April 2010 Archives

The New York Review of Books: The proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries outside the US, UK, and Canada, which jointly developed the first atomic bomb, was inevitable and had been predicted, writes Jeremy Bernstein:

What had not been predicted was the extent to which it would be abetted by espionage. The German-born physicist Klaus Fuchs, who had been part of the British delegation at Los Alamos and returned to England where he worked on nuclear weapons, gave the Russians what was essentially the blueprint of the bomb the US used at Nagasaki. He is in the unique position of having helped three countries build nuclear weapons. Nor did anyone foresee that proliferation of nuclear weapons would become a commercial enterprise, which is the situation that we find ourselves in at the present time.

At the center of this activity is the Pakistani metallurgist A.Q. Khan and his collaborators.

A new book by nuclear armaments expert David Albright, called Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America's Enemies, highlights how Iran, South Africa, Iraq, and Libya have all made use of Pakistan's supply network to get close to making a bomb, and certain smugglers very rich.

Nature: Bose–Einstein condensates are ideal tools with which exotic phenomena can be investigated. The hitherto-unrealized Dicke quantum phase transition has now been observed with one such system in an optical cavity.

Science News: If the weird rules of atomic physics do help birds find their way around the globe — as some scientists suspect — a new study has identified ways of finding out how.

The study is among the first to propose a direct test of how quantum entanglement, an effect that inexorably links two electrons in a way that Einstein called “spooky,” could change the behavior of whole animals.

“This paper has really made a contribution by suggesting an experimental test,” comments Thorsten Ritz, a physicist at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the new work.

Slate Magazine: Richard Clarke's Cyber War may be the most important book about national-security policy in the last several years, writes Fred Kaplan:

The threat, as the title suggests, is cyberwar, which Clarke—the White House counterterrorism chief under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush—defines as "actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation's computers or networks for the purpose of causing damage or disruption."

The militaries of more than 20 nations, including the United States, Russia, and China, have set up special cyberwarfare units. The consequences of such a war, Clarke and his co-author Robert Knake maintain, could "change the world military balance" and "fundamentally alter political and economic relations."

And yet, they persuasively argue, the United States—which has by far the most sophisticated offensive cyberwar capabilities—would almost certainly lose the war, because our economic and military infrastructures are so dependent on computer networks and because we have done so little to protect those networks from a cyberattack.

CNET News: Solar-panel manufacturer First Solar announced Wednesday it has signed a definitive agreement to purchase solar-project developer NextLight Renewable Power for approximately $285 million.

Physics Today: The first-ever discovery of ice and organic molecules on an asteroid may hold clues to the origins of Earth's oceans and life 4 billion years ago.

University of Central Florida astronomers detected a thin layer of water ice and organic molecules on the surface of 24 Themis, the largest in a family of asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter.

Their unexpected findings were published in Nature.

"What we've found suggests that an asteroid like this one may have hit Earth and brought our planet its water," said UCF astronomer Humberto Campins, the study's lead author.

Some theories suggest asteroids brought water to Earth after the planet formed dry. Scientists say the salts and water that have been found in some meteorites support this view.

Using NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, Campins and his team of researchers measured the intensity of the reflected sunlight as 24 Themis rotated. Differences in intensity at different wavelengths helped researchers determine the makeup of the asteroid's surface.

They were surprised to find ice and carbon-based compounds evenly distributed on 24 Themis. More specifically, the discovery of ice is unexpected because surface ice should be short lived on asteroids, which are expected to be too warm for ice to survive for long.

Perhaps most promising hypotheses to explain the ice, is the possibility that 24 Themis might have preserved the ice in its subsoil, just below the surface, as a kind of "living fossil" or remnant of an early solar system that was generally considered to have disappeared long ago.

Related link
Water ice and organics on the surface of the asteroid 24 Themi

Australian Broadcasting Corporation: A multi-million dollar scientific space balloon has crashed on take-off in Alice Springs, destroying its payload, tipping over a car and sending observers running for their lives.

Nature: Dorothy Hodgkin was born 100 years ago next month. When Hodgkin won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964, much was made of her gender. She was only the fifth woman to become a laureate in science, the first from Britain, and the first women not married to a scientist.

Hodgkin was therefore by definition exceptional. When Georgina Ferry began to write her biography soon after her death in 1994, one of her principal motives was to try to understand what it was that had enabled her to transcend the conventions of her time. "She never acknowledged that she faced barriers on the grounds of her gender," writes Ferry, "and her story largely bears this out."

