September 2009 Archives

Space.com: NASA has long planned to mine water on the Moon to supply human colonies and future space exploration. Now the discovery of small amounts of water across much of the lunar surface has shifted that vision into fast-forward, with the US space agency pursuing several promising technologies.

A hydrogen reduction plant and lunar rover prospectors have already passed field tests on Hawaii's volcanic soil, and more radical microwave technology is being evaluated.

"You can make back costs fairly quickly [within a year] compared to the launch costs of just throwing tanks of water and oxygen at the moon," said Gerald Sanders, manager of NASA's InSitu Resource Utilization Project.

Still, Sanders cautioned that there are big unknowns—how much water the Moon holds, where it is, and how deep will they have to excavate to get to it.

Nature News: An independent report has all but ruled out radioactive contamination from the experiments of physicist Ernest Rutherford as the source of a cluster of deaths at the University of Manchester, UK.

Related Link
Manchester University deaths not linked to Rutherford radiation The Guardian

BBC News: Engineers hope an early warning system being installed at the Large Hadron Collider could prevent incidents of the kind that shut down the machine last year.

Physics Today: A team of engineers and artists working at the University of Washington's Solheim Rapid Manufacturing Laboratory has developed a way to create glass objects using a conventional three-dimensional printer and "open-sourced" the technique so anyone can use it.

The team's method, which it named the Vitraglyphic process, is a follow-up to the Solheim Lab's success last spring printing with ceramics. (See an example image on the right. Photo credit: University of Washington)

"It became clear that if we could get a material into powder form at about 20 microns we could print just about anything," said UW professor Mark Ganter.

Three-dimensional printers are used as a cheap, fast way to build prototype parts. In a typical powder-based 3D printing system, a thin layer of powder is spread over a platform and software directs an inkjet printer to deposit droplets of binder solution only where needed. The binder reacts with the powder to bind the particles together and create a 3D object.

Glass powder doesn't readily absorb liquid, however, so the approach developed for ceramic printing had to be radically altered.

By adjusting the ratio of powder to liquid the team found a way to build solid parts out of powdered glass that fused when heated to the right temperature.

Glass is a material that can be transparent or opaque, but is distinguished as an inorganic material (one which contains no carbon) that solidifies from a molten state without the molecules forming an ordered crystalline structure. As the glass molecules remain in a disordered state, the resulting object is technically a super-cooled liquid rather than a true solid.

"By publishing these recipes without proprietary claims, we hope to encourage further experimentation and innovation within artistic and design communities," said UW associate professor Duane Storti.

Ronald Rael, an assistant professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, has been working with the Solheim Lab to set up his own 3D printer. Rael is working on new kinds of ceramic bricks that can be used for evaporative cooling systems.

"3D printing in glass has huge potential for changing the thinking about applications of glass in architecture," Rael said. "Before now, there was no good method of rapid prototyping in glass, so testing designs is an expensive, time-consuming process." Rael adds that 3D printing allows one to insert different forms of glass to change the performance of the material at specific positions as required by the design.

Science: At the height of the Korean War, a scared 16-year-old boy made a promise as he lay wounded by shrapnel on a battlefield. "I said, ‘God, if you save my life, I will return this love to my enemy,’" recalls Kim Chin-Kyung, who was fighting for the south against the north.

Six decades later, the 74-year-old businessman turned university administrator is keeping his word. Last week, Kim was appointed president of Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST) at a ceremony in Pyongyang to commemorate completion of the $35 million campus, which after 4 years of delays is expected to open in November to the crème de la crème of North Korea's science graduate students.

NYTimes.com: With a federal plan to handle nuclear waste in deadlocked disarray, the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board—an advisory panel that has spent 20 years studying a proposed repository at Yucca Mountain—turned Wednesday to discussing ways of reusing the fuel instead.

But as the panel made evident during the meeting, such reuse was uncertain, along with the future of Yucca Mountain.

Earth Island Journal: A recent New York Times article pointedly asked whether NASA climate scientist James Hansen still matters. The subtext to the story was, has Hansen been too vocal and too unconventional in his criticism of Washington’s response to climate change to be taken seriously?

Nell Greenberg interviews Hansen over his recent political action on combating climate change, and how he ended up in climate science in the first place.

NPR: NASA is running out of the special kind of plutonium needed to power deep space probes, worrying planetary scientists who say the US urgently needs to restart production of plutonium-238.

But it's unclear whether Congress will provide the $30 million that the administration requested earlier this year for the Department of Energy to get a new program going.

NYTimes.com: The modern car is still 60% of steel by weight.

But automotive steel has changed quite a bit since the Ford company's first Model T rolled off the assembly line in 1908. Metallurgists and manufacturers have learned to manipulate steel's microstructure through precise control of processing to create sheet steels of increasing strength. Prompted by crash-worthiness requirements and the need to make cars lighter to improve gas mileage, automakers are replacing conventional steels with advanced high-strength ones.

Where once a single grade of steel might have sufficed, the typical "body in white," as automakers call a car's basic skeleton, might now be a patchwork of a dozen or more steels of different types and strengths, tailored through computer modeling to handle the stress and strain of normal driving—and of severe crashes.

Nature News: Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics was intended to become a world leader in the field. Nature's Eric Hand finds out if it has lived up to its ambitions.

guardian.co.uk: A 2°C rise in global temperatures will not necessarily result in the calamity predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), China's most senior climatologist has told the Guardian.

Despite growing evidence that storms in China are getting fiercer, droughts longer, and typhoons more deadly, Xiao Ziniu, the director general of the Beijing Climate Center, said it was too early to determine the level of risk posed by global warming.

Physics Today: Panasonic will launch next month a new household LED light bulb in Japan that it says lasts 40 times longer than incandescent bulbs.

The screw-in bulbs that fit common light sockets are part of the EverLED line.

According to Panasonic, if used an average of five and a half hours per day, the new bulbs can last up to 19 years. That's 40 times longer than incandescent bulbs.

NYTimes.com: Researchers have discovered that the topography of a desert locust’s wings and the way they twist when flapping are important for the insect’s efficiency as a flier. Compared with flat, stiff wings, they produce about 30 percent more lift for the same effort.

New Scientist: A dirty bomb attack on the US would find the country ill-prepared to clean up the resulting radioactive mess, a government watchdog has warned—and hasty attempts at cleaning up could make things worse.

Nature News: Iranian researchers say they are dismayed and angered that a 2009 paper coauthored by Kamran Daneshjou, Iran's science minister, appears to have plagiarized a 2002 paper published in Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics by South Korean researchers. The similarities between the articles were revealed by Nature. Iranian scientists say they intend to press for an examination of the allegations, and for the minister's resignation—should wrongdoing be established.

