July 2009 Archives

msnbc.com: Bats use sonar to navigate and hunt. Many have been killed by wind turbines, however, which their sonar doesn't seem to recognize as a danger. Surprisingly, radar signals could help keep bats away from wind turbines.

Chattanooga Times Free Press: The Tennessee Valley Authority is on track to complete a $2.5 billion, five-year plan to finish a second reactor at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant by 2012.

TVA began construction of Watts Bar II in 1973, but work was suspended in 1988 when TVA's growth in power sales declined. After mothballing the unit for 19 years, TVA's board decided in 2007 to finish the reactor because it is projected to provide cheaper, no carbon-emitting power compared with the existing coal plants or purchased power it may help replace. More than 1850 TVA and contract employees are working on the project.

Watts Bar II is the first commercial reactor in the country to seek a license since 1995 and could be the last reactor of its generation to be built.

BBC News: How do you dismantle a nuclear bomb? And how do you verify another country is genuinely disarming without compromising sensitive national security material?

BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera was given access to a unique exercise run by the UK and Norway to find out.

New York Times: A tiny glass telescope, the size of a pea, has been successfully implanted in the eyes of people with severely damaged retinas, helping them to read, watch television and better see familiar faces.

The telescope implant is only 4mm long and contains two wide angle glass microlenses.

The new device is for people with an irreversible, advanced form of macular degeneration in which a blind spot develops in the central vision of both eyes.

In a brief, outpatient procedure, a corneal specialist implants the mini-telescope in one eye in place of its natural lens. The telescope magnifies images on the retina, extending them so they fall on healthy cells outside the damaged macula, said Allen W. Hill, chief executive of VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies in Saratoga, California, the implant's maker.

Physics Today: A new $120 million proton therapy center opened in Oklahoma City two weeks ago. It is only the sixth proton treatment center in the US and will treat approximately 1500 patients a year.

The 18,300 m² facility is a joint project between ProCure Treatment Centers, Inc, a four-year-old start-up company; Radiation Medicine Associates, one of the state's leading radiation oncology practices; and INTEGRIS Health, the state's largest Oklahoma-owned, not-for-profit healthcare corporation, which will offer ancillary care to patients that need it.

ProCure is currently building a US network of proton therapy centers, the second of which will be in Chicago, followed by locations in New Jersey, Detroit and South Florida.

Proton therapy is attractive to physicians because for some types of cancers, the higher doses of radiation can be used to control and manage cancer while significantly reducing damage to healthy tissue and vital organs that occur with more traditional radiation treatment.

The Oklahoma center was built in 27 months and makes use of a number of new innovations, such as the design of the treatment room, and the uses of robotic patient positioning systems to bring the cost of treatment down by a significant margin. The protons are created through use of a 220-ton cyclotron that is 5.4-meters in diameter and 2.4 meters high (see above. Photo credit: ProCure Treatment Centers).

"Right now, there are only about 6,000 treatment slots available in the United States for a quarter of a million cancer patients who are candidates for proton therapy," said Procure's CEO Hadley Ford.

Ford acknowledged that energy executive and philanthropist Aubrey K. McClendon, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Oklahoma City-based Chesapeake Energy Corporation, personally provided the initial $70 million funding for ProCure. "ProCure's vision to make proton therapy more accessible to cancer patients caught my attention three years ago," says McClendon. "The company has done an exceptional job developing and constructing this facility since that time."

"Oklahoma City's proton center is the realization of what was not much more than a dream four years ago," said Procure's founder, physicist John Cameron (left) at the opening ceremony.

Cameron survived a bout of prostate cancer through proton therapy four years ago. "Many are talking about building proton centers; we're actually doing it," he says. "These are very exciting times for us and for patients with cancer."

"The nature of the proton therapy—a daily course of treatment that can last for up to eight weeks—argues for more centers in many more communities," said W.C. Goad, medical director of the new center. "In every center in the country, half or more of the patients treated come from out of state."

Related Physics Today articles
Accelerators shrink to meet growing demand for proton therapy March 2009
Weighing Proton Therapy's Clinical Readiness and Costs June 2003

Physics Today: The Large Hadron Collider is now on schedule to restart in the winter instead of the fall.

The LHC, which has been offline since September last year, has seen its schedule slip back at least three times in recent months as CERN grapples with a number of technical difficulties, including the risk that the collider may not reach 14 TeV. In a series of tests carried out over the last few weeks, CERN staff discovered vacuum leaks in two sectors of the LHC that had been cooled down to 80 K.

To repair the sectors have to be brought to room temperature—which has to be done gradually over a period of weeks—that will delay beam injection to mid-November says the CERN Bulletin.

On a brighter note the shutdown has allowed the various experimental groups to refine and improve their equipment. The CMS group finished a series of experiments with cosmic rays to align the detector, and refurbished the detectors cooling system. ATLAS has installed several upgrades they weren't expecting to install for a number of months. The GRID computer system has undergone full scale tests.

The final sector to be checked will be cooled down in August, which—if they find more leaks—may mean that the LHC could be delayed until the New Year.

Related News Pick
LHC restart pushed back, may not run at 14 TeV
LHC repair plan points to weaknesses in original design
Late start for Large Hadron Collider

Nature News: Until recently, string theory—long heralded as a 'theory of everything'—hadn't been particularly good at explaining anything.

But at a workshop this month at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, scientists have been using the theory to make progress in tackling one of the biggest puzzles in condensed-matter physics: the origin of high-temperature superconductivity.

Washingtonpost.com: When it comes to space, we've outsourced the jobs to machines says Howard McCurdy in the Washington Post.