What did influence her social and scientific circumstances were also exceptional, and provided the environment in which it was possible for her to fulfil her promise and achieve science's highest honor, says Ferry. The support of her parents, and the forward-thinking planning of Somerville College in Oxford.

The Guardian: The incredible ambition of the Large Hadron Collider has fired our imagination; physicists have become cult TV stars; dramatic new pictures from space grace a million computer screensavers. Is this a golden age of science? The Guardian asks Brian Cox, Martin Rees, Alok Jha, Kevin Fong, Dara O Briain, Tim Radford, Sam Wollaston, Laura Spinney, Ian Sample, and Alice Roberts, for answers.

NPR: The Obama administration is promoting nuclear power, but at the same time it has put an end to plans to bury nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

Now, a blue-ribbon committee is pondering what to do with the waste. One option under consideration is a process that would dramatically reduce its radioactive lifetime.

Less than 1% of spent reactor fuel is made up of the nasty radioactive elements that last hundreds of thousands of years.

And Sherrell Greene at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee says the technology to remove those elements from waste is as old as nuclear reactors themselves.

Related link
Laser nuclear technology might pose security risk

CNET News: If you're a materials scientist at NASA's Glenn Research Center, or an engineer at the Johnson or Marshall Space Centers studying Space Shuttle flow-control valves, or any one of countless others in the agency needing a supercomputer, there's really just one place to go—the advanced supercomputing facility at the Ames Research Center.

At the center is the sixth-most-powerful supercomputer on Earth, Pleiades, with a current rating of 973 teraflops.

The facility services about 1500 users across NASA, according to Rupak Biswas, the agency's advanced supercomputing division chief.

Pleiades, like most, if not all, supercomputers, is a work in progress. Debuted in late 2008 with a world number 3 ranking and a measurement of 487 teraflops, the machine has now doubled its capacity, even as it has dropped three places in the rankings. Based on SGI's Altix ICE system, the system will continue to grow in the foreseeable future.

Physics Today: The European Southern Observatory has announced that the Cerro Armazones site in Chile will be the baseline site for the planned $1.3 billion optical/infrared 42-meter European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), and not the island of Las Palmas as hoped by ESO member state Spain.

NPR: Although Los Alamos National Laboratory is known for designing nuclear weapons and maintaining the viability of the US stockpile, the lab is also a center for finding ways to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

Los Alamos has trained some 5000 inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over 30 years. They've come from more than 40 countries, according to David Bracken, a former deputy group leader.

FT.com: When China joined the World Trade Organization seven years ago, the move was applauded by companies from other industrialized countries as a way of protecting their intellectual property rights—Chinese companies could no longer copy designs or technology and export the results abroad at drastically reduced prices, without, in theory, being taken to court.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. A rising Chinese electronics company is suing technology groups Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba over alleged infringements of its patents. It is part of a growing trend in China of lawsuits from Chinese groups asserting their own intellectual property rights.

Beijing Huaqi Information Digital Technology, better known by its brand name Aigo, has accused HP and Toshiba of violating six patents for USB Plus, a storage port technology used in many laptop computers.

The Frederick News-Post Online: It is absolutely impossible that Bruce Ivins, accused of mailing anthrax and killing five people in 2001, could have created and cleaned up anthrax spores in the timeline and manner the FBI alleges, Ivins's former coworker said last Thursday.

The National Academy of Sciences brought in Henry Heine, a former microbacteriologist for the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, to explain spore preparation to the panel, which is tasked with investigating the science the FBI used to accuse Ivins, also a former microbacteriologist for USAMRIID.

And though Heine discussed only scientific methods and technologies before the panel, he said afterward he firmly believes Ivins did not and could not have grown and prepared the anthrax.

Related news picks
Anthrax investigation still yielding surprising findings
FBI call on NAS to study anthrax case
Independent review set on FBI anthrax inquiry
Anthrax attacks gave rise to biodefense industry
Anthrax investigation should be investigated says, Rep. Rush Holt
Questions remain over anthrax case
Scientists raise queries over FBI anthrax probe

New York Times: Xerox Corp's purchase last September of Affiliated Computer Services Inc has helped to raise the high-tech company's revenue and share price. The acquisition of ACS, which sells data services to a wide range of businesses, could signal Xerox's shift toward services and away from manufacturing.

