January 2010 Archives

Science News: Groups at Harvard and the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, have designed and built a quantum computer to simulate and calculate the behavior of a molecular, quantum system.

The simulation mimics reality exactly.

Science: In 1996, the US Congress decided to sell the 1 billion cubic meters of gaseous helium—specifically the heavier isotope, helium-4—that the country had stockpiled.

But conditions it imposed on the sales are keeping the price of helium artificially low and encouraging waste of a substance indispensable for numerous scientific and technological applications, says a National Research Council report released last week.

Related link
Selling the nation's helium reserve NRC report

FT.com: China has experienced the strongest growth in scientific research over the past three decades of any country, according to figures compiled for the Financial Times, and the pace shows no sign of slowing.

Jonathan Adams, research evaluation director at Thomson Reuters, said China’s “awe-inspiring” growth had put it in second place to the US—and if it continues on its trajectory it will be the largest producer of scientific knowledge by 2020.

Nature: The surprising discovery of methane in Mars's atmosphere could be a sign of life there. Researchers are now working out how to find its source, reports Nature's Katharine Sanderson.

Physics Today: The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), which is at the heart of the stockpile stewardship program to maintain the reliability of US nuclear weapons without conducting nuclear underground tests, has successfully delivered more than 1 megajoule of laser energy to a target in a few billionths of a second.

This is about 30 times the energy ever delivered by any other group of lasers in the world. In the near future it's only competitor will be NIF's clone, Megajoule in France, which is still under construction.

Composite photo shows all three floors containing the 132-ton, 10-meter diameter target chamber. Diagnostic instruments will be attached to the round hatches. Credit:Jacqueline McBride/LLNL

"This accomplishment is a major milestone that demonstrates both the power and the reliability of NIF’s integrated laser system, the precision targets and the integration of the scientific diagnostics needed to begin ignition experiments," said NIF Director Ed Moses. "NIF has shown that it can consistently deliver the energy required to conduct ignition [fusion] experiments later this year."

A demonstration

In order to demonstrate fusion, the energy that powers the Sun and the stars, NIF focuses the energy of 192 powerful laser beams into a pencil-eraser-sized cylinder containing a tiny spherical target filled with deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen.

Inside the cylinder, the laser energy is converted to x rays, which compress the fuel until it reaches temperatures of more than 93 million °C and pressures billions of times greater than Earth’s atmospheric pressure.

The rapid compression of the fuel capsule forces the hydrogen nuclei to fuse and release many times more energy than the laser energy that was required to initiate the reaction. 

The NIF laser system began firing all 192 laser beams onto targets in June 2009.

In order to characterize the x ray drive achieved inside the target cylinders as the laser energy is ramped up, these first experiments were conducted at lower laser energies and on smaller targets than will be used for the ignition experiments. These targets used gas-filled capsules that act as substitutes for the fusion fuel capsules that will be used in the 2010 ignition campaign. The 1 MJ shot represents the culmination of these experiments using an ignition-scale target for the first time.

A new direction

The next step is to move to ignition-like fuel capsules that require the fuel to be in a frozen hydrogen layer (at 19 Kelvin or −218 °C) inside the fuel capsule. NIF is currently being made ready to begin experiments with ignition-like fuel capsules in the summer of 2010.

NIF, the world’s largest laser facility, is the first facility expected to achieve fusion ignition and energy gain in a laboratory setting.

Paul Guinnessy

NPR: Chances are better than ever that terrorists will unleash a chemical or biological weapon in the next three years—that was the finding of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism a year ago. This week, the commission issues a report card on progress in preventing such a disaster.

NYTimes.com: Americans today receive far more medical radiation than ever before. The average lifetime dose of diagnostic radiation has increased sevenfold since 1980, and more than half of all cancer patients receive radiation therapy. Without a doubt, radiation saves countless lives, and serious accidents are rare.

But patients often know little about the harm that can result when safety rules are violated and ever more powerful and technologically complex machines go awry. To better understand those risks, the New York Times has examined thousands of pages of public and private records and interviewed physicians, medical physicists, researchers and government regulators.

It found that while this new technology allows doctors to more accurately attack tumors and reduce certain mistakes, its complexity has created new avenues for error—through software flaws, faulty programming, poor safety procedures, or inadequate staffing and training. When those errors occur, they can be crippling.

Physics Today: After six years of successfully exploring Mars, NASA has given up trying to drive the Spirit Mars rover out from where it got stuck several months ago.

Spirit's twin rover Opportunity still remains free and is currently heading towards a large crater called Endeavor.

End of the road for Spirit (credit: NASA/JPL)

In the next few weeks, Spirit will be to optimized to survive the severe Martian winter so that it can operate as a stationary science platform for years to come. The two rovers were originally designed to last just 90 days, and have driven more than 12 miles across the surface.

"Spirit is not dead; it has just entered another phase of its long life," said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA headquarters in Washington. "We told the world last year that attempts to set [Spirit] free may not be successful."

Stuck in sand

Ten months ago, as Spirit was driving south beside the western edge of a low plateau called Home Plate, its wheels broke through a crusty surface and churned into soft sand hidden underneath.

After Spirit became embedded, the rover team crafted plans for trying to get the six-wheeled vehicle free using its five functioning wheels—the sixth wheel quit working in 2006. In November, another wheel quit working, making a difficult situation even worse.

Although some of the more recent efforts to unstick the rover looked promising, the coming winter mandates a change in strategy.

This animation from Spirit's front camera shows the motion during five drives on 14-23 January 2010 to try and get the rover out of the sand. Credit NASA/JPL

At Spirit's current location it is mid-autumn. Winter will begin in May. Solar energy is declining and expected to become insufficient to power further driving by mid-February. The rover team plans to use those remaining potential drives for improving the rover's tilt. Spirit currently tilts slightly toward the south. The winter sun stays in the northern sky, so decreasing the southward tilt would boost the amount of sunshine on the rover's solar panels.

"We need to lift the rear of the rover, or the left side of the rover, or both," said Ashley Stroupe, a rover driver at JPL. "Lifting the rear wheels out of their ruts by driving backward and slightly uphill will help. If necessary, we can try to lower the front right of the rover by attempting to drop the right-front wheel into a rut or dig it into a hole."

At its current angle, Spirit probably would not have enough power to keep communicating with Earth through the Martian winter. Even a few degrees of improvement in tilt might make enough difference to enable communication every few days.

"Getting through the winter will all come down to temperature and how cold the rover electronics will get," said John Callas, project manager at JPL for Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity. "Every bit of energy produced by Spirit's solar arrays will go into keeping the rover's critical electronics warm, either by having the electronics on or by turning on essential heaters."

A stationary state

Even in a stationary state, Spirit can continue doing scientific research.

"There's a class of science we can do only with a stationary vehicle that we had put off during the years of driving," said Steve Squyres, a researcher at Cornell University and principal investigator for the two Martian rovers.

One stationary experiment Spirit has begun studies tiny wobbles in the rotation of Mars to gain insight about the planet's core. This requires months of radio-tracking the motion of a point on the surface of Mars to calculate long-term motion with an accuracy of a few inches.

"If the final scientific feather in Spirit's cap is determining whether the core of Mars is liquid or solid, that would be wonderful," said Squyres.

Tools on Spirit's robotic arm can study variations in the composition of nearby soil, which has been affected by water. Stationary science also includes watching how wind moves soil particles and monitoring the Martian atmosphere.