In his famous 1945 article anticipating communications satellites, Arthur C. Clarke opined that humans would need to operate the orbital switching stations. Wernher von Braun, who proposed a large space telescope, was sure that astronauts would be stationed nearby. For nearly every outpost in space, from spaceships and space stations to lunar colonies and Martian research bases, we thought humans would be there. We were wrong.

We did not anticipate the incredible advances in machine technology that the second half of the 20th century would bring. Technologies such as remote sensing, digital imaging, solid-state electronics, electric power generation, space communication and computer capacity reduced the costs and improved the capabilities of robotic spacecraft dramatically. We don't need technicians to change the film in space telescopes—the telescopes don't use film—and we don't need astronauts to maintain communications satellites.

BBC News: We might never consider the size of the raindrops as we hurry for cover, but their variety has puzzled scientists for many years.

Now, by filming one falling raindrop, researchers in France have explained why the drops are an array of so many different sizes.
Reporting in the journal Nature Physics, the team described how the drop deformed and burst as it fell.

Various: The 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing has led to widespread coverage in the media. Some articles and websites that may be of interest to Physics Today readers include:

• NASA's official 40th anniversary website, which combines all the major news releases connected to the anniversary and background information.




• The BBC's Apollo Moon landing subsite in which Richard Hollingham assesses the scientific reasons for going back to the Moon.
• Science magazine has made free a number of selected articles on the scientific results scientists made from the Apollo missions.

From the Physics Today archives:

• Reflections on the Moon (September 1969), an editorial by Editor-in-Chief R. Hobart Ellis Jr on the scientific impact of the Moon landing.
• Apollo 11 Success Brings Astronomy Down to Earth (September 1969), Physics Today looks at how—because of the Moon landings—astronomy had truly become "a laboratory science."
• NAS Panel Urges Greater Role in Apollo for Science (February 1970)
• The interior of the Moon (March 1974) Don L Anderson looks at the unexpected and confusing data brought back by the Apollo astronauts.
• Countries Race to Launch Moon Missions (February 2005), a look at the new space race to launch scientific instruments to the Moon.
• Finally, Freeman J. Dyson in October 1968 looked back at the first Orion project, a spaceship design that would bear the same relationship to the Saturn V rocket as "the majestic airships of the 1930's bore to the Boeing 707. The airships were huge, flimsy, with a payload absurdly small in comparison to their size, just like the Apollo ships."

Google Moon has a visual map of the landing site.

Above: The original video of the moment that the Apollo Eagle module landed on the Moon.

Space.com on how the Apollo program is influencing the design of the Orion capsule that will lead NASA's new efforts to return to the Moon. The main two differences says, NASA engineer Jiff Geffre, is the electronics—which allows for significant automation of the spacecraft's flight—and the endurance—Orion will be able to stay on the Moon for days instead of hours. This builds on work they have done for the space shuttle.

Nature interviews Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt—the first and last scientist to touch the lunar surface. Schmitt decrys the lack of geologists in the next batch of astronauts to go through training and expresses skepticism that the Moon was formed by the collsion of another body with the Earth. "The primary fact that makes me sceptical is that we know, from the group of samples brought back from the Moon called pyroclastic glasses, that there is a reservoir of volatile elements deep in the Moon that, under the hypothesis of a giant impact, should not be there," he says.

A series of opinion pieces on whether the US should return to the Moon, include commentary by former NASA administrator Michael Griffin:

What is most striking about this 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon is that we can no longer do what we're celebrating. Not "do not choose to," but "can't."

By the 40th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Oregon Trail was carrying settlers to the West. By the 40th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, a web of rail traffic crisscrossed the continent. By the 40th anniversary of Lindbergh's epic transatlantic flight, thousands of people in jetliners retraced his route in comfort and safety every day. And on the 40th anniversary of Sputnik, hundreds of satellites were orbiting the Earth.

Only in human spaceflight do we celebrate the anniversary of an achievement that seems more difficult to repeat than to accomplish the first time. Only in human spaceflight can we find in museums things that most of us in the space business wish we still had today.

...At this 40th anniversary of Apollo, we need to ask ourselves a simple question: Do we want to have a real space program, or do we just want to talk about what we used to be able to do?

And from Tom Wolfe who points out that while Armstong walked on the Moon, NASA was already laying off scientists as funding for the Apollo program tapered off.

The reason why you have to dig a little bit back into the space race, says Wolfe, who describes the atmosphere and fear that existed in the US at the time of the 1957 launch of Sputnik:

Physicists were quick to point out that nobody would choose space as a place from which to attack Earth. The spacecraft, the missile, the Earth itself, plus the Earth’s own rotation, would be traveling at wildly different speeds upon wildly different geometric planes. You would run into the notorious “three body problem” and then some. You’d have to be crazy. The target would be untouched and you would wind up on the floor in a fetal ball, twitching and gibbering. On the other hand, the rockets that had lifted the Soviets’ five-ton manned ships into orbit were worth thinking about. They were clearly powerful enough to reach any place on Earth with nuclear warheads....

...Every time you picked up a newspaper you saw headlines with the phrase, SPACE GAP ... SPACE GAP ... SPACE GAP ... The Soviets had produced a generation of scientific geniuses — while we slept, fat and self-satisfied! Educators began tearing curriculums apart as soon as Sputnik went up, introducing the New Math and stressing another latest thing, the Theory of Self-Esteem.

And apart from Wernher von Braun, there was no one who could successfully defend NASA against Congress on philosophical grounds, which was its undoing, says Wolfe.

Clara Moskowitz looks at why it is so hard to go back. This time NASA is aiming for a sustained human presence instead of short visits. Moreover, NASA's current rockets and space shuttles aren't capable of surpassing low-Earth orbit to reach the Moon with the amount of gear required for a manned expedition.