Nature: Thanks to extensive, long-term monitoring, a team from Japan and Australia has measured the properties of a deep ocean current that flows northward from Antarctica. The current is important both for the current climate, because of its unexpected vigor, and for the future climate, because disrupting it could bring about major changes.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Some countries, including Canada, Japan, and Germany, set a mandatory retirement age for public employees, including professors at public universities. The US doesn't. In a commentary, Michael Ruse, a forced retiree who left Ontario for a job at Florida State, examines the pros and cons of mandatory retirement in academia.

SPACE.com: NASA's Spirit rover landed on Mars on 4 January 2004. This week, if Spirit wakes up from a likely power-saving safe-mode, it will surpass Viking's record mission of six years and 116 days on the Martian surface. If Spirit remains in hibernation, the record will belong to its sister rover Opportunity, which landed on Mars 11 days later and is still operating.

SPACE.com: Launched in 2003, the Japanese space probe Hayabusa may become the first spacecraft to visit an asteroid and return samples to Earth. Despite a damaging solar flare, the failure of one of its gyros, and other mishaps, the probe landed on asteroid Itokawa on 25 November 2005 and is believed to have retrieved a sample. If all goes to schedule, a reentry capsule will detach from the probe and land in the Australian outback on 13 June. Besides the samples, Hayabusa collected images, IR spectra, and other data.

San Jose Mercury News: The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory directs the energy of 192 powerful lasers at tiny capsules made of diamond. Two years ago, inventor Victor Kley sued the lab, alleging that his process for making the capsules had been used without his permission. A jury has dismissed the suit.

Washington Post: In honor of Earth Day, US Energy Secretary Steven Chu participated in a live online forum hosted by the Washington Post. It's too late to submit questions, but you can still read the transcript. Chu also communicates with the public on his Facebook page.

Nature: From a vantage on the International Space Station, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer will look for antihelium nuclei and other exotic matter, whose existence would help clarify why matter predominates over antimatter—provided the experiment gets launched. As the number of shuttle launches dwindles, AMS scientists are rushing to replace the experiment's superconducting magnet with a permanent magnet. Tests had revealed that the superconducting magnet consumed more power than expected. If AMS had flown with the SC magnet, its mission would have been drastically shortened.

New York Times: The US enforces tough restrictions on the export of high-tech military and civilian equipment. A recent speech given by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates to military contractors could signal an overhaul of those restrictions, which, for example, prevent Chinese universities from buying US-made supercomputers.

Washington Post: Volcanic eruptions, like that of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull last month and Washington State's Mount St. Helens in 1980, can break open the volcano itself, making it easier for ash, gas, and magma to escape and frustrating attempts to predict an eruption's course and severity.

New Scientist: Michael Brooks, who has a PhD in physics, is one of a handful of scientists vying for victory in British parliamentary elections on 6 May. In an opinion piece, he declares:

My manifesto is simple. I am standing to highlight the fact that the current spread of politicians' interests doesn't reflect the population they are supposed to represent. Science is not just an indulgence for the curious. It is vital to our life, culture and economic well-being.

SPACE.com: Tonight, Earth passes through the densest part of the debris trail shed by comet Thatcher along its orbit. The annual meteor shower that results from the encounter was first recorded by Chinese observers in 687 BC.

Miami Herald: In an op-ed piece that appeared in both English and Spanish-language publications, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and US Energy Secretary Steven Chu outlined the benefits of cooperation on clean energy in the Western Hemisphere:

We're already making progress. As part of [Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas], the United States and the Inter-American Development Bank are working with partners across the region to develop a regional clean energy network that will link energy efficiency centers in Peru and Costa Rica with Chile's Renewable Energy Center in Santiago, Mexico's Wind Center in Oaxaca, a biomass center in Brazil and a geothermal center in El Salvador. This new network will bring U.S. and regional experts together to explore technologies and implementation strategies that will benefit us all.

Nature: Beneath the waters off Vancouver Island lies a loop of cables, 800 km long, that provides power and telecommunications to NEPTUNE Canada. The project, whose name stands for North-East Pacific Time-Series Undersea Networked Experiments, consists of a set of experiments gathering biological, geophysical, and other kinds of data from the sea floor.

The Guardian: A key assumption behind the recent ban on air traffic in the UK, France, and other European countries is that ash spewed into the air by Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano would cripple a jetliner's turbines. That assumption, it turns out, was based in part on wind-tunnel data taken under conditions whose applicability to the ashy skies above Northern Europe is in doubt.