Paul Guinnessy

Related news picks
Stuck Mars rover makes another discovery
Mars rover unlikely to be freed
Freeing a Mars rover from a sand trap
NASA's Mars rover is really stuck
NASA's rover is stuck on Mars
Spirit Mars rover is still running, just
Mars rovers still making tracks

Science News: Pulling yourself back together after a breakup can be tough to do. But a new hydrogel has no trouble. Using little more than water, clay, and a new, designer compound, scientists have created a moldable gel that is both strong and can heal itself in seconds when split in two. The gel may advance efforts in tissue engineering and environmentally friendly chemistry.

BBC Radio 3: Philip Dodd presents an edition of Night Waves dedicated to assessing science in America under Barack Obama.

One year ago today Barack Obama's inaugural address pledged that "We will restore science to its rightful place...our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed."

These words brought delight to many in the science world and provoked anger amongst others. Under President Bush science in America had become a hotly contested subject with accusations of inappropriate political interference, skepticism of climate change science was widespread and federal funding for stem cell research restricted on religious grounds.

Obama had made many science-related promises on the campaign trail, so a year on how comfortably does science sit in the American landscape?

USAToday.com: Girls may learn to fear math from the women who are their earliest teachers.

Despite gains in recent years, women still trail men in the US in some areas of math achievement, and the question of why has provoked controversy.

Now, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of first- and second-graders suggests what may be part of the answer: Female elementary-school teachers who are concerned about their own math skills could be passing that along to the little girls they teach.

Related link
Female teachers' math anxiety impacts girls' math achievement

guardian.co.uk: Says Dylan Evans:

The UK terror threat has been raised from "substantial" to "severe"—but what on earth does this actually mean?

The official explanation—that an attack is now "highly likely" rather than merely "a strong possibility"—does not make things any clearer.

Given that the threat level had stood at substantial since last July until this weekend's announcement, and there were no terrorist attacks during this period, we can infer that "a strong possibility" indicates an attack has a probability of less than 1% per day. But how much greater is the probability now that an attack is "highly likely"? Would it be 2% per day, or 5%?

The obvious solution to this problem is to dispense with verbal labels entirely, and to express risk estimates in numerical terms. This is not a new idea; more than a century ago, William Ernest Cooke, government astronomer for Western Australia, argued that weather forecasters should attach numerical probabilities to their predictions.

The idea is often rejected, however, on the grounds that it would be too complicated for most people to understand. This is rubbish. US National Weather Service forecasters have been expressing their forecasts of rain in numerical terms since 1965, and over the years they have got better and better at it. If weather forecasters can do it, why not the rest of us?

Various: The formula for the perfect parking job was recently worked out by mathematician Simon Blackburn at the University of London.

"In November 2009, Vauxhall Motors commissioned me to write a report on some of the mathematics of parking," said Blackburn. "It was a great opportunity to describe how 'school' mathematics can be used to understand a question that lots of people might ask, and I thoroughly enjoyed writing the report."

Stanford mathematics professor Keith Devlin tells NPR's Audie Cornish, "it's actually a very clever use of simple mathematics."

Related links
The formula for perfect parallel parking NPR
The geometry of perfect parking

Physics Today: A 15-year-old high-school student has discovered a new pulsar through an NSF-funded program called the Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC), which is a joint project of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and West Virginia University.

Shay Bloxton, (left image. credit NRAO/AUI/NSF), a sophomore at Nicholas County High School in Summersville, West Virginia, spotted evidence of the pulsar on 15 October 2009 in data from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). "I was very excited when I found out I had actually made a discovery," says Bloxton.

One month later, Bloxton was invited to the GBT to confirm her analysis of the object with NRAO astronomers through a new observation—which proved that the object is a pulsar, a rotating, superdense neutron star.

"Participating in the PSC has definitely encouraged me to pursue my dream of being an astrophysicist," said Bloxton, adding that she hopes to attend West Virginia University to study astrophysics.

The PSC provides training for teachers and students in scientific techniques and in the use of astronomical software. Each student group is given a parcel of data from the GBT to analyze.

Each portion of the data is analyzed by multiple teams. In addition to learning to use the analysis software, the student teams also must learn how to recognize man-made radio interference that contaminates the data. The project is funded through 2011.

This is the second success for the PSC program. In March 2009, Lucas Bolyard, a student from South Harrison High School in West Virginia, discovered a pulsar-like object called a rotating radio transient.

Related link
Pulsar Search Collaboratory

Science News: A stone hitting a pond can produce a tiny supersonic splash, a new study has found.

Researchers studying the shape of an air cavity made when an object hits a liquid noticed a similarity to the shape of the nozzles that are in supersonic jet engines. Sure enough, air escaping from the cavity can reach supersonic speeds, the team reports in a paper published online 11 January in Physical Review Letters.

Related news story
Supersonic bathtub physics: What happens when discs are pushed through water, Scientific American

The Observer: Says Robin McKie:

On Wednesday last week, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the the UN's Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, apologized for including, in the organization's fourth assessment report of 2007, the claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. In fact, it will take at least 300 years for global warming to take its toll.

Given that the IPCC's 2007 report had won the panel a Nobel peace prize that year (shared with Al Gore), the error looks egregious, particularly to those who reject the idea that the billions of tonnes of carbon we pump into the atmosphere could possibly have an impact on our climate. Now, every word and line of IPCC's work is being scrutinized by these skeptics in their search for further climate calumnies. If they are lucky, they may even stumble on one or two.

The prospect, not surprisingly, causes many climate change scientists to squirm. Indeed, such is their discomfort that many now argue it is time for a total reorganization of the IPCC, an organization that is now more than two decades old and whose operations are beginning to creak suspiciously.

Related Link
China's change on climate change

Nature Physics: A new detailed analysis of the melting point of diamond suggests that Neptune and Uranus could contain liquid diamond oceans.

Measuring the melting point of a diamond is very difficult because usually when it's heated to very high temperatures diamond changes to graphite. To get round this researchers applied extremely high levels of pressure to diamonds and blasted them with lasers to reach 50,000 degrees—similar to temperature and pressure conditions found in the outer planets.

When diamond is melted it behaves like water during freezing and melting, with solid forms of diamond "icebergs" floating atop liquid forms.

Related article
Diamond: Molten under pressure

New Scientist: Canada is one of the world's biggest suppliers of radioactive isotopes for medical use through an aging 50-year-old reactor based at Chalk River in Ontario.

Two brand-new reactors, constructed on the same site for more than Can$350 million ($330 million), called MAPLE 1 and MAPLE 2 were built as replacements.

But the sad truth is that the MAPLEs have never been officially switched on, and the chances are they never will be.

This has led to a furious row over who is to blame for this costly and embarrassing debacle.

Many in the nuclear industry point the finger at Canada's nuclear regulator. The regulator's view is that the reactors' manufacturer failed to deliver a crucial safety feature that it had promised would underpin the design.

Others blame the Canadian government for killing off the project before crucial technical questions had been resolved.

Alison Motluk takes a look at the technical difficulties faced by the reactors, why the Canadian government shut them down, and why it is building a billion-dollar replacement.

