New York Times: In 1949 scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, determined that the Soviet Union had succeeded in testing its first atomic bomb. They did so by measuring the gamma radiation emitted by rainwater collected in a barrel on an NRL roof. According to a report by the National Research Council, the US is at risk of losing the specialized knowledge needed to perform such feats of nuclear forensics. The New York Times's William Broad reports that the US government has recognized the problem and is taking measures to address it.
July 2010 Archives
Rockford Register Star: Thanks to the application of some elementary physics, Mark Overmyer of Oregon, Illinois, enabled his daughter Laura (shown here) to triumph in the speed event of last week's 73rd All-American Soap Box Derby in Akron, Ohio. For the past three years, Overmyer has been perfecting two soapbox innovations: a polyurethane and rubber compound for the wheels and prism glasses, which eliminate the need for the driver to poke her head up in a drag-inducing way to see where she's going.
Nature: Phytoplankton, the tiny photosynthesizing organisms that inhabit Earth's oceans, provide half the planet's oxygen and sequester 100 megatons a day of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Phytoplankton also make up the oceanic food chain's first link. Monitoring the health of this vital population is essential but tricky because it fluctuates strongly on multiple scales of time and space. Now, as Nature's Quirin Schiermeier reports, a team led by Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has met that challenge by combining satellite imagery with data gathered over the past century from ocean-going ships. The team's conclusion is alarming: The total biomass is steadily falling at a rate of 1% per year, possibly because seawater is becoming warmer and more acidic. The accompanying image, taken by NASA's SeaWIFS orbiter, shows vast "rivers" of plankton (green) between two masses of seawater off the coasts of Argentina and the Falkland Islands.
Science: Robots for future space exploration missions will need to be smarter: Researchers are working to program robots to circumvent danger, spot enticing features on their own, and perform experiments without human input. Besides achieving better results, greater autonomous behavior would make robots more efficient by improving their energy storage, speed, and heating and cooling capabilities, among other things. Toward that end, NASA has been designing software, which has been used on the Mars rover Opportunity, to seek out a single property of an object, such as finding the largest or the darkest rock. Paradoxically, however, the rover has to be told when to be autonomous and when not to.
Nature: Photovoltaic solar panels convert sunlight into electrical energy with efficiencies up to 20%. No photosynthesizing plant, alga, or bacterium can match that efficiency—sugar cane comes closest with 8. But the photosynthesizers have one big advantage over the photovoltaics: Chemical energy in the form of fuel is much easier to store and transport than electrical energy is. Recognizing that advantage, the US Department of Energy has just announced the foundation of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis. Led jointly by Caltech and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, JCAP will receive $122 million over five years. Its aim, as Nature's Jeff Tollefson reports, will be to develop systems that convert sunlight directly to fuel.
Daily Mail: It has been calculated that asteroid 1999 RQ36, which is more than 500 meters in diameter, has a 1-in-1000 chance of colliding with Earth by the year 2200, most likely on 24 September 2182. Although the asteroid’s current orbit is known, no one can predict its future path with absolute certainty because of the Yarkovsky effect, which arises when a rotating asteroid absorbs and re-radiates the Sun's energy, thus altering the asteroid's orbit. One solution to prevent the asteroid's potentially devastating collision with Earth: Deflect the asteroid's trajectory by detonating a nuclear warhead on its surface.
Chronicle of Higher Education: Alison Head and Michael Eisenberg of the University of Washington in Seattle have analyzed the written guidance that a wide sample of US undergraduates received from their professors when assigned research projects. In most cases, the handouts gave clear instructions on how the eventual research paper should appear, but lacked big-picture advice on how to conduct research. Another common feature of the research assignments, the Chronicle's Kelly Truong reports, was an adherence to the traditional single-author paper. The option for teams to submit multimedia studies was rarely offered.
SPACE.com: Miniaturization is all the rage now in such devices as laptop computers and cell phones—and now satellites can be added to the list. Nanosatellites, some no bigger than a Klondike ice cream bar, can contain the same components as their full-size counterparts but cost less and create less space debris. And because of their small size, they don’t require a dedicated launch vehicle; they can piggyback on someone else’s rocket. Although nanosatellites cannot replace larger satellites for some experiments, they are proving invaluable in certain fields of study, such as astrobiology.
Time: Science-fiction author and physicist Gregory Benford, his twin brother James, and James's son Dominic have come up with a new proposal for detecting signals beamed into the galaxy by aliens who want to be discovered. According to the Benfords, aliens are most likely to send bursts of pulses now and again, rather than strong continuous beams, which consume far more energy. To find those pulses, the best strategy is to monitor several stars continuously, rather than slowly sweep the entire galaxy. Time's Michael Lemonick describes the proposal, which the Benfords wrote to mark the 50th anniversary of the SETI program.
