NYTimes.com: A study released on Monday by researchers at George Mason University and the University of Texas at Austin found that only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring and fewer than a third believed that climate change was "caused mostly by human activities."
More than a quarter of the weathercasters in the survey agreed with the statement "Global warming is a scam," the researchers found.
The split between climate scientists and meteorologists is gaining attention in political and academic circles because polls show that public skepticism about global warming is increasing, and weather forecasters—especially those on television—dominate communications channels to the public.
A study released this year by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities found that 56% of Americans trusted weathercasters to tell them about global warming far more than they trusted other news media or public figures like former Vice President Al Gore or Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential candidate.
Nature: Gold nanoparticles coated with a thin layer of an oxide allow molecules adsorbed on surfaces of materials as diverse as platinum, yeast cells, or citrus fruits to be characterized routinely in the laboratory through the use of spectroscopy.
Geoscientist: How did the Mediterranean fill up after the Straits of Gibraltar were breached? Geoscientist's Ian Randall reports on a new model that constrains the evolution of the "Zanclean Flood."
NYTimes.com: Urgent warnings by government experts about the risks of routinely using powerful CT scans to screen patients for colon cancer were brushed aside by the Food and Drug Administration, according to agency documents and interviews with agency scientists.
After staying quiet for a year, the scientists say they plan to make their concerns public at an FDA meeting to discuss how to protect patients from unnecessary radiation exposure. The two-day meeting is part of a reassessment of the risks of routine radiology. The average lifetime dose of diagnostic radiation has increased sevenfold since 1980, driven in part by the increasing popularity of CT scans. Such scans can deliver the radiation equivalent of 400 chest x rays.
ScienceNOW: In an effort to curb global warming, scientists have proposed everything from launching sunlight-blocking dust into the stratosphere to boosting the number of carbon-sucking algae in the oceans.
Now, a Harvard University physicist has come up with a new way to cool parts of the planet: Pump vast swarms of tiny bubbles into the sea to increase its reflectivity and lower water temperatures. "Since water covers most of the Earth, don't dim the Sun," says scientist, Russell Seitz, speaking at an international meeting on geoengineering research. "Brighten the water."
Physics Today: CERN's Large Hadron Collider has finally started colliding two 3.5-TeV circulating beams of protons together to produce 7-TeV collisions and the official start of the LHC research program.
The collisions above (image credit: CERN) occurred at 13:06 Central European Summer Time, according to a live broadcast from CERN, with a couple hundred thousand collisions taken in the first hour.
"It's a great day to be a particle physicist," said CERN director general Rolf Heuer. "A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends."
Chemistry World: Researchers in the US have shown that perovskites—a class of mixed oxide minerals—can perform as well as platinum in certain types of catalytic converter for removing pollutants from diesel exhaust. Although it is early days in the research, the finding could eventually result in cheaper, more robust catalytic converters for diesel engines that do not rely on expensive and scarce platinum group metals.
NPR: At the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco last week, scientists presented work on everything from the greenhouse gas emissions of livestock to the effect of human skin oils on office air quality. Ira Flatow and guests discussed these stories and other news from the meeting on Science Friday.
Science: Have you noticed that computers have stopped getting faster?
Microprocessor clock frequencies plateaued around 2005, a stunning break after a decades-long run of ever-compounding improvements in computing speed.
The cause is a breakdown of the simple constant-electric-field scaling rules that had guided the shrinking of field-effect transistors for decades. As transistors shrank, they switched faster and used less power to switch but a certain amount of power is still needed to switch them from ON to OFF and vice versa.
Companies continue to shrink the transistor, emphasizing the increasing number of parallel processors (cores) they can place on a single silicon chip. But with power supply voltages stuck at about 1 V, increasing clock frequencies as in the past would result in unsupportable increases in power dissipation and heat generation. The transistor is rapidly approaching its ultimate physical limits.
The only way to decisively break the power dissipation bottleneck is to change the physics of transistor operation in ways that facilitate further reduction of operating voltage says Thomas N. Theis and Paul M. Solomon in Science.
Various: A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by Jessica Whiteside of Brown University in Rhode Island and colleagues, has come up with a plausible explanation for the rise of the dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex.
The evidence is in the large fluctuations of between different types of carbon isotopes embedded in the rock (carbon-12 and carbon-13). These fluctuations reflect perturbations of the carbon cycle including a transient increase in CO2 around the time giant volcanic eruptions split Pangaea, the single super continent that made up the land mass at the time.
latimes.com: Werner J. A. Dahm, 52, is the chief scientist for the US Air Force, and his job is to separate promising ideas from the stuff of Star Trek.
He advises generals in an era of tightening research and development budgets which scientific innovations are worth pursuing—or not.
Weapons systems take decades to develop and accrue powerful advocates along the way. Dahm's mission is to judge the technology early on and independent of any advocates. Sometimes it means disappointing those in charge.
The LA Times takes a look at a day in the life of the US Air Force's chief scientist.
Science: It is a sobering fact that of all the matter in the universe, only 17% is made of particles we know. Little is actually known about the remaining 83%, but we do have a name for it—dark matter.
Daily Telegraph: In the biggest survey ever conducted using the Hubble Space Telescope, 446000 galaxies were studied to see how matter was distributed throughout the universe and how quickly it had expanded.
And the astronomers found that the universe was growing faster and faster with time, as predicted by Einstein in his theory of general relativity.
After a series of brief talks on the project, a member of the audience asked how could junior members of collaborations get any credit for what they have accomplished, particularly when there could be more that 1000 co-authors on an LHC paper?
Felicitas Pauss, the coordinator for external relations at CERN, and Ian Shipsey at Purdue University, said that the leaders of the collaboration knew who did what and how well, and are able to give appropriate credit in letters of recommendation.
A counter viewpoint appeared in this week's Nature, in which Julia Lane argues that to capture the essence of good science, academics, universities, industry, and governments must combine forces to create an open, sound and consistent system for measuring all the activities that make up academic productivity.
Outside of the informal assessments mentioned by Pauss and Shipsey, some more scientific methods are used to assess the quality of scientists for tenure or employment—the most famous of which is the h-index. This index was originally developed by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego.
The h-index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other people's publications. When hiring a scientist, some institutions will look at the average h-index for scientists of the same age and, if the scientist being considered has a higher-than-average h number, offer tenure-track position on the basis of it.
However, the h-index has known flaws in assessing academics both in physics and in other fields, which amplifies calls by Lane and others to expand the metrics to include the full range of work done by scientists—including teaching ability and outreach to the public, which are usually only included as supplementary material.
With the renewed interest in nuclear weapons I have been struck by how few people there still are who have seen one explode. There are a few survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and there are a small number who witnessed some of the above ground test explosions. But the last American above-ground test was in 1962 and the last above-ground test by any country was conducted by the Chinese in 1980. This means that the Indians, Pakistanis, Israelis--to say nothing of the Iranians and North Koreans--have never seen a nuclear explosion.