Anthony Doyle, publishing editor for the Springer journal Engineering with Computers, in which the paper was published, also told Nature that the journal will label it as "retracted" online, and include an erratum in the next issue drawing attention to the matter. "Springer takes plagiarism very seriously."

The affair has been widely picked up among Iranian researchers' e-mail networks, blogs, and some political news websites in Iran.

Science: Ferromagnets, such as those made of iron or nickel, are called itinerant because the electrons whose spins aligned to create the magnetic state are extended and are the same as the ones responsible for conduction. Ferromagnetism was a mystery for classical physics, and its explanation in terms of spin, exchange interactions, and repulsions between identical particles was a triumph of early quantum mechanics.

However, it proved difficult to apply these early models to real ferromagnets in a quantitative way, both because the simple models neglect important features relevant in real materials and because theoretical tools to properly treat the strong correlation problem have only recently been developed. Fortunately, the simple models studied in the early days of quantum mechanics can also be applied to fermions other than electrons. In Science a paper discusses new evidence for an analog of ferromagnetism in an ultracold gas of neutral lithium-6 atoms. When repulsive interactions between these freely moving particles are sufficiently strong, a transition to ferromagnetic ordering is seen.

Related Link
Itinerant Ferromagnetism in a fermi gas of ultracold atoms

Science News: By linking the electrical currents of two superconductors large enough to be seen with the naked eye, researchers have extended the domain of observable quantum effects. Billions of flowing electrons in the superconductors can collectively exhibit a weird quantum property called entanglement, usually confined to the realm of tiny particles, say scientists in Nature.

"It's an exciting piece of work," comments physicist Steven Girvin of Yale University. "People are interested in pushing the boundaries of quantum mechanics."

The Boston Globe: For more than two decades, scientists have strived to build an artificial nose that can mimic what is sometimes called our most elusive sense. Now, with a growing slate of potential applications—detecting cancer in a breath, say, or identifying airborne toxins on the battlefield—the technology is advancing and efforts are proliferating.

In North Grafton, a small startup company, CogniScent, is working on an electronic nose that resembles a yellow Dustbuster and sniffs out everything from molds to dangerous chemicals. At MIT, researchers are working on "RealNose," a Pentagon-funded project inspired by dog noses that aims to use actual biological parts—the smell receptors that recognize odor molecules. And, further afield, the Space Shuttle just returned to Earth carrying an "ENose," that spent about six months gathering scent data on the International Space Station.

The work is beginning to pay off, in prototypes of devices that are showing their promise in lab experiments.

Various: New data and images from flybys of the Moon by the Cassini, the US Deep Impact spacecraft, and a NASA instrument on India's Chandrayaan-1 orbiter provide compelling evidence of traces of water on the Moon. The results were published in Science magazine.

Tentative clues for the existence of water ice on the Moon have existed for sometime. Faith Vilas, director of the Multiple Mirror Telescope in Arizona saw phyllosilicates—minerals formed through heat and water—back in 1999 when the Galileo spacecraft flew by the Moon, but until recently could not get her research accepted for publication.

Both the Clementine and Lunar Prospector spacecrafts saw some hints of hydrogen molecules some years ago. But it was new data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, (LRO) which was discussed at a conference last week that gave hints that conditions would be ripe for water ice.

The LRO's Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment, which measured the temperature of the lunar surface, discovered that some of the polar craters contain some of the lowest temperatures in the solar system, even colder than the surface of Pluto. These measurement were proof that the Moon has permanently dark and extremely cold places said science team member Ashwin Vasavada from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California at the conference.

Data from the LRO's Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector didn't show many neutrons inside the craters but surprisingly showed evidence of ice outside of the craters says University of Arizona astronomer William Boynton. "It actually could be better (for exploration) because getting down inside those craters is very difficult," he adds.

According to the results published in Science, concentrations in sunlit soil might average about one liter per ton of lunar material. That water doesn’t remain on the Moon, but comes and goes each lunar day.

In contrast, water molecules bound to phosphate minerals within volcanic rocks—material that formed well beneath the lunar surface—date back several billion years, says Francis McCubbin of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC A fourth, unpublished study led by McCubbin finds a surprisingly high abundance of this interior water, which may shed new light on how the Moon formed.

"It’s so startling because it’s so pervasive," said Lawrence A. Taylor of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, a co-author of one of the papers that analyzed data from a NASA instrument aboard India’s Chandrayyaan-1 satellite. "It’s like somebody painted the globe," he told the New York Times.

Carle Pieters, of Brown University, who led the Chandrayaan-1 observation team, said: "When we say ‘water on the moon’, we are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles. Water on the moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimeters of the moon’s surface," she told the London Times.

The discovery of more evidence for water on the Moon is spurring excitement over its implications for future space exploration says space.com's Leonard David.

"If ice is found we have to further explore it with landers, rovers, coring drills to assess its distribution and composition," explained Bernard Foing, the European Space Agency (ESA) project scientist for the now defunct ESA SMART-1 lunar orbiter. He is also the director of the International Lunar Exploration Working Group (ILEWG).

Following that appraisal, Foing said that the next task is to organize how ice could be partly exploited on the spot in some areas to ease the next steps of human exploration towards an international lunar base.

NASA help hold a press conference to announce the findings at 2:00pm EST earlier today.

Related Links
Water on the Moon? Nature
Possible surface ice on moon surprises Arizona Star
Water sheathes, permeates Moon ScienceNews
Prospect of Water Ice Spurs Excitement for Moon Exploration Space.com
It's Official: Water Found on the Moon Space.com
India's first space mission finds water on Moon The Guardian
Evidence suggests water exists on the Moon LA Times

Nature: The period with which the brightness of a pulsating star oscillates depends on the specific structure of its interior.

Using asteroseismology, astronomers can measure the temporal frequency spectra of pulsating stars—the seismograms of astronomers—to infer information about the stars' otherwise unobservable interior.

For example, rotating pulsating stars "sound" different from nonrotating stars: because rotating stars cannot preserve their spherically symmetric shape during pulsation, their temporal frequency spectrum is marked by nonradial modes of pulsation.

This property has allowed astronomers to measure the spin rates of pulsating white dwarfs—stellar remnants of relatively low-mass stars. But until this week, they hadn't been able to measure the internal rotation profiles of these stars.

In a paper in Nature S. Charpinet, G. Fontaine, and P. Brassard present the first evidence that a newly born white dwarf, dubbed PG 1159-035, rotates at the same rate for almost the entire depth of its body.

Related Link
Seismic evidence for the loss of stellar angular momentum before the white-dwarf stage

csmonitor.com: Some 60,000 metric tons of radioactive waste is stored at nuclear power plants across the US, awaiting federal action that’s already a decade late.