New Scientist: Cosmologist John Barrow of the University of Cambridge has been studying the physics of rowing, in particular, the best way to arrange the port and starboard rowers in racing boats. 
The conventional rig, in which the port and starboard rowers alternate, causes a slight but energy-wasting side-to-side wiggle as the rowers move up and down the hull on each stroke. In an analysis published in the American Journal of Physics, Barrow found all the rigs for four- and eight-person boats that eliminate the wiggle. Some of the rigs are already in use, but two of them were previously unknown. Earlier this week, the New Scientist tested Barrow's rigs on London's river Thames. Justin Mullins describes the results.
The conventional rig, in which the port and starboard rowers alternate, causes a slight but energy-wasting side-to-side wiggle as the rowers move up and down the hull on each stroke. In an analysis published in the American Journal of Physics, Barrow found all the rigs for four- and eight-person boats that eliminate the wiggle. Some of the rigs are already in use, but two of them were previously unknown. Earlier this week, the New Scientist tested Barrow's rigs on London's river Thames. Justin Mullins describes the results.
Guardian: The strongest winds blow offshore and the most cost-effective wind turbines are the biggest ones. For those reasons, engineering companies are vying to develop mammoth wind turbines that can operate far from the shore and generate of the order of 10 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 10 000 homes. The Guardian's John Vidal describes the race and a new British entrant, the Aerogenerator X.
Nature: Since June 2009, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been surveying the Moon's surface with a resolution of 50 cm. As Nature's Roberta Kwok reports, researchers are using the survey data to measure lunar craters. From those measurements a clearer idea should emerge of the timing and nature of the bombardments that created the craters and changed the surfaces of other solar system bodies, including Earth.
Nature: Prions are particles of misfolded proteins that cause several neurodegenerative diseases, including bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cows, scrapie in sheep, and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease in humans. Although those diseases can be transmitted by ingesting prions, what causes prions to form in the first place is a mystery. Now, as Nature's Daniel Cressey reports, a team from London has demonstrated that prions will form spontaneously in the presence of steel wires. Previously, the wires had been used to collect already-formed prions. Two possibilities appear to account for the observation: Either the wires catalyze prion formation or, by concentrating prions, the wires tip an otherwise equal balance between spontaneous formation and degradation toward formation.
Wired: Organic light-emitting diodes arrayed in an active matrix of transistor-controlled pixels provide smartphones with high-resolution, full-color displays without the need for a power-sapping backlight. Only three companies in the world make active-matrix OLED displays, which has caused supply problems for Taiwan-based smartphone manufacturer HTC. As Wired's Priya Ganapati reports, HTC has had to switch from using OLED displays to LCD displays, which, though brighter, consume more power.
Science: A device is being developed that allows severely disabled people to write e-mail, surf the internet, and even control a wheelchair—all via sniffing. Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, report their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The device works by detecting slight changes in pressure on a person’s soft palate, the tissue that controls air flow through the nose. Smelling isn't involved. Because many disabled people are still able to move their palate, they can use the device. This is not the first technology developed to aid the disabled to communicate: In his 1997 book, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered a massive stroke, documented his experience using a device that allowed him to select letters by blinking his left eye.
Chronicle of Higher Education: In her Catalyst column, the physical scientist and blogger known as Female Science Professor examines the stressful condition working with jerks: "obnoxious, rude, patronizing, manipulative, controlling, unethical, and/or unpleasantly strange people." After characterizing the jerks found in academia, she discusses why one might have to work with them and how to break up with them.
Nature: At a meeting last week in Bremen, Germany, scientists reported the first results from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Launched in February into a geosynchronous orbit, SDO observes the Sun's magnetic field structure and atmosphere on short length and time scales, the aim being to relate magnetic variability to the internal and external dynamics of solar plasma. Nature's Richard Lovett summarizes the findings so far.
Science: The America COMPETES act, an ambitious bill to fund an array of initiatives in scientific research and education, was authorized late last week by the Senate's Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. In surmounting that hurdle, the bill acquired two additional programs that the already-authorized House version lacked. Before the bill becomes law, it must go through two more Senate authorization committees and be reconciled with the House version. And if any money authorized by the bill is to reach its intended recipients, the corresponding appropriation bills have to pass, too.