Speaking Sunday at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum (from the left in above image), NASA Mission Control creator Chris Kraft, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins. (Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls).

The International Geophysical Year helped heat up the space race, said Armstrong, and provided a mechanism for engendering cooperation between former adversaries through the first Apollo–Soyuz meeting in space in 1975, to the later joint missions to Mir and the International Space Station. "In that sense, among others, it was an exceptional national investment for both sides," he said.

Paul Guinnessy

TwinCities.com: Far below the Black Hills of South Dakota, crews are building the world's deepest underground science lab called Homestake at a depth equivalent to more than six Empire State buildings—a place uniquely suited to scientists' quest for mysterious particles known as dark matter.

Scientists, politicians, and other officials gathered 22 June for a groundbreaking of sorts at a lab 4850 feet below the surface of an old gold mine that was once the site of Nobel Prize–winning physics research.

The site is ideal for experiments because its location is shielded from cosmic rays that could interfere with efforts to prove the existence of dark matter, which is thought to make up nearly a quarter of the mass of the universe.

The deepest reaches of the mine plunge to 8000 feet below the surface. Some early geology and hydrology experiments are already under way at 4850 feet. Researchers also hope to build two deeper labs that are still awaiting funding from Congress.

"The fact that we're going to be in the Davis Cavern just tickles us pink," said Tom Shutt of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, referring to a portion of the mine named after scientist Ray Davis Jr, who used it in the 1960s to demonstrate the existence of particles called solar neutrinos.

CNET News: Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates has managed to fulfill a personal dream of taking some classic physics lectures and making them available free over the Web.

The lectures, done in 1964 by noted scientist (and Manhattan Project collaborator) Richard Feynman, take notions such as gravity and explain how they work and the broad implications they have in understanding the ways of the universe.

Tapping his colleagues in Redmond to create interactive software to accompany the videos, Gates is making the collection available free from the Microsoft Research Web site.

Gates said that he hoped his action would serve as a model for taking great educational content and making it broadly available for free.

csmonitor.com: In the past, national borders were determined by war, revolution, or, as is the case with many former colonies, someone in a pith helmet doodling on a map. But in the 21st century, the job could be done by global warming.

For instance, the 463-mile border between Italy and Switzerland runs mostly through the Alps, and has remained more or less fixed since Italy became a unified state in 1861.

Seeking to define the border more precisely, a 1941 convention between the two countries established the demarcation as running along the ridge crest of the glaciers in the mountain range.

But as the Alps experience the warmest period in 1,300 years, those glaciers are beginning to recede, moving the border northward. As the Discovery Channel reported in May, measurements taken at the Monte Rosa massif found that the border has shifted hundreds of feet in some places, with most of the change in the past five years. Now the two countries are at work redefining their boundaries, this time basing them on rock, not ice. Italy plans to make similar arrangements with France and Austria.

NPR: An exhaustive, three-year search for some tapes that contained the original footage of the Apollo 11 moonwalk has concluded that they were probably destroyed during a period when NASA was erasing old magnetic tapes and reusing them to record satellite data.

"We're all saddened that they're not there. We all wish we had 20-20 hindsight," says Dick Nafzger, a TV specialist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, who helped lead the search team.

"I don't think anyone in the NASA organization did anything wrong," Nafzger says. "I think it slipped through the cracks, and nobody's happy about it."

NASA has, however, offered up a consolation prize for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission—the agency has taken the best available broadcast television footage and contracted with a digital restoration firm to enhance it, so that the public can see the first moonwalk in more detail than ever before.

Science News: Hundreds of high-resolution satellite photos of the Arctic sea ice taken during the past 10 years should be immediately declassified and released to the scientific research community, the National Research Council reported on July 15. Shortly after, the US Geological Survey made about a thousand of the images available to the public through the Global Fiducials Library.

“Most people from the scientific community are not aware that these images have been collected,” says Stephanie Pfirman, chair of the NRC committee that wrote the report. “They’ll be very excited to see these results.”

Science: India's first moon probe, Chandrayaan-1, has suffered a critical malfunction that jeopardizes the remainder of the mission. The spacecraft, which entered lunar orbit last November, can no longer orient itself with high precision. "Its pointing accuracy has been compromised," says a mission engineer who asked for anonymity.

Nature News: The worldwide shortage of medical isotopes is about to get much worse this week, as the High Flux Reactor in Petten, the Netherlands, closes for a month-long maintenance inspection.

It joins the National Research Universal reactor in Chalk River, Ontario, Canada, which has been closed since 15 May because of a heavy-water leak and is unlikely to restart before late 2009, according to Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, the government-sponsored body that runs the facility.

Related News Picks
Europe's isotope shortage will continue into 2009
Isotope shortage could delay cancer treatments
Canada pulls plug on costly medical reactor plan

News@UofT: Just about any road with a loose surface—sand or gravel or snow—develops ripples that make driving a very shaky experience. A team of physicists from Canada, France, and the UK have re-created this "washboard" phenomenon in the lab with surprising results: ripples appear even when the springy suspension of the car and the rolling shape of the wheel are eliminated. The discovery may smooth the way to designing improved suspension systems that eliminate the bumpy ride.

"The hopping of the wheel over the ripples turns out to be mathematically similar to skipping a stone over water," says University of Toronto physicist Stephen Morris, a member of the research team.

SPACE.com: History books tell us that the planet Neptune was found in the mid-1800s after years of speculation and search.

But in 1613, more than two centuries before Neptune was officially discovered, Galileo Galilei knew he had found it, according to a new theory by University of Melbourne physicist David Jamieson.