ISNS: The latest risk assessment for aftershocks from last week's Haitian earthquake is in. Based on aftershock patterns of historical quakes, experts are forecasting a high chance of moderate tremors over the next 30 days, while measurements of the geological toll from the original earthquake reveal new regions at risk of another "big one" over the coming decades.

The US Geological Survey estimates a 90% chance that Haitians will feel a number of moderate temblors similar in size to Wednesday's magnitude 5.9 aftershock over the next 30 days. Seismologists expect a series of two or three aftershocks of magnitude 5.0 or greater, which according to the USGS statement "will be widely felt and has the potential to cause additional damage, particularly to vulnerable, already damaged structures."

The USGS experts have placed the odds of a strong magnitude 6.0 or greater aftershock, which would have 30 times the energy of a 5.0, at about one in four.

"Anyone living in Haiti or involved in relief work there must maintain situational awareness with regard to their personal earthquake safety," warned the USGS. "Entry into or reoccupation of obviously damaged structures should be avoided."

Aftershocks are common in the wake of a large earthquake. The initial magnitude 7.0 quake in Haiti was caused by the rupture and release of 200 years of strain that built up as the edges of two tectonic plates stayed glued together despite moving in opposite directions along the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault. The aftershocks that people on Haiti will continue to feel are part of the geological repair process as the crack in the Earth readjusts itself. They are most likely to occur within the small region of the 300-mile-long fault that ruptured last week.

The chance of another large quake similar in size to the original earthquake has also increased in areas to the east and west of Port-au-Prince, outside of the 25 to 40 miles that ruptured last week. The strain in these areas of the Enriquillo fault, which have remained quiet thus far, has increased and is capable of producing another magnitude 7.0 quake, according to computer models that just finished crunching the data from last week's quake.

Jian Lin, a USGS seismologist who studies the Caribbean, compares the situation to a city—the impact of the collapse of a large building may make other buildings more likely to fall.

"The problem is that for the largest earthquakes we really cannot forecast when they will happen," said Lin. "We don't know if it would happen in the next few months, next few years, or up to a hundred years from now."

Devin Powell
Inside Science News Service

Related news picks
More science from the Haiti earthquake
The Haiti earthquake

The Daily Telegraph: A team of scientists from the universities of Bristol, Glasgow, and Southampton have found a way to tie light up in knots.

The light was controlled using holograms specially designed with "knot theory"—a branch of abstract mathematics inspired by twists in shoelaces and rope.

Various: The assassination of theoretical physicist Masoud Alimohammadi in Iran last week has drawn vocal comments both in and outside the country in light of the confusion over who carried out the killing.

Although Alimohammadi's research didn't appear to be related to nuclear weapons, Asia Times Online correspondent Mahan Abedin, an Iran expert, observes that, while this is true, Alimohammadi did have a string of affiliations to scientific and research organizations at the center of Iran's nuclear program, such as the Theoretical Physics Institute headed by Mohammad Javad Larijani.

Alimohammadi was buried on 14 January. More than 1000 mourners turned up, says Voice of America.

Al Jazeera English reports that former presidents Mohammad Khatami and Hashemi Rafsanjani condemned the attack, calling it "terrorism."

Pro-reformer Khatami said the bomb attack was carried out by groups seeking to "further destabilize" the country in light of the recent crackdown on the opposition party, which was widely believed to have won the presidential election last June.

Alimohammadi was known to have been one of more than 240 academics who signed a petition pledging support to the reformist opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi before the election, and to have appeared in an online video, filmed a week before his death, criticizing the Iranian government, says ScienceInsider.

Rafsanjani, who did not publicly back the opposition, said in a statement, carried by the semi-official ILNA news agency, that the bombing was a sign of "a new era of intrigue" in Iran.

Manouchehr Mottaki, the Iranian foreign minister, has stopped short of explicitly accusing the US of being behind the bombing but has accused the US of being partly involved. Bill Burton, the White House deputy press secretary, called those accusations "absurd."

Counteracting the report in ScienceInsider, Ali Moghara, who heads the physics faculty at Tehran University, told Al Jazeera that Alimohammadi was just a physicist who engaged in "no political activity."

Paul Guinnessy

Related Links
Physicist killed in Iranian bomb blast
Killing of professor sparks fight over his science and his politics

NPR: Scientists attending the American Meteorological Society meeting in Atlanta say the field has weathered a storm created two months ago when hackers released e-mails from some prominent climate scientists. They say the e-mails revealed bad behavior by a small number of researchers and revealed some weaknesses in the scientific process. But the scientists say the e-mails did nothing to undermine the data showing that climate change is real.

Wired.com: The long-distance scientific recordings of the blast wave from the first hydrogen bomb test have been rediscovered in a formerly classified safe at Columbia University.

On 1 November 1952, the US created a 10-megaton blast that set off a low-frequency sound wave, which was recorded halfway around the world at special listening stations designed by the Lamont Geological Observatory in Palisades, New York.

It was the first time a nuclear explosion had been detected from such a long distance and it marked the beginning of international test monitoring, a key element of nuclear nonproliferation plans.

Related Link
Build your own microbarograph

Various: As more aftershocks hit Haiti this morning after last week's earthquake, scientists have been trying to assess what further damage the country may suffer.

David Kerridge, who is head of Earth hazards at the British Geological Survey (BGS), says that "with an earthquake of this size and the mountainous terrain there is a strong possibility of landslides which may have caused many causalities in more remote parts of the island. Due to disruptions in communications the full extent of the disaster might not be clear for a few days."

Kristina Bartlett Brody of ScienceNews has talked to David Applegate, senior science adviser for natural hazards with the US Geological Survey. "Our folks and others are acquiring all the imagery they can," he says, "in order to examine possible landslide-dammed drainages that could create subsequent flash flood hazard, identify surface rupture and look for the extent of ... ground failure."

Haiti's political situation had made it a difficult place to do science, says Eric Calais, a geophysicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who has used GPS stations to monitor the area since 2003 (see left). "A lot of researchers who otherwise would have liked to work in Haiti decided not to.... There is very little science infrastructure."

Aftershocks

But while scientists, particularly those who work in the region, try and collect their instruments, Haiti has suffered more than 50 aftershocks measuring more than magnitude 4.5 which have hampered both relief work and in the ability of researchers to get to their instruments. The largest aftershock, a 6.1-magnitude tremor, struck southwest of Port-au-Prince at 6:03 EST this morning.

Brian Baptie, also from BGS says that "earthquakes of this size always have aftershocks that can last for many weeks" which may hamper rescue efforts and cause buildings to collapse that were affect by the original seismic event.

Nevertheless, some conclusions can be drawn from the existing data—based on GPS readings Calais has created a simulation showing how the ground has deformed since the earthquake (see below).

Simulation of coseismic ground motion based on the finite fault model of USGS/NEIC (shows on the surface projection of the rupture, which dips 70 degrees to the south). Black arrows show expected displacements at GPS sites, background color shows interferometric fringes (ASAR IS2 ascending, 2.82 cm range change between fringes).

Was the quake predictable?

Paul Mann (see right image) from the University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences has explained in more detail how he and his colleagues back in 2008 forecasted that Haiti was going to suffer a severe earthquake in the near term.

"Earthquake prediction to a seismologist means that the epicentral location, date and size of the event can be determined before the earthquake occurs on faults that may have been quiescent for years or even centuries," he says.

