device, but how to manufacture one of the other warhead components. Delays in the program could extend the refurbishment program by another 10 years.
New York Times: "In the debate over global warming, one thing is clear: as the planet gets warmer, sea levels will rise. But how much, where and how soon? Those questions are notoriously hard to answer.
Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colo., are now adding to the complexity with a new prediction. If the melting of Greenland’s ice sheets continues to accelerate, they say, sea levels will rise even more in the northeastern United States and Maritime Canada than in other areas around the world.
The researchers, Aixue Hu and Gerald A. Meehl, based their predictions on runoff data from Greenland and an analysis of ocean circulation patterns."
Science News: A report given at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Toronto, Canada last week suggests that scientists have discovered a way to measure the Earth's magnetic field from 1000 years ago.
Geophysicist Annick Chauvin from the University of Rennes, France, and her colleagues have analyzed samples of bricks and mortar from 9th and 10th century French buildings.
They suggest that the Earth's magnetic field at the buildings locations peaked in 840 A.D. and measured about 70 microtesla, compared to 48 microtesla for the present day.
Related Link
Archaeomagnetic Study performed on Early Medieval Buildings from western France
Nature: The ability to produce arbitrarily superposed quantum states is a prerequisite for creating a workable quantum computer. Such highly complex states can now be generated on demand in superconducting electronic circuitry.
Related Link
Synthesizing arbitrary quantum states in a superconducting resonator
SPACE.com: "For the first time, astronomers have observed the phases of an extrasolar planet in visible light, as the world orbits around its star.
The planet, CoRoT-1b, was the first planet discovered by the French CoRoT (Convection Rotation and Planetary Transit) satellite about 2.5 years ago. It is about 1,600 light years away in the constellation Monoceros."
The Daily Telegraph: Steven Chu, the US Energy Secretary, has proposed fitting white roofs to buildings in over to save energy and money on air conditioning by deflecting the sun's rays.
More pale surfaces could also slow global warming by reflecting heat into space rather than allowing it to be absorbed by dark surfaces where it is trapped by greenhouse gases and increases temperatures.
In a wide-ranging discussion at the three-day Nobel laureate Symposium in London, Chu described climate change as a "crisis situation", and called for a whole host of measures to be introduced, from promoting energy efficiency to renewable energy such as wind, wave and solar.
Chu's comments are backed up by research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which suggests white roofs can cut energy bills by 20%.
Inside Science News: Search crews found debris fields Tuesday in the area where Air France flight 447 apparently crashed into the Atlantic Ocean.
Recovering parts of the aircraft on the seabed however, will be difficult.
"The water is deep in that region," says John Perry Fish, CEO of American Underwater Search and Survey, “some 7000 meters deep in the deepest parts, but averaging about 4000 meters. It is near the mid-Atlantic ridge, [an undersea mountain range] which runs from Iceland to the south Atlantic."
The first problem in finding the debris and black boxes from the plane, he said, is that the aircraft was not being tracked on radar when it disappeared, "so you don't know exactly where to start. If you have a radar track, you can plot an area of a couple miles out from that point and start searching." Without the radar, he said, the task is to find the floating debris and do "hindcasting," which traces the path of debris backwards as it floats on the ocean currents.
Chris German, the chief scientist for the deep submergence group at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, says that even with two debris fields located miles apart, the backtracking can be done. "You look at the ocean currents and wind and determine where the debris was 10 hours before, then 10 hours before that. You do that all the way back to when you think the crash occurred." Fish said that the hindcasting could trace out the path up to 30 days back in time.
Unmanned sonar-mapping submersibles can then be used to look for wreckage on the seabed, particularly the blackbox&which contains data about the final minutes of the flight—that emits an ultrasonic acoustic ping to help guide rescuers to its location.
The conditions however are at the limit of current technology, making any sort of recovery operation extremely difficult.
Science: The fundamental rationale for the tenure system has been to promote the long-term development of new ideas and to challenge students' thinking says Dan Clawson from the University of Massachussetts Amherst, Amherst, MA. Proponents argued more than 60 years ago that tenure is needed to provide faculty the freedom to pursue long-term risky research agendas and to challenge conventional wisdom. Those arguments are still being made today and are still valid.