Building magazine: After dominating the architecture scene for 40 years, Norman Foster seems to have decided that the world is not enough: his practice has joined a European consortium to look into how future structures could be built on the Moon as part of the European Space Agency's Aurora programme.

Nature News: India's environment minister Jairam Ramesh will visit the site of a proposed underground neutrino laboratory next month, to try to break the impasse between physicists and environmentalists over its construction.

The US$160 million India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) was to have been completed by 2012 to study the elusive particles known as neutrinos. But its construction is mired in controversy over the wisdom of locating the facility in prime elephant and tiger habitat at Singara in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, 250 kilometers south of Bangalore.

Physics Today: Peter Chen, the well-known and eminent head of research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH Zürich) has resigned after an investigation—at his request—concluded that falsified data had been published in a doctoral thesis of one of his research students and in two papers that his research group had submitted and published in the Journal of Chemical Physics. The investigation could not conclude who was responsible for the falsifications.

In a statement released by ETH Zürich the institute said "out of respect for ETH Zürich and the function as head of research, Peter Chen has acknowledged his responsibility and decided to step down as vice president at the end of September 2009."

"Scientific misconduct jeopardizes the very core of research and must carry consequences," says ETH Zürich President Ralph Eichler. "This has been the case here and the matter also shows that the established control mechanisms for research really do work."

The research projects affected hail from the field of basic research in chemistry at ETH Zürich and were published in 2000 by members of the team then headed by Chen. He has been professor of physical-organic chemistry since 1994 and the vicepresident of research and corporate relations since 2007.

The papers under suspicion concerned results relating to the spectroscopic structural clarification of hydrocarbon radicals: short-lived chemical compounds that are formed during combustion processes. The number of citations accrued by the two papers is 66, which is quite a large score.

Intensive search for discrepancies

The experiments were conducted with the so-called "zero-kinetic-energy photoelectron spectroscopy" (ZEKE) method, a high-resolution version of photoelectron spectroscopy. The method can be used, among other things, to analyze highly reactive or unstable compounds. The measurements include those of the energies of electrons that break away from the molecule under examination after it has absorbed light. The spectra determined as a result can then be used to analyze the geometric structure and dynamics of the compounds.

However, after the papers were published, other research groups working in the same field obtained significantly different results.

Chen's group set about seeking an explanation for the discrepancies in conjunction with a former postdoctoral researcher's group. The discrepancies initially involved the ionization energies of hydrocarbon radicals, that is, the energy required to remove the most weakly bound electron from the rest of the radical.

A disturbing conclusion

Not only was the attempt to reproduce the values measured unsuccessful, but other inconsistencies led Chen to suspect foul play. He called upon ETH Zürich's executive board to appoint a scientific board of inquiry to clarify the irregularities at the beginning of January 2009. At the same time, he and his co-authors withdrew the first publication.

Five internationally renowned professors (three external ones and two from ETH Zürich) were appointed to the commission. They scrutinized the studies in question, repeated the processes used at the time where possible and interviewed the three authors involved in the experiments: the doctoral student and postdoctoral researcher at the time and Chen.

The commission concluded that some of the data had been falsified. For example, certain diagrams involving representations of the measured spectra often contained identical patterns from static, that is technically unavoidable signals without any discernible information content. The fact that some of the noise patterns recur in an identical fashion is virtually impossible, which suggests they were added to the diagrams afterward says the final report. Moreover, repeating the experiments revealed that some of the lines apparently measured within the spectra did not actually exist.

In addition, the relevant lab books and most of the raw data for the experiments are missing, limiting the likelihood that the experiment could be successfully replicated.

Resolution

All of the people involved in the experiments categorically deny having carried out the falsifications; however, they all agree that the data were falsified.

Consequently, the second publication with the fake data was withdrawn.

At this point, the author of the doctoral thesis initially withdrew his thesis on his own accord, but retracted the withdrawal later.

ETH Zürich has postponed the planned publication of the commission's report for the time being for legal reasons associated with the doctoral thesis.

After receiving the report ETH Zürich's executive board conducted its own investigation to form its own opinion. "The commission resolved the matter objectively and I am much obliged to them in the name of ETH Zürich," says Eichler. "Unfortunately, there is now no legal way of finding out for sure who was responsible for the falsifications," he added.

Chen assumes responsibility

As the current vicepresident responsible for quality assurance in research, Chen felt that the incident had compromised his effectiveness, and decided to step down.

"Peter Chen is an impressive researcher and a highly valued member of our board in every respect," stresses Eichler. "We very much regret to lose such an accomplished leader, but we are happy that he'll remain in our midst as a model colleague, outstanding scientist and professor."

Paul Guinnessy

Related Links
The zero kinetic energy photoelectron spectrum of the propargyl radical, C₃H₃ Published February 2000
Zero kinetic energy photoelectron spectra of the allyl radical, C₃H₅ Published July 2000
Erratum: "Zero kinetic energy photoelectron spectra of the allyl radical, C₃H₅" [J. Chem. Phys. 113, 561 (2000)] Published July 2009

Related News stories
Senior professor resigns over falsified 'pure research' The Daily Telegraph
Research chief steps down over fake data NatureNews
Embarrassment as technology institute research chief resigns World Radio Switzerland

Space.com: Efforts to free the stuck Spirit rover on Mars have been dragging on since May. Last week a NASA official said the robot may never get free.

"We are proceeding very cautiously and exploring all reasonable options," said John Callas, NASA project manager for Spirit and its twin, Opportunity. "There is a very real possibility that Spirit may not be able to get out, and we want to give Spirit the very best chance."

Washingtonpost.com: The end of the cold war arms race owes more to Soviet Premier Gorbachev and physicist Yevgeny Velikhov than to US President Ronald Reagan says David E. Hoffman in the Washington Post.

The Soviet Union had plans to compete with Reagan's "star wars" program that would have taken the arms race into space and provided massive subsidies to the Soviet military industrial complex says Hoffman, whose article is based on his recently published book The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy.

However, in 1985, Velikhov urged Gorbachev not to do it. Velikhov had concluded, based on earlier research, that Reagan's idea could not work. He proposed that Gorbachev abandon the conventional Cold War approach of matching what Reagan was doing, and argued instead for an "asymmetrical" response, one that would answer Reagan but not be the same.

One asymmetrical option would be to overwhelm any defense system by building more missiles. Inevitably, some Soviet missiles would get through.

The asymmetrical response that Gorbachev favored more was to talk Reagan out of missile defense program that the US did not yet possess and exchange it all for something that both leaders wanted: deep reductions in existing nuclear arms.

csmonitor.com: Wind is the fastest growing renewable energy in Europe—making up a third of new energy there, with 20 turbines added every working day in 2008, according to EU statistics.