American Physical Society: The APS council voted on Sunday to attach what it calls a commentary to its official November 2007 statement on climate change. The addition of the 743-word commentary was triggered by a campaign by some APS members to modify the original 159-word statement, which remains intact and in force:

New York Times: With his student Glen Rebka in 1959, Pound measured the gravitational redshift and confirmed a key prediction of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. With his Harvard colleagues Edward Purcell and Henry Torrey in 1946, he discovered nuclear magnetic resonance, the phenomenon that underlies magnetic resonance imaging.

Chronicle of Higher Education: The online community for graduate students GradShare has created a bulletin board where students can post the research statements of their own theses and vote on the hotness of other student's statements.

New Scientist: Quantum-encrypted signals using entangled photons have already been sent up into space and back. Now, a new milestone has been reached: continuous operation at high-bit rate.

Nature: In schemes for ion-based quantum computing, shared vibrational modes are used to entangle the ions. Michael Biercuk of the University of Sydney in Australia and his colleagues have shown that vibrational modes of coupled ions have another use: as the basis for a detector that can measure forces as small as 174 yoctonewtons (yocto is 10^-24).

American Geophysical Union: After a search lasting more than a year, the world's largest professional society for Earth and space scientists has a new CEO, Christine McEntee. McEntee has worked at several professional organizations, including, most recently, as the CEO of the American Institute of Architects. In a press release announcing her departure, AIA President George H. Miller said:

Over the past four years, Chris McEntee significantly enhanced [the] recognition by policy makers, the media, and others that design matters, especially in the areas of sustainability and livable communities. Chris is embracing an opportunity of great personal and professional interest and we wish her every future success.

MedicalPhysicsWeb: Positron emission tomography reveals the location of tumors and other malignancies thanks to technetium-99m and other radioactive nuclides. Because the nuclides are produced at just a few specialized nuclear reactors, the supply is vulnerable to stoppages. A proposal to make nuclides using cyclotrons could boost and secure the supply.

ScienceNow: The orbits of Earth and other planets lie within a thick, pancake-shaped cloud of dust whose faint emission of reflected sunlight is called zodiacal light. The dust origin was first proposed in 1684 by Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. Now, David Nesvorny of Southwest Research Institute has explained where the dust originates: from comets whose orbits take them no closer to the Sun than Jupiter's orbit.

The New York Times: Women in the US earn just over a quarter of bachelor's degrees in computer science. Their underrepresentation is more severe in the world of Silicon Valley startups:

Women own 40 percent of the private businesses in the United States, according to the Center for Women's Business Research. But they create only 8 percent of the venture-backed tech start-ups, according to Astia, a nonprofit group that advises female entrepreneurs.

The Independent: According to a series of newly published papers, changes in Earth's oceans and ice cover caused by global warming could lead to changes in Earth's crust, including more earthquakes, landslides, and tsunamis.

Phronesisaical: Cheryl Rofer and Molly Cernicek wonder if innovation can be encouraged at the US national laboratories. Could too much paperwork and splitting research groups into too small a team be stifling innovation?

The theory at the national laboratories once was that those doing non-weapons research could be called upon to work on weapons if the situation demanded. That was the bargain that Rofer signed on for in 1965, the height of the Cold War. And there was a flow of ideas between the two kinds of work. Laser isotope separation would provide uranium for weapons or civilian reactors. Geology served both hot dry rock and containment of underground nuclear tests. Genetics investigated the damage radiation caused.

The two kinds of research are almost completely separate now at the national laboratories. And that does not bode well for increasing innovation nor for recruiting future nuclear weapons stewards.

KYPost.com: Police have caught a man they suspect of breaking into Roy Glauber home last month while the 2005 Nobel Prize for physics winner was away.

The thief took Glauber's Nobel prize and other academic awards gained from a lifetime of service to physics. All the prizes are still missing.

ScienceNOW: Astrophysicists have found that when a supermassive black hole quickly devours gas and dust, it can generate enough radiation to abort all the embryonic stars in the surrounding galaxy. It's not clear what this means for life's ability to take hold in such a bleak environment, but the research shows that the process might have determined the fates of many of the large galaxies in the universe.

The Guardian: The British Chiropractic Association has dropped its libel action against physicist and science writer Simon Singh at the end of a two-year battle that has been a landmark in the libel reform campaign.

The case had become a cause celebre, with scientists, celebrities and freedom of speech campaigners lining up to condemn the British libel laws and argue that Singh had a right to express his opinion in print.

Singh was sued by the BCA for a piece he wrote in the Guardian's comment pages criticizing the association for defending chiropractors who use treatments on children with conditions such as colic and asthma, when there is little evidence such treatments work.