However, a 30-year trend toward privatization is creating a pseudo–market environment within public universities that marginalizes the tenure system. A pseudo–market environment is one in which no actual market is possible, but market-like mechanisms (such as benchmarking and rankings based on research dollars, student evaluations, or similar attributes) are used to approximate a market.
Nature News: ITER—a multi-billion-euro international experiment boldly aiming to prove atomic fusion as a power source—will initially be far less ambitious than physicists had hoped.
Faced with ballooning costs and growing delays, ITER's seven partners are likely to build only a skeletal version of the device at first.
The project's governing council said last June that the machine should turn on in 2018; the stripped-down version could allow that to happen.
But the first experiments capable of validating fusion for power would not come until the end of 2025, five years later than the date set when the ITER agreement was signed in 2006.
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ITER, the $11 billion fusion project gets final go ahead
The Register: Hewlett Packard has confirmed that yesterday's announcement of UK job cuts will not just hit its manufacturing plant in Scotland, but also HP's research laboratories in Bristol.
The firm will not detail exactly what is happening, but emails from HP staff sent to the Register suggest as many as half its Bristol research staff could be laid off.
"According to various sources and friends, HP has at a single stroke on Thursday HALVED their R&D people based in Bristol, UK on Thursday. 3 entire labs are to be axed. Approx 70 or so positions are to be eliminated - with completion towards the end of this year," says one email.
HP announced 5700 job cuts in Europe earlier this week.
HP said: "HP Labs is streamlining its research portfolio to further sharpen its focus on creating a pipeline of high-impact innovation with a clear path to market that addresses the most important customer challenges. HP is committed to bringing breakthrough innovation to market quickly, and HP Labs will continue to play a significant role in this effort."
London Times: Europe should scrap its support for wind energy as soon as possible to focus on far more efficient emerging forms of clean power generation including solar thermal energy, says Jack Steinberger, a physicist at CERN and a former Nobel Prize winner.
Steinberger said that wind represented an illusory technology — a cul-de-sac that would prove uneconomic and a waste of resources in the battle against climate change.
“Wind is not the future,” he told the symposium of Nobel laureates at the Royal Society. Instead, he said, technologies such as solar thermal power—for which parabolic mirrors reflect the Sun’s rays to generate heat and electricity—represent a more promising way of supplanting fossil fuels. “I am certain that the energy of the future is going to be thermal solar,” he told The Times. “There is nothing comparable. The sooner we focus on it the better.”
Associated Press: A mass extinction some 260 million years ago may have been caused by volcanic eruptions in what is now China, new research suggests.
[Image credit: Re-evaluating vertical motion preceding the Emeishan continental flood basalt province, SW China]
The so-called Guadalupian Mass Extinction, devastating marine life around the world, was preceded by massive eruptions in the Emeishan geological province of Southwest China, says Paul Wignall of the University of Leeds and colleagues in Science.
Related Link
Volcanism, Mass Extinction, and Carbon Isotope Fluctuations in the Middle Permian of China
Science: In 1962, astronomers discovered a shining dot in the sky that appeared to be moving at an astonishing 47,000 kilometers per second, or one-sixth the speed of light. The velocity indicated that the object—named 3C 273—was a few billion light-years away, yet it was so bright it could have been a nearby star.
To study the object further, researchers delved into a trove of the astronomical past: a collection of photographic plates at Harvard University dating as far back as the 1860s. They spotted 3C 273 on some 600 photographs taken with a variety of telescopes over 70 years, some of them days apart.
The images showed fluctuations in the object's brightness on time scales as short as a week. Because the object could not be dimming or brightening faster than light could traverse it, the researchers inferred that in spite of being more luminous than a billion suns, the object had to be less than a light-week across—the size of the solar system. The finding helped characterize 3C 273 as a new type of object known as a quasar, one of the most powerful energy sources in the universe.
The discovery shows the value of historical sky observations, says Harvard astronomer Jonathan Grindlay, who is leading an initiative to scan the 500,000 plates in the university's collection and put them online. The project—called Digital Access to a Sky Century at Harvard (DASCH)—is part of a movement by a small but persistent group of astronomers to preserve, digitize, and study old astronomical photographs in hope of doing new science.