What the European wind energy industry now wants is to expand—offshore. Ocean winds are a stronger and more predictable form of energy than the ones on land, and the industry is pushing a $57 billion investment to allow broad-winged turbines to spin at sea.

ScienceNOW: Objects with opposite electric charges—positive and negative—attract each other. But a new observation puts a twist on this concept.

Oppositely charged droplets of liquid mutually attract, yet those with a whole lot of charge bounce off each other. The findings could cause a rethinking of some important industrial processes, such as the electrostatic separation of water from crude oil.

The Guardian: The combined cost of replacing the UK's Trident nuclear missile system and building, equipping, and running two large aircraft carriers will be as much as US$260 billion, far more than the UK government has admitted, says an in-depth study by the political action group Greenpeace.

The discrepancy is because the government's published estimates on Trident do not include the cost of conventional military forces directly assigned to support the nuclear force, nor the cost of new installations that would be required at the atomic weapons establishment at Aldermaston, or exchange rate fluctuations in equipment and supplies such as the F-35 jet fighter bought from the US.

David Cameron, leader of the conservative party, the main opposition group in the UK Parliament, said that a strategic defence review would be carried out rapidly should the conservatives win the general election. He made it clear that no area of the defense budget was exempt from discussions.

The Labour party, which runs the government, indicated that it might consider scaling back the number of Britain's nuclear missile–carrying submarines from four to three.

There is also widespread opposition replacing Trident among army chiefs, reflected yesterday by Lord Guthrie, chief of defence staff under former prime minister Tony Blair. Britain needed to keep a deterrent to maintain a voice in international nuclear weapons negotiations, he told the Guardian. However, he added: "We must examine ways of delivering a weapon more cheaply."

Wired.com: A Texas team called Armadillo Aerospace is the first to qualify for the top prize in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge after flying its moonship twice in two hours to simulate a moon landing. Armadillo Aerospace is one of three teams in the hunt for the $1 million award.

The Texans saw their craft, Scorpius, easily meet the requirements for Level 2 of the challenge, which require ascending to at least 50 meters, flying horizontally, and landing on a rocky replica of the lunar surface 50 meters away then making a return flight.

Each flight, made last weekend in Caddo Mills, Texas, had to last 180 seconds. John Carmack, the legendary coder behind Doom and Quake who leads Armadillo Aerospace, said Scorpius is capable of much greater altitude.

"Our Scorpius vehicle actually has the capability to travel all the way to space," he said, adding that Armadillo plans flights to 6,000 feet soon at its base in Texas before heading to New Mexico to achieve greater heights. Fully loaded with ethanol and liquid oxygen fuel, the craft weighs about 1,900 pounds.

Related Link
Engine leak stalls Xombie rocket's bid for NASA cash

Nature News: Suspending a cat between life and death is one of the best-known thought experiments in quantum mechanics.

Now researchers from Germany and Spain are proposing a real experiment to probe whether a virus can exist in a superposition of two quantum states.

Such superpositions are typically the domain of smaller, inanimate objects such as atoms. But the team believes that their technique, using finely tuned lasers, will soon allow for the superposition of something much closer to a living organism. They outline the experiment in a paper posted to the arXiv pre-print server.

Related Link
Towards quantum superposition of living organisms

The Walrus: Installed on the second floor of a small building on the summit of Arizona's Mount Graham, Guy Consolmagno is multitasking. He's checking e-mail on his laptop and listening to the Penguin Cafe Orchestra on his iPod, all the while keeping an eye on a bank of computer monitors.

One floor up, nestled in a silvery-white dome, a telescope is trained on a potato-shaped chunk of rock and ice known as Haumea, which orbits the Sun some six billion kilometers from Earth. Thin clouds have been drifting overhead since sundown, but if they dissipate, the telescope's digital camera will record changes in Haumea's brightness as it tumbles through the outer reaches of the solar system, offering Consolmagno and fellow astronomers hints about the structure and evolution of our planetary family.

All this is typical fare for a scientist. What is perhaps surprising is that Consolmagno is also a Jesuit brother, that many of his colleagues are ordained priests, and that they're scanning the heavens with the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope or, more affectionately, the "Pope scope." The state-of-the-art facility is part of the Vatican Observatory, established behind St. Peter's Basilica in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII at least partly to show that the Roman Catholic Church was not anti-science—an allegation that has persisted since Galileo was dragged before the Inquisition for claiming that the Earth moves.

BBC News: Less than two months before the scheduled launch of Russia's flagship planetary spacecraft, officials are set to recommend a delay until 2011.

The Phobos-Grunt mission aims to land on the Martian moon Phobos to collect soil samples and return them to Earth.

Sources within the Russian space industry gave RussianSpaceWeb.com details of the likely postponement.

The Russian space agency Roscosmos is expected to announce the mission's fate within a week.

The agency's decision will be based on results of testing which the spacecraft has been undergoing since July at its assembly facility at NPO Lavochkin in Khimki, near Moscow.

A delay for Phobos-Grunt would also affect China's first Mars probe Yinghuo 1, as the two craft are due to be launched together on the same Zenit rocket.

Science: Global warming is raising the possibility of a devastating oil spill in the Arctic, as melting sea ice attracts more shipping and energy exploration. But the US is ill-prepared to prevent and recover from spills in this ecologically fragile region, say scientists and policymakers. So they are asking the US government to reinvigorate the national oil-spill research program with a focus on the Arctic.

csmonitor.com: Four technologies aim to use heat from the Sun to make electricity. But which one has the edge?

Wired.com: When astronomers discovered COROT-7b in February, they couldn’t determine its mass because they didn’t have precise enough measurements of the velocity of its star. Now, using 70 hours of observation data from the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph, scientists from the European Southern Observatory have calculated that the exoplanet is only about five times more massive than Earth.

Combined with the planet’s known radius, which is almost twice that of Earth, the new mass measurement makes COROT-7b the first exoplanet with a known density similar to Earth’s.

Nature News: In 2003, the University of Rochester in New York launched a digital archive designed to preserve and share dissertations, preprints, working papers, photographs, music scores—just about any kind of digital data the university's investigators could produce.

At the time of the launch, the university librarians were worried that a flood of uploaded data might swamp the available storage space.

Six years later, the US$200,000 repository lies mostly empty.

Researchers had been very supportive of the archive idea, recalls Susan Gibbons, vice-provost and dean of the university's River Campus Libraries—especially as the alternative was to keep on scattering their data and dissertations across an ever-proliferating array of unintegrated computers and websites.

"So we spent all this money, we spent all this time, we got the software up and running, and then we said, 'OK, here it is. We're ready. Give us your stuff'," she says. "And that's where we hit the wall." When the time came, scientists couldn't find their data, or didn't understand how to use the archive, or lamented that they just didn't have any more hours left in the day to spend on this business.