Wall Street Journal: Bill Watkins, the former CEO of hard-disk drive maker Seagate Technology, wants to shake up the prices of solid-state light-emitting diodes.
Watkins became CEO of LED maker Bridgelux in January. On Tuesday, the Sunnyvale, California, company released a product called Helieon that Mr. Watkins says will cost as low as $20 for a lighting unit that has a lifespan of more than 10 years.
While $20 may seem like a lot for a lightbulb, Mr. Watkins says the price is less than half of the $50 that has been standard for similar LED lighting systems.
Nature News: "I am here to watch you." So began anthropologist Arpita Roy when introducing herself in 2007 to a roomful of particle physicists. At the time, those scientists were racing to finish work on the world's biggest machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.
The LHC carries the hopes of generations of physicists, who have designed it to reach energies never before achieved in a collider and—possibly—to produce a zoo of particles new to science. But the LHC is also a huge human experiment, bringing together an unprecedented number of scientists. So in recent years, sociologists, anthropologists, historians and philosophers have been visiting CERN to see just how these densely packed physicists collide, ricochet and sometimes explode.
washingtonpost.com: At colleges and universities across the country, many graduate students who have babies work until their due dates and return soon after giving birth.
If they don't, they risk getting kicked off projects, falling out of favor with powerful faculty members and losing their student status, which is often required for visas, health insurance plans and student loan grace periods.
"Workplace balance is an issue in any workplace, but it can play a huge role in academics," said Lisa Maatz of the American Association of University Women. "They judge your research, but they also judge your collegiality."
Did you have any difficulty juggling the demands of academia and of home? Considering commenting or provide advice below.
Physics Today: A new radiocarbon dating technique that can determine the age of ancient mummies, old artwork, and other relics without causing damage was announced yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society held in San Francisco, California.
"This technique stands to revolutionize radiocarbon dating," said Marvin Rowe, of Texas A&M university at Qatar, who led the research team. "It expands the possibility for analyzing extensive museum collections that have previously been off limits because of their rarity or intrinsic value and the destructive nature of the current method of radiocarbon dating."
Science: The exceptional properties of many materials often come at the expense of limited performance in other areas. For example, conventional metals and their alloys are strong--they are good at resisting stress (i.e., an applied load)—but they tolerate only a very small amount of strain (i.e., deformation) before they are irreversibly deformed. Rubber can easily return to its original shape, even after large deformations, but is much weaker than conventional metals.
However, some metal alloys exhibit "shape memory"; they are strong but can recover from being deformed when heated.
This process seems counterintuitive, but these alloys take advantage of solid-to-solid "diffusionless" phase transitions: The atoms rearrange how they pack into crystals in an orderly fashion, and this process changes the material's macroscopic shape.
Few other materials possess this combination of strength and flexibility, and clever engineering has exploited these properties--for example, in implanted medical devices such as stents. In Science, Y. Tanaka and associates report on a superelastic alloy that almost doubles the useful range of deformation that can be induced in such alloys.
IP Global: Building a nuclear weapon has never been easier. NATO's Michael Rühle provides step-by-step instructions for a country to go nuclear, from discretely collecting material to minimizing the fallout when caught. The last choice he says, is to decide whether to be a "virtual" nuclear power or announce your arrival with a big bang, i.e. with a nuclear test that establishes your credentials as a nuclear weapons state.
Nature: The golden ratio—n exact 'magic' number often claimed to be observed when taking ratios of distances in ancient and modern architecture, sculpture and painting—has been spotted in a magnetic compound.
Smithsonian Magazine: Twice a day, seven days a week, from February to November for the past four years, two researchers have stepped outside a research station at the South Pole and walked nearly a mile in darkness to the South Pole Telescope. Their goal, trying to solve possibly the greatest riddle in the universe: what is most of it made of?
In Character: Christine Rosen has written the following essay on whether society is taking technology and development for granted, compared to the early part of the industrial age.
Visiting the Paris Exhibition in 1900, the American writer Henry Adams saw something so remarkable he compared its influence to that of the Virgin Mary. It was a hall filled with early power generators known as dynamos. Watching them at work, he "began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross," he wrote in The Education of Henry Adams. "The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring." Adams wondered if he should pray to it.
Women scientists have discovered nebulas and the first radio pulsars, developed spray-on skin for burn victims, pioneered cancer-beating therapies, created cutting-edge computer chips, and won Nobel Prizes, but as the Royal Society lauds past women scientists, their contemporaries are still facing a number of difficulties, including being asked to make the tea and take notes at meetings by their male colleagues.
A survey of US science education by the Bayer Corporation reports that "significant numbers of women and underrepresented minority chemists and chemical engineers say they were discouraged from pursuing" a career in science and engineering at some point in their lives"
Have you noticed any improvements in how women scientists have been treated at your institution? Physics Today would like to know. Contact us in the comment box below.
Fake wine is "an ongoing problem," says Jones, with some wine experts estimating that up to 5 percent of the fine wine sold today is fake.
"The problem goes beyond ordinary consumers being overcharged for a bottle of expensive wine of a famous winery with a great year listed on the label," Jones pointed out. "Connoisseurs collect vintage wines and prices have soared with 'investment wines' selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars a case at auction."
Jones said the wine industry is fighting forgeries with special seals and high-tech labels. The method for authentication of a wine's vintage may provide added confidence that the vintage on the label is the vintage in the bottle.
A 'hot' grape
The new vintage-checking technique is similar to radio-carbon dating, used for years to estimate the age of objects up to 68,000 years in the past. It works by comparing the amount of carbon-14 (C14), a less common form of atmospheric carbon, to carbon-12 (C12), which is more stable and abundant.
The ratio of these two carbon forms, or isotopes, has remained constant in the atmosphere for thousands of years.
"Until the late 1940's all carbon-14 in the Earth's biosphere was produced by the interaction between cosmic rays and nitrogen in the upper atmosphere," Jones says. "This changed in the late 1940's up to 1963 when atmospheric atomic explosions significantly increased the amount of C14 in the atmosphere. When the tests stopped in 1963 a clock was set ticking—that of the dilution of this "bomb-pulse" C14 by CO2 formed by the burning of fossil fuels."
Traces of radioactive carbon—including with recent vintages the "bomb-pulse"—are captured by the grape plants through the absorption of carbon dioxide and eventually transformed into alcohol and other carbon-based components of the wine.
"The year that the grapes were grown fixes the age or vintage of the wine," Jones says.
"The carbon-14 isotope ratio of the wine alcohol can therefore be used to determine the vintage of a wine."
An accelerator mass spectrometer was used to determine the C14 levels in the alcohol components of 20 Australian red wines with vintages from 1958 to 1997 and the measurements compared to the radioactivity levels of known atmospheric samples. They found that the method could reliably determine the vintage of wines to within the vintage year.