It has long been known that Galileo observed Neptune, but it was thought that he discounted the object as a star and gave it no further thought. But it turns out Galileo may have known the "star" had moved in relation to other stars, Jamieson reveals. That sort of movement would have caught Galileo's attention, since he knew that it was just the sort of thing planets did.

New Scientist: High-energy laser weapons have been hailed as the future of anti-missile defense, but they may be further from being battle-ready than military chiefs hoped.

In recent tests, several prototypes have suffered serious damage to their optics at intensities well below the expected levels of tolerance. "Optical damage has been quietly alarming upper management in most major programs," Sean Ross of the US Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico told a meeting of the Directed Energy Professional Society in Newton, Massachusetts, last week. There are also big problems managing the waste heat generated by high-intensity beams.

BBC News: Astronomers have revealed faint images of the two oldest and most distant supernovae to be discovered to date.

When a massive star effectively runs out of nuclear fuel, it explodes in a supernova—releasing all of its material into space.

The scientists described in the journal Nature how they gathered images of the exploding stars by monitoring the same galaxies over five years.

They used multiple images to pick out supernovae in the distant universe.

Related Link
Type IIn supernovae at redshift z approximately 2 from archival data

ESA: These Envisat images highlight the dramatic retreat of the Aral Sea's shoreline from 2006 to 2009 (see animated image below).

The Aral Sea was once the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, but it has been steadily shrinking over the past 50 years since the rivers that fed it were diverted for irrigation projects. By the end of the 1980s, it had split into the Small Aral Sea (north) and the horseshoe-shaped Large Aral Sea (south). By 2000, the Large Aral Sea had split into two — an eastern and western lobe. As visible in the images, the eastern lobe retreated substantially between 2006 and 2009. It appears to have lost about 80% of its water since the 2006 acquisition, at which time the eastern lobe had a length of about 150 km and a width of about 70 km.

The sea's entire southern section is expected to dry out completely by 2020, but efforts are underway to save the northern part.

The Kok-Aral dike, a joint project of the World Bank and the Kazakhstan government, was constructed between the northern and southern sections of the sea to prevent water flowing into the southern section. Since its completion in 2005, the water level has risen in the northern section by an average of 4 m.

As the Aral Sea evaporated, it left behind a 40 000-km² zone of dry, white salt terrain now called the Aral Karakum Desert. Each year violent sandstorms pick up at least 150 000 tonnes of salt and sand from the Aral Karakum and transport it across hundreds of kilometers, causing severe health problems for the local population and making regional winters colder and summers hotter. In an attempt to mitigate these effects, vegetation that thrives in dry, saline conditions is being planted in the former seabed.

In 2007, the Kazakhstan government secured another loan from the World Bank to implement the second stage, which includes the building of a second dam, of the project aimed at reversing this manmade environmental disaster.

Envisat acquired these images on 1 July 2006 and 6 July 2009 with its Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument while working in Full Resolution Mode to provide a spatial resolution of 300 m.

Salon.com: The experience of CERN in having to counter widespread but baseless public concerns about black holes consuming the Earth is, more broadly, the experience of science in our culture today, say Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Science is simultaneously admired and yet viewed as dangerously powerful and slightly malevolent—an uneasiness that comes across repeatedly in Hollywood depictions.

As science-fiction film director James Cameron (Aliens, Terminator, Titanic) has observed, the movies tend to depict scientists "as idiosyncratic nerds or actively the villains."

That's not only unfair to scientists: It's unhealthy for the place of science in our culture—no small matter at a time of climate crisis, bioweapon threats, pandemic diseases, and untold future controversies that will surely erupt as science continues to dramatically change our world and our politics.

To begin to counter this problem, though, we need to wake up to a new recognition: Fixing the problem of science education in our schools, although very important, is not the sole solution. We also have to do something about the cultural standing of science—heavily influenced by politics and mass media—and that's a very different matter.

NYTimes.com: Spaceflight is now embedded in our culture, so much so that it is usually taken for granted—a far cry from the old days when the world held its breath for Alan B. Shepard Jr and John Glenn and watched, transfixed, the scene at Tranquility Base. That was then; no astronauts today are household names. Yet space traffic is thick and integral to the infrastructure of modern life.

John Noble Wilford looks back to the early days of spaceflight in which he wrote what he calls "the greatest story of my career 'Men Land on Moon."

Photos about the Moon can be found in their media blog, or track the history of the Apollo 11 mission in real time at WeChooseTheMoon.org, a web site that is re-creating the entire Apollo 11 trip as it happened.

Guardian.co.uk: As concerns increase in the UK about the "dumbing down" of science education, the government has launched a consultation on the new GCSE science curriculum. Unfortunately the consultation process is happening when nearly all the teachers are on holiday.

As Alom Shaha, a science teacher and filmmaker, says on the Guardian's website:

There are not enough students going on to study science at A-level. Top universities are complaining about the low standard of the few students who do choose to study science beyond school. There's a shortage of good science teachers.

These factors combine to create a crisis that has damaging implications for the future of British science and the economy. The QCA consultation is an opportunity for science teachers to play a role in improving things and I think as many science teachers as possible should take part.

In that regard Shaha has created a website www.howscience.co.uk to make an easier way for teachers and interested parents to contribute to the consultation.

SPACE.com: Uranium exists on the Moon, according to new data from a Japanese spacecraft.

The findings are the first conclusive evidence for the presence of the radioactive element in lunar dirt, the researchers said. They announced the discovery recently at the 40th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

Nature News: Indian universities are likely to find themselves under a new oversight body, human resource development minister Kapil Sibal has announced.