"In our Haiti studies, we estimated the size of the future event (7.2 magnitude on the Ritchter scale) based on the time we inferred since the fault was last active [the last major earthquake was in 1751], the rate of slip along the fault as determined from GPS measurements in Haiti published by D. M. Manaker et al. (2008) (7 mm/yr), and the location of the rupture (the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone (EPGFZ), a strike-slip fault we have studied from geologic mapping)."

"All attempts to precisely predict the exact date of a major earthquakes on the many plate boundaries and seismically active intraplate areas on the planet have ended in failure," he says. But attempts "to forecast the likely sites of future earthquakes based on GPS studies and fault mapping have been more successful since they are less specific (ie, no certain date or epicentral locations)."

Mann and his group calculated that if the ground is moving at 7 mm per year, and the last major earthquake happened 250 years ago, then there is an accumulated strain of 1.7 meters (7 mm X 250 yrs = 1.7 meters). Other regions that have had ground displacement of a similar amount have had earthquakes of 7.0-magnitude, which led to their prediction of a 7.0-magnitude earthquake for Haiti. Last week's earthquake was exactly a 7.0 magnitude earthquake.

Mann and his colleagues were particularly worried about the large population situated on the fault line—the city of Port-au-Prince has a population of 2 million people. The city is well known for poor construction, and the surrounding area has many steep hills of loose soil that have been built on. In an earthquake this soil could buckle and quickly undermine the buildings' foundations.

It was for these reasons, says Mann, that they presented their warning to geologists and policy makers at the 2008 Caribbean conference. It wasn't a prediction, he adds, but a forecast, "similar to the way this term is used by meteorologists," he says, "who forecast future weather trends but cannot predict exact weather conditions on specific dates weeks or months into the future."

The next big one?

The research that Mann and his colleagues have done in the region suggests that the next big earthquake could be along the Septentrional fault zone of the northern Dominican Republic.

"This second, northern strand of the Carib-Noam plate boundary has a faster rate than the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone and therefore accumulates strain at a faster rate," says Mann. According to their calculations, although there hasn't been a major quake for 800 years along the fault, they forecast that a 7.5 magnitude earthquake is likely sometime in the future. "We have no idea when this fault might rupture: tomorrow or 100 yrs from now," Mann says, "but recent events show the importance of this type of research, and retrofitting older buildings in order to avoid a repetition of the Haiti disaster along that part of the plate boundary."

Related Links
After Haiti, worries about other big quakes InsideScienceNews
Geologists to evaluate future Haiti risks Naturenews
Interseismic Plate coupling and strain partitioning in the Northeastern Caribbean
Actively evolving microplate formation by oblique collision and sideways motion along strike-slip faults: An example from the northeastern Caribbean plate margin (1995)
Powerpoint presentation delivered by Mann et al. at 18th Caribbean Geological Conference (2008) (138MB PPT)
Paleoseismicity of the North American-Caribbean plate boundary (Septentrional fault), Dominican Repulbic (1993)

WSJ.com: Adam Keiper, editor of the New Atlantis and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, expresses his personal view about the history of nanotechnology.

On 29 December 1959, Richard P. Feynman gave an after-dinner talk at an annual American Physical Society meeting, entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom."

One attendee later told science writer Ed Regis that the puzzled physicists in the room feared Feynman meant that "there are plenty of lousy jobs in physics."

Feynman said that he really wanted to discuss "the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale." In short, a half-century ago he anticipated what we now call nanotechnology—the manipulation of matter at the level of billionths of a meter.

Some historians depict the speech as the start of this now-burgeoning field of research. Yet Feynman didn't use the word "nanotechnology" himself, and his lecture went for years almost entirely unmentioned in the scientific literature until the 1980s (Editor's note: Physics Today referred to it in 1979).

The story of how his talk was forgotten and then, decades later, inserted into the history of nanotechnology is worth understanding less because of what it tells us about the past than because of what it hints about the future, a future in which billions of dollars in research and development funds are at stake.

Related Physics Today article
Microscience: an overview

The Independent: The Royal Society in London is making available in digital form the key original manuscript that describes how Isaac Newton devised his theory of gravity after witnessing an apple falling from a tree in his mother's garden in Lincolnshire, although there is no evidence to suggest that it hit him on the head.

washingtonpost.com: This year marks the 50th anniversary of the creation of the laser. Like many a transformative development, it was met initially with thunderous public indifference. A number of techno-pundits regarded the upstart gizmo as basically a glorified parlor trick, a "solution looking for a problem," as Charles Townes, who won the Nobel Prize for pioneering the idea, later wrote.

Half a century later, lasers check out our groceries, read and write CDs and DVDs, guide commercial aircraft, enable eye surgery and dental repairs, target weapons, provide worldwide communications, survey the planet, print documents, cut fabric for clothing and metal for tools, make powerful pointers for PowerPoint slides and are now poised to ignite nuclear fusion, among scores of other uses.

Related news story
The laser turns 50: A birthday bash NPR

The Economist: Electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) are usually associated with warfare.

In a less extreme fashion, however, EMPs have peaceful uses. They are already employed industrially to shape soft and light metals, such as aluminum and copper.

Now a group of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology in Chemnitz, Germany, has found a way to use an EMP device to shape and punch holes through industry’s metallic heavyweight—steel. This could transform manufacturing by doing away with the need to use large, heavy presses to make goods ranging from cars to washing machines.

Science: Astrophysicists know that 83% of the matter in the universe is dark matter—invisible stuff as yet undetected. The other 17% is detectable "baryonic matter," the atoms and ions that make up stars, planets, dust, and gas.

To astronomers' surprise, the ratio of baryonic matter to dark matter seems to vary from galaxy to galaxy like the ratio of chocolate chips to dough in different batches of home-baked cookies.

Now, a team led by Stacy McGaugh at the University of Maryland, College Park, has determined that the proportion varies by scale: The largest galaxies have the highest percentage of baryonic matter, although not quite 17%; whereas the smallest galaxies have less than 1%.

FT.com: The connection between hard-up truck drivers in Russia and Edinburgh-based Canongate Technology which makes beer flow-sensors is not immediately obvious.

Canongate has adapted the sensors it produces to a new use: instead of monitoring the level of beer in brewery tanks its technology is now also used to detect whether people driving trucks across Russia are siphoning off fuel for illicit sale.

Canongate’s move is part of a trend known as “soft diversification,” in which companies use specific technological know-how as a platform to set up new operations in a related field.

While this way of entering new fields is not especially new, the number of companies adopting it is growing, as more businesses seek to exploit ownership of their existing technologies.

csmonitor.com: Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says Iran will make its own higher enriched nuclear fuel, effectively rejecting a UN-backed exchange proposal that would have eased Western fears about Iran's nuclear program.

"I declare that by the grace of God, the Iranian nation will produce 20 percent enriched uranium and anything it needs itself," Ahmadinejad told thousands of people in the central city of Isfahan last month.

Yet analysts cast doubt on Iran's technical and industrial capacity to fulfill that pledge.

Nature: A lack of coordination in Arctic research funding leaves scientists without the support they need for fieldwork. John England outlines how Canada can set things right, and show leadership in the north.

space.com: NASA has narrowed the choices for its next unmanned space mission down to three potential expeditions: one aimed at Venus and the others promising to return samples of an asteroid or the Moon.