The case has cost Singh more than US$300000 that he will never fully recover. "It still staggers me that the British Chiropractic Association and half the chiropractors in the UK were making unsubstantiated claims," he said. "It still baffles me that the BCA then dared to sue me for libel and put me through two years of hell before I was vindicated. And it still makes me angry that our libel laws not only tolerate but also encourage such ludicrous libel suits."

NPR: Because of geology and history of the region, scientists were not surprised when an earthquake struck China on Wednesday. They were, however, intrigued that the quake may have been preceded by a small foreshock reports Richard Harris.

It might seem as though earthquakes are increasing in frequency or strength compared with past years, but scientists say that isn't the case says NPR's Kathleen Masterson.

Related link
Earthquake in western China kills hundreds
Hundreds dead in western China quake

SPACE.com: The oldest known Martian meteorite—a space rock that fell to Earth—is some 400 million years younger than originally thought. It formed about 4.091 billion years ago, a time when the red planet was wet and had a magnetic field, a new study suggest

Various: Updated 4/16/2010: A number of outlets have written articles about the societal impact of volcanic ash caused by this week's eruption in Iceland.

Nature News: Around four tonnes of ancient Roman lead was yesterday transferred from a museum on the Italian island of Sardinia to the country's national particle physics laboratory at Gran Sasso on the mainland. Once destined to become water pipes, coins or ammunition for Roman soldiers' slingshots, the metal will instead form part of a cutting-edge experiment to nail down the mass of neutrinos.

Yale Environment 360: Michael D. Lemonick takes a look at how, as the world warms, sea levels could easily rise 1 to 3 meters this century. But the increases in sea level will vary widely by region, with prevailing winds, powerful ocean currents, and even the gravitational pull of the polar ice sheets determining whether some coastal areas will be inundated while others stay dry.

NPR: Astrophysicist Adam Frank asks:

The Babylonians didn't do it. The Romans didn't do it. The Chinese of the Tang Dynasty didn't do it. The Persian Empire didn't do it. For 50,000 years of human cultural evolution it didn't happen. For 6,000 years of civilization it didn't happen.

Then, in the space of a mere hundred years, we manifest pathways to utter ruin not once but twice. We have managed to put the entire project of civilization up for grabs first through nuclear arms and then through the twin perils of climate change and resource depletion.

How did this happen?

New Scientist: Pure randomness is surprisingly difficult to create, even if you draw on the inherent randomness of quantum mechanics. Now, though, a "true" random number generator is on the cards, by using entangled "qubits."

CBS News: Astronomers have discovered the closest new star to us that's been spotted in 63 years. The new find, a brown dwarf called UGPS 0722-05, is less than 10 light years from here, and the coldest brown dwarf ever discovered.

Brown dwarfs have so little mass that they never get hot enough to sustain the nuclear fusion reactions that power stars like the sun. Still, they do shine, because they glow from the heat of their formation, then cool and fade.

SPACE.com: The 2007 Comet McNaught has been identified as the biggest comet measured to date, according to scientists, whose calculations were based on the comet's overall influence in space.

NPR: Scientists still don't understand why some supercell thunderstorms form twisters and others don't. Ira Flatow and guests discuss the VORTEX2 project, in which scientists hope to solve twister mysteries by using mobile weather stations to chase tornadoes around the plains.

NYTimes.com: The Russian government, hoping to diversify its economy away from oil, is building the first new scientific city since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even more improbably, it is modeled, officials say, on Silicon Valley.

The site, still nameless and near a village outside Moscow, is conceived not as a secretive, numbered city in Siberia but as an attempt to duplicate the vibrancy and entrepreneurial spirit of America's technology hotbed.

Various: In the two decades since its launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has transformed the way we see and understand our universe.

Now, to mark the observatory's 20th anniversary, scientists at NASA have selected the most dramatic and scientifically important images it has taken.

Related links
Up close and phenomenal—the Hubble telescope at 20 The Observer
Images mark 20 years of Hubble telescope Daily Telegraph

The Independent: It has been described as probably the most important garden in Europe but is open to the public on only one day a year.

Now, however, the Garden of Cosmic Speculation developed by American-born landscape architect and historian Charles Jencks may be replicated in Geneva at CERN.

Additional photos available at Ficker.

Various: Hewlett-Packard scientists last week announced a new advancement in memristors or memory resistors. They were theoretically conceived in 1971 by Leon O. Chua, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, but they were not put into practical effect until 2008 at an HP lab.