Physicist Yash Pal led the committee that recommended setting up a six-member National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) to reform higher education. The commission would replace nearly a dozen regulatory bodies and bring all streams of higher education, including engineering, medicine, agriculture, and law, under its purview.

Various: An opera about string theory and five-dimensional space has premiered in Paris.

Hypermusic Prologue is a collaboration between composer Hèctor Parra and Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, who authored Warped Passages: Unraveling the Universe's Hidden Dimensions (Allen Lane, 2005), an account of cutting-edge physics, including string theory, and the likelihood that there exists additional spatial dimensions.

Randall says that the piece which is basically about two physicists, one of whom explores other dimensions, and one who stays at home. It tries to capture the competition in cutting edge science, the creativity in science as well as in art, says Randall in the above video. "It wasn't clear how to incorporate the ideas into an opera...it did turn into an exciting collaboration."

Baritone James Bobby and soprano Charlotte Ellett sang Randall's libretto, accompanied by musicians and technicians of the Paris-based Ensemble Intercontemporain.

A review in Nature by Stefan Michalowski and Georgia Smith says that the singers and musicians gave "admirable performances, with flashes of startling beauty."

Hypermusic Prologue will be performed on 27–28 November at Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, Spain, and on 6 December in the Grand Auditorium of the Philharmonie, Luxembourg.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: President Barack Obama recently spoke of the importance of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), as has every president since Lyndon B. Johnson who signed the treaty in 1968.

Yet all presidents to a lesser or greater degree have weakened the treaty, through lax enforcement, by carving out exceptions for certain countries, or by just ignoring it.

We have come to the point now that North Korea, which signed the treaty in 1985, is now mocking it. And in all the discussions over a possible Iranian bomb, no one seems to think the treaty's 90-day withdrawal clause would be much of a hurdle if Tehran decided to leave the NPT.

If President Obama really wants to strengthen the treaty, a good—and necessary—place to start is to make it much more difficult for any of the 189 member states to leave the NPT, say Henry Sokolski and Victor Gilinsky.

It is at odds with the NPT's purpose to allow a country to import or develop technology under the treaty's cover and then walk out to make bombs. At a minimum, before legally exiting the treaty, a country should have to clear its NPT obligations by returning whatever it got from others based on the understanding that it was a good-faith treaty member.

Nature News: With its electron microscope, genetic sequencing machines, and observatory, the Yokohama Science Frontier High School is equipped like no other. Will future scientists be inspired there, asks David Cyranoski.

Scripps Oceanography News: George G. Shor Jr, professor emeritus of geophysics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, died 3 July at his home in La Jolla, California, from complications following several strokes. He was 86 years old.

Shor's distinguished career included helping develop the nation's consortium of research ships operated by oceanographic institutions and participating in the creation of the California Sea Grant program.

Shor was born 8 June 1923, in New York City. He received his BS degree in mechanical engineering from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1944. He joined the Naval Reserve and served in World War II as an electronics officer and communications officer, with duty in the Pacific theater on a ship that transported troops. After the war, he remained in the Naval Reserve until his retirement as commander in 1983.

In the fall of 1946 he returned to Caltech for graduate work in geophysics and received an MS degree in 1948. He then worked for Seismic Explorations, Inc. (SEI), based in Houston, which had a number of crews prospecting for oil. He worked in New Mexico and west Texas, and by 1949 he led the operations of one of the company's crews.

In 1951 Shor returned to Caltech for his Ph.D. in seismology and geology. His adviser was the noted earthquake expert Charles Richter. Shor received his PhD in 1954, with a dissertation on recording blasts to reach the Mohorovicic discontinuity, the boundary layer between Earth's crust and mantle, the depth of which varies from about 3 miles beneath the ocean floor to about 25 miles beneath the continents.

In 1953 Shor began work at Scripps Institution of Oceanography as an assistant research geophysicist at the Marine Physical Laboratory, and he continued with that unit until his retirement in 1991. During his decades at Scripps, he advised many graduate students.

Shor planned and served as chief scientist on many research expeditions at sea, where he carried out studies of the structure beneath the sea floor, using refraction and reflection techniques, from explosives to air guns. His early work was in the Gulf of Alaska, a region then little known for its geologic history.

In 1960 he led the first leg of the first expedition by Scripps into the Indian Ocean, part of the International Indian Ocean Expeditions. His research continued in that region, and he became a special adviser to the Committee for Coordination of Joint Prospecting for Mineral Resources in Asian Offshore Areas (CCOP) from 1976 to 1991.

Project Mohole was established in the mid-1950s an attempt to retrieve a sample of material from Earth's mantle by drilling a hole through the Earth's crust to the Mohorovicic discontinuity, or Moho. If successful, this highly ambitious exploration of the intraterrestrial frontier would provide invaluable information on Earth's age, makeup, and internal processes. In addition, evidence drawn from the Moho could be brought to bear on the question of continental drift, which at the time was still controversial. Shor served on some of the Mohole Project's committees and scheduled several expeditions to determine geologic structure. He and his colleague Russell W. Raitt identified the best location to drill the hole, off Hawaii. The project was ended by Congress before drilling could begin.

In the 1960s Shor helped to establish the California Sea Grant program, headquartered at Scripps and involving a number of California universities. He served as its manager from 1969 to 1973. The organization founded a great many studies on marine subjects within the state.

Shor was chairman of two divisions at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. From 1968 until his 1991 retirement he served as an associate director of the institution, primarily for seagoing operations and management of the institution's fleet of research ships. He participated in the establishment of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS), which coordinates operations of the research ships operated by oceanographic institutions.

Shor was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the American Miscellaneous Society, the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, the Seismological Society and Sigma Xi.

He is survived by his wife of 59 years, Scripps historian Elizabeth (Betty) Noble Shor, and three children.