BBC: Eighty-three percent of the matter in the universe is dark matter, an unknown substance whose only detectable property so far is its gravitational mass. Identifying dark matter's true nature will depend on finding another detectable property. The BBC's Paul Rincon reports on a proposal to do just that in a deep underground mine in Canada. The proposal depends on moving an existing dark-matter detector from its current, shallower site in a mine in Minnesota.
New York Times: Dozens of companies in the US are pursuing the goal of turning algae into a cost-effective and environmentally friendly source of biofuel. As photosynthesizing organisms, algae already convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into biomass. And they can live in polluted ponds. But natural strains of algae aren't efficient enough for commercial exploitation. That's why, as the New York Times's Andrew Pollack reports, researchers are trying to genetically engineer "superalgae," whose oily bodies can be converted to gasoline, jet fuel, and other useful hydrocarbons.
Washington Post: Democrats in the US Senate yesterday abandoned their comprehensive energy bill, which would have sought to lower greenhouse gas emissions, largely because Republicans and some conservative Democrats maintain the bill would lead to higher energy costs. A more limited bill will be put forward instead that would impose higher liability costs on oil companies, create incentives to develop natural gas vehicles, and provide rebates for products that reduce home energy use. The Senate's Democratic leadership hope the revised bill will win the needed support and be passed in the next two weeks.
New Scientist: In light of the budding space tourism and commercial space industry, Astronauts4Hire was formed to provide a pool of skilled commercial scientist-astronauts to fly experiments in space on the commercial vehicles being developed. Currently numbering 17, its members receive spaceflight training, and will eventually complete micro-gravity and high-gravity flights. In New Scientist, writer Celeste Biever interviews president and cofounder Brian Shiro about how and why the group was formed.
Economist: Because so many people, including criminals, are using cell phones, researchers are exploring a new field of forensic phonetics to try to identify people from their voices. At the 4th International Crime Science Conference held July 15 in London, current research concerning various features of the human voice, such as its fundamental frequency, was discussed. In future, forensic phonetics could play a key role in police work and courtrooms.
Los Angeles Times: Reporting from the Farnborough International Airshow in southern England, W. J. Hennigan of the Los Angeles Times has found evidence that the market for commercial aircraft is pulling out of recession as the number of airline passengers increases worldwide. In particular:
European-aircraft maker Airbus sold 133 passenger jets worth $13 billion at Farnborough. Its Chicago rival, Boeing Co, landed 103 orders worth around $10 billion. Makers of smaller commercial jetliners such as Brazil's Embraer and Canada's Bombardier Inc, also struck contracts worth billions of dollars.
"The resurgence of orders indicates an upward trend in the industry," said Michel Merluzeau, managing partner of aerospace consultant G2 Solutions in Kirkland, Wash. "Last year was a very depressed market. It seems we're now entering a growth mode."
New York Times: IBM Corp launched its new Z series of mainframe computers today. The new machines will be a modest 40% faster than their predecessors, but will consume 60% less power. A water-cooled version of the machine reduces power consumption by a further 12%. Those gains in efficiency translate to lower electricity bills and are expected to entice server-intensive industries like banking to upgrade their mainframes.
Chronicle of Higher Education: After enjoying rising budgets for the first, boom years of the 21st century, Ireland's universities, like the rest of the country's public sector, are enduring severe cuts as the Irish government struggles to cope with a deep recession. Spending on higher education was cut 5.6% in 2009 and will fall a further 9.4% this year. The Chronicle's Aisha Labi reports on how Irish universities are coping with the new and sudden austerity.
Daily Mail: Elena Semouchkina of Michigan Technological University in Houghton and her colleagues have, paradoxically, built a prototype invisibility cloak out of glass. The cloak, or rather a piece of cloak, is composed of close-spaced rods of germanium-antimony-selenium, 5 microns in diameter and surrounded by air. A paper describing the concept appears in the journal Applied Physics Letters.
Nature: In 1996, NASA and its German counterpart the DLR agreed to build the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, an IR telescope mounted in a converted Boeing 747. Fourteen years later on 26 May, SOFIA's 2.7-m telescope, which peers from a large door in the airplane's fuselage, saw its first light. Nature's Eric Hand examines the long-delayed mission's likely scientific payoff.
Nature: Vanishing extra dimensions and diquarks are among the phenomena that physicists hope to find at the Large Hadron Collider in addition to the much anticipated Higgs boson. As the 35th International Conference on High-Energy Physics starts today in Paris, Nature's Zeeya Merali reviews the LHC's increasingly exotic to-do list.