A similar reality check has greeted other data-sharing efforts.

Most researchers happily embrace the idea of sharing. It opens up observations to independent scrutiny, fosters new collaborations and encourages further discoveries in old data sets.

But in practice those advantages often fail to outweigh researchers' concerns. What will keep work from being scooped, poached or misused? What rights will the scientists have to relinquish? Where will they get the hours and money to find and format everything?

NYTimes.com: In good times or bad, the pace of technological change never seems to let up. This relentless engine of innovation, economists agree, is the wellspring of the nation’s long-run prosperity. But it presents a daunting challenge to science and technology professionals who are trying to stay ahead, seeking a career that is unlikely to become outsourced, automated or obsolete.

The sour economy has only intensified those pressures. So colleges across the country are reporting a surge in applications since last fall, up as much as 50 percent, for continuing education programs intended for people with science and engineering backgrounds. The offerings, in classroom settings and online, range from short courses of a few days to graduate degree programs that span years.

ReviewJournal.com: Managers of the Nevada Test Site are ready to write a new chapter in the history of the nation's nuclear weapons proving grounds.

They hope the Rhode Island-size test site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, will become home this fall to a new National Center for Nuclear Security, where experts on treaty verification, counterterrorism and nonproliferation will huddle to chart the nation's course for achieving national goals.

The center "will probably be the biggest thing at the site in many decades," said Stephen M. Younger, president of National Security Technologies, NSTec, the managing and operating contractor at the Nevada Test Site.

Nevada Site Office Manager Stephen Mellington said the center will play a pivotal role in supporting arms reduction treaties and "other nonproliferation activities we're going to be doing with the intelligence communities."

Science News: Shortly before his 80th birthday, on September 15, the physics Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann spoke with Science News Editor in Chief Tom Siegfried about his views on the current situation in particle physics and the interests he continues to pursue in other realms of science.

Gell-Mann is most well known for introducing the concept of quarks, the building blocks of protons, neutrons and other particles that interact under the influence of the strong nuclear force. (see The Status Quark).

After many years as a professor of physics at Caltech, Gell-Mann moved in the mid-1980s to New Mexico as one of the founding members of the Santa Fe Institute, where he continues his research today.

Nature News: The earthquake that rocked the ancient city of L'Aquila, Italy, less than six months ago was caused by a fault not thought to be a major seismic hazard.

The Gran Sasso region near L'Aquila is criss-crossed with large, looming faults running through the mountainous terrain that their activity has created. But the first published analyses of the quake, which struck on 6 April and killed 307 people, suggest that the culprit was the Paganica fault, an undistinguished fracture in comparatively flat ground.

"It shows it is dangerous to work on the assumption that the faults associated with the largest topographic features are going to produce the largest events," says Richard Walters, who studies tectonics at the University of Oxford, UK.

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2009 L'Aquila earthquake

Science: The Moon isn't made of green cheese and almost certainly doesn't harbor hypothetical particles called "strangelets," an analysis of lunar soil has shown. The result undermines a possible strangelet sighting a decade ago and strengthens the case that the bizarre particles, which protesters once feared might emerge from an atom smasher and consume Earth, don't exist.

"I'm not surprised," says Frank Wilczek, a theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. "It would be a great discovery to find strangelets, but the theoretical case for them is pretty shaky." Still, he says, "it's not crazy" to look for them.

guardian.co.uk: Harvard and Yale universities lost 30% of the value of their endowments in the last year due to the financial crisis.

Harvard's endowment dropped by $11billion to $26 billion in the year to the end of June, according to the Harvard Management Company, which oversees the endowment. Excluding donations and distributions, the decline in investment performance amounted to 27.3%, the biggest in four decades.

The losses have forced the university to lay off 275 staff and halt plans for a campus expansion across the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Yale's endowment fell by $7 billion to $16 billion over the same period.

"We want to alert you to the fact that another round of reductions will be necessary," Yale's president, Richard Levin, wrote in a letter to the Yale community.

This means that Yale will have an annual deficit of $150 million from 2010–11 to 2013–14, he wrote. He said the school would cut non-salary expenses by another 5% this year, having already reduced staff and non-salary expenses by 7.5%.

Science: China was late to join the race to develop novel rare-earth materials. "We lag behind the world in applications," says Xu Guangxian of Peking University, a chemist who was detained by the Red Guard in the late 1960s before becoming a pioneer in separating rare earths from other minerals. But Western observers agree that China is catching up fast in areas such as fuel cells and magnetic refrigeration, thanks in part to research efforts now happening here at the Baotou Research Institute of Rare Earths (BRIRE). "Absolutely, they are gaining ground," says Clint Cox, an analyst at The Anchor House, a rare earths consulting firm in Chicago, Illinois. Today, about three-quarters of the world's neodymium magnets are made in China. Domestic industrial demand is rising: Last year, China consumed 60% of all processed rare earths.

That unnerves some industry analysts and US legislators, who have expressed concern about China's dominance of the rare-earth supply. Last year, China satisfied 95% of global demand--now about 125,000 tons per year—and holds more than half of all proven reserves. In the 1990s, China's cheap production costs sent prices plummeting, driving many non-Chinese rare-earth mines out of business. Prices started creeping up in 2005, however, when China began to limit production and slap export tariffs on some rare earths. In a policy paper last month, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology floated the idea of prohibiting export of three scarcer rare earths--europium, terbium, and dysprosium.

If the Chinese government were to implement such a policy, that "would be a big problem for other countries," says Judith Chegwidden, managing director of Roskill Information Services Ltd., a mining analysis company in London. China has a "natural monopoly" over heavier rare earths, she says, simply because few mines elsewhere have ample reserves.

The Daily Telegraph: US scientists are trying to map the complex interplay of attractive forces between planets and moons in order to reduce the amount of fuel used by spacecraft. The Genesis spacecraft used this technique in 2004 to cut its fuel load by a factor of ten.

Depicted by computer graphics, the optimal journey pathways look like strands of spaghetti that wrap around planetary bodies and snake between them.

The pathways connect sites called Lagrange points where gravitational forces balance out.

Virginia Tech's Shane Ross said: "I like to think of [these tubes] as being similar to ocean currents, but they are gravitational currents."

"If you're in a parking orbit round the Earth, and one of them intersects your trajectory, you just need enough fuel to change your velocity and now you're on a new trajectory that is free."

"It's not the same as a [gravitational] slingshot," said Ross. "Slingshots don't put you in orbit round a moon, whereas this does."

COSMOS magazine: Jupiter's gravity captured a comet in the mid-20th century, holding it in orbit as a temporary moon for 12 years.

The comet, named 147P/Kushida-Muramatsu, is the fifth body known to have been pulled by Jupiter from its orbit around the Sun.