But only one of those contenders will get the green light for $650 million in funding (which excludes rocket costs) and a launch sometime before 30 December 2018. The competition is part of NASA's New Frontiers program to develop medium-class missions to explore the solar system.

washingtonpost.com: The work of physicists at the University of Maryland's Joint Quantum Institute requires such precise environmental controls that some of the more sensitive experiments have to be run in the middle of the night, when there is less traffic and fewer vibrations outside.

Soon, sleepy grad students will get some relief. The university has announced that it had been awarded $10.3 million in stimulus funds to build an underground laboratory for advanced quantum science.

Nature News: In an accidental discovery, chemists have stumbled on a catalyst that strips only carbon dioxide from the air—ignoring oxygen—and converts it into a useful compound.

Science: When the cash-strapped Florida state legislature recently slashed funds for higher education for the third straight year, big across-the-board cuts spilled down through individual state university budgets. But at Florida State University—one of the "big four" Florida state schools—the fiscal crisis has turned into a ravaging torrent for a few departments, most of them in the sciences.

In the end, unlike at other universities, FSU administrators balanced their budget by firing many faculty members, including many tenured professors. That decimated the geological sciences, oceanography, and anthropology departments.

NPR: Epsilon Aurigae is what's known as an eclipsing star. Every 27 years or so, it dims dramatically. In fact, you would have a hard time finding Epsilon Aurigae right now, because the star began dimming last August—and it won't be fully visible again for more than a year. That's one of the longest eclipses known to humankind.

Now, using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered that Epsilon Aurigae is actually two stars spinning around each other.

Various: Updated 1/15/10: A number of publications have written reports about the 7.0-magnitude earthquake (on the Richter scale) that rocked Haiti on Tuesday. It was the most powerful in the region for more than 100 years.

According to Jian Lin, a geophysicist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), even though the quake was "large but not huge," there were three factors that made it particularly devastating: First, it was centered just 10 miles southwest of the capital city, Port-au-Prince; second, the quake was shallow--only about 10–15 kilometers below the land's surface; third, and more importantly, many homes and buildings in the economically poor country were not built to withstand such a force and collapsed or crumbled.

All of these circumstances made the earthquake a "worst-case scenario," Lin said.

There is a highly complex tangle of tectonic faults near the intersection of the Caribbean and North American crustal plates.

The Haiti earthquake epicenter is marked by the star along the displaced portion (shown in red) of the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault. The fault lines with small arrows denote a different kind of fault called thrust faults, where one plate dives under another. Strike-slip faults grind past one another. The dotted lines at bottom denote complex seafloor formations. (Source: P. Jansma, and G. Mattioli, Geol. Soc. Amer. Spec. Paper 385, 13, 2005. )

The quake struck on a 50 to 60-km stretch of the more than 500-km-long Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault, which runs generally east–west through Haiti, to the Dominican Republic to the east and Jamaica to the west.

It is a "strike-slip" fault, according to the US Geological Survey, meaning the plates on either side of the fault line were sliding in opposite directions. In this case, the Caribbean Plate south of the fault line was sliding east and the smaller Gonvave Platelet north of the fault was sliding west.

But most of the time, Earth's plates do not slide smoothly past one another. They stick in one spot for perhaps years or hundreds of years, until enough pressure builds along the fault and the landmasses suddenly jerk forward to relieve the pressure, releasing massive amounts of energy throughout the surrounding area.

Such seismic areas "accumulate stresses all the time," says Lin, who has extensively studied a nearby, major fault, the Septentrional Fault, which runs east–west at the northern side of the Hispaniola island that makes up Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In 1946, an 8.1-magnitude quake, more than 30 times more powerful than this week's quake, struck near the northeastern corner of the Hispaniola.

Compounding the problem, he says, is that in addition to the Caribbean and North American plates, there is a wide zone between the two plates made up of a patchwork of smaller "block" plates, or "platelets"—such as the Gonvave Platelet—that make it difficult to assess the forces in the region and how they interact with one another. "If you live in adjacent areas, such as the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Puerto Rico, you are surrounded by faults."

Residents of such areas, Lin says, should learn to recognize basic earthquake warning signs such as small rapid tremors that could indicate a bigger quake is coming.

The geologist says that aftershocks, some of them significant, can be expected in the coming days, weeks, months, years, "even tens of years." But now that the stress has been relieved along that 50- to 60-km portion of the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault, Lin says this particular fault patch should not experience another quake of equal or greater magnitude for perhaps 100 years.

However, the other nine-tenths of that fault and the myriad networks of faults throughout the Caribbean are definitely "active," he adds.

Related coverage

Slate asks how do we know what the magnitude was of earthquakes before modern seismographs came along, especially as the Richter scale is just 75 years old? The answer lies in reviewing historical accounts of damage to buildings, the distance at which people felt tremors, and reports on changes in the soil. In a related piece Slate looks at whether humans can affect the frequency of earthquakes through mining, development, or dam building.

ScienceNOW's Richard A. Kerr talks to seismologist William McCann, who suggests that it could have been a lot worse. The quake ruptured only a part of the fault segment that caused a magnitude-7.5 quake over 200 years ago, he says, and that quake was about 20 times more powerful than the one that struck near Port-au-Prince on Tuesday.

The Associated Press reports that scientists said they warned officials in Haiti two years ago that their country was ripe for a major earthquake.

Sensors on underground magnets that steer particles around the four-mile Fermilab's Tevatron ring apparently picked up seismic ripples from the earthquake, says Symmetry magazine.

Related Links
How do you measure an earthquake from 250 years ago?
Are there more big earthquakes than there used to be?
Haiti quake could have been even worse
How satellites help analyse the Haiti earthquake

Nature News: The latest in a string of high-profile academic fraud cases in China underscores the problems of an academic-evaluation system that places disproportionate emphasis on publications, critics say.

Editors at the UK-based journal Acta Crystallographica Section E last month retracted 70 published crystal structures that they allege are fabrications by researchers at Jinggangshan University in Jiangxi province. Further retractions, the editors say, are likely.

Several sources revealed to Nature that roughly one-third of more than 6000 scientists surveyed across six top institutions admitted to plagiarism, falsification, or fabrication.

In a related news story, Katharine Sanderson discovers that a new publication by US–Chinese company Scientific Research called Journal of Modern Physics had copied papers from the UK's Institute of Physics open-access New Journal of Physics.

Symmetry breaking: A Fermilab shipment of cavities to the Japanese laboratory KEK marks a major milestone in the advancement of US particle accelerator technology and the development of the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC).

Fermilab has shipped two high-gradient nine-cell ILC-type cavities for use in the S1-global effort, a prototype at KEK of the ILC main linac.

The New Yorker: In the summer of 2008, the journal Nature published a short, illuminating essay that tracked the global migration of scientific research over the centuries, as empires rose and fell.

The center of world science, for instance, was in France in 1740, before it moved to Germany, then Britain, and, later, America, carrying with it, in each case, a major dimension of global leadership.

The authors discovered that great shifts in global scientific leadership follow a clear pattern: “Each former scientific power, especially during the initial stages of decline, had the illusion that its system was performing better than it was, overestimating its strength and underestimating innovation elsewhere. The elite could not imagine that the centre would shift.”