New York Times: The House authorization committee that oversees NASA yesterday shrank from $6 billion to $0.75 billion the amount of money NASA is allowed to spend on commercial launch vehicles. Senate authorizers had also proposed a cut, but to $1.3 billion. A shift from federal to commercial launches is a key element of President Obama's NASA overhaul. Both the White House and the Senate authorizers called for the cancellation of NASA's Ares-1 heavy-lift vehicle; the House authorization bill does not.
Science: In his Career Advice column, David Jensen of Kincannon & Reed Global Executive Search draws from his own experience and those of others to urge young scientists to make an effort to fit in with their coworkers. He acknowledges that some scientists are mavericks who resist making the adjustments needed to fully participate in a group:
If that describes you, fine. It's your choice. The important thing is to realize that you're putting yourself at a disadvantage. You'll need to work harder than your colleagues to accomplish as much.Jensen recounts that he was given similar advice about a previous position, but he ignored it. He assumed that doing his job well would be enough for his employer. It wasn't. When business took a downturn, he was laid off.
Wired: Einstein's general relativity and other physics theories don't explicitly rule out time travel. But any time traveler must confront one of the constraints that Einstein evoked to derive relativity: An effect cannot take place before its cause—or, more concretely, you cannot travel back in time and kill grandpa and your other progenitors. Wired's Laura Sanders describes a theory by MIT's Seth Lloyd and his collaborators that allows time travel and prevents grandpa killing but at the cost of amplifying the probability of unlikely events.
Chronicle of Higher Education: Osorb is a silica-based gel invented by Paul Edmiston, a chemistry professor at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Thanks to its affinity for hydrocarbons and its ability to expand while maintaining its integrity, Osorb is ideal for cleaning up oil slicks. As the Chronicle's Sophia Li reports, that's just what it's now being used for in the Gulf of Mexico.
SPACE.com: Last month, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R–CA) introduced a bill, HR 5587, "to establish a United States Commission on Planetary Defense and for other purposes." The bill springs from the concern of Rohrabacher and others that a so-called near-Earth object could strike Earth with catastrophic results. The bill, which has bipartisan support, is currently being considered by the House Committee on Science and Technology.
San Francisco Chronicle: The eminent climate scientist Stephen Schneider died yesterday of a heart attack. He was 65. Schneider's research focused on the effects of carbon dioxide and aerosols. He was also a strong proponent of mitigating the effects of greenhouse gases. In a recent paper, he and his coauthors used citation data to demonstrate that 98% of the world's top climate scientists believe that greenhouse gases are warming our planet.
Nature: Judging by the torrent of papers on the arXiv preprint server, topological insulators have become one of the hottest topics in physics—and not just in condensed-matter physics. Not only do these novel materials have potential applications in electronics, but they also harbor deep connections to particle physics. Nature's Geoff Brumfiel reports on the excitement surrounding this new field. For a more technical review, click on the cover image.
New York Times: Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who heads the US Department of Energy, has emerged as the White House's lead representative in the efforts to halt the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. As the New York Times's John Broder reports, Chu and other government officials have determined the nature and timing of several key interventions. Robert Dudley, BP's lead representative in the containment efforts, says of Chu: "He can speak with senior executives and then with subsea engineers, and ask probing questions about pressure variants and burst steel casing. He can actually interpret the data and have a very sharp engineering discussion with an expert from BP.”
Chronicle: With the aim of securing its position as southern China's pre-eminent higher education hub, Hong Kong has mandated that its universities switch in 2012 from offering three-year, English-style bachelor's degrees to four-year, US-style bachelor's degrees. As the Chronicle's Mary Hennock reports, the territory's oldest university, Hong Kong University, is responding to the mandate with the boldest reform: a complete redesign of its undergraduate curriculum around a core four broad areas—humanities; global issues; Chinese culture, state, and society; and scientific and technological literacy.
Daily Mail: A British-designed, solar-powered aircraft, Zephyr, broke the endurance record of 82 hours for unmanned flight on Saturday when it flew continuously for seven days, and it is expected to continue to fly for another seven. During the daytime, the aircraft is powered by the Sun via paper-thin solar arrays on its wings, which also charge batteries to power the craft through the night. With a 22.5-meter wing span and weight of 50 kilograms, Zephyr is capable of soaring for long periods of time—possibly for military or civil surveillance purposes—without the need for refueling or servicing.
Science: In her Issues and Perspectives column, Beryl Lieff Benderly examines the views on immigration of Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California, Davis. Matloff is particularly concerned about the H-1B visa, which is used by universities to hire postdocs and by tech companies to hire workers. Matloff is skeptical that the shortages purportedly being filled by H-1B holders really exist.