The discovery adds to our understanding of how Jupiter interferes with objects from the "Hilda group," which are asteroids and comets with orbits related to Jupiter's orbit.

Related Arxiv Paper
Quasi-Hilda Comet 147P/Kushida-Muramatsu: Another long temporary satellite capture by Jupiter

NPR: Steven Chu is an optimist. The secretary of energy, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, believes science can solve many of the nation's energy challenges.

"Scientists by their nature are very optimistic," he said. "We learn about Newton, about Maxwell, about Einstein. And yet you want to do some science that can contribute on the shoulders of those giants—you've got to be pretty optimistic.

"That doesn't mean I'm a cockeyed optimist," he cautioned. "You've still got to come up with the goods."

Chu knows cleaner coal, new nuclear power plants, more renewable energy will take time. In a conversation with NPR's Steve Inskeep, he lays out ambitious plans for the country's energy future.

Washingtonpost.com: A tool developed by the Idaho Department of Water Resources and the University of Idaho is changing the face of water management and conservation by efficiently offering specific measurements of the water consumed across a large region or single field.

Using surface temperature readings from government satellites, air temperature, and a system of algorithms, the new method lets officials measure how much water is "consumed" on a certain piece of land through evapotranspiration.

Evapotranspiration is a combination of the evaporation of water into the atmosphere and the water vapor released by plants through respiration—basically, a measurement of the water that leaves the land for the atmosphere, not water that is diverted or pumped onto land but then returned quickly to the water table or river for other users.

Wired.com: Physicist Paul Halpern explores the past, present, and intriguing future of high-energy particle physics in Collider. He explains what all the hubbub surrounding the Large Hadron Collider is about and why physicists are pretty much beside themselves with anticipation.

Nature News: How quickly did oxygen build up in Earth's early atmosphere? An analysis using chromium isotopes trapped in ancient ocean deposits has provided an unexpected clue.

A team led by Robert Frei of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, sampled banded iron formations—an iron-rich sedimentary rock—dating from around and in between the two main periods of intense oxygen increases. They show that oxygen snuck into surface ocean waters 2.8-2.6 billion years ago—at least 200 million years earlier than predictions based on analyses of other metal isotopes.

More surprisingly, they also claim that around 1.9 billion years ago, oxygen levels actually dipped back down to almost where they were before the Great Oxidation Event, at less than 1% of today's levels.

Related Link
Fluctuations in Precambrian atmospheric oxygenation recorded by chromium isotopes

The Daily Telegraph: Tom Boles, 65, has seen 125 exploding stars, more than anyone else. The previous record—set by Bulgarian-born professor Fritz Zwicky, who identified 123 exploding stars before his death in 1974—stood for 36 years.

His latest discoveries were made on August 20 when he spotted supernova number 124, or "2009i"', followed by number 125 or "2009io" a few nights later, helping him to the record.

The painstaking task, which took him 13 years, has earned him the respect of the professional science community.

John Mason, from the British Astronomical Association, said Boles's achievement was unparalleled in the history of the organization.

The Independent: Google is disappointed with the lack of breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector but the company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by a quarter or more.

"We've been looking at very unusual materials for the mirrors both for the reflective surface as well as the substrate that the mirror is mounted on," the company's green energy czar Bill Weihl told Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.

The Times of India: Contrary to India's space agency ISRO's explanation that Chandrayaan-1's orbit around the Moon had been raised from 100 km to 200 km in May this year for a better view of the Moon's surface, it is now known that this was because of a miscalculation of the Moon's temperature that had led to faulty thermal protection. As stated in the Times of India:

Admitting this, T K Alex, director of the ISRO Satellite Centre in Bangalore, said, "We assumed that the temperature at 100 km above the Moon's surface would be around 75 degrees Celsius. However, it was more than 75 degrees and problems started to surface. We had to raise the orbit to 200km."

On May 19, however, ISRO said it had raised Chandrayaan's orbit to "enable further studies on orbit perturbations, gravitational field variation of the Moon and also enable imaging of the lunar surface with a wider swath."

It now transpires that heating problems on the craft had begun as early as November 25, 2008, forcing ISRO to deactivate some of the payloads—there were 11 in all.

As a result, some of the experiments could not be carried out which raised questions on whether the pre-launch thermal vacuum test done on the spacecraft at the ISRO Satellite Centre in Bangalore was adequate.

Sources at NASA headquarters told Physics Today last year that they were concerned with the documentation and test results provided by ISRO for integrating two NASA-funded experiments onto the spacecraft: M³, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, and miniSAR, a Synthetic Aperture Radar system to search for lunar polar ice.

Daily Telegraph: The world's 'quietest' room opened its doors for the study of nanotechnology in Bristol.

The ''ultra-low vibration suite'', which cost £11m, allows scientists to manipulate atoms and molecules without the interference of environmental vibrations interrupting their work.

There is virtually no air movement inside the cutting edge laboratory, which is anchored to the rock foundation in the basement of the Nanoscience and Quantum Information Centre in Bristol.

The building's architecture prevents the penetration of echo and sound waves inside the building, despite its location in the Bristol city centre.

Meanwhile, its exterior panels are made from 'self-cleaning' glass, that uses nano-particles to break down dirt.

The Centre will be used for a range of experiments, from looking for solutions to greener power production to better ways to battle cancer.

guardian.co.uk: While sailing remains a purely Earth-bound pursuit for now, it could one day be the means of propulsion for hitherto impossible space missions.

Speaking at the British Science Festival in Guildford, Colin McInnes of Strathclyde University described the physics and feasibility of solar sailing, which harnesses the "pressure" of the sun's radiation.

Nature: After decades of neglect, in 2002 Pakistan set out to dramatically reform its higher-education system. The reforms were designed to reverse years of chronic underfunding, to invest in the academic workforce and to revitalize a moribund research enterprise. This ambitious agenda generated immense public interest and controversy. Although it is too early to judge the outcome of the experiment, it is already clear that some initiatives were more successful than others say Athar Osama and colleagues in Nature.

NYTimes.com: The human-driven buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere appears to have ended a slide, many millenniums in the making, toward cooler summer temperatures in the Arctic, the authors of a new study report.

Scientists familiar with the work, published journal Science, said it provided fresh evidence that human activity is not only warming the globe, particularly the Arctic, but could also even fend off what had been presumed to be an inevitable descent into a new ice age over the next few dozen millenniums.

Related Link
Recent Warming Reverses Long-Term Arctic Cooling

NPR: Today, NASA released the first collection of views from the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope. Thanks to new imagers installed in May 2009 during a visit from the space shuttle Atlantis, Hubble can now see farther, clearer, and across a wider spectrum than ever before.