In addition to testing alcohol, measuring the age of other wine components, such as tartaric acid and various phenolic substances, can help improve the reliability of the technique for detecting fraud, Jones notes.
Science: In the past decade, there has been an explosion of academic and industrial interest in the use of organic conducting ("pi-conjugated") materials in optoelectronics, flexible logic circuits, light emission, energy conversion, optical communications.
Compared with inorganic materials, pi-conjugated materials can more easily be tuned through molecular design and cost less to manufacture.
Advances in physical understanding, synthetic control of the chemical product, and computational molecular design now allow pi-conjugated materials to be tailored for a specific purpose or function. In Science, Joel M. Hales and associates report a promising new approach to the design of pi-conjugated materials for all-optical communications.
FT.com: An ambitious plan for an electricity "supergrid" in the North Sea was launched last week by a group of 10 leading European companies.
Such a supergrid connecting the UK, Germany, and Norway is expected to cost $40 billion.
The Friends of the Super-grid group, which includes Siemens and Hochtief of Germany, Areva of France, and Prysmian of Italy, said the project would make it possible to develop high volumes of offshore wind power in the North Sea and reduce electricity prices.
Science: Pipes feature strongly in the infrastructure of everyday life, from domestic water pipes to oil and natural gas conduits. A primary consequence of the onset of turbulence in the fluid flowing through the pipes is the dramatically increased power required to pump stuff at the same rate. Thus, the incentives to understand and control the transition process are strong.
More than 100 years after Osborne Reynolds's seminal experiments on the transition of flow through a pipe from a laminar (smooth) to a turbulent state, the exact physical mechanism that drives this phenomenon still vexes the fluid mechanics community.
In Science Björn Hof and associates describe a mechanism that feeds energy into a turbulent flow system, allowing the onset of the transition to be manipulated and even the suppression of the turbulence.
Nature News: Neutrinos like to keep to themselves. These ghostly particles are so reluctant to interact with ordinary matter that billions zip harmlessly through each person every day, and it takes giant, specialized detectors to capture even a handful of them. Now astronomers are finding hints of an even more elusive type of neutrino, one so shy that it could never be detected directly: the sterile neutrino.
"The question of sterile neutrinos is absolutely crucial for nuclear particle physics and astrophysics."
For more than a decade, this subatomic spectre has intrigued theorists and experimenters, but experimental efforts have had trouble catching them. Now, two observations in space—one in microwaves and the other in x rays—are raising hopes again.
Physics Today: At just after 5:20 this morning central European time, two 3.5-TeV proton beams successfully circulated in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This is the highest energy yet achieved in a particle accelerator. The first attempt to collide beams at 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) is expected in the near future.
"Getting the beams to 3.5 TeV is testimony to the soundness of the LHC's overall design, and the improvements we've made since the breakdown in September 2008," says CERN's director for accelerators and technology, Steve Myers. "And it's a great credit to the patience and dedication of the LHC team."
By the time the LHC switched off for general maintenance and the holiday period on 16 December, another record had been set with collisions recorded at 2.36 TeV.
Higher energy collisions beyond 2.36 TeV require higher electrical currents in the LHC magnet circuits, which placed exacting demands on the new machine protection systems—built after the initial accident at CERN—which have now been readied for the task.
The fact that the LHC has been running so smoothly since operations restarted has led the CERN council to change the colliders' operating schedule, says CERN's director general Rolf Heuer.
"Traditionally, CERN has operated its accelerators on an annual cycle, running for seven to eight months with a four to five month shutdown each year," says Heuer. "With the LHC, things are different. Being a cryogenic machine operating at very low temperature, the LHC takes about a month to bring up to room temperature and another month to cool down. A four-month shutdown as part of an annual cycle no longer makes sense for such a machine."
Instead, says Heuer, the LHC will run with longer periods of operation—18&ndahs;24 months with a short stop at the end of 2010—accompanied by longer shutdown periods when needed.
"This will bring enough data across all the potential discovery areas to firmly establish the LHC as the world's foremost facility for high-energy particle physics," says Heuer. "Only when the repairs and consolidation are complete after the LHC's next shutdown will we be fully able to consign 19 September 2008 to the history books."
Science: The interior structure and composition of solar system bodies are key to understanding their origin and evolution. Saturn's largest icy moon, Titan, and the jovian moons, Ganymede and Callisto, are of similar size, mean density, and primordial ice-rock fraction from which the satellites formed.
Titan is distinct due to its dense nitrogen atmosphere, with methane as the next most abundant constituent, which precludes direct observations of the surface.
Before the arrival of the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft to study the Saturn system in 2004, little was known about the nature of Titan's interior—information as to its origin, evolution, and the rate at which it degasses was limited.
In Science, Luciano Iess of Sapienza University of Rome in Italy and associates report evidence based on the analysis of its gravitational field using radio waves that the interior was much colder than previously thought, and thereby impeded substantial melting and subsequent separation of the primordial ice-rock mixture.
"The ripples of Titan's gravity gently push and pull Cassini along its orbit as it passes by the moon and all these changes were accurately recorded by the ground antennas of the Deep Space Network within 0.005 mm/s even as the spacecraft was over a billion km away," said Iess. "It was a tricky experiment."
The above image shows Titan's likely interior structure. The surface is seen as yellow.
In the cutaway, the outermost 500-km appear to be ice essentially devoid of any rock (light grey) with an internal ocean that is hypothesized from other Cassini data (blue) caught between the icy layers.
The remaining interior is a cool mix of ice studded with rock (dark gray). This suggests Titan's interior is cool and sluggish, and failed to allow the interior to separate into completely differentiated layers of ice and rock.
"These results are fundamental to understanding the history of moons of the outer solar system," said Cassini Project Scientist Bob Pappalardo, commenting on his colleagues' research. "We can now better understand Titan's place among the range of icy satellites in our solar system."
New Scientist: Dark matter is hypothetical, invisible stuff that cosmologists invoke to explain why the universe appears to contain much less matter than their calculations say it should, and some think that it is made up of hypothetical particles called axions.
Even though we haven't yet found a genuine axion, however, materials called topological insulators can be used to mimic them, say Shoucheng Zhang and colleagues at Stanford University, California. Magnetic fluctuations in the materials produce a field just like an axion field, his team found.
"They are an exact mathematical analogy," says Zhang, who presented his work at the March APS meeting.
Various: Andrew Cleland, John Martinis, and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have provided the first clear demonstration that the theory of quantum mechanics applies to the mechanical motion of an object large enough to be seen by the naked eye. Their work satisfies a longstanding goal among physicists.
The observations reveal that the reddest color of the Great Red Spot corresponds to a warm core within the otherwise cold storm system, and images show dark lanes at the edge of the storm where gases are descending into the deeper regions of the planet. These types of data, detailed in Icarus, give scientists a sense of the circulation patterns within the solar system's best-known storm system.