New York Times: President Obama's overhaul of NASA's manned space program included the cancelation of the Constellation return-to-the-moon program, a greater reliance on commercial launch vehicles, and a visit to an asteroid as NASA's next big destination. Yesterday, as the New York Times's Kenneth Chang reports, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation kept the plan's most controversial element, the Constellation cancelation, but authorized NASA to develop an alternative launch vehicle that, like Constellation's Ares rocket, is capable of sending spacecraft to the moon and beyond.
BBC: The US Army has transported to Afghanistan what it calls its Active Denial System, a truck-based weapon that focuses an intense, but nonlethal beam of microwaves onto enemy soldiers at distances of about 500 m. ADS is part of the Pentagon's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program, which includes optical weapons that distract without blinding and acoustic weapons that focus intense sound to warn off attackers.
SPACE.com: On Wednesday, an unexpectedly bright gamma-ray burst temporarily shut down NASA’s robotic spacecraft Swift. Launched in 2004 to detect and image bursts of radiation emitted from exploding stars (including, ironically, gamma-ray bursts), Swift carries three different telescopes that image in optical, x-ray, and gamma-ray wavebands. This particular burst occurred some 5 billion years ago. Although the unexpected burst temporarily blinded Swift, scientists were able to quickly put it back online and recover the data recorded.
Irish Times: Humphrey Jones, a biology and science teacher at St. Columba’s College in Dublin, Ireland, reviews his 10 favorite science-related smart-phone apps for the Irish Times. Jones also runs the colorful and informative Frog Blog for children and adults interested in science.
New Scientist: A material used in smoke detectors here on Earth may soon power spacecraft to other planets. The US has long used the decay of plutonium-238 to power its spacecraft to the outer solar system. But because the US stopped producing the isotope in the 1980s, and NASA has almost used up its remaining supply, an alternative fuel is being sought. Americium-241, whose decay is used in smoke detectors to trigger an alarm, may be the solution. Because 241Am decays more slowly than 238Pu, using the new fuel could mean longer trips. On the other hand, 241Am provides less power per unit mass than 238Pu, which would make an americium-powered spacecraft heavier and harder to launch. A solution must be found by 2020, when NASA and the European Space Agency are planning a joint mission to Jupiter.
New York Times: To encourage customers to make the switch from their familiar gas-powered cars to new electric-powered ones, General Motors will offer an eight-year warranty on all 161 components of the battery that powers its Chevrolet Volt electric car. The batteries themselves will be manufactured at a new plant in Holland, Michigan, by Compact Power, a subsidiary of the South Korean company LG Chem.
Nature: Weak, low-frequency Earth tremors are hard to detect, but their seismic signatures have the potential to help predict the timing and severity of full-blown earthquakes. Tremors can also reveal the condition of crust near deep faults. Nature's Naomi Lubick reports on a tremor-detecting experiment taking place on the Olympic Peninsula near Seattle, Washington.
SPACE.com: Japan’s IKAROS is the first spacecraft to be propelled by sunlight. Short for Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun, IKAROS was launched on 21 May by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. IKAROS’s solar sail—successfully deployed in early June—is embedded with thin-film solar cells, and, when struck by light photons, can move the craft through space. The probe felt its first accelerating push from sunlight earlier this month. IKAROS even captured a photograph of itself by deploying a small, free-floating camera.
All India Today: Having earned his PhD in quantum computing last year at the age of 21, Tathagat Avatar Tulsi has just taken up a professorship at the Indian Institute of Technology at Powai in Mumbai. Tulsi's first paper in Physical Review A, "Faster quantum-walk algorithm for the two-dimensional spatial search," appeared two years ago.
San Franciso Chronicle: The world's largest maker of computer chips, Intel Corp, yesterday reported net income of $2.89 billion for the quarter that ended on 26 June. That figure amounts to 51 cents per share and exceeds analysts' expectations of 43 cents per share. According to the company's CEO Paul Otellini, the bump in profits arose from the delayed purchasing of new personal computers in offices and homes.
Physics Today: The US National Academies’ National Research Council has written a draft conceptual framework for K–12 science education standards to "identify and articulate the core ideas in the disciplines of science (life sciences, physical sciences, Earth and space sciences, and engineering and technology) as well as cross-cutting ideas and [scientific] practices." The academies’ Board on Science Education is asking for practitioners, researchers, and the public to weigh in by completing an online survey by 2 August.