The family suggests donations in his memory be made to Scripps Institution of Oceanography for its valuable oceanographic research collections or to Friends of the International Center at UC San Diego for scholarships.

Wired.com: Only two sizes of black holes have ever been spotted: small and super-massive. Scientists have long speculated that an intermediate version must exist, but they’ve never been able to find one until now.

Astrophysicists identified what appears to be the first-ever medium-sized black hole, with a mass at least 500 times that of our Sun. Researchers from the Centre d’Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements in France detected the middling hole in a galaxy about 290 million light-years from Earth.

Science: How will the US find the talent to fuel its clean-energy economy? Secretary of Energy Steven Chu has a solution—a 10-year, $1.7 billion education program called RE-ENERGYSE (REgaining our ENERGY Science and Engineering Edge)—and the physics Nobelist says there's no time to waste. But Congress may prefer to wait until next year.

San Francisco Business Times: Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories—longtime secretive federal agencies working on classified weapons programs—are about to throw open their doors to the private sector.

The labs are pursuing better ways of commercializing their technology with other-than-weapons applications. They are partnering with the private sector in new ways and pushing for an open campus on 50 acres to help the labs better collaborate with the best and brightest.

In addition, the two Livermore-based labs are working with the local business council, consulting with MBA students, and launching a formal “hub” program to partner with the transportation industry.

The shift could mean a transformation of the role the labs play in the Tri-Valley and the Bay Area economy, creating an economic engine with tech transfer capabilities that rival those of University of California, San Francisco and UC Berkeley.

Science News: A team of theoretical physicists and astronomers has calculated that any hidden extra dimension beyond our familiar three-dimensional space, a world known in physics parlance as a 3-brane, must be less than 3 micrometers. The researchers base their findings on the recent discovery of one of the smallest and oldest black holes ever found.

The new limit is less than half that of previous limits on the length of an extra dimension, Oleg Gnedin of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and his colleagues report in a study posted online 30 June (http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.5351).

The Economist: When an airliner takes off for a transatlantic flight it needs to carry some 80 tonnes of fuel, which accounts for around one-fifth of its weight. On really long flights, fuel can account for 40% of a plane’s take-off weight, so that around 20% of the fuel is used to carry the rest of the fuel. Each tonne of fuel burned also produces 3.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Yet inside a hanger at a Swiss airfield is the prototype of an aircraft that does not use any fuel at all. The wings of this aircraft are almost as big as those of an airliner, but they are covered in a film of solar cells that convert sunlight into electricity to drive its engines.

csmonitor.com: Unless enormous amounts of soil are dumped onto the Mississippi River Delta, the region could lose up to 5,212 square miles of land to ocean and tidal marsh by 2100 say two Louisiana State University scientists.

This could leave New Orleans with just the French Quarter and the airport above part of a vast bay.

“This was an attempt to give real boundary conditions for restoration efforts,” says Harry Roberts, one of the researchers conducting the study.

The researchers acknowledge that the study is a first cut at putting numbers to the problem. Others are likely to devise more precise estimates. “But even if we’re off by 50 percent, it’s still bad,” says Michael Blum, Dr. Roberts’s colleague on the work.

Nature: Physicists often state that nuclear shell structure—the way in which protons and neutrons are arranged within a nucleus—is the cornerstone of any satisfactory description of an atomic nucleus. But over the past decade it has become apparent that the exact number of particles required to fill a particular shell is not as fixed as was once thought. The results of two experiments, one by Kanungo et al. reported in Physical Review Letters, and the other by Hoffman et al. in Physics Letters B, add significantly to the discussion. They demonstrate that ²⁴O, the oxygen isotope with proton number Z = 8 and neutron number N = 16, is a doubly magic nucleus. This result is all the more surprising because ²⁴O is also the heaviest oxygen isotope to exist.

Related Links
One-neutron removal measurement reveals ²⁴O as a new doubly magic nucleus
Evidence for a doubly magic ²⁴O

The Observer: More than 1,767 safety incidents have occurred at nuclear power plants in the UK between 2001-08 according to a report written by the government's chief nuclear inspector, Mike Weightman of the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII), and released under the UK's Freedom of Information Act.

About half were subsequently judged by inspectors as serious enough "to have had the potential to challenge a nuclear safety system". They were "across all areas of existing nuclear plant", including Sellafield in Cumbria and Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire, says Weightman.

Various: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Bevatron, built by the Atomic Energy Commission—the forerunner of the Department of Energy—in the early 1950s, is slowly being demolished thanks to $74 million of stimulus funding. Soon, by 2011, all traces of it will be gone reports Wired magazine.

LBNL has a flicker photo galley of the Bevatron, some of which are posted below.

The 10,000 ton Bevatron is a weak focusing synchrotron that was closely watched by Physics Today, both during construction and for the scientific results it produced.

Paul Dirac had predicted the existence of antimatter in the 1930s and the Bevatron's mission—as the most powerful accelerator in the world—was to discover the antiproton (which it did) and explore the fundamental physics behind hadrons using beams of 6.2-GeV protons.

The Bevatron had a number of upgrades during its lifetime in an attempt to regain its status as one of the most powerful synchrotrons in the world, and to continue to do interesting science.

In 1960 the Bevatron had a three-year upgrade which cost more than the initial construction ($9.6 million) and increased the intensity of the proton beam by a factor of four. In 1967, metal fatigue shut the Bevatron down for three months while repairs were made. In the early 1970s the accelerator switched to nitrogen ions, which were more energetic than the protons initially used in the accelerator, and made the Bevatron more attractive to the biological sciences.