"This is our first detailed look inside the biggest storm of the solar system," said coauthor Glenn Orton, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We once thought the Great Red Spot was a plain old oval without much structure, but these new results show that it is, in fact, extremely complicated."
Sky gazers have been observing the Great Red Spot in one form or another for hundreds of years, with continuous observations of its current shape dating back to the 19th century. The spot, which is a cold region averaging about 110 Kelvin is so wide about three Earths could fit inside its boundaries.
The thermal images were obtained by 3 giant 8-meter telescopes—the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, the US-led Gemini Observatory telescope in Chile, and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan's Subaru telescope in Hawaii—have provided an unprecedented level of resolution and extended the coverage provided by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s.
Together with observations of the deep cloud structure by the 3-meter NASA Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, the level of thermal detail observed from these giant observatories is comparable to visible-light images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope for the first time.
One of the most intriguing findings shows the most intense orange-red central part of the spot is about 3 to 4 Kelvin warmer than the environment around it, said Oxford University fellow, Leigh Fletcher, the lead author of the paper.
This temperature differential might not seem like a lot, but it is enough to allow the storm circulation, usually counter-clockwise, to shift to a weak clockwise circulation in the very middle of the storm. Not only that, but on other parts of Jupiter, the temperature change is enough to alter wind velocities and affect cloud patterns in the belts and zones.
"This is the first time we can say that there's an intimate link between environmental conditions—temperature, winds, pressure and composition—and the actual color of the Great Red Spot," Fletcher said. "Although we can speculate, we still don't know for sure which chemicals or processes are causing that deep red color, but we do know now that it is related to changes in the environmental conditions right in the heart of the storm."
The Economist: Between 1992 and 2007, according to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory physicist Ian Hutcheon, 17kg of highly enriched uranium was seized from smugglers around the world, along with 400 grams of plutonium.
In neither case is that enough for a proper atom bomb, but it is still worrying says the Economist.
Presumably, more is out there. Even if it is not, the material that has been found could have been used to make a “radiological” weapon, by blowing it up and scattering it around a city using conventional explosives.
Hutcheon is one of those charged with analyzing this captured material, to discover how dangerous it really is and where it came from.
NPR: Geologists working in Haiti say they've been able to trace the exact location of the earthquake fault that gave way on 12 January and killed more than 200,000 people. They've also discovered that decades of deforestation in Haiti actually contributed to the earthquake's toll along the coastline by allowing sediment to drain from the mountains and form a flood plain which people built on. This loose soil liquified in the earthquake, causing loss of life.
Physics Today: Heat is the bane of computer manufacturers as it places severe limits on how fast computer chips can run. Some computer systems, such as Intel's Pentium desktops, have fans that blow cool air onto the circuit boards. Other solutions, which usually involve supercomputers, include dipping the entire computer in a fast-moving fluid to keep the equipment cool.
But what if we could design a liquid cooling system that could be built onto the silicon chip?
Their paper in Optics Express describes how to make liquid flow vertically upward along a silicon surface, overcoming the pull of gravity, without pumps or other mechanical devices, through strong capillary action.
It works by carving nanometer-scale structures in silicon, with extremely short, high-powered laser bursts. These grooves increase the attraction or hydrophile that water molecules feel toward the silicon. The attraction becomes so great that it overcomes the strong bond that water molecules feel for other water molecules.
So instead of sticking to each other, the water molecules climb over one another for a chance to be next to the silicon. The water rushes up the surface at speeds of 3.5 cm per second, fast enough to allow any desktop computer chip with this design to run substantially hotter than traditional computer chips.
In basketball, the ball typically follows a parabola—it's the elegant arched trajectory naturally formed by any projectile, from an artillery round to a tomato, moving in a gravitational field.
According to Brancazio, the correct angle for scoring from free throws is to create a parabola curve by angling the throw at 45°, except when it isn't, which is most of the time.
The reason is that 45° works only if the ball is shot as the same height as the basket. Those of us who aren't 7 ft tall with long arms have to compensate by launching the ball at a higher angle, typically in ranges from 52° to 59°.
SPACE.com: A commercial company is offering researchers a chance to fly in a plane that simulates weightless and low-gravity environments like the Moon, Mars, and Earth-orbit.
Nature News: If quantum computing networks are ever to become a reality, physicists must find a way to direct and harness the light emitted in quantum experiments without using cumbersome apparatus.
NPR: Author Lewis Carroll was also a math teacher in Oxford, England, and mathematicians say Alice in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass are full of algebraic lessons—such as why a raven is like a writing desk.
That's the riddle the Mad Hatter asks Alice. And, as Keith Devlin from Stanford University tells NPR's Jacki Lyden, "That particular scene—and lots of other scenes in Alice in Wonderland—were a reflection on the increasing abstraction that was going on in mathematics in the 19th century."
Science: On 23 September 1966, NASA's Nimbus II satellite soared over Earth in a polar orbit every 108 minutes, taking pictures of cloud cover and measuring heat radiated from the planet's surface. The data documented the extent of polar ice shelves and the paths of two typhoons, but like thousands of other Nimbus II records, the information was originally stored on analog tapes and later forgotten for decades.
The resulting image (above) is the oldest and most detailed from NASA's Earth-observing satellites. It's also the latest success story in what researchers call techno-archaeology: pulling data from archaic storage systems. Once forgotten and largely unreadable with modern equipment, old data tapes are providing researchers with new information on changes in the surfaces of Earth and the moon.
The researchers found that the relatively slow gas movement, known as the meridional flow—the flow of material along meridian lines from the equator toward the poles at the surface and from the poles to the equator deep inside—sped up a few years before the last solar minimum began in 2008, weakening the Sun's magnetic field at the poles and extending the solar minimum.
Nature News: Using a special trap, researchers have captured and weighed three isotopes of the superheavy element nobelium—the heaviest element so far to have its mass measured directly.
Nature News: Talks at the first Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, held in 1970, described an analysis of Moon rocks collected during the Apollo 11 mission. Petrologist Larry Taylor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, described how he saw only pure metallic iron in the samples—a sign that there wasn't any water around to rust the iron. This and other results that year led to the party line: the Moon is, and always was, bone dry.
Forty years on, at the same annual conference, Taylor and his colleagues announced that they have been wrong all along.
Three groups presented evidence that certain crystals in the volcanic rocks collected by Apollo astronauts contain as much as several thousand parts per million of water.
The results suggest that the lunar interior has always held some water—challenging theorists to change their thinking about how the Moon formed during a fiery impact, and how the once-molten body cooled.
The work also hints that comets have played a more important part in delivering water to the Moon than researchers had previously thought.
Science News: Embracing chaos just might help physicists build a quantum brain. A new study shows that disorder can enhance the coupling between light and matter in quantum systems, a find that could eventually lead to fast, easy-to-build quantum computers.
AFP: The consortium of agencies building the International Space Station wants to see if the orbital outpost can operate until 2028, the European Space Agency said on Thursday.