New York Times: South Korea generates 40% of its electricity from nuclear power. Only three countries—France, Japan, and the US—run more nuclear power stations. Now, as it exhausts its options for storing highly radioactive waste, South Korea plans to reprocess the waste into plutonium to fuel its next generation of fast-breeder reactors. But, as Choe Sang-Hun of the New York Times reports, carrying out that plan would contravene a 1974 treaty with the US, which is worried about the proliferation of material for nuclear weapons.
Guardian: To help meet its goal of deriving 20% of its energy from renewable sources, Egypt has just announced plans to build a new 100-MW solar power plant. Scheduled for completion by 2017, the new plant will be sited near the country's most famous project for exploiting renewable energy, the 2.1-GW Aswan Dam hydroelectric power station.
New York Times: An international team of researchers has measured the charge radius of the proton in experiments that are 10 times more accurate than earlier ones—and found that the proton, or hydrogen nucleus, measures 0.8418 femtometer instead of the 0.8768 femtometer previously thought. Although the difference may seem negligible, the proton is the primary building block of the visible universe. The 4% change in size yields a second, discrepant value of the Rydberg constant, and may lead to revising the theory of quantum electrodynamics. The scientists published their results in the 8 July issue of Nature.
BBC: The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, launched in 2004 to study the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko when it places a lander there in 2014, caught the first-ever images of the asteroid Lutetia 450 million kilometers from Earth. On Saturday, from a distance of 3000 km, Rosetta revealed Lutetia to be lumpy and potato-like in appearance. About two hours of data transmission and pictures were beamed back to Earth. The observations will be valuable to asteroid science, and will be applicable to other asteroids besides Lutetia.
Wired: Because it passes through clothes, terahertz radiation can reveal hidden weapons and explosives. Unfortunately, water vapor absorbs in the THz band, making it difficult to measure reflected THz signals remotely. Now, Xicheng Zhang of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and his colleagues have developed a way of circumventing that limitation. In a paper published on 11 July in Nature Photonics, they describe an ingenious method for what amounts to converting the THz signal into a more penetrating UV signal.
SPACE.com: On Sunday, thousands gathered on Easter Island to view the total solar eclipse—when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, blocking Earth's view of the Sun. This solar eclipse was one of the most remote ever, visible along a thousand-mile track in the southern Pacific Ocean, starting about 2:00pm ET in northern New Zealand and ending about 5:00pm ET at the southern tip of South America. It is the first total eclipse to hit the island in 1400 years.
Washington Post: The still-unplugged oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has yet to affect Americans' energy-use habits, at least as far as pollsters can tell. David Fahrenthold and Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post report on what might be behind that disconnect, which is in contrast to the reactions that followed earlier environmental disasters, such as the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 and the ignition that same year of the Cuyahoga river in Cleveland.
Chronicle: After surveying 9512 assistant professors across various academic disciplines, researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education have concluded that physical scientists are the most satisfied with their jobs and tenure prospects. Here's the ranking:
1. Physical sciences
2. Humanities3. Agriculture/natural resources/environmental science
4. Business
5. Social sciences
6. Medical schools and health professions
7. Biological sciences
8. Engineering/computer science/math/statistics
9. Education
10. Other professions (journalism, law, architecture, etc.)
11. Visual and performing arts
11. (tie) Health and human ecology
As the Chronicle's Kelly Truong reports, professors' perceptions of how subjective the tenure review process is may account for the gap between the physical sciences and the arts.
New York Times: Last week, to much press attention, the journal Science published a study that purported to identify the human genes responsible for longevity. Widespread criticism of the paper ensued, prompting the journal yesterday to post a Q&A with the paper's authors. The controversy is reminiscent of another Science paper whose findings provoked immediate skepticism: the purported observation in 2002 by Rusi Taleyarkhan and his collaborators of sound-induced nuclear fusion.
SPACE.com: The latest in a line of NASA Mars rovers, Curiosity, is being readied for launch in 2011, with a new landing system that is being tried for the first time. Unlike previous rovers—such as Spirit, Opportunity, and Sojourner—which used an airbag and landing platform to land on the planet's surface, Curiosity will land on its wheels because of its innovative suspension system.
When the rover touches down on Mars in August 2012, it will get to work collecting samples and testing rocks to study the planet's geological past.
Chronicle: Writing in the Chronicle, David Stone, who directs Northern Illinois University's Office of Sponsored Projects, offers general and insightful advice on grant proposals—how to write them, how to get them accepted, and how to manage the resulting projects. According to Stone:
Grant writing is the end of a process, not the beginning. Long before you make the decision to write a grant proposal for your research, you should be taking concrete steps to raise your profile in the eyes of reviewers.
Daily Mail: An implantable miniature telescope has received FDA approval for use in the US.