Washington Post: A. Q. Khan, the creator of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program who provided clandestine nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea, boasted in a recent television interview that he and other senior Pakistani officials—who were eager to see Iran develop nuclear weapons—years ago guided that country to a proven network of suppliers and helped advance its covert efforts.

Khan told a television interviewer in Karachi, Pakistan, that if Iran succeeds in "acquiring nuclear technology, we will be a strong bloc in the region to counter international pressure. Iran's nuclear capability will neutralize Israel's power."

Although Khan has previously claimed nationalist and religious justifications for helping to spread sensitive technology, several experts said his latest statement was an unusually direct claim of broad, official Pakistani support for an Iranian nuclear weapon.

Bloomberg: First Solar Inc, a US–based renewable energy company, will build the world's largest solar power plant in China as the country plans to increase nonpolluting electricity generation.

The plant would be about thirty times larger than existing solar power stations operating in Europe, Dulce Qu, a Beijing-based spokeswoman for the company, told Bloomberg. The 2,000-megawatt complex will be built in Ordos City, Inner Mongolia, China, by 2019, said First Solar, a company based in Tempe, Arizona.

Related Link
China Outdoes U.S. in Making Solar Productsm New York Times

I, Cringely: Information technology reporter Robert X. Cringely asks why academic education hasn't faced the price drops other industries connected to IT have faced:

MIT has all its lectures available for viewing for free over the Internet. Why hasn't some entrepreneur yet leveraged this amazing act of generosity? Some little school could outsource its entire physics department, for example, using MIT lectures and a single professor in-house. My physics department had only 2.5 professors (the .5 was the department chair who drove a cab on the side) and we didn't have the benefit of MIT video.

There is enough good material available for free online right now that it would be easy to create a virtual university (WikiVersity?) with the only thing missing being the granting of degrees. It's that whole "degree from MIT" thing that allows that school not to worry about sharing its lecture bounty, because in the education system lectures are viewed as worthless unless they lead to a degree.

Why is that?

NYTimes.com: A $17 million energy project in California that was supposed to demonstrate the feasibility of extracting vast amounts of heat from the Earth's bedrock has been suspended indefinitely after the drilling essentially snagged on surface rock formations.

Related News Pick
California residents shaken over geothermal energy concerns

Wired.com: Tipping points are found in ecosystems, economies, and even bodies. But they're usually recognized in retrospect, when it's too late for anything but regret.

Now a growing body of research suggests there are telltale mathematical signals. If scientists can figure out how to detect them, they may be able to forecast tipping points ahead of time.

"We are repeatedly blindsided by disasters that come out of the blue. If we had better tools for anticipating those events, we could avoid some of them," said Steve Carpenter, a University of Washington ecologist.

BBC News: The vast Andromeda galaxy appears to have expanded by digesting stars from other galaxies, research has shown.

When an international team of scientists mapped Andromeda, they discovered stars that they said were "remnants of dwarf galaxies."

The astronomers report their findings in the journal Nature.

Related Link
The remnants of galaxy formation from a panoramic survey of the region around M31

ScienceNOW: Imagine cardboard-thin TV screens that stretch across entire walls or portable video screens that can be rolled up when not in use. Those are some of the possible applications for tiny, inorganic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that researchers have developed. The new LEDs are just as thin as conventional organic LEDs and liquid-crystal displays, but they're much brighter and more versatile.

Naturejobs: Scientists, postdocs, and students planning to travel to the US to work or study need two things before applying for a visa: time and patience.

Despite recent efforts by federal agencies to improve and accelerate the visa-application process—including adding staff and setting shorter waiting times—it still needs legislative and regulatory reform, say those who are familiar with the system. Many consider it to be a labyrinthine muddle of requirements and regulations. Delays of up to half a year are not uncommon, even with the processing improvements brought in to clear the backlog and speed procedures after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 forced a visa clampdown.

Forbes.com: Outsider Peter Woit is challenging the debate about physics "theory of everything."

NPR: To build the 787, Boeing took two giant leaps. First, it created the structure not from metal, but from lightweight composite material. And second, it outsourced more than ever before.

Boeing has more than 800 orders for the new jet. It remains the best-selling new aircraft in the company's history.

But Boeing's 787 Dreamliner has also produced a lot of headaches from the outset. There have been a handful of cancellations for the first test flight, which was first scheduled for nearly two and a half years ago. And this week the man in charge of Boeing's passenger jet business was replaced.

The Register: In a project described as "the computing equivalent of the raising of the Mary Rose," engineers at Bletchley Park intend to restore a 1950s-era computer—featuring a magnificent 112.5 bytes of memory—to working order.

The machine in question was built at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in Oxfordshire. It was designed in 1949 to automate the job of a human calculating team, whose work was apparently so boring that mistakes became unacceptably frequent.

NYTimes.com: IBM researcher Frances Ross is growing a crop of mushroom-shaped silicon nanowires that may one day become a basic building block for a new kind of electronics.

Nanowires are just one example, although one of the most promising, of a transformation now taking place in the material sciences as researchers push to create the next generation of switching devices smaller, faster, and more powerful than today's transistors.

The reason that many computer scientists are pursuing this goal is that the shrinking of the transistor has approached fundamental physical limits.

CNET News: The Excalibur, a new turbine-electric hybrid propelled VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) unmanned attack drone, has successfully completed another test flight after taking on two new onboard computers last week.

Developed by Aurora Flight Sciences Corp. for the US Army Aviation Applied Technology Directorate and the Office of Naval Research, the Excalibur is another radical robo-craft concept vying to fill the military's burgeoning demand for specialized unmanned aerial vehicles.

NPR: Van Gogh, N.C. Wyeth, and other artists recycled canvases by painting over previous works. Today museum scientists are using new x-ray technology to uncover the outline of hidden paintings, and using chemistry to fill in the colors. Jennifer Mass, senior scientist at the scientific research and analysis laboratory at the Winterthur Museum, explains the techniques.

IEEE Spectrum: The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse. It can see millions of colors, adjust easily to shifting light conditions, and transmit information to the brain at a rate exceeding that of a high-speed Internet connection.

But why stop there?

In the Terminator movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger's character sees the world with data superimposed on his visual field--virtual captions that enhance the cyborg's scan of a scene. In Rainbows End by the science fiction author Vernor Vinge, characters rely on electronic contact lenses, rather than smartphones or brain implants, for seamless access to information that appears right before their eyes.

"These visions might seem far-fetched, but a contact lens with simple built-in electronics is already within reach," says Babak A. Parviz.

"In fact, my students and I are already producing such devices in small numbers in my laboratory at the University of Washington, in Seattle. These lenses don't give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet. But we have built a lens with one LED, which we've powered wirelessly with RF. What we've done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology."