Science: The first superconductors were discovered in 1911. Half a century passed before physicists came up with a theory that could explain why some compounds had zero resistance at a few degrees above absolute zero. In 1986, researchers discovered complex compounds nicknamed "cuprates" containing copper and oxygen that become superconductors at much higher "critical temperatures"—now as high as 138 kelvin, but couldn't explain how or why they worked.
In the last couple of years, researchers have discovered a new type, four families of iron-based superconductors with distinct crystal structures, that superconduct at temperatures as high at 27 Kelvin. Using tools honed on the cuprates they have made measurements that took decades to achieve in the older materials.
More importantly, although physicists cannot say exactly how the iron-based superconductors work, they have developed a scheme that many say captures the essence of what's going on. "We don't have a full solution yet," says MIT theorist Patrick Lee, "but the situation is better than in the cuprates."
In fact, the emerging portrait of the iron-based superconductors jibes with some theories of the cuprates and seems to undermine more-exotic alternatives. So if physicists are on the right track with the iron-based superconductors, then the cuprates may not be so inscrutable after all.
NPR: In Antarctica, you'll find 90 percent of the world's glacial ice, but new research from the US Geological Survey shows that every ice front in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula is retreating.
Jane Ferrigno US Geological Survey is the lead author of that new report. She tells NPR that scientists have known for a while that some of the peninsula's ice shelves are breaking up.
Nature News: Scientists say they have caught the first pieces of interstellar dust—the fundamental building blocks of the Sun, Earth and the rest of the Solar System. The discovery required an army of volunteers, including a Canadian man who spent 15 hours a day studying images online and eventually discovered the first dust sample.
BBC News: 2010 is a big year for nuclear fusion but experts fear that a lack of fuel could push the dream of cheap, safe, clean and limitless energy far into the future.
Nature News: With the launch of a powerful laser facility, called Orion, the UK's atomic weapons establishment (AWE), which is generally closed to academic research, is opening up.
Researchers will use Orion to explore two key parameters for materials used in nuclear weapons: their opacity and their equation of state.
The first describes how radiation travels through a material—in this case, the two stages that make up a weapon, particularly as how the opacity changes with age
The other parameter—the equation of state—describes how a material behaves at enormous pressures and temperatures. By generating data on these and other crucial parameters, Orion will give nuclear-weapons scientists the information they need to ensure that their models are correct.
Sciencebase: Back in the 1970s LP's were the common medium of choice for Hi-fi enthusiasts. When the compact disc emerged on to the market with its claims of superior quality and scratch resistance, the hi-fi enthusiasts split into two camps: those who clung to vinyl and those who went digital.
But, was concentrating on audio quality all for nothing? Within another generation the notion of digital audio had changed with compressed formats such as MP3's becoming popular.
He has provided insight into the topology of those additional dimensions, and in 1999 he introduced the theory to nonscientists in a best-selling book, The Elegant Universe.
In 2008 he cofounded the World Science Festival, an annual event that brings together scientists, artists, and ordinary people who are simply interested in the great questions of the universe.
Greene talked to Discover about how string theory has evolved, the attempts to find supporting evidence through new experiments, and the challenges of making science exciting to the general public.
Science News: Evidence for the existence of Earth's magnetic field has been pushed back about 250 million years, new research suggests. The field may therefore be old enough to have shielded some of the planet's earliest life from the Sun's most harmful cosmic radiation.
The Economist: You might think that measuring the global levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would be a priority. If you did think that, though, you would be wrong.
No such system exists, because NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), a satellite that would have fulfilled the role, was lost on launch this time last year. The purpose of OCO was to work out the fate of carbon dioxide that is emitted by industrial processes but does not then stay in the atmosphere—about 60% of the total.
America is planning to build a new OCO. In the meantime, however, a small group of scientists are doing their best to monitor emissions at ground level. At the end of February a number of these researchers met at the Royal Society in London, to discuss what they were up to.
Physics Today: A pioneering deep-sea exploration robot—one of the first successful submersible vehicles that was both unmanned and untethered to surface ships—was lost at sea on a research expedition to explore the Chile Triple Junction—the only place on Earth where a mid-ocean ridge is being subducted (or pushed) beneath a continent (South America) in a deep ocean trench.
The 15-year-old Autonomous Benthic Explorer (ABE), was launched late Thursday night by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and had reached the seafloor to begin its 222nd research dive when, in the early hours of Friday morning, all contact with the surface vessel Melville abruptly ceased. All efforts to reestablish contact failed. “The loss had nothing to do with earthquake activity off Chile," said the ABE team.
ABE “revolutionized deep-sea exploration by expanding scientists’ abilities to reach into the deep,” said Chris German, chief scientist of WHOI's National Deep-Submergence Facility. Although ABE had been recently replaced by Sentry, a more advanced robot, ABE was called out of retirement as Sentry had already been committed to another research expedition when the urgent call came through to investigate geological activity off the Chilean coast.
Cracked glass
On ABE’s first dive on the research cruise, it had detected evidence of hydrothermal vents. At the time of its loss, ABE had just begun a second dive to home into a vent site and photograph it.
Researchers onboard Melville believe the craft may have suffered a catastrophic implosion of one of the glass spheres used to keep ABE buoyant. An implosion, under pressure equivalent to more than two tons per square inch at depths of 3 km, would have caused all of ABE’s other spheres to implode, destroying onboard systems used to communicate with the surface ship and return ABE to the surface.
A strong workhorse
Unlike human-occupied submersibles or vehicles connected by cables to surface ships, ABE could survey wide swaths of undersea territory on dives lasting up to a day.
Enhanced over the years with multibeam sonar, Doppler navigation, and an anchoring system, ABE was pre-programmed to maintain a designated course but had enough decision-making capacity to avoid collisions with seafloor terrain. ABE made detailed, high-resolution maps, “sniffed out” unusual chemicals emerging from the seafloor, and photographed biological communities and complex geological features. It often operated from ships in remote areas with no other systems available for rescue should it become trapped or disabled. While risky, this strategy paid off, enabling multidisciplinary research in previously unexplored regions, such as the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.
Built as a prototype, ABE was the first autonomous robot to make detailed maps of mid-ocean ridges, the 64373-km undersea volcanic mountain chain at the boundaries of Earth’s tectonic plates where new sea-floor crust is created. It was also the first AUV—a new kind of deep-submergence vehicle—to locate hydrothermal vents. ABE explored seamounts, undersea volcanoes, and other areas with harsh, rugged terrain.
“In a way, it’s fitting that its demise comes on the job, and that it has gone to be recycled through the Chile subduction zone,” said German.
SPACE.com: Former NASA astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz has been developing a new rocket engine that draws upon electric power and magnetic fields to channel superheated plasma out the back. That stream of plasma generates steady, efficient thrust that uses low amounts of propellant and builds up speed over time.
The rocket technology could drastically cut down the amount of time a spacecraft needs to fly between Earth and Mars.