The device was developed by VisionCare to treat end-stage age-related macular degeneration—when a blind spot develops in the central vision of the eye.
Implanted in the cornea, the device expands an incoming image onto the peripheral parts of the retina that are undamaged from AMD, thereby reducing the blind spot's effect. So far, the device is slated for use in people over the age of 75 and doesn't treat AMD directly; it can only be implanted in one eye, and the patient has to learn how to merge the two images rendered in order to see.
Nature: ITER, the international fusion reactor project, was expected to cost €5 billion to construct, but is likely to cost three times more, and will soon need €1.4 billion to cover construction costs for 2012–13. To keep the project on track, its biggest contributor, the European Union, will divert funds from its central research fund. Nature's Geoff Brumfiel provides details of the deal.
Haaretz: Although making a simple battery from a potato is a common child’s science project, researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have found a way to make a potato battery more efficient: by boiling the potato first. Published in AIP’s Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, their findings indicate that boiled potatoes generate up to 10 times more electric power than uncooked potatoes do. Because potatoes are grown in many countries around the world, in a wide range of climates, they could provide an economical and sustainable source of electrical power to developing countries.
New York Times: Yesterday morning around 7am, Solar Impulse, a solar-powered airplane, took off from Payerne, Switzerland. The goal of the flight: to test whether the energy that fell on its solar-panel-covered wings during the day and stored in its batteries could sustain the plane during a night flight. The test was successful. On its 26-hour flight, Solar Impulse reached a maximum altitude of 8564 m and maintained an average speed of 40 km/h. The ultimate goal of the Solar Impulse Project is to fly nonstop around the world.
Chronicle: By fall next year, Songdo Global University Campus in Incheon, South Korea, will begin enrolling its first undergraduates. How many arrive at the brand-new campus from outside South Korea is an open question. The university's budget, as well as those of its international partners, has been hit by the global recession. As the Chronicle's David McNeill reports, two of those partners, Stony Brook University and North Carolina State University, have put their participation on hold.
CNN: The climate scientists whose leaked e-mails suggested they had fudged data have been cleared of dishonesty by an independent review. The review, which was published today in London, was led by Muir Russell, a retired civil servant and former principal of Glasgow University. Although the embarrassing e-mails contained exchanges from climate scientists from around the world, the leaks themselves originated from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The review's three main findings are
1. Climate science is a matter of such global importance that the highest standards of honesty, rigor, and openness are needed in its conduct. On the specific allegations made against the behavior of CRU scientists, we find that their rigor and honesty as scientists are not in doubt.
2. In addition, we do not find that their behavior has prejudiced the balance of advice given to policy makers. In particular, we did not find any evidence of behavior that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.
3. But we do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of the CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA, who failed to recognize not only the significance of statutory requirements but also the risk to the reputation of the University and, indeed, to the credibility of UK climate science.
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UK Parliament holds hearings on climategate
Nature: As China's economy grows, so too do the country's investment in science and its appetite for petroleum, iron ore, and other natural resources. It makes sense, therefore, for China to expand its fleet of research vessels that can both study the ocean and prospect for valuable resources. Nature's Jane Qiu outlines those ambitions, which are part of China's next five-year budget plan.
Los Angeles Times: A student at the University of California, Davis, has proposed the term “hella” to denote the (as yet unnamed) metric prefix for a million billion trillion, or 1027. Austin Sendek, a 20-year-old physics major, has petitioned the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (one of three organizations that oversee the keeping of metric standards) to consider the term at its upcoming meeting in September. What started as a joke on Sendek’s Facebook page has been gaining supporters, including Google, which incorporated “hella” in its online calculator. The term, which originated in northern California, means “really” or “a lot.”
New York Times: The US federal government has just finished building the nation’s largest zero-energy office building—the Research Support Facility on the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory campus in Golden, Colorado. To qualify as zero-energy, a building must create as much energy as it uses over the course of a year. Besides solar panels and a low-energy radiant heating and cooling system, the building has other energy-saving features. Windows can be opened to provide ventilation, and the walls consist of a layer of insulation sandwiched between two concrete layers, which will absorb heat during the day to keep the interior cool, and then release the heat at night.
New York Times: No longer in the vanguard of particle physics, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center has converted its Nobel-winning particle smasher into a powerful electron-based x-ray laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source. As the first scientific results from LCLS are published, Kenneth Chang of the New York Times looks at how LCLS has transformed and rejuvenated SLAC.
Chronicle: Mexico's economy is the 14th largest in the world, yet only 28% of the country's citizens are enrolled in higher education, despite a plan launched four years ago to build new universities and colleges. The Chronicle's Marion Lloyd looks at the challenges Mexico faces to increase the number of university places while also improving the quality of university teaching.