Memristors are simpler than today’s semiconducting transistors, but can store information even in the absence of an electrical current.

The new breakthrough, published in Nature, is that a memristor can perform logic steps, potentially enabling computation to be performed in chips where data are stored.

Related news pick
Big advance reported in memory chip design

Related links
From lab to fab—An HP Labs discovery demonstrates the viability—and versatility—of memristor technology HP press release
‘Memristive’ switches enable ‘stateful’ logic operations via material implication Nature
HP labs outlines breakthroughs in memristor chip research eWeek
HP sees a revolution in memory chip New York Times

New Scientist: Trying to find remains that have been buried, even animals as large as an elephant or mass graves, is not an easy task. It is made even more difficult when investigators only appear on the scene months or years after such events occur.

One research tool that could potentially help is hyperspectral imaging. This multi-wavelength detector looks for variations in the intensity of light at various wavelengths reflected by vegetation on the ground. The precise pattern of intensities has been found to reflect changes caused by nutrients released into the soil as bodies decompose.

Various: Lightning is typically associated with rain clouds and thunderstorms, which leads to an unusual observation, why is there lightning in the middle of the desert? Or in plumes of volcanic ash?

The answer may lie in a new theory by Thomas Pähtz, Hans J. Herrmann, and Troy Shinbrot, in Nature Physics.

They suggest that particles transfer electrical charge vertically when the particles are smashed together, such that positive charges move downward and negative charges move up in the cloud.

Although the theory explains how the particles develop charge, it doesn't explain the origin of the external electrical field needed to kick off the charging process.

Related links
Why do particle clouds generate electric charges?
Swirling dust shocks physicists NatureNews
Colliding dust grains charge each other up ScienceNews

The Boston Globe: The United States is facing a critical shortage of nuclear scientists and engineers, even as demand rises for their expertise in managing an aging US arsenal, monitoring dangerous weapons stockpiles around the world, and operating new nuclear power plants, according to the latest government figures and independent studies.

Physics Today: The European Space Agency's Venus Express has returned the clearest evidence yet that Venus is still geologically active by combining topological data from NASA's Magellan spacecraft.

Relatively young lava flows have been identified in a series of infrared images sent back from the spacecraft of the volcanic peak Idunn Mons in the Imdr Regio area of Venus. The finding suggests the volcanic eruptions may still occur on Venus.

Nature News: Overlooking Los Angeles, six small domes nestle amid the pine trees atop Mount Wilson. Individually, the 1-meter telescopes inside those buildings have no chance of competing with the biggest ground and space telescopes. But collectively, the Mount Wilson telescopes are producing some of the sharpest images ever made.

NYTimes.com: Induction cooking has been around for decades, but only recently has demand driven prices down and selection up. In the last two years, Viking, GE, Samsung and Kenmore have begun selling induction ranges.

With its energy efficiency, kitchen geek appeal and growing reputation for power and precision, induction cooking may be the iPad of the kitchen. Like Apple's latest invention, induction technology could forever change everyday tasks, or it might never deliver on its promise.

ScienceNOW: Individual wind turbines and even whole wind farms remain at the mercy of local weather for how much electricity they can generate. But researchers have confirmed that linking up such farms along the entire U.S. East Coast could provide a surprisingly consistent source of power. In fact, such a setup could someday replace much of the region's existing generating capacity, which is based on coal, natural gas, nuclear reactors, and oil.

SPACE.com: NASA's new space exploration plan includes a heavy emphasis on robotic missions that would land on the moon, Mars and even asteroids to pave the way for human exploration.

The agency's 2011 budget proposed by President Barack Obama calls for funding two such missions starting next year. One of those missions is a lunar expedition that would test the ability to control robots remotely from Earth, or the International Space Station, on the moon.

New Scientist: Pure diamond is a super-tough electrical insulator, but given the right impurities it becomes a semiconductor. Crucially, it is also the best thermal conductor on Earth. Those properties means synthetic diamond could be used to make microchips that handle high-power signals but do not require power-hungry cooling systems.

"Diamond-based control modules in electric cars and industrial machinery could lead to considerable energy savings," says Hideaki Yamada of National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Tsukuba, Japan.

BBC News: A prototype solar-powered plane has made its first full test flight - coming closer to the goal of using solar energy to fly around the world.

The Solar Impulse, with a wingspan similar to that of a super-jumbo jet but weighing the same as a saloon car, took off from a Swiss airfield.