Nature News: Millions of hectares of land will be needed to meet growing energy demands in the United States over the next two decades, according to new 'energy sprawl' estimates. The researchers behind the study say that biomass production for fuel or electricity generation will have the biggest impact on landscape and habitats.

The broad analysis of potential US energy and climate-mitigation scenarios compared the land and habitat impacts of various energy mixes -- from nuclear power to biofuels -- resulting from an array of policy options. The study is published this week in PLoS ONE

Related article
Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency: Climate Policy Impacts on Natural Habitat for the United States of America

csmonitor.com: Children born since the dawn of the Internet Age probably wouldn't think twice about learning online. They might just as soon read a Shakespeare sonnet on Twitter as hear it live from a teacher in a classroom.

And yet the educational establishment still debates whether e-learning (aka "virtual schooling" or "distance education") can be as good as traditional in-person teaching in a campus setting. Jokes are still being made about successful e-schools, such as the University of Phoenix, as being "diploma mills."

Now the results of a recent federal study should help "log out" of that tired debate. The study, released by the US Department of Education, found that many types of online education for a college degree are better at raising student achievement than face-to-face teaching is.

NYTimes.com: Updated 9/14/09: Lawrence M. Krauss, the director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University asks in the New York Times:

The most challenging impediment to human travel to Mars does not seem to involve the complicated launching, propulsion, guidance or landing technologies but something far more mundane: the radiation emanating from the Sun's cosmic rays. The shielding necessary to ensure the astronauts do not get a lethal dose of solar radiation on a round trip to Mars may very well make the spacecraft so heavy that the amount of fuel needed becomes prohibitive.

There is, however, a way to surmount this problem while reducing the cost and technical requirements, but it demands that we ask this vexing question: Why are we so interested in bringing the Mars astronauts home again?

Update: Krause also appeared on NPR's Science Friday to discuss some of the ideas in his editorial in more depth.

Mt. Wilson Observatory: Updated: 9/3/2009: The observatory has escaped serious damage although 40 ongoing research projects will have to be rescheduled, and all the delicate equipment will have to be checked for soot and dust damage. Some scientists had been waiting more than a year for observing time reports the LA Times.

Updated: 9/2/2009 Mount Wilson "is still in good shape" said Incident Commander Dietrich at a briefing this morning. The Californian fire brigades are reporting that the observatory should be safe for the time being.

Previous Report 9/1/2009

US Forest Servie Fire Dispatch has informed Hal McAlister, director of the Mt Wilson Observatory that as of 9:40 PDT this morning, ground crews were back at the Observatory. As of 8:00 am, air tankers were back in operation.

The dispatcher expressed his opinion that as long as the fire continues to press the mountain from one direction "you are going to make it."

Furthermore, there is some light rain developing in places in the Los Angeles basin, and there is a possibility for some thunderstorm activity that could lead to dry lightning. The humidity is up and the temperature is a bit lower, so, all in all, things are looking more promising than they have in the last few days.

View from the observatory as of noon (PDT), Tuesday 1 September.

The latest news can be found here.

Meanwhile, the LA Times takes a look back at the history of the Mt. Wilson observatory. Astronomer Edwin Hubble for example, used the then-groundbreaking 100-inch Hooker telescope, to make two of the most surprising scientific discoveries of the 20th century: The universe was far larger than anyone imagined and that it was expanding.

Related News Article
Historic Observatory Threatened By Calif. Wildfire NPR

latimes.com: In a lab in Caltech, Harry Atwater holds up a plastic panel, a fraction of a millimeter thick. Even in the bright room, the surface's panel remains jet-black—absorbing all the light that hits it.

The high-tech material is 10 times more efficient at absorbing light than the regular silicon cells that some homeowners install on their roofs to harvest the energy of the sun.

It is one of several projects that Atwater's team at Caltech is pursuing in a push to design the next generation of solar cells—ones that are cheap, long-lasting and flexible enough to be practical for homeowners and businesses.

NPR: Researchers in several laboratories are vying for the claim that they have produced the world's smallest lasers. The lasers are a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Scientists hope they can be used to create even smaller and faster electronics, to study diseases, or possibly even to treat cancer from inside human cells.

Nanowerk: Electrospray-deposited polymer films can be used to make organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) with better characteristics than those made from spin-coated films, according to Yutaka Yamagata of the RIKEN Center for Intellectual Property Strategies, Wako, and colleagues. These researchers have used a novel dual-solvent concept to make the electrospray-deposited films smoother than before, thereby enabling the superior devices to be built.

Related Link
Thin-Film Fabrication Method for Organic Light-Emitting Diodes Using Electrospray Deposition

Physics Today: The search for the best observatory site in the world has lead to the discovery of what is thought to be the coldest, driest, calmest place on Earth. "The astronomical images taken at the site should be at least three times sharper than at the best sites currently used by astronomers," Will Saunders, of the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO) and visiting professor to University of New South Wales (UNSW), who led the study.

View Larger Map

The joint US-Australian research team combined data from satellites, ground stations and climate models in a study to assess the many factors that affect astronomy: cloud cover, temperature, sky-brightness, water vapour, wind speeds and atmospheric turbulence.

The researchers pinpointed a site, known simply as Ridge A, that is 4,053m high up on the Antarctic Plateau. Located within the Australian Antarctic Territory (81.5° S 73.5° E), the site (see picture above) is not the highest point on the Plateau but 144km away from it.

The highest point, called Dome A, is the site of an international robotic observatory and the proposed new Chinese 'Kunlun' base (80.37° S 77.53° E).

Last year, the AAO completed the first detailed study into the practical problems of building and running the proposed optical/infra-red PILOT telescope project in Antarctica. The 2.5-metre telescope will cost over AUD$10million and is planned for construction at the French/Italian Concordia Station at Dome C by 2012.

Ridge A is not only particularly remote but extremely cold and dry. The study revealed that the site has an average winter temperature of − 70°C.

It is also a site that is "so calm that there's almost no wind or weather there at all," says Saunders. "Because the sky there is so much darker and drier, it means that a modestly-sized telescope there would equal or be far superior to the best existing observatories on high mountain tops in Hawaii and Chile," he adds.

Interest in Antarctica as a site for astronomical and space observatories has accelerated since 2004 when UNSW astronomers published a paper in the journal Nature confirming that a ground-based telescope at Dome C, another Antarctic plateau site, could take images nearly as good as those from the space-based Hubble telescope.

Making use of this Antarctic sites will give Australian astronomers a chance to become major partners with Chinese or European efforts to build the first major Antarctic observatory says Saunders.

Related Links
Where Is the Best Site on Earth? Domes A, B, C, and F, and Ridges A and B
Exceptional astronomical seeing conditions above Dome C in Antarctica Nature