The idea behind ion engines has been around for more than 60 years, and has been used in some small experimental micro-satellites in Earth orbit. The Ad Astra Rocket Company is now trying to successfully build an interplanetary engine called the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) by competing for some R&D funds from NASA.
Nature News: Georgia's borders are guarded by some of the best radiation detectors available—so why are nuclear smugglers still slipping through? asks Sharon Weinberger.
latimes.com: Yesterday, two Nobel Prize-winning scientists, chemist Alan Heeger (2000) and physicist David Gross (2004), portrayed two Nobel Prize-winning physicists, Niels Bohr (1922) and Werner Heisenberg (1932), in a reading from Copenhagen, a play that revolves around quantum mechanics and the development of nuclear weapons.
Science: Buildings use 40% of the primary energy supplied in the US, and more than 70% of all generated electricity, primarily for heating, cooling, and lighting.
About 20% of the energy used by buildings can potentially be saved by correcting faults, including malfunctions and unnecessary operation. Another 10 to 20% can be saved by deploying advanced control systems to regulate temperature and air flow inside the buildings.
The energy efficiency resource recoverable through such improved building controls and fault detection corresponds to the output from hundreds of power plants, equivalent to more than one-third of US coal-fired power production.
Realizing these substantial savings will require introducing intelligence into the infrastructure of buildings, to distribute the optimization of their operation and detection of their faults say Neil Gershenfeld, Stephen Samouhos, and Bruce Nordman.
Laing's protocol can simplify the operation of existing qubit setups and has immediate applications for communication systems such as earth-to-satellite links and the use of integrated photonic waveguides.
The paper also details a photonic implementation of the scheme for entangled pairs of three dimensional particles, so-called qutrits.
The protocol works because security is guaranteed with a measure of the purity on the entanglement shared by Alice and Bob. This kind of measure is robust in an unknown or slowly varying reference frame, yet would reveal the action of any Eavesdropper, (called Eve in this example), as her measurements would strongly and negatively impact the purity. Interestingly, the varying reference frame has no impact at all on the correlations Alice and Bob use determine their secret key.
Crucially, the protocol achieves reference frame independent quantum cryptography without the use of the extra resources which make previous protocols more challenging and in some cases unwieldy.
Nature News: Later this month a remote-controlled aircraft is scheduled to take off from the Mojave Desert in California and veer west over the Pacific Ocean. The Global Hawk, a slim-winged, high-flying jet, was designed for military reconnaissance and tested in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But this time the plane will fly for science.
The plane will measure concentrations of ozone, aerosols and various trace gases along a 15000 kilometer loop around Hawaii. At the same time, atmospheric scientists hope that the drone's flight will usher in an era of unmanned scientific aircraft that can probe parts of the sky normally inaccessible to manned planes.
Physics Today: One of the greatest concerns and large unknowns in climate science has been the potential impact of methane trapped and frozen in the polar regions of the planet, particularly in the Arctic permafrost. If climate change causes the methane to be released, the gas could start a positive feedback reaction that could trigger abrupt climate warming.
Until now no evidence of such a mechcanism has been seen, but an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov. say this change is under way—in a little-studied area under the sea, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, west of the Bering Strait.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf, a methane-rich area that encompasses more than 2 million square kilometers of seafloor, was long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in the methane, but Shakhova and Semiletov team states that it is in fact perforated and starting to leak large amounts of methane into the atmosphere.
"The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world's oceans," said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF's International Arctic Research Center. "Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap."
Methane is more than 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. It is released from previously frozen soils in two ways. When the organic material (which contains carbon) stored in permafrost thaws, it begins to decompose and, under anaerobic conditions, gradually releases methane. Methane can also be stored in the seabed as methane gas or methane hydrates and then released as subsea permafrost thaws. These releases can be larger and more abrupt than those that result from decomposition.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is more than three times as large as the nearby Siberian wetlands, which have been considered the primary Northern Hemisphere source of atmospheric methane. Shakhova's research results show that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already a significant methane source, releasing 7 teragrams of methane yearly, which is as much as is emitted from the rest of the ocean. A teragram is equal to about 1.1 million tons.
"Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already," she said. "If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger."
Shakhova notes that Earth's geological record indicates that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about .3 to .4 parts per million during cold periods to .6 to .7 parts per million during warm periods. Current average methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years, she said. Concentrations above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are even higher.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a relative frontier in methane studies. The shelf is shallow, 50 meters or less in depth, which means it has been alternately submerged or terrestrial, depending on sea levels throughout Earth's history. During Earth's coldest periods, it is a frozen arctic coastal plain, and does not release methane. As Earth warms and sea level rises, it is inundated with seawater, which is 12-15 degrees warmer than the average air temperature.
"It was thought that seawater kept the East Siberian Arctic Shelf permafrost frozen," Shakhova said. "Nobody considered this huge area."
"This study is a testament to sustained, careful observations and to international cooperation in research," said Henrietta Edmonds of the National Science Foundation, which partially funded the study. "The Arctic is a difficult place to get to and to work in, but it is important that we do so in order to understand its role in global climate and its response and contribution to ongoing environmental change. It is important to understand the size of the reservoir—the amount of trapped methane that potentially could be released—as well as the processes that have kept it "trapped" and those that control the release. Work like this helps us to understand and document these processes."
Earlier studies in Siberia focused on methane escaping from thawing terrestrial permafrost. Semiletov's work during the 1990s showed, among other things, that the amount of methane being emitted from terrestrial sources decreased at higher latitudes. But those studies stopped at the coast. Starting in the fall of 2003, Shakhova, Semiletov and the rest of their team took the studies offshore. From 2003 through 2008, they took annual research cruises throughout the shelf and sampled seawater at various depths and the air 10 meters above the ocean. In September 2006, they flew a helicopter over the same area, taking air samples at up to 2,000 meters in the atmosphere. In April 2007, they conducted a winter expedition on the sea ice.
They found that more than 80% of the deep water and more than 50% of surface water had methane levels more than eight times that of normal seawater. In some areas, the saturation levels reached more than 250 times that of background levels in the summer and 1,400 times higher in the winter. They found corresponding results in the air directly above the ocean surface. Methane levels were elevated overall and the seascape was dotted with more than 100 hotspots. This, combined with winter expedition results that found methane gas trapped under and in the sea ice, showed the team that the methane was not only being dissolved in the water, it was bubbling out into the atmosphere.
These findings were further confirmed when Shakhova and her colleagues sampled methane levels at higher elevations. Methane levels throughout the Arctic are usually 8 to 10 percent higher than the global baseline. When they flew over the shelf, they found methane at levels another 5 to 10 percent higher than the already elevated Arctic levels.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf, in addition to holding large stores of frozen methane, is more of a concern because it is so shallow. In deep water, methane gas oxidizes into carbon dioxide before it reaches the surface. In the shallows of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, methane simply doesn't have enough time to oxidize, which means more of it escapes into the atmosphere. That, combined with the sheer amount of methane in the region, could add a previously uncalculated variable to climate models.