The plane's wings are covered by solar cells which power four electric motors.
Its designers hope a slightly larger production model will circumnavigate the globe in two years' time.

Physics Today: NASA, US Navy and university researchers have successfully demonstrated the first robotic underwater vehicle to be powered entirely by natural, renewable, ocean thermal energy, that can be scalable to a wide range of autonomous crafts capable of virtually indefinite ocean monitoring for climate and marine animal studies, exploration and surveillance.

NYTimes.com: If you listen to climate scientists—and despite the relentless campaign to discredit their work, you should—says Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman, it is long past time to do something about emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Physics Today: Updated 4/7/2010: According to sources at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, element number 117 has been successfully synthesized.

There were hints that element 117 had been discovered at the recent 31st meeting of the Program Advisory Committee for Nuclear Physics, but the news became public when a paper describing the research was accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters.

ScienceNOW: If efficiency were all that matters, animals would hobble around like pirates with two peg legs. That's because, mathematically speaking, running with stiff legs requires less energy. But humans and many other animals have "squishy" legs, and a new simulation suggests why. When attached to real, floppy bodies, so-called compliant legs prove more efficient, absorbing more force and offering more stability in rough terrain. The finding helps explain the long-puzzling paradox of why animals crouch and bounce as they run and may change how researchers model animal locomotion.

Nature News: Europe's busiest big science facilities, such as powerful neutron sources and synchrotrons, are centers of international collaboration—but there is precious little coordination to ensure that they are adequately funded, or that underused or moribund facilities are wound down.

To tackle this problem, says Carlo Rizzuto, chair of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures, charged with drawing up Europe's priority list of such facilities, he is calling for a new independent body to help manage their cash flow across the continent.

NYTimes.com: Blas P. Uberuaga, Xian-Ming Bai, and colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have shown that by altering the microstructure of metals, metallurgists may be able to make nuclear reactor parts that are self healing.

Their conclusions are based on computer simulations of the long-term impact of neutron emissions on copper—not because much copper is used in nuclear plants, but because it is a relatively well-modeled metal.

Cracks in the internal parts of reactors are a big concern both to the nuclear power plant operators (who want to keep maintenance costs low, and any repairs that require shutting the reactor down cost a lot of money), and to regulators (who want to make sure that radioactive material doesn't leak into the environment).

Related link
Efficient annealing of radiation damage near grain boundaries via interstitial emission

Wired UK: This wreck image attached is not computer generated. It's the sonar image of Russian nuclear submarine B-159 (called K-159 before decommissioning), which has been lying 248 meters down in the Barents Sea, between Norway and Russia, since 2003. The Russian Federation hired Adus, a Scottish company that specializes in high-resolution sonar surveying, to evaluate if it would be possible to recover the wreck.

ScienceNOW: It's not every day that scientists reduce the uncertainty in a fundamental constant of nature from 30% to 1.5%, but a team of theoretical physicists claims to have done just that.

Using supercomputers and mind-bogglingly complex simulations, the researchers have calculated the masses of particles called "up quarks" and "down quarks" that make up protons and neutrons with 20 times greater precision than the previous standard.

The new numbers could be a boon to theorists trying to decipher particle collisions at atom smashers like Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) or trying to develop deeper theories of the structure of matter.

"It's an audacious claim, and it will have to be looked at very carefully, but I think the result is robust," says Paul Mackenzie, a theorist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, who was not involved in the work.

Nature News: The reasons for the current financial crisis have been picked over endlessly, but one widespread view is that it involved failures in risk management. Facing up to these failures could prompt the bleak conclusion that trying to anticipate the economic future is an impossible task. That's the position taken by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his influential book The Black Swan, which argues that big disruptions in the economy can never be foreseen, and are much more common than is evident from conventional theory.

How should those still working in financial markets absorb this pessimistic message? In a preprint on arXiv, Andrew Lo and Mark Mueller of the Sloan School of Management at MIT, in Cambridge, suggest that what economists grappling with uncertainty need is a proper taxonomy of risk. In this way, they state, risk assessment in economics can be united with the way uncertainties are handled in the natural sciences. It may then become clearer where conventional economic theory is a reliable guide to planning and forecasting, and where its predictive value fails.

NPR: About five years ago, the writer Ian McEwan joined a group of artists and scientists on a sponsored weeklong trip to the Arctic—the idea was to inspire artists to think about climate change.

Before going to the Arctic, McEwan had been interested in the issue of climate change, but he couldn't figure out a way to write a novel that wouldn't sound preachy—until something about the disarray in the ship's boot room gave him an idea.