Related Physics Today articles
Astronomers Save Historic Plates (June 2003)
North Carolina institute offers to archive old astronomy data (March 2009)
AFP: A team of French physicists led by Jean-Yves Bigot of the Institute of Materials Physics and Chemistry in Strasbourg say they have used a "femtosecond" laser, using ultra-fast bursts of laser light, to alter electron spin and thus speed up retrieval and storage.
The technique could increase the speed at which data is written and read from a hard drive up to 100,000 times, they say in this week's Nature Physics.
The work builds upon Albert Fert and Peter Gruenberg's discovery that tiny changes in magnetic fields can yield a large electric output. Their research led to the creation of a new electronics field called "spintronics" that relies on electron spin to store data; however, sensors for reading that data until now were too slow to be effective.
"Our method is called the photonics of spin, because it is photons [particles of light] that modify the state of the electrons' magnetisation" on the storage surface, Bigot told AFP.
Related Physics Today articles
Discoverers of Giant Magnetoresistance Win this Year's Physics Nobel (December 2007)
Quantum Spin Hall Effect Shows up in a Quantum Well Insulator, Just as Predicted (January 2008)
Magnetic Semiconductors Enable Efficient Electrical Spin Injection (April 2000)
Related Link
Coherent ultrafast magnetism induced by femtosecond laser pulses
Science News: Swooping within 25 kilometers of Enceladus, the Cassini spacecraft has obtained additional evidence that the interior of this tiny, icy moon of Saturn may contain liquid water.
Hunter Waite of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and his colleagues base their findings on close-up observations made with Cassini's Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer, which on March 12, 2008 and October 9, 2008 tasted the plumes of icy particles and water vapor known to spew from the moon.
In a research abstract for a talk at the 2009 Joint Assembly of the American Geophysical Union in Toronto, Waite and his collaborators cite two findings that they say "provide compelling evidence for the existence—today or in the recent past—of liquid water in Enceladus' interior."
Last year Waite spoke about the preliminary results of the March 12 flyby. It was "a completely unexpected surprise [that the chemistry of Enceladus interior] resembles that of a comet," said Waite. "To have primordial material coming out from inside a Saturn moon raises many questions on the formation of the Saturn system."
"Enceladus is by no means a comet," he added. "Comets have tails and orbit the sun, and Enceladus' activity is powered by internal heat while comet activity is powered by sunlight. Enceladus' brew is like carbonated water with an essence of natural gas."
The Guardian: We must shake off this inertia to keep sea level rises to a minimum
Björn Lomborg's claim that sea levels are not rising faster than predicted are unfounded and used by those wanting to downplay climate change
csmonitor.com: Some of Pervez Hoodbhoy's nuclear physics students will go on to oversee Pakistan's atomic bombs. That gives him pause.
"The student body has become very conservative, very Islamist, their outward appearance has changed," says Professor Hoodbhoy, the chair of the physics department at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. "It's row after row of these burqa women."
Students avoid talking politics with Hoodbhoy, a cautionary voice on nuclear weapons in a nation that takes boisterous pride in having them. "They think I'm on the wrong side," he says.
International concerns are mounting again about the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons as fighting rages with the Taliban. But thanks to safeguards, experts worry much less about the Islamic fighters in the hills making off with a warhead. It's the radicals among the educated – potential insiders – who are in a more realistic position to abscond with nuclear material and know how to use it.
Science: Pacemakers and bionic ears (cochlear implants) were the first medical bionic devices to be used successfully in humans.
On the horizon there is the prospect of a neural prosthesis capable of operating prosthetic limbs, a bionic eye, as well as other devices for the restoration of body function.
These developments are crucially dependent on successfully connecting the device to cellular tissue. The development of organic polymer conductors is contributing to achieving that success.
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Sound Research Aids the Deaf April 2006
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SPACE.com: The first astronauts to walk on the moon in the 1960s and 1970s were inundated by sticky lunar dust that clung to their spacesuits whenever they ventured outside.
Now, four decades later, a self-funded study by an Australian physicist has found a link between the dust's stickiness and the angle of the sun at the time of each moonwalk.
The new research, which drew on the personal files and paper charts of physicist Brian O'Brien of Perth, suggests that future lunar astronauts may have greater problems with dust adhesion in the middle half of the day than NASA's Apollo missions faced in the early morning.