Related Link
China: The end of the science superpowers Nature

Physics Today: Citing a more "hopeful state of world affairs" in relation to the twin threats posed by nuclear weapons and climate change, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) is moving the minute hand of its Doomsday Clock one minute further away from midnight. It is now 6 minutes to midnight—the symbolic end of civilization. The decision by the BAS Science and Security Board was made in consultation with the Bulletin's board of sponsors, which includes 19 Nobel laureates.

In a statement supporting the decision to move the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock, the BAS board said:

"For the first time since atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, leaders of nuclear weapons states are cooperating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material. And for the first time ever, industrialized and developing countries alike are pledging to limit climate-changing gas emissions that could render our planet nearly uninhabitable. These unprecedented steps are signs of a growing political will to tackle the two gravest threats to civilization—the terror of nuclear weapons and runaway climate change."

"...By shifting the hand back from midnight by only one additional minute, we emphasize how much needs to be accomplished, while at the same time recognizing signs of collaboration among the US, Russia, the European Union, India, China, Brazil, and others on nuclear security and on climate stabilization."

Created in 1947 by the BAS, the Doomsday Clock has been adjusted only 18 times prior to today, most recently in January 2007 and February 2002 after the events of 11 September 2001.

The move of the clock's minute hand brought a number of BAS board members to a press conference organized by the BAS earlier today, which included Arizona State University physicist Lawrence Krauss, the cochair of the BAS Board of Sponsors. "We encourage scientists to fulfill their dual responsibilities of increasing their own, as well as the public's understanding of these issues and to help lead the call to action," said Krauss. "We urge leaders to fulfill the promise of a nuclear weapon-free world and to act now to slow the pace of climate change. Finally, we call on citizens everywhere to raise their voices and compel public action for a safer world now and for future generations. Even though we are encouraged by recent developments, we are mindful of the fact that the Clock is ticking."

Jayantha Dhanapala, president of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, said:

"In the saga of human history civilizations have been threatened both by natural causes and by man-made folly. Some have survived by making the necessary rational responses to the challenges. Others have gone under leaving only their ruins. Today it is the entire planet that stands imperiled by the danger of nuclear weapons and the real risk of climate change inexorably threatening our ecosystem. Both impending disasters are within our capabilities to remedy. The opportunity must be seized now out of a recognition that these are global dangers that transcend national boundaries."

Nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy from Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan, said:

"We may be at a turning point, where major powers realize that nuclear weapons are useless for war-fighting or even for deterrence. Threats to security are more likely to come from economic collapse, groups bent on terrorizing civilians, or from resource scarcity exacerbated by climate change and exploding populations, rather than from conflict between nuclear-armed superpowers. Against these new threats, nuclear weapons are a liability."

Paul Guinnessy

InsideScience: Astronomers meeting in Washington last week announced that a recent search for supernovae found something quite unusual: antimatter.

Usually stars like our Sun are powered by fusion reactions in which the nuclei of two atoms fuse together to form a heavier nucleus. In Y-155, a star in the constellation Cetus, the astronomers argue that another process was crucial: the making and unmaking of antimatter particles.

In all stars a titanic struggle takes place between gravity, which wants to draw matter toward the center of the star, and the pressure of nuclear interactions, which tends to keep the star inflated as if it were a balloon. Only when the star uses up all its internal fuel, causing the nuclear reactions to slow down, does gravity start to win out. The resulting gravitational collapse is what causes the star to explode. When a star dies in this way, as a supernova, it often spews matter into space and can be brighter than its host galaxy, at least for a short time. Astronomers love to study such supernovae since they say a lot about the inner mechanisms of stars and also provide a yardstick for determining how far away the star was.

Notre Dame astronomer Peter Garnavich reports that what makes Y-155 different is its mass, an estimated 200 times heavier than our Sun. With such a large mass, the pressure at the core of the star is so great that the light released in nuclear reactions is capable of creating new particles, electron–antielectron pairs. The creation of these particles actually hastens the collapse of the star and its eventual explosion.

The idea of a supernova triggered by the creation of antimatter has been around for only about 40 years, Garnavich said, but the observational evidence is sparse. In the case of Y-155 the signature light cast out after the explosion was odd: most ssupernovae send out higher-energy blue light first followed by cooler red light, but in this case the red light came first then the blue. That and the much larger amount of radioactive nickel shooting outwards compared to common supernovae led the researchers to suspect that antimatter was involved in triggering the explosion.

Garnavich is part of a team of scientists participating in a project called ESSENCE. Using a 4-meter-wide telescope mirror at high altitudes in Chile, the scientists observed 200 of the most explosive type of supernova. Y-155 was the most explosive of them all.

The Keck Telescope on Hawaii was directed at Y-155 so that an accurate spectrum—that is, a summary of all the light coming from the star—could be recorded. This allowed the distance to the star to be determined. At a distance of 7 billion light-years, this star lies about halfway back in time toward the origin of the universe.

Garnavich said that because of its size and powerful emission, Y-155 might resemble the first generation of stars in the universe. Another ESSENCE scientist, Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley, said that the antimatter-supernova mechanism might be important in locating these first stars.

Phil Schewe

NYTimes.com: OmniVision has announced a new image sensor chip that uses a technique called BSI, or backside illumination, that basically turns the camera chip upside down so that the light is collected through the back of the chip. In a more typical image sensor, light has to pass through a series of layers on the image chip before reaching the sensor. BSI provides better performance, particularly in low-light conditions.

Both NASA and the National Security Agency have been using BSI image technology in satellites for years, but this OmniVision chip is one of the first made available to consumers.

The chip, which will most likely appear in a mobile phone, is capable of recording 14.6 megapixel single images, or full 60-frames-per-second 1080p high-definition video.

Related Link
OmniVision adopts backside illumination technology for CMOS imager (description of an earlier BSI chip)

Science: Back in the late 1990s, archaeologist Sam Paley of the University at Buffalo in New York was frustrated in his study of the throne room of the 9th century BCE Northwest Palace at Nimrud, the storied Assyrian capital in what is now Iraq, as many artifacts from the room were scattered among many museums.

Then at a conference he heard a presentation by Donald Sanders, a leading proponent of using interactive three-dimensional computer graphics in archaeology, and enlisted Sanders's help.

The pair spent many years getting photographs from museums and successfully built a virtual 3D model of the structure.

The throne room is a classic example of the growth of virtual archaeology, in which archaeologists use computers to re-create the environment and conditions of the past.

The technique is slowly moving into mainstream archaeology.

Wired.com: The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) project, a joint project between NASA and the German space agency, the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und Raumfahrt, had its first test flight last month over the Mojave desert.

The converted 747SP flies to a high enough altitude to get above 99% of the water vapor in the atmosphere, making the instrument ideal for carrying out infrared observations of the night sky. IR radiation is generally absorbed by water vapor.

“The biggest modification is that we cut a huge hole in the side of the fuselage” is what NASA spokesman Alan Brown said when asked about the airplane by Wired.com, “it’s about 15 feet long.”

Related Physics Today articles
NASA saves SOFIA by slashing planet-finding funds (2006)
The decade of infrared astronomy (1991)

Related news picks
SOFIA to open door on new era of astronomy (2008)
SOFIA observatory debuts at NASA-Dryden (2007)

latimes.com: Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, 50, was described by colleagues as a respected Tehran University physicist. Reformist websites and two students also described him as an outspoken supporter of opposition figure Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

Earlier this morning he was killed when a large explosion destroyed his car and shattered windows for 150 to 300 feet around the vehicle, say witnesses.