"It seemed to strike a chord with a lot else that I'd understood about climate science, the politics of it and human institutions," McEwan says. "We're very good at making wide and sweeping statements of intent, but once we get down to it, often very little happens. And that, at least, gave me the first suspicion that maybe the route into this was through comedy, a comedy of human nature."

Facing a challenge

The result was a book called Solar. Like McEwan, the book's main character, Michael Beard, takes a journey to the Arctic. Beard, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, doesn't care much about climate change; he just wants to get away from the chaos of his own life. He falls under the spell of the Arctic and his amiable companions, but he can't put aside minor irritations like the messy boot room.

Beard eats too much, drinks too much, and has virtually no moral compass.

McEwan says this farcical portrayal of a scientist loaded down with bad habits is his way of depicting how difficult it is for spoiled, lazy, self-centered human beings to take on the challenges required to reverse the effects of climate change. And despite, or maybe even because of his many flaws, Beard was a fun character to create.

NYTimes.com: Eureka Fund, based in San Francisco, is one of a handful of new nonprofit organizations created to give the general public an opportunity to pay for scientific research that is not fully supported by government or private sources.

They are part of a fledgling movement to take the idea of crowd-sourcing and crowd-financing, which has worked in arenas like small business and education, to scientific research.

And while the notion of citizens’ directly donating to public research that could ultimately produce profits may raise questions, several ventures are entering the field. Two other websites—Sciflies.org, based in St. Petersburg, Florida, and FundScience.org, in Pittsburgh—plan to roll out their donation platforms to finance independent research by this summer.

Science: Physicists' best chance of spotting an effect of "quantum gravity"—the melding of quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of gravity—may have evaporated.

According to some quantum-gravity theories, the speed of light may change very slightly with the light's wavelength, and experimenters are searching for the effect in radiation from distant stellar explosions.

Those searches may be in vain, however says Sabine Hossenfelder of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm. If light's speed varied in this way, then untenable paradoxes would arise, she says.

The speed variations must be at least 23 orders of magnitude smaller than experimental limits set last year, she adds.

Related link
The box-problem in deformed special relativity

SPACE.com: NASA's next red planet probe, the Mars Science Laboratory—now dubbed Curiosity—has been years in development and overcome numerous hurdles. Now engineers are taking a close look at the car-sized rover's nuclear power plant.

Engineers preparing the Curiosity rover for its planned launch in 2011 found a slightly faster than expected degradation rate in the rover's multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator.

Nature News: The 'ticks' of the current standard atomic clocks are marked by the regular vibrations of an ensemble of caesium atoms, which vibrate 9.2 billion times every second.

However, noise inherent in the system means that there is a fundamental 'classical limit' to how accurately the clocks can measure those vibrations.

Now two groups, one led by Markus Oberthaler at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and the other by Philipp Treutlein, then at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, Germany, have shown that this classical limit can be breached using a quantum twist.

NPR: Scientists have found hundreds of big, gassy planets that orbit close to "their" star, though solar systems with small rocky planets, like ours, have been elusive.

This might be because they are hard to detect using existing techniques, but an astronomer says he's getting a bit nervous. He doesn't want to think that we are the exception rather than the rule.

Science News: A detailed study of college-level physics courses confirms students’ deepest fears: Homework really is important. Students who regularly copied problem sets earned lower grades and were three times as likely to fail the class, the study found.

“Homework copying is severely impeding students’ learning, and teachers don’t take it seriously enough,” says study coauthor David Pritchard, a physicist at MIT. “It’s a killer for the grades and a killer for the students.” The study appeared March 18 in Physical Review Special Topics–Physics Education Research.

The Economist: Dealing with climate change might mean tinkering with the oceans and the atmosphere. Those who could do so would like the regulations to be clear.

Nature: Non-abelian anyons are hypothesized particles that, if found, could form the basis of a fault-tolerant quantum computer. The theoretical finding that they may turn up in three dimensions comes as a surprise.

Related link
Majorana fermions and non-abelian statistics in three dimensions

Al Jazeera English: The Large Hadron Collider,one of the most expensive experiments in history, started working this week. Al Jazeera English takes a look at the LHC, what it is that scientists are looking for, and whether there are tangible benefits from such an experiment. Interviewees include CERN physicist Jonathan Butterworth, New Scientist's Valerie Jamieson, and biochemist Otto Rossler, who is concerned about the risks associated with running the LHC.