May 2010 Archives

Telegraph: On May 26, the US Air Force tested its X-51A Waverider, which flew 200 seconds at Mach 6—six times the speed of sound—setting a new record. The previous record was 12 seconds. The unmanned craft, which is almost wingless, launched from a B-52 bomber and plunged into the ocean at the end of its run, as planned. The craft could have many applications, including space exploration and commercial transportation.

Chronicle: Michael Mann is a prominent climate researcher whose speciality is reconstructing Earth's past climate. Ken Cuccinelli is Virginia's attorney general. Leaked e-mails between Mann and his fellow researchers appeared to suggest that they were misrepresenting their research to support the case that humans are changing Earth's climate. In response to what became known as climategate, Cuccinelli, a climate change skeptic, demanded earlier this month that the University of Virginia hand over the research records that Mann kept there before he moved last year to Pennsylvania State University. Now, the University of Virginia has petitioned a state court to overturn the AG's demand.

Science: In 2000, the leaders of Europe's higher education establishments gathered in Bologna, the site of the world's oldest university. Their goal: to make the higher education systems of Europe's countries more compatible with each other. In personal terms, European students who start their university educations at the same time should be able to graduate, move on to advance degrees, and finish at the same time, regardless of where in Europe they choose to study. Now, 10 years after the Bologna Process was announced, Science's Elisabeth Pain examines its progress.

Baltimore Sun: Three recipients will share the $1 million Shaw Prize in astronomy this year: Charles L. Bennett of Johns Hopkins University and Lyman A. Page Jr and David N. Spergel of Princeton University. From their work with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe experiment, they determined that the universe is 13.7 billion years old and that the type of matter that has been observed on Earth constitutes less than 5% of all matter in the universe—dark matter and dark energy make up the other 95%.

Nature: Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) is an experimental program for assessing airline passengers and others for the intent to cause harm. The program, which is being funded by the US Department of Homeland Security, relies on remote sensors that can measure heart rate, face temperature, and other supposedly outward indications of "malintent." In a news feature, Nature's Sharon Weinberger examines whether these and other methods are effective.

New York Times: On Wednesday this week, for the first time in the two companies' history, Apple Inc's total value on NASDAQ overtook Microsoft Corp's. Apple is now the world's most valuable publicly traded tech company. Among US companies of any kind, only Exxon Mobil Corp is now worth more. Apple's recent success is attributed to its introduction of a series of innovative consumer products, starting with the iPod (2001) and followed by the iPhone (2007) and iPad (2010). Microsoft, however, is currently more profitable than its rival.

New Scientist: Every two years in Atlanta, the Gathering for Gardner convention draws mathematicians, magicians, and puzzle enthusiasts. This year’s event, G4G9 (the ninth one), was held 24–28 March. The world’s premier celebration of recreational mathematics honors Martin Gardner, who wrote the mathematical games column for Scientific American from 1957 to 1981 as well as numerous books, including The Annotated Alice, first published in 1960. Gardner died on 22 May at the age of 95.

Nature: Nuclear reactors around the world produce highly enriched uranium for civilian research. Compared with the HEU in nuclear arsenals, the total amount of civilian HEU is modest (about 100 tons), yet not so modest that its proliferation implications can be discounted. Pablo Adelfang, the head of reactor research at the International Atomic Energy Agency, discussed the danger recently with Nature's Declan Butler.

Washington Post: Last February, two communications satellites, the Russian Kosmos-2251 and the US Iridium-33, accidentally smashed into each other. In January 2007, a Chinese antimissile kill vehicle deliberately destroyed Fengyun-1C, a Chinese weather satellite. These and other incidents have strewn space junk in low Earth orbit, worrying the US Department of Defense, which included the threat in its latest US Space Posture Review.

New York Times: Demand in the US for Nissan's small electric car, the Leaf, is so high that customers have already taken up all 19 000 spots on the car's waiting list, six months before the first cars arrive in dealerships. Nissan says it might even suspend pre-orders. Like most small cars on the market, the Leaf has a front-mounted engine that drives the front wheels. The battery-powered electric engine provides up to 80 kW of power (110 hp) and a top speed of 140 km/h (87 mph). The battery holds 24 kWh of energy, which is enough to drive about 160 km (100 miles), and takes 20 hours to fully recharge from a typical power socket installed in US and Japanese houses.