Hard-line Iranian officials immediately blamed Israel and the West for the assassination, which came at a time of heightened tension over Iran's nuclear program. Some nuclear physics students at Tehran University told the LA Times that they believed he was killed because of his outspoken support for the student and opposition movements.

His published research papers are not directly related to nuclear weapons research.

Related Links
Israel and US behind Tehran blast - Iranian state media BBC
Massoud Ali-Mohammadi research profile
Tehran university professor killed by bomb The Guardian
Iranian nuclear physicist killed in bombing Washington Post
In a Time of Tension, Scientists Build Hopeful US-Iran Links Science (2007)

NPR: What happens when scientific research borders on science fiction? Michael Belfiore, author of the new book The Department of Mad Scientists, talks about the bizarre projects happening behind the scenes at DARPA—the research arm of the Department of Defense.

Nature News: Renewable energy is not a viable option unless energy can be stored on a large scale. David Lindley looks at five ways to do that.

The Guardian: The health dangers from nuclear radiation have been oversold, stopping governments from fully exploiting nuclear power as a weapon against climate change, argues a professor of physics at Oxford University.

Wade Allison does not question the dangers of high levels of radiation but says that, contrary to scientific wisdom, low levels of radiation can be easily tolerated by the human body.

Most scientists who have responded disagreed with Allison's conclusions, but his comments have highlighted the lack of understanding of how the body deals with low doses of radiation, a crucial issue given it is increasingly used in modern medical procedures such as scanning and cancer treatment.

Science: If there's one thing you can be sure about with particle accelerators, it's that they're expensive to build. The €3 billion Large Hadron Collider at CERN is the most extreme example. But even at the other end of the scale, a hospital that wants an accelerator for proton beam therapy for cancer patients will likely have to fork out more than $100 million, and neither of the two most common existing technologies—cyclotrons and synchrotrons—is well-suited to the task. Now a handful of accelerator physicists are experimenting with a new type of machine—a cross between a cyclotron and a synchrotron—that avoids many of the shortcomings of both and is simpler and cheaper to build.

NPR: From way out in space, our home galaxy would look pretty much like a flat disc of bright stars with spiral arms. But the Milky Way is actually surrounded by a vast halo of invisible dark matter that's shaped like a squashed beach ball.

That's according to a new map of our galaxy's dark matter announced at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, DC.

Related news story
Dark matter 'beach ball' unveiled BBC

The Guardian: It would connect turbines off the wind-lashed north coast of Scotland with Germany's vast arrays of solar panels, and join the power of waves crashing on to the Belgian and Danish coasts with the hydro-electric dams nestled in Norway's fjords: Europe's first electricity grid dedicated to renewable power will become a political reality this month, as nine countries—Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden and Ireland and the UK—formally draw up a €30 billion plan to link their clean energy projects around the North Sea.

New Scientist: A complex 248-dimensional symmetry called E₈ has been glimpsed in laboratory experiments on exotic crystals.

Radu Coldea of the University of Oxford and his colleagues chilled a crystal made of cobalt and niobium to 0.04 °C above absolute zero. Atoms in the crystal are arranged in long, parallel chains. Because of a quantum property called spin, electrons attached to the atom chains act like tiny bar magnets, each of which can only point up or down.

Applying a 5.5-Tesla magnetic field perpendicular to the direction of the electrons create spontaneous patterns in the electron spins in the chains, some of which match the E₈ structure.

Related link
Quantum Criticality in an Ising Chain: Experimental Evidence for Emergent E₈ Symmetry

Nature: The peculiar ultra-fast trembling motion of a free electron—the Zitterbewegung predicted by Erwin Schrödinger in 1930 when he scrutinized the Dirac equation—has been simulated using a single trapped ion.

Related article
Quantum simulation of the Dirac equation

NYTimes.com: Earlier this year, the Savannah River nuclear site in Aiken, South Carolina, won one of the biggest pots of stimulus money, $1.6 billion, to accelerate its cleanup of radioactive waste left behind after decades of producing materials for the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. But the pressure to spend the money quickly and effectively has led to a series of bitter disputes among officials that burst into public view this fall after the tensions reached critical mass.

At the heart of the dispute is the question of whether officials in Washington or at the site can do a better job managing the cleanup. The tensions have spurred a wide-ranging investigation by the Department of Energy's inspector general and a host of bitter accusations, including one that led to an inquiry into whether one stimulus official had really threatened another by saying she wanted to shoot him.

Related news story
Federal stimulus funds hard at work at nuclear facility Augusta Chronicle

NPR: At a once-defunct Polaroid film factory in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the lights are on again and a new industry is rising up inside the ruins of an old one.

The company Konarka makes solar panels, but not the kind most people have seen. These are thin, lightweight, flexible plastic sheets, and that enables them to be used in all sorts of new ways.

"We make what's called plastic solar cells; we call it 'power plastic,' " says Rick Hess, Konarka's chief executive officer.

Related news story
Solar panel thefts heating up

The Guardian: What are chemists, physicists, and engineers working on in the quietest building in the world? The Guardian's Louise Tickle visit's Bristol University's new Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information to find out why improvements in energy efficiency using nanodiamonds require access to a quiet room.

AAS Meeting: About 15 percent of stars in the galaxy host systems of planets like our own, with several gas giant planets in the outer part of the solar system, says Ohio State University astronomer Scott Gaudi.

“Now we know our place in the universe,” said Gaudi. “Solar systems like our own are not rare, but we’re not in the majority, either.”

Gaudi reported his findings at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, DC, when he accepted the Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy.

The find comes from a worldwide collaboration headquartered at Ohio State called the Microlensing Follow-Up Network (MicroFUN), which uses gravitational microlensing to search the sky for extrasolar planets.

Gravitational microlensing occurs when one star happens to cross in front of another as seen from Earth. The nearer star magnifies the light from the more distant star like a lens. If planets are orbiting the lens star, they boost the magnification briefly as they pass by.

This method is especially good at detecting giant Jovian-type planets in the outer reaches of solar systems.

This latest MicroFUN result is the culmination of 10 years’ work—and one sudden epiphany, explained Gaudi and his departmental colleague Andrew Gould.

Ten years ago, Gaudi wrote his doctoral thesis on a method for calculating the likelihood that extrasolar planets exist. At the time, he concluded that less than 45% of stars could harbor a configuration similar to our own solar system.

Last month, Gould was examining a newly discovered planet with Cheongho Han of the Institute for Astrophysics at Chungbuk National University in Korea. The two were reviewing the range of properties among extrasolar planets discovered so far, when Gould saw a pattern.

“Basically, I realized that the answer was in Scott’s thesis from 10 years ago,” Gould said. “Using the last four years of MicroFUN data, we could add a few robust assumptions to his calculations, and we could now say how common planet systems are in our galaxy.”

The find boils down to a statistical analysis: in the last four years, the MicroFUN survey has discovered only one solar system like our own—a system with two gas giants resembling Jupiter and Saturn, which astronomers discovered in 2006 and reported in the journal Science in 2008.

“We’ve only found this one system, and we should have found about six by now—if every star had a solar system like Earth’s,” Gaudi said.

The slow rate of discovery makes sense if only a small number of systems—around 15%—are like ours.

“While it is true that this initial determination is based on just one solar system and our final number could change a lot, this study shows that we can begin to make this measurement with the experiments we are doing today,” Gaudi added.