"The release to the atmosphere of only one percent of the methane assumed to be stored in shallow hydrate deposits might alter the current atmospheric burden of methane up to 3 to 4 times," Shakhova said. "The climatic consequences of this are hard to predict."
Related video
The lead author, Natalia Shakhova, explains the new findings in this video.
The Economist: Eskimos have numerous ways to describe different types of snow, whether its 'sticky,' flakey, wet, or dry. And as the recent snowstorms on the East coast of the US have shown, the type of snow that falls on the ground (heavy and wet with the first snowstorm, leading to power outages, felled trees, and blocked roads for days, and light and fluffy for the second, which caused less disruption) can have a big impact on whether utilities and governments can still provide core services.
Forecasting what sort of snow will fall is not easy. But Jim Steenburgh and Trevor Alcott from the University of Utah think they have found a correlation between weather conditions at the time of a snowfall and the amount of water in the snow that fell.
This is called the snow-to-liquid ratio (based on the area of snow cover and how much liquid it would produce when melted), and the higher the ratio, the drier and more powdery the snow.
Steenburgh and Alcott found that temperature plays a large part in controlling snow density. Where that temperature pertains, though, is crucial. It is the temperature above the crests of the range, where the snow crystals form, that seems to matter most. When this is around freezing point, the snow formed is dense (ie, the value of the ratio is low). As the temperature falls, snow gets drier and fluffier because of the formation of dendrite crystals that contain lots of spaces. As conditions get colder still, though, the crystals become more compact again, and the snow gets heavier.
Physics Today: Evidence for the most massive antinucleus discovered to date has been published by researchers studying high-energy collisions of gold ions at the Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).
The new antinucleus, discovered at RHIC’s STAR detector (see right), is a negatively charged state of antimatter containing an antiproton, an antineutron, and an anti-Λ particle. It is also the first antinucleus containing an anti-strange quark. The results will be published online by Science Express.
“This experimental discovery may have unprecedented consequences for our view of the world,” commented theoretical physicist Horst Stoecker, vice president of the Helmholtz Association of German National Laboratories. “This antimatter pushes open the door to new dimensions in the nuclear chart—an idea that just a few years ago, would have been viewed as impossible.”
The discovery may help elucidate models of neutron stars and opens up exploration of fundamental asymmetries in the early universe.
New nuclear terrain
All terrestrial nuclei are made of protons and neutrons (which in turn contain only up and down quarks). The standard Periodic Table of Elements is arranged according to the number of protons, which determine each element’s chemical properties. Physicists use a more complex, three-dimensional chart to also convey information on the number of neutrons, which may change in different isotopes of the same element, and a quantum number known as “strangeness,” which depends on the presence of strange quarks (see diagram). Nuclei containing one or more strange quarks are called hypernuclei.
The diagram above is known as the 3-D chart of the nuclides. The familiar Periodic Table arranges the elements according to their atomic number, Z, which determines the chemical properties of each element. Physicists are also concerned with the N axis, which gives the number of neutrons in the nucleus. The third axis represents strangeness, S, which is zero for all naturally occurring matter, but could be non-zero in the core of collapsed stars. Antinuclei lie at negative Z and N in the above chart, and the newly discovered antinucleus (magenta) now extends the 3-D chart into the new region of strange antimatter.
For all ordinary matter, with no strange quarks, the strangeness value is zero and the chart is flat. Hypernuclei appear above the plane of the chart. The new discovery of strange antimatter with an antistrange quark (an antihypernucleus) marks the first entry below the plane.
This study of the new antihypernucleus also yields a valuable sample of normal hypernuclei, and has implications for our understanding of the structure of collapsed stars.
“The strangeness value could be non-zero in the core of collapsed stars,” said Jinhui Chen, one of the lead authors, a postdoctoral researcher at Kent State University and currently a staff scientist at the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, “so the present measurements at RHIC will help us distinguish between models that describe these exotic states of matter.”
The findings also pave the way towards exploring violations of fundamental symmetries between matter and antimatter that occurred in the early universe, making possible the very existence of our world.
Collisions at RHIC fleetingly produce conditions that existed a few microseconds after the Big Bang, which scientists think gave birth to the universe some 13.7 billion years ago. In both nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC and in the Big Bang, quarks and antiquarks emerge with equal abundance. At RHIC, among the collision fragments that survive to the final state, matter and antimatter are still close to equally abundant, even in the case of the relatively complex antinucleus and its normal-matter partner featured in the present study. In contrast, antimatter appears to be largely absent from the present-day universe.
“Understanding precisely how and why there’s a predominance of matter over antimatter remains a major unsolved problem of physics,” said Brookhaven physicist Zhangbu Xu, another one of the lead authors. “A solution will require measurements of subtle deviations from perfect symmetry between matter and antimatter, and there are good prospects for future antimatter measurements at RHIC to address this key issue.”
In a single collision of gold nuclei at RHIC, many hundreds of particles are emitted most created from the quantum vacuum via the conversion of energy into mass in accordance with Einsteins famous equation E = mc2. The particles leave telltale tracks in the STAR detector (shown here from the end and side). Scientists analyzed about a hundred million collisions to spot the new antinuclei, identified via their characteristic decay into a light isotope of antihelium and a positive pi-meson. Altogether, 70 examples of the new antinucleus were found.
The STAR team has found that the rate at which their heaviest antinucleus is produced is consistent with expectations based on a statistical collection of antiquarks from the soup of quarks and antiquarks generated in RHIC collisions. Extrapolating from this result, the experimenters believe they should be able to discover even heavier antinuclei in upcoming collider running periods. Theoretical physicist Stoecker and his team have predicted that strange nuclei around double the mass of the newly discovered state should be particularly stable.
RHIC’s STAR collaboration is now poised to resume antimatter studies with greatly enhanced capabilities. The scientists expect to increase their data by about a factor of 10 in the next few years.
NYTimes.com: Specialists say such safeguards, such as ear muffs at loud stadiums, are critical for young ears in a deafening world. Hearing loss from exposure to loud noises is cumulative and irreversible; if such exposure starts in infancy, children can live “half their lives with hearing loss,” said Brian Fligor, director of diagnostic audiology at Children’s Hospital Boston.
The Economist: WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information.
Despite the abundance of tools to capture, process and share all this information—sensors, computers, mobile phones and the like—it already exceeds the available storage space. Moreover, ensuring data security and protecting privacy is becoming harder as the information multiplies and is shared ever more widely around the world.
Science News: Recent studies show that the oceans may hold more “garbage patches” of fine plastic flotsam than scientists realized and that the fragments extend well below the sea surface.