By linking parts of the Bevatron with other equipment at LBNL— the SuperHILAC serving as the injector and the Bevatron as an accelerator—the Bevalac accelerator was created in 1974 which led to a completely new field of research: relativistic heavy-ion reactions. This time carbon-12 ions were injected into the ring (reaching 2.1 GeV), which regained LBNL's reputation of having the most powerful heavy-ion accelerator in the world.

Improvements to the Bevalac continued well into the 1980s. In 1982 new upgrades, which included a new vacuum system for the Bevatron, allowed the Bevalac to accelerate uranium ions.

In science, research at the Bevatron led to at least four Nobel Prizes, one for the discovery of the antiproton by Emilio Segré and Owen Chamberlain.

The Bevatron's beam was finally turned off in 1993 by one of the people who built it: Edward Lofgren.

Related Physics Today articles
Bevatron Launched (1954)
During the next three years (1961)
The Bevatron Reactivated (1963)
Bevatron Shut Down 3 Months: Metal Fatigue in Alternator (1967)
Long-lived kaon shows no 2-muon decay (1971)
Two accelerators switch to nitrogen ions (1971)
Conflicting evidence for K-meson decay (1972)
Bevalac makes a successful debut (1974)
Bevalac accelerates uranium (1982)
Probing Dense Nuclear Matter in the Laboratory (1993)

The Independent: Major nations have failed to agree to set a goal halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, according to a draft document ahead of talks tomorrow—a setback to efforts to secure a new UN climate pact.

Negotiations involving senior officials from the 17-nation Major Economies Forum broke down overnight after China and India opposed any mention of the target, a source familiar with negotiations told Reuters.

CNET News: Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a fabric made of a mesh of light-sensitive fibers that collectively act like a rudimentary camera. The fibers, which each can detect two frequencies of light, produced signals that when amplified and processed by a computer reproduced an image of a smiley face near the mesh.

"This is the first time that anybody has demonstrated that a single plane of fibers, or 'fabric,' can collect images just like a camera but without a lens," said Yoel Fink, an associate professor of materials science, who along with colleagues described the approach in a the journal Nano Letters.

Related Link
Exploiting Collective Effects of Multiple Optoelectronic Devices Integrated in a Single Fiber

ScienceNOW: One fine day about 74 000 years ago, a giant volcano on Sumatra blew its top. The volcano, named Toba, may have ejected 1000 times more rock and other material than Mount St. Helens in Washington State did in 1980. In the process, it cooled the climate by at least 10 °C, causing a global famine.

But could the aftermath have been even worse? A new study in the Journal of Geophysical Research—Atmospheres puts to rest questions about whether Toba plunged Earth into a 1000-year deep freeze. Their simulations indicate that the temperature drop would last only a few decades and put to rest the claim that volcanic eruptions could have a long-term impact on the climate.

Wall Street Journal: Like many other technology companies, Hewlett-Packard is in the process of making layoffs and other cost cuts. In the quarter ended 30 April, HP’s selling, general and administrative expenses dropped 13% from the same period last year and its research-and-development budget fell by almost 20%.

But when it comes to advanced research—far-reaching projects that might not turn into profits for years—HP says it’s still investing. Next week, the company’s long-term research division, HP Labs, plans to announce an expanded program of grants to university researchers to pursue a variety of projects. HP won’t disclose the amount of money it’s spending on the grants, but says the budget has increased 30% since last year when the program started.

NYTimes.com: In 2006, Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, drilled a hole three miles deep near the corner of Neuhaus Street and Shafer Lane in Basel, Switzerland, to look for geothermal energy—the heat simmering within Earth’s bedrock.

All seemed to be going well—until December, when the project set off an earthquake, shaking and damaging buildings and terrifying many in a city that, as every schoolchild here learns, had been devastated exactly 650 years before by a quake that sent two steeples of the Münster Cathedral tumbling into the Rhine.

Hastily shut down, Häring’s project was soon forgotten by nearly everyone outside Switzerland. As early as this week, though, an American start-up company, AltaRock Energy, will begin using nearly the same method to drill deep into ground laced with fault lines in an area two hours’ drive north of San Francisco. The New York Times article has worried residents. AltaRock Energy has published a response to the article on their web site.

Slate.com: With oil-sands production at more than 1.2 million barrels per day, Canada, which also produces conventional oil, has quietly passed Saudi Arabia to become the top supplier to the US.

US government analysts expect that production could triple again by 2030 and could eventually deliver to the US as much as 37% of imported crude.

The local environmental fallout—in terms of deforestation, water demand, and toxic waste—varies among the dozens of ongoing extraction projects but is often immense.

In other words, US policymakers are now faced with an awkward problem: How do you balance improvements in energy security with worsening climate change, especially when dealing with a resource that isn't yours?

Related Physics Today article
Physics in the oil sands of Alberta

The Economist: The proteins that make up chicken feathers could provide a cheap ($200 per car) and effective way to store hydrogen fuel in cars.

Richard Wool and a colleague, Erman Senöz, have discovered that keratin—the fibres that make up feathers—when heated in the absence of oxygen, forms hollow tubular structures six millionths of a meter across and riddled with microscopic pores, much like carbon nanotubes.

To avoid melting the fibers they first heat-treated the feathers to around 215°C. This strengthened their structure and allowed further heating to 400–450 °C. At this point the material becomes more porous, increasing its surface area and its hydrogen-storing capacity.

Washingtonpost.com: University of Maryland engineering professor Bruce Jacob had a few songs he wanted to record, tunes that had been jangling around in his head for years. He bought a guitar, but the notes he played never sounded as good as the music he had imagined.

Here's how Jacob, 43, describes the sounds a guitar makes: "If you have a bunch of paints, you can create any paint you want from the three or four fundamental colors. With guitars, it's the exact same thing. You can make any sound you want out of three or four colors. But most guitars have one color."