As to the possibility of life as we know it existing elsewhere in the galaxy, scientists will now be able to make a rough guess based on how many solar systems are like our own.

Our solar system may be a minority, but Gould said that the outcome of the study is actually positive.

“With billions of stars out there, even narrowing the odds to 15 percent leaves a few hundred million systems that might be like ours,” he said.

cleveland.com: Using a 69-year-old Cleveland-built telescope that's been refurbished with the help of refrigerator magnets and the black velvet found in Elvis paintings, astronomers are looking for the faint, telltale glow of orphaned stars unleashed by galactic impacts. 

Like crash investigators, they're probing the collisions' aftermath to decipher how and when clusters form, and what happens within their chaotic boundaries. 

"What we're looking for is to understand how the cluster came together," said Case Western Reserve University astronomy department chairman Chris Mihos, who presented new results from the team's Virgo observations at this week's annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, DC. 

NYTimes.com: The nation’s top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government’s intelligence assets—including spy satellites and other classified sensors—to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical forests.

washingtonpost.com: While students at an all-girls school in Montgomery County were laboring one day last month to build bridges out of popsicle sticks, their teachers were trying to build bridges for them into the male-dominated field of engineering.

The popsicle-stick bridges shattered under 60 pounds of pressure. Teachers at the Holton-Arms School in Bethesda hope their seemingly unique engineering course will make girls' interest in the field last longer.

"It's about taking risks and getting them over the anxiety of always having to be right all the time," said physics teacher Chris Lee, who designed the course four years ago.

Wired.com: A trusted equation for calculating the age of the solar system may need rewriting. New measurements show that one of the equation's assumptions—that certain kinds of uranium always appear in the same relative quantities in meteorites—is wrong.

"Since the 1950s, or even before that, no one had been able to detect any differences" in the quantities of uranium, says Gregory Brennecka of Arizona State University, coauthor of a paper describing the work published online December 31 in Science. "Now we're able to measure slight differences."

Related Link
²³⁸U/²³⁵U Variations in Meteorites: Extant ²⁴⁷Cm and Implications for Pb-Pb Dating

washingtonpost.com: Civilization can now track the passage of time with an accuracy of three or four parts in 10 million billion, equivalent to gaining or losing no more than one second in 100 million years or so.

But for a host of urgent purposes from fundamental physics to neuroscience and defense applications that's not good enough.

So scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the federal agency responsible for the clock-tech that determines official US time, are busily trying out new ways to slice it into pieces that are hundreds of times smaller than today's smallest.

WSJ.com: Almost since Pope Gregory XIII promulgated the new calendar—itself a reform of Julius Caesar's calendar—in 1582, proposals have bubbled up for something better.

Creating a calendar is difficult. Western tradition demands a seven-day week. Ancient custom, rooted in Moon cycles, calls for a 12-month year. The Earth's tilted axis produces four seasons. But Earth's orbit, uncooperatively, takes slightly more than 365 days, and 365 is divisible by none of 7, 12 or 4. And thanks to the little bit of extra time—about one-fourth of a day—required for a complete orbit, leap years are needed to keep things on track.

The Wall Street Journal's Charles Forelle takes a brief look at the Gregorian calendar and some of the alternatives such as giving February, May, August, and November 35 days and the rest 28 days, except in a leap year, when December has 35.

NPR: One of the more dramatic changes we've heard in music over the last 10 years is that it seems to have gotten louder.

The reason is compression, the dynamic compression that's used a lot in popular music. The idea is to make a song jump out of your iPod compared with the song that preceded it.

However, the technique can make listening to music fatiguing as well as distort the sound of the instruments.

This issue came to a head last year with the release of Metallica's album Death Magnetic.

That record is so loud that the International Telecommunication Union has set standardization measurements for long-term loudness, says Bob Ludwig, a record mastering engineer. "And that Metallica record is one of the loudest records ever produced."

washingtonpost.com: Of the 84,000 chemicals in commercial use in the US—from flame retardants in furniture to household cleaners—nearly 20% are secret, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, their names and physical properties guarded from consumers and virtually all public officials under a little-known federal provision.

The policy was designed 33 years ago to protect trade secrets in a highly competitive industry. But critics—including the Obama administration—say the secrecy has grown out of control, making it impossible for regulators to control potential dangers or for consumers to know which toxic substances they might be exposed to.

The Boston Globe: US officials are questioning why the US still pursues a foreign policy strategy based on the ability to annihilate Russia.

In a thorough review expected to be completed in March, the size, structure, and mission of the US nuclear arsenal are being reconsidered as part of President Obama's public pledge to reduce the role of nuclear weapons.

Obama has already reached a tentative agreement with Russia to reduce the number of strategic nuclear warheads on both sides from about 2200 to between 1500 and 1675 in the next several years, while also slashing number of missiles designed to carry them to between 500 and 1000. The Nuclear Posture Review, led by the US Defense Department, could recommend going even further, to 1000 warheads or fewer.

For the first time, influential voices, including a former top nuclear commander and senior Obama advisers, are proposing that one leg of the nuclear arms "triad''— a $30 billion-a-year enterprise made up of land-, air-, and sea-based weapons—be eliminated.

NYTimes.com: During the holiday season, many people place toy trains on circular tracks beneath their Christmas trees.

Last month, at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, physicists and engineers built tracks inside one of its fusion reactors and ran a toy train on them for three days.

It was not an exercise in silliness, but in calibration.

The modified model of a diesel train engine was carrying a small chunk of californium-252, a radioactive element that spews neutrons as it falls apart.

“We needed to refine the calibration technique to make sure we are measuring our neutrons as accurately as possible,” said Masa Ono, the project head of the National Spherical Torus Experiment.

Nature: NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the ESA’s X-Ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM-Newton) made their first observations 10 years ago.

The complementary capabilities of these observatories allow us to make high-resolution images and precisely measure the energy of cosmic x-rays.

Less than 50 years after the first detection of an extrasolar x-ray source, these observatories have achieved an increase in sensitivity comparable to going from naked-eye observations to the most powerful optical telescopes over the past 400 years. Nature highlights some of the many discoveries made by Chandra and XMM-Newton that have transformed 21st century astronomy

Nature: An array of air bubbles in a rubber-like material can be made to block the transmission of sound. This finding might help in the design of soundproof walls for music rooms and urban apartments.

Scientific American: Sixty Sun-powered Stirling engines are about to begin generating electricity outside Phoenix, Arizona, for the first time.

Such engines, which harness heat to expand a gas and drive pistons, are not used widely today other than in pacemakers and long-distance robotic spacecraft. Scientific American's Cynthia Graber looks at the pros and cons of using stirling engines in solar power.

Science: In 1960, at the height of the cold war, Rashid Sunyaev left his home in Tashkent, the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan, to study physics in Moscow. He was then 17 years old, with exceptional mathematical talent—the kind of student the Soviet government would have liked to groom into a weapons scientist. With genuine apprehension, Sunyaev's grandmother asked him to make a promise: Could young Rashid stay away from work that might help in the building of missiles and bombs?

Half a century later, she would have been proud of her grandson, who now directs the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, and is a chief scientist at the Space Research Institute in Moscow. Not only did Sunyaev manage to keep his word about avoiding secret military programs, but he also helped unlock secrets of the universe that are now pillars of modern cosmology.