SPACE.com: Last week, Chilean officials called on NASA to help with the group of 33 miners trapped underground in a gold and copper mine since 5 August. This week, NASA is sending two physicians, one psychologist, and one engineer to Chile to provide nutritional