Most of these items are the size of fingernail clippings or smaller. They are the wave-shattered remnants of items such as rubbish, abandoned fishing gear and floats from fishing nets and scientific instruments. These plastic bits are especially common in a region of the Pacific Ocean southwest of California that is sometimes called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Recent cruises reveal that there’s more garbage in this patch than often meets the eye, oceanographer Giora Proskurowski of the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Mass., reported February 24 at the American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences meeting.
Science: "The running joke is that somebody's about to announce the discovery of water on Mars, again," says planetary scientist Robert Grimm of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. Actually, it was more than 30 years ago that researchers first discovered water on Mars, more than a million cubic kilometers of it frozen in the north polar ice cap.
Planetary scientists reported the latest water-ice findings at December's American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco, California. Jeffrey Plaut of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, and Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) team members reported detecting ice-rich deposits as deep as 1 kilometer beneath the 3-million-square-kilometer Dorsa Argentea Formation near the south polar cap.
At this week's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Houston, Texas, Plaut and team members on SHARAD (SHAllow RADar)--the radar flying on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter--will report that ice is indeed abundant across the 1000-kilometer span of the Deuteronilus Mensae area on the edge of the great northern lowlands.
Nature: The cool molecular gas from which stars form has been detected in relatively ordinary faraway galaxies. The results point to a continuous fueling of gas into the star-forming guts of assembling galaxies.
NPR: The magnitude-8.8 quake in Chile this weekend apparently changed the length of the day — and shifted the way Earth wobbles, according to scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Xin Hunanet: China plans to launch Tiangong 1 (Heavenly Palace), an 8.5- ton unmanned space module, next year, which will eventually form the basis of a permanent space station.
The module is being used to test China's docking capability. After Tiangong 1 has successfully docked with three Shenzhou spacecraft, which are expected to be put into space within two years following the module's launch, additional modules will be added to expand the station's size to about 20 tons, said Qi Faren, former chief designer of the Shenzhou spacecraft.
Physics Today: Using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists have detected ice deposits near the Moon's north pole. NASA's Mini-SAR instrument, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 2 to 15 km in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it's estimated there could be at least 600 million metric tons of water ice.
The Mini-SAR has imaged many of the permanently shadowed regions that exist at both poles of the Moon. These dark areas are extremely cold and it has been hypothesized that volatile material, including water ice, could be present in quantity here. The main science object of the Mini-SAR experiment is to map and characterize any deposits that exist.
Currently running in billions of cell phones around the world, the ARM is a prime example of a chip that is simple, low power, and low cost.
Furber led development of the ARM in the 1980s while at Acorn, the UK company also known for the BBC Microcomputer, which Furber played a major role in developing.
David Brown interviews Furber about some of the lessons on energy-efficient computing he has learned through working on these and subsequent projects.
Furber also talks about his current project, SpiNNaker (Spiking Neural Network Architecture), a massively parallel system of a million ARM processors designed to simulate the workings of part of the human brain.
Physics Today: Chile is a highly seismic area because of its proximity to the stressed Nazca and South American tectonic plates which are converging at a rate of 80 mm per year, one of the fastest rates on Earth. Since 1973 there have been 13 events of magnitude 7.0 or greater on the richter scale.
Sometimes the earlier quakes in the region, such as the 1960 9.5 earthquake of May, 1960—the largest earthquake worldwide in the last 200 years or more—can cause increased stress that leads to other earthquakes.
Geologist Jian Lin of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution says this is what happened on Saturday, 27 February, when a 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck Chile in an offshore zone about 230 km north of the source region of the 1960 quake. The quake was approximately 300-500 times more powerful that the one that hit Haiti. A large and powerful set of aftershocks can be expected from this earthquake.
The earthquake, was centered some 65 miles west-southwest of Talca, Chile, about 21.7 miles below the ocean’s surface, “relatively shallow for a subduction quake,” said Lin. It occurred at the interface between the two plates, with the “subducting” Nazca plate moving down and landward below the South American plate, uplifting a large patch of the seafloor.
Saturday’s earthquake had a “much longer” rupture zone–500-600 km–than that of the Haiti quake–35-50 km.
Physics Today: (Updated 3/2/10 to include Gemini Observatory). Chile has ideal weather conditions for observing the night sky in the Southern Hemisphere, with high altitude and low humidity, which has led to some major international astronomical facilities being based there.
Through a message on the ESO website, the staff expressed their deepest condolences to the families of the victims and sympathy and support for all those affected by the earthquake.
No casualties among ESO staff occurred but power cuts and network interruptions were impacting communications from the telescopes to the outside world. The largest outrage happened at the La Silla Paranal Observatory, the southern-most telescope among the facilities, which lost power for 10 minutes.
Astronomers who were scheduled to visit ESO were asked to put their trips on hold until further notice, and were encouraged to remotely control the telescopes over the internet.
"Despite being the 7th strongest earthquake ever recorded worldwide, the ESO observatory sites did not suffer any damage," said Lars Lindberg Christensen, at the ESO headquarters in Garching, Germany, "partly as [the telescopes] are engineered to withstand seismic activity and partly due to their distances from the epicentre."
The National Optical Astronomy Observatory's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile also survived intact with nearly all the staff and visitors confirmed safe.
"The effects were strong,' says a message on the NOAO website, "but no significant damage was registered. Both telescopes and observatory infrastructure are intact with no detected damage. Indeed, observations on the telescopes continued immediately after the earthquake. Minor rock slides on the access road were cleared Saturday morning. Electricity, external telephone, and internet connectivity were lost initially, but internal communications remained stable, allowing operations to continue."
It was a similar situation at the Gemini Observatory, "The earthquake disrupted observations on early Saturday morning for less than 30 minutes," said a press release. "Subsequent operations have been essentially normal with the exception of Internet connectivity."
Nature News: Google's search engine is a powerful tool for helping scientists to find academic papers and details of conferences or identify potential collaborators. And for most researchers around the world, access to Google—and all its related products, including the literature search Google Scholar—is unfettered.
Despite some google results being censored by the Chinese government, the tool is widely used in China.
So Google's move to withdraw from the Chinese market after a series of hacking attempts on its servers, may have an unintended impact on access to the latest scientific research papers by Chinese scientists. Alternately, it may strengthen use of more specialized search engine products produced by scientific publishers who offer access to China at a free or discounted rate.
redOrbit: Unless you're interested in isotopic labeling, neutrons don't figure much into chemistry. Neutral in charge and a bit bigger than a proton, the neutron neither gives an atom its name nor determines much about its reactivity.
But neutrons have some unsung properties that make them useful for investigating matter. Because they are neutral, they can penetrate deeper into a sample than electrons can. Because they have mass and spin, they have a magnetic moment and can probe magnetism. Because they interact with nuclei rather than electron orbitals, they are sensitive to light elements and can even distinguish between hydrogen and deuterium. And they're nondestructive. These features are inspiring researchers to use neutrons to analyze a variety of materials, from coal and complex fluids to cell membranes and membrane proteins and including magnetic materials.
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