The Independent: This is the first image of the entire sky taken by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, which was launched last year. The satellite's goal is to map the cosmic microwave background radiation—the light that has pervaded the universe ever since radiation and matter fell out of equilibrium some 400 000 years after the Big Bang. In the map, emission from the Milky Way appears blue and white and occupies the central regions; the CMB appears magenta stippled with yellow and occupies the periphery. Cosmologists hope to use Planck's unprecedentedly detailed maps to understand conditions in the early universe.
SPACE.com: Progress 38, a Russian robotic cargo ship filled with supplies for the International Space Station, took off Wednesday, 30 June, from Kazakhstan, and docked successfully on Sunday, 4 July, two days later than planned. The Progress series of spacecraft, which have operated since 1978, originally supplied Soviet space stations, but now make about 3–4 trips per year to the ISS. The expendable unmanned craft carries tons of supplies for the astronauts, including fresh food, clothes, and equipment. After it has been unloaded of cargo and reloaded with trash, it undocks and maneuvers into an orbit that will take it into Earth's atmosphere, where it will burn up.
Physics Today: Curiosity, awareness, initiative, and the fragility of Earth are the themes at the heart of Douglas W. Jacobs’s play R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe, which opened last month at Arena Stage in Crystal City, Virginia. The final performance is this weekend.
Listen to a Physics Today interview with Jacobs.
Continue reading Theater Review: The life and times of Buckminster Fuller.
Washington Post: A reclusive Russian mathematician, Grigori Perelman, who three months ago was awarded the Clay Mathematics Institute Millennium Prize for proving the Poincaré conjecture, yesterday turned down the award and the $1 million prize. Perelman, who quit his job at the Steklov Institute and lives with his elderly mother in St. Petersburg, has in the past turned down a number of other mathematics awards, including the most prestigious of all, the Fields medal.
Proving the Poincaré conjecture is one of seven Millennium Prize Problems posed in 2000 by the Clay Institute. Of the six that remain unsolved, two are of direct relevance to physics: Yang–Mills existence and mass gap and Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness.
Wired: Earth is constantly pelted by high-energy muons from outer space. To stop or even deflect the speedy particles, you need a lot of material; the denser and the higher up the periodic table, the better. Physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, CERN, and elsewhere realized they could use the muons to detect material for making nuclear bombs. The muons would pass easily through the walls of a thick metal container, but they'd be deflected by an ingot of uranium or plutonium, which are dense and have high atomic numbers. Having built a detector, which relies on making a map from the muons' deflections, a CERN-based team has now put it through its first test. It passed.
BBC: Finland currently has four nuclear power stations that produce 30% of the country's electricity. With the aim of becoming self-sufficient in electricity generation, Finland's parliament has just approved two new nuclear power stations, in addition to the four in use and a fifth under construction.
Science: Although a US House of Representatives subcommittee approved a budget of $19 billion for NASA for FY 2011—the amount requested by the Obama administration—it refrained from taking a position on the White House’s space exploration plan. Some members of Congress, both inside and outside the committee, oppose two of the plan's central proposals: canceling the Constellation program and using commercial rockets to replace the space shuttle. Because the bill that funds NASA is unlikely to be passed before the November elections, Constellation's fate and the future direction of NASA's manned spaceflight program are likely to remain uncertain into the next fiscal year.
New Scientist: Reminiscent of Michael Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park, the San Diego Zoo and the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, are collaborating to try to use frozen cells from dead animals to bring endangered species back from the brink of extinction. The team members have created induced pluripotent stem cells from frozen skin cells, which they hope to coax into becoming sperm and eggs. The San Diego Zoo currently has cell samples from more than 800 species.
Continue reading Zoo to resurrect endangered species.
Nature: The European Space Agency's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) spacecraft has released its first map of Earth's soil moisture. Launched in November 2009, SMOS derives soil moisture by measuring and analyzing the microwave spectrum emitted by the ground. In the map shown below, blue connotes dry soil; red connotes wet soil. The map was taken on 21 June, when the US midwest was unusually wet and the UK southeast was unusually dry.
New York Times: Through a government-funded scheme, home owners can get favorable long-term loans to pay for solar panels and other energy-saving devices whose upfront costs are high. But, as Todd Woody of the New York Times reports, the two government entities that guarantee home loans, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, regard those loans as liens; they must be cleared if the house is resold. The policy is creating difficulties for families who have already taken out the loans and is putting off others who might want to take advantage of them.