So Jacob decided to create a better guitar, attacking an elusive aesthetic problem with a series of math equations, a circuit board, and wiring. He and a couple of his students launched Coil, a company that uses the patent-pending electronics they developed to customize the sound in guitars.

NPR: Some environmentalists believe building more nuclear power plants today is the best way to combat climate change while solar and other renewable energy sources mature. Ira Flatow and experts discuss the economic and engineering hurdles to nuclear development in the US.

The Guardian: Consumers will need to pay more for energy if the UK is to have any chance of developing the technologies needed to tackle climate change, according to a Royal Society report.

The report said that the government must put research into alternatives to fossil fuel much higher among its priorities, and argued that current policy in the area was "half-hearted".

"We have adapted to an energy price which is unrealistically low if we're going to try and preserve the environment," John Shepherd, a climate scientist at Southampton University and co-author of the report said. "We have to allow the economy to adapt to higher energy prices through carbon prices and that will then make things like renewables and nuclear more economic, as carbon-based alternatives become more expensive."

Related Link
Towards a low carbon future

Nature: Cratons are the oldest, most stable parts of Earth's crust, and as such hold clues to Earth's early evolution.

Dewashish Upadhyay, a geochemist now at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, analyzed the make-up of isotopes in rocks from India's Bastar craton and found that some of the rocks carry the signature of a differentiation event—the separation of materials with different geochemical properties.

This event must have taken place during the first 400 million years of Earth's history, possibly when a magma "ocean" covering the planet solidified.

Related Link
¹⁴²Nd evidence for an enriched Hadean reservoir in cratonic roots

Science News: Scientists have generally assumed that the most energetic cosmic rays are primarily protons. That’s true even though heavier nuclei such as iron are more easily accelerated to high energies because of their greater electric charge.

Heavy nuclei, however, are also more fragile and the extraordinarily violent processes that rev them up to enormous energies can also cause these nuclei to fragment.

“Ask anybody what are the highest-energy [cosmic ray] particles, and they’d say ‘protons,’ ” says physics Nobel laureate James W. Cronin of the University of Chicago. But, as he announced 22 June at the Windows on the Universe meeting, the Pierre Auger Observatory in Malargüe, Argentina, has identified an abundance of iron nuclei at some of the highest energies its cosmic ray detectors can record.

Related Links
Studies of Cosmic Ray Composition and Air Shower Structure with the Pierre Auger Observatory
The Cosmic Ray Energy Spectrum and Related Measurements with the Pierre Auger Observatory

Science News: Concrete creeps. And now scientists think they know why.

New measurements suggest that the rearrangement of nano-sized concrete particles is responsible for the way buildings, bridges, and other load-bearing concrete structures deform over time, a process technically known as “creep.” The new insight could allow engineers to make stronger and longer-lasting concrete, researchers report in a study to be published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Related Link
Nanogranular origin of concrete creep

SPACE.com: The dwarf planets and other objects that litter the Kuiper belt in the far reaches of our solar system are a strange bunch, but astronomers have found what they think might be the weirdest one.

Discovered on Dec. 28, 2004 (cataloged as 2003 EL61 and nicknamed "Santa" for a time), the minor planet now known as the dwarf planet Haumea, to honor its Hawaiian discovery, is as big across as Pluto and one-third of its mass, but shaped something "like a big squashed cigar," said one of the astronomers who studies the object, Mike Brown of Caltech.

Haumea—which has a satellite moon named Namaka—is currently undergoing a series of mutual occultations and eclipses with Namaka. "Study of these events will allow us to study this system with unprecedented detail," says Brown.

Related Link
Mutual events of Haumea and Namaka

NPR: From sci-fi to documentaries, good science films tell the human story behind scientific ideas. Which films get the science right, and which don't? Physicist and movie critic Sidney Perkowitz runs through some of this summer's top science flicks.

Nature News: Modern refrigerants designed to protect the ozone layer are poised to become a major contributor to global warming because of their future explosive growth in the developing world.

Hydrofluorocarbon chemicals (HFCs) were developed to phase out ozone-depleting gases, in response to the Montreal Protocol. But they can be hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than carbon dioxide as greenhouse gases in trapping heat.

In the new study, a team led by Guus Velders at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency in Bilthoven analyzed the latest industry trends and then modeled HFC production to 2050. Their results suggest that HFC emissions could be the equivalent of between 5.5 billion and 8.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually by 2010—roughly 19% of the projected CO₂ emissions if greenhouse gases continue to rise unchecked.

Related Link
The large contribution of projected HFC emissions to future climate forcing

The Economist: A few years ago Yadong Yin was experimenting with tiny beads that changed color when a magnetic field was applied to them. This was interesting but there was no obvious way to turn them into a product

Now Yin and his colleagues at the University of California, Riverside, have come up with possible applications that range from a new type of paint to lipsticks and giant advertising billboards.

Yin’s beads are magnetochromatic microspheres. They are made from tiny blobs of polymer that contain particles of iron oxide. The structure of these particles changes in a magnetic field in a way that produces “interference” colors when light is shone on them.

It is the rearrangement of the particles’ microstructures that produces the pertinent detail.

The new research appears in the 15 June Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: After years of investment, South Africa has abandoned its plan to develop a fleet of electricity-generating pebble bed modular reactors (PBMR), once hyped as the future of nuclear power.

Problems with the PBMR aren't new; a 2008 German report chronicles Germany's own problems developing the reactor since 1967.

China, the only other country still developing PBMR-based power reactor designs, has taken a slower approach, and it is unclear if they have run into problems as well.