New York Times: Daniel Greenberg, an expert on science policy and a former editor of Science and Government Report, has written a novel that makes fun of academia and its hunger for federally funded research. A review of the novel, which is entitled Tech Transfer, appears in today's New York Times.

Hindustan Times: Teaching students the powerful yet abstract concepts of physics is a perennial and universal challenge. The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur is currently holding a six-day workshop for teachers to tackle that challenge. One of the presentations went through a series of 30 low-cost experiments, including the "dancing nut," which helps explain friction.

BBC: From its vantage above the Martian surface, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has shed light on the demise of another NASA Mars mission, Phoenix. The Phoenix lander set down south of Mars's northern polar cap 25 May 2008. After collecting data about the planet's water and ice, the lander abruptly shut down communications with Earth 120 Martian days later. MRO's high-resolution imager can just make out the lander, but recent images are noticeably different from images taken two years ago. Although the images can't account for Phoenix's telecommunications failure, they do show what might have happened afterward: the lander was broken apart by Martian ice.

Science: Faced with a deep annual deficit and growing debt, the UK's new coalition government has cut about $9 billion from its budget in a bid to improve the country's financial position. The cuts, which were announced last week, fell most heavily on subsidies for local government. Science has been largely spared.

Nature: In theory, sending quantum-encrypted messages is secure because any attempt at snooping is apparent to the recipient. In practice, the physical systems that encrypt the messages are imperfect. Noise creeps in. Still, until now, physicists had believed that if noise remained below 20%, snooping would be exposed. The University of Toronto's Feihu Xu, Bing Qi, and Hoi-Kwong Lo have devised a method to intercept quantum encrypted communication while remaining below the 20% detection threshold.

Chronicle: Responding to Congressional criticism, the National Institutes of Health has released plans for making the grant-giving agency's rules on financial conflicts of interest more stringent. Under the new rules, grant recipients, which include many biophysicists, must report payments from outside companies that exceed $5000 (the previous limit was $10 000). Other stipulations include requiring universities to provide detailed plans of how they handle conflicts of interest.

NPR: Thanks to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, there are so many photos of the Moon streaming to Earth that scientists can't keep up. So Oxford astrophysicist Chris Lintott has set up a website, MoonZoo, where anyone can log in and get trained to review and classify the tens of thousands of Moon photos. Among other things, participants will count the number of craters in an image and look for craters with boulders around the rim. This is the second citizen science project that Lintott has launched; in 2007 he launched GalaxyZoo to categorize images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

Wired: Nintendo Co's popular Wii video game console senses the position of a player's hands by means of strap-on controllers. The controllers in turn rely on tiny built-in accelerometers. Now, a team from MIT has devised what could be a simpler way to interact with a computer: multicolored gloves that the player wears and the computer monitors through a webcam.

Physics Today: The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency yesterday launched two scientific spacecraft aboard a single H-IIA rocket.

The 640-kg Akatsuki (“daybreak”) is now on its way to a rendezvous with Venus in late December or early January. From its orbit around the planet, the spacecraft’s suite of instruments will study lightning, volcanism, and other active Venusian processes. The objective of the rocket’s other payload, the 300-kg IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun), is to assess the feasibility of propelling spacecraft solely with solar energy. In a few weeks’ time, IKAROS (depicted at right) will unfurl a 14 × 14 m² sail that will harvest the momentum of solar photons. Embedded in the sail are thin solar cells that will power the spacecraft’s electronics and drive a second means of locomotion and maneuver: an ion propulsion engine.

Economist: Fuel cells powered by cheese, though not a new idea, are looking more attractive as an alternative, and greener, energy source. Whey, a byproduct of cheese making, is rich in lactose and, when consumed by bacteria, can produce an electric current. The process is doubly beneficial. Whey is considered an environmental hazard and manufacturers must find a way to safely dispose of it anyway. Another example of recycling cheap raw-waste products as fuel is the use of vegetable cooking oil to power automobiles.

Science: Carl Wieman shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for making a Bose–Einstein condensate. Yesterday, Wieman, who’s now the associate director for science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, testified before the Senate Commerce Committee about the possible role of federal agencies in teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Wieman advocated letting NASA and other agencies continue to focus on what they do best. Fixing STEM education, he said, will require improving accountability and adopting methods of proven success.

BBC: In Chicago earlier this week, the Heartland Institute held its Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, a forum for scientists, economists, and others who doubt that mankind’s use of fossil fuels is changing Earth’s climate.

Nature: Thanks to an underwater camera, scientists studying the Deepwater Horizon disaster can see the oil gushing from the well head on the sea floor. Thanks to satellite and aircraft imagery, they can also see the slick spreading on the sea surface. Now, oceanographers on board the RS Pelican have detected what they say could be the plume that carries the oil upward through the sea itself.

New York Times: Budget woes have reduced the number of positions available at US schools, creating the worst job market for teachers since the Great Depression. Even teachers qualified in previously sought-after fields, like physics and special education, are facing difficulty finding jobs.

Science: The Member of Parliament for Cambridge, one of the world’s great centers for scientific research, is himself a scientist. Julian Huppert, who studies DNA knotting, was among 57 Liberal Democrat candidates elected on 5 May. He talks about his interest in science and politics in an interview with Science magazine’s John Travis. (Quantum physicist and Science Party candidate Michael Brooks failed in his attempt to win a seat in the same election.)

Los Angeles Times: Facing a recession-induced drop in state support, the University of California system aims to trim $500 million from its budget while preserving its research and teaching enterprises. The cuts are expected to come from spending less on energy and from centralizing administrative functions that are currently carried out by each of the system’s 11 campuses.

Washington Post: One day after Iran and Turkey announced an agreement to swap enriched uranium, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the US, China, Russia, and their allies had agreed to wider, stiffer sanctions against Iran. Among the sanctions is a ban on selling tanks, aircraft, and other heavy weaponry. The sanctions are intended to pressure Iran into halting its program to build nuclear weapons. Yesterday’s deal with Turkey, which was brokered by Brazil, is intended to reduce the amount of nuclear material in Iran.

Chronicle: During the course of a year, researchers at Princeton University create images of their experiments, simulations, and theories. The most artistically appealing of those images are collected and displayed each year in the university’s Art of Science exhibition. This year’s exhibition, the fourth in the series, focuses on energy science.

MSNBC: On Tuesday the Atlantis astronauts added another room to the International Space Station. Using a robot arm, two astronauts—Garrett Reisman and Piers Sellers—attached a 6-meter-long Russian chamber, which will be used as a closet and mini-lab and provides an extra docking port. The space station has been a work in progress since 1998, when its first component, the Zarya control module, was launched. With this latest addition, the space station is near complete, with more living space than a 5-bedroom house. Until 23 May, while the space shuttle is still docked, the station is brighter than usual and can be seen from Earth.

New York Times: The White House and Congress both want the US to reduce its dependence on oil from potentially unreliable foreign sources. Given Canada’s friendliness and closeness, the Athabasca Oil Sands seem like an ideal source. However, extracting the oil is environmentally damaging and piping it across the continent to distant refineries is potentially risky.

New York Times: Two physicists have analyzed Pentagon images of interception tests and concluded that the SM-3 antimissile missile is not “proven and effective,” as President Obama has described it. The dispute centers on what counts as a successful interception: destroying the warhead, as MIT’s Theodore Postol and Cornell’s George Lewis say, or hitting any part of the missile, as the Pentagon says. The distinction is important, Postol and Lewis argue, because a nudged-off-course nuclear missile could still detonate.

Los Angeles Times: Having invented a better battery, MIT’s Yet-Ming Chiang tried to manufacture the batteries first in the US, then in China. Neither of those early attempts proved successful. The US was too costly; China was too lax about protecting his intellectual property. Now, with the help of a US government grant, Chiang is set to open his first factory—in a former videotape plant in Detroit.

Physics Today: Last month, 12 astronomers met at NASA HQ to rank the scientific value of continuing to operate 11 space-based missions. Such reviews, which began in the 1990s, are needed because the cost of supporting existing missions is so great that it can imperil future missions. In ranking the missions, the panelists weighed the likely yield of scientific discoveries (new missions tend to score more highly than old missions) and the cost to NASA (missions run largely by overseas agencies do well). The panel put Planck in first place. Launched last year, the European mission is mapping the cosmic microwave background’s temperature and polarization anisotropies. Here’s the ranked list:

1. Planck
2. Chandra
3. Warm Spitzer
4. Swift
5. XMM-Newton
6. WMAP
7. Suzaku
8. GALEX
9. RXTE
10. INTEGRAL
11. Warm WISE

Times Higher Education: The pendulum that Léon Foucault used in his famous demonstration of Earth’s rotation is irreparably broken. Last month, the cable supporting the pendulum’s 28-kg brass bob snapped, causing the bob to crash onto the marble floor of the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Paris.

Chronicle: The US House of Representatives has voted 292 to 126 to support a package of Republican amendments to the America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science Act of 2007. The COMPETES act called for a doubling of funding for basic research within seven years. Under the amendment package, that target has receded 10 years into the future. Last week’s vote on the act, like all its predecessors, authorized spending on the act’s programs but has yet to include the necessary money in an appropriations bill.

Nature: The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor could be getting a new director. ITER’s seven partners—Europe, Japan, the US, South Korea, China, Russia, and India—are reportedly troubled by a likely three-year delay in meeting the original 2016 completion date and by a likely doubling of the project’s cost to €10 billion (US$12.6 billion). According to Nature:

Osamu Motojima, a distinguished Japanese physicist, is being floated as the project's new chief. The appointment, if made, may trigger further changes for the project. "I wouldn't be surprised if there's a huge shake-up in ITER management under him," said one fusion scientist familiar with the project.

New York Times: Ares is the rocket designed to launch NASA’s Orion capsule and its four crew on missions to the Moon. Both vehicles are part of NASA’s Constellation program. Under President Obama’s new plan for NASA, Orion will remain under development and Ares will be scrapped. Despite what appears to be the rocket’s imminent cancellation, Constellation’s managers have started an accelerated program of tests for the rocket.

Los Angeles Times: With the help of Brazil’s president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Iran and Turkey have reached a tentative agreement to swap enriched uranium. If the deal goes through, Turkey will receive 1200 kg of 3.5% enriched uranium from Iran. In return, Iran will receive a far smaller amount, 120 kg, of 20% enriched uranium by way of Turkey from the so-called Vienna group: US, Russia, France, and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Washington Post: Soon after the 20 April explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig, reporters simply repeated BP's 5000-barrels-a-day estimate of the spill rate. Now, some reporters are examining the bases of that and other estimates, which vary by a factor of five or more.

Science: According to a Stanford University study, 83% of women scientists pair up with members of their own discipline. Neither male scientists nor women who work in other academic fields show such a strong intradisciplinary predilection. Beryl Lieff Benderly explores its implications in her most recent Taken for Granted column.

New Mexico Business Weekly: Sandia Corp, the subsidiary of Lockheed Martin that runs Sandia National Laboratories, has chosen Paul J. Hommert as its new chief. Apart from three-year stints at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the UK's Atomic Weapons Establishment, Hommert has spent his entire career at Sandia, one of three nuclear weapons labs in the US. He ran the lab's nuclear weapons program before becoming director.

Nature: In another sign of warming relations between Taiwan and China, the Taiwanese government has announced that its universities will admit up to 2000 students a year from the Chinese mainland. The deal is mutually beneficial. Taiwan's research universities, which were facing a shortage of local students, gain access to a bigger pool of applicants; mainland students gain access to a wider choice of institutions in the Chinese-speaking world.

National Geographic: Two brothers, Levi and Corban Tillemann-Dick of IRIS Engines Inc, are carrying on their father’s dream of designing a smaller, lighter, and more efficient automobile engine. Unlike the traditional internal combustion engine, which drives pistons, their award-winning Internally Radiating Impulse Structure drives flanges that open and close like the iris of an eye. Compared with pistons, the flanges have a larger working surface area, which increases efficiency while reducing waste heat.

Washington Post: The White House’s plan for getting astronauts into space in the coming decades entails canceling the costly Constellation launcher and relying instead on Russian and commercial launchers. As for destinations, the plan calls for a rendezvous with a suitable asteroid before a future visit to Mars or a revisit to the Moon. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Eugene Cernan, the first and last men to walk on the Moon, oppose the plan. Testifying on 11 May before the Senate Commerce Committee, the astronauts advocated boosting NASA’s exploration budget and revising what they say is an ill-advised plan that imperils US predominance.

Nature: Senators Joe Lieberman and John Kerry took the wraps off their climate bill yesterday. The bill’s goal is stepwise reduction in US carbon emissions that reaches 80% by 2050. To attain that goal, the bill provides for a so-called cap and trade system of emission allowances that can be bought and sold and whose total is kept below a target limit.

NPR: Having abandoned plans to use Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the nation’s repository for radioactive waste, the US government is considering an alternative site: the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. WIPP, which occupies salt caverns outside Carlsbad, New Mexico, is already being used to store the federal government’s own nuclear waste. The site has ample space for spent fuel from commercial reactors.

New York Times: A husband-and-wife archaeological team from the University of Central Florida in Orlando have used a new approach—lidar (light detection and ranging)—to investigate the remains of one of the largest Maya cities in Central America. By using airborne laser signals that penetrated the dense jungle in Belize, Arlen and Diane Chase mapped out the topographic detail of the site of ancient Caracol—an area that the couple has been studying for the past 25 years.

BusinessWeek: Tokyo Electric Power Co has bought a 9.2% stake in a project to build two 1.4 GW reactors in Texas. Called Nuclear Innovation, the reactor project began life a joint venture between NRG Energy Inc, which is based in Princeton, New Jersey, and Toshiba Corp, which is based in Tokyo. The reactors are expected to begin generating power in 2016 and 2017.

Science: Jupiter’s gas is thought to occupy cylindrical zones that are nested around the planet’s axis and rotate at different rates. Compositional stratification and the planet’s spherical shape would give rise to the planet’s famous stripes, but what is responsible for creating the cylindrical zones in the first place? A new lab experiment by a team from Paris and Göttingen, Germany, has found support for one answer: the tides exerted by Jupiter’s moons. The experiment involved water, a flexible silicon container, metal rollers, plastic tracers, and lasers.

New Scientist: Do suckling babies extract milk by squeezing the nipple like a milkmaid or by sucking from the nipple like a milking machine? Donna Geddes from the University of Western Australia found in favor of sucking after they combined ultrasound movies of suckling infants with measurements of the pressure the babies created as they fed. The results could help solve the problem of why some babies don’t take up breast feeding.

Physics Today: At a cabinet meeting yesterday, President Barack Obama asked Energy Secretary Steven Chu to help BP contain and mitigate the oil slick spreading from the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico. Chu will lead a team of government scientists and officials that will meet in Houston for discussions with BP officials.

Chronicle: To save money amid a state-wide budget crisis, the University of California is looking into expanding and enhancing its online teaching. A move online could expand access to oversubscribed courses. Whether it would save money or improve learning is an open question on UC campuses.

New York Times: Jean Duprat of the University of Paris and his colleagues have retrieved micrometeorites from deep in the Antarctic snow and analyzed their composition. The micrometeorites’ mix of isotopes and molecules suggests that the solar system’s supply of organics didn’t require seeding from interstellar comets or other external objects.

SiliconValley.com: A group of equipment manufacturers and other interested parties has released a proposal to boost the performance of Wi-Fi by raising its operating frequency from the current 4 GHz to 60 GHz. The proposal from Wireless Gigabit Alliance is among several that tackle the problem of quickly downloading large files.

New York Times: Billionaire businessman Richard Branson has established a $220 million fund to promote the efficient and environmentally responsible use of natural resources. The Virgin Green Fund focuses on helping already-established companies continue the R&D needed to develop innovative products and services.

Physics Today: Veteran NASA astronaut and fellow of the American Geophysical Union Piers Sellers is scheduled to blast off on Friday on board the space shuttle Atlantis. Sellers will take with him two objects of significance to physicists: a piece of the apple tree that grew in Isaac Newton’s garden and the Nobel Prize medal that was awarded in 2006 to John Mather for his work on the cosmic microwave background. Before joining the astronaut corps, Sellers was a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where Mather did his prize-winning work.

Nature: One scrap metal worker is dead and six others are sick after they pried off the steel and lead casing that protected a potent cobalt-60 source of gamma rays. The source was used by the chemistry department of the University of Delhi, which sold it to the workers as scrap. In response to the incident, the Indian government is reviewing the regulations that stipulate how scientists handle radioactive materials.

New Scientist: Researchers are increasingly using quantitative methods to determine whether the human brain is hard-wired to appreciate such musical qualities as beat and the difference between minor and major keys.

Science: Venus, Earth's twin by size and composition, is a hostile planet full of heat, a carbon dioxide–laden atmosphere, and thick sulfuric clouds.

Most puzzlingly, venusian winds move at up to 60 times the speed of the planet's rotation; Earth's fastest winds clock in at just 10% to 20% of the rotation speed.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is out to solve this problem with its Akatsuki mission, slated for launch on 18 May. Akatsuki will train four cameras at ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths on the planet to track clouds at different altitudes. The craft also has a high-speed camera that aims to capture venusian lightning, presumed to occur but never directly observed.

TheDartmouth.com: Space is the "primary ingredient of physical reality," and has the same basic properties "everywhere and every when," said Frank Wilczek, 2004 Nobel laureate in physics, in the public lecture "What is Space?" on Thursday.

arXiv blog: Using social networks to make recommendations will always compromise privacy, according to a mathematical proof of the limits of privacy.

physicsworld.com: A war of words has broken out in the dark-matter community over a report posted on the arXiv e-print server earlier this week. The preprint from the XENON100 collaboration poured cold water on claims that dark matter has been detected by two other experiments—but now the report itself has been attacked by other researchers in the field.

Physics Today: At a symposium and press conference held at the European Space Agency's ESTEC space research and technology center, in Noordwijk in the Netherlands today, the first scientific results from ESA's Herschel infrared space observatory were revealed, challenging old ideas of star birth and opening new roads for future research. Herschel is the largest astronomical telescope ever to be placed into space. The diameter of its main mirror is four times larger than any previous IR space telescope and one and a half times larger than Hubble Space Telescope.

The images show thousands of distant galaxies furiously building stars and star-forming clouds draped across the Milky Way.

Nature: An elastic polymer has been made whose molecular structure mimics that of titin, a protein found in muscle. The resulting material is tough and stretchy and dissipates energy — just like muscle itself.

New Scientist: To get complicated nanostructures on a silicon chip it is sometimes necessary to grow them in separate layers and then transfer these one by one onto the final chip (PDF) to build them into working components.

Often it takes strong chemicals to separate the layers from the surface on which they are grown, and high temperatures may be needed to activate the thermal adhesives that keep the components in place at their destination.

Grégory Schneider and Cees Dekker at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience in Delft, the Netherlands, have found a way to use water to quickly and easily transfer layers from one surface to another. They exploit the fact that different materials have different hydrophilicity—the tendency to attract water through transient hydrogen bonds.

NPR: Sydney Levitus is land-based in Silver Spring, Maryland. But his work frequently transports him—at least figuratively—back to the helms of ships that plied the seas many decades ago. He's looking at temperature readings from the ship's logbooks.

Physics Today: Rice University undergraduates Lila Kerr and Lauren Theis have developed a rudimentary blood centrifuge that does not require electricity, by adapting a standard salad spinner.

Nature News: Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, largely forgotten as attention turned to biofuels and batteries, are staging a comeback.

Space.com: Many existing space technologies play dual roles in both military and civilian life. A US Air Force space plane and a failed hypersonic glider tested by the Pentagon represent the latest space missions to raise concerns about weapons in space. But while their exact purpose remains murky, they join a host of new space technology tests that could eventually bring the battlefield into space.

ProPublica: Two billion dollars in federal stimulus money is leading to 4000 extra jobs on top of the 11 000 already working to clean up nuclear contamination at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation site, but at a cost.

New Scientist: Corrected: 5/6/2010: The tetraquark, a massive particle made up of four quarks, may have been seen at KEK particle accelerator in Tsukuba, Japan.

Thirty years ago, tetraquarks were proposed as a solution to the equations of quantum chromodynamics. QCD is a theory developed to describe how quarks combine to make two-quark mesons, such as pions and kaons, and three-quark baryons like protons or neutrons.

Possible sightings of tetraquarks have occurred before at KEK, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Stanford, California, and D-Zero at the Fermilab accelerator in Illinois. It is extremely rare to observe these particles.

Ahmed Ali and colleagues at German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, Germany, found a 2008 data anomaly in KEK's BELLE experiment, in which the end result from colliding electrons and positrons decayed at too rapid a rate for the suspected particle created. If this particle was a tetraquark, however, then the decay rate would match the experimental results.

Related link
Tetraquark interpretation of the BELLE data on the anomalous Υ(1S)π⁺π^- and Υ(2S)π⁺π^- production near the Υ(5S) resonance

NYTimes.com: XENON100, a new widely anticipated experiment underneath a mountain in Italy designed to detect dark matter particles, did not see anything during a test run last fall, scientists reported Saturday.

But, they said, the clarity with which they saw nothing spurred hopes that such experiments are approaching the rigor and sensitivity necessary to detect the elusive gravitational glue of the cosmos.

The results also cast further doubt on some controversial claims that dark matter has already been seen.

"It's the strongest statement about dark matter today and it reads: we have looked here and there and over there but didn't find nothing," said Rafael Lang of Columbia University, one of the researchers.

A paper describing the work has been submitted to Physical Review Letters.

Related link
First dark matter results from the XENON100 experiment

Nature News: In 2002, bioinformatician Mark Gerstein and his colleagues set up a server to host some commonly used genomics databases to monitor any anomalies in web traffic or surreptitious scans.

Seven months later, the picture that emerged was one of a network under siege. Not all of these visits were attacks, Gerstein notes, but many were.

Protecting research data presents particular challenges. Most information-technology (IT) professionals suggest ensuring that large or sensitive data stores are managed by a centralized IT team that can monitor and administer systems, keeping a close watch over traffic and limiting access.

But this can conflict with the ethos of researchers who need such systems to be accessed by a wide variety of students, postdocs, and collaborators.

SPACE.com: An adrift Intelsat satellite that stopped communicating with its ground controllers last month remains out of control and has begun moving eastward along the geostationary arc, raising the threat of interference with other satellites in its path, Intelsat and other industry officials said.

Science News: Shooting lasers at the sky can make the germ of a raincloud, a new study shows. In an experiment that smacks of science fiction, scientists used a high-powered laser to squeeze water from air, both indoors and out.

Although the technique is unlikely to be an instant rainmaker anytime soon, it could plant the seeds for more eco-friendly cloud manipulation.

OregonLive.com: The conflicting forces that drive the musical Gracie and the Atom, which opened over the weekend at Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, Oregon, are religion and science, or, described more broadly, faith and rationality, writes Marty Hughley. And when one of the songs is titled "Beautiful Math," you don't have a hard time guessing where the show's sentiments lie.

Nature News: Italy and Russia plan to fund a compact nuclear-fusion experiment called IGNITOR, according to an intra-governmental memorandum signed on Monday in Milan, Italy.

But fusion scientists contacted by Nature have dismissed claims made by its inventor that the reactor is a bigger step towards fusion power than the much more expensive international ITER project.

Various: A 1999 report commissioned by the federal agency that oversees offshore drilling suggests failures of underwater blowout preventers designed to stop oil spills like the massive one threatening the Gulf Coast are not unprecedented, as claimed by BP CEO Tony Hayward in an interview with NPR, and are far from unknown, reports McClatchy Newspapers' Les Blumenthal.

Moreover, the tragic failure to contain the deep-seated pressures 7 kilometers beneath the Gulf of Mexico was not likely the result of overreaching, says ScienceNow's Richard Kerr. In wells 65 kilometers off the coast of Louisiana, "the depths and pressures are rather routine" for the oil industry, says petroleum engineer Kenneth Gray of the University of Texas, Austin.

Meanwhile BP, the rig's owner, is preparing three different techniques to reduce the flow of oil, says Hayward. One involves placing a dome over the leak and channeling the oil to the surface, which has never been done at this depth; the second involves drilling a new hole nearby to relieve the pressure at the existing site; and the third requires eight robotic submarines to fix the well's blowout preventer.

Former New York Times editor Andrew C. Revkin is also compiling other alternatives and explanations for the difficulty in sealing the well, at his Dot Earth blog.

symmetry: Business in the particle accelerator world is booming, as is business at Advanced Energy Systems, where Tony Favale is president. His company is doing research and design work for the next generation of accelerators, which will be employed in electron lasers for the Navy, radiation detectors for the Department of Homeland Security, and more efficient particle colliders at US national laboratories.

But of the seven positions he was advertising in November, three were still unfilled in mid-March because Favale can't find enough qualified accelerator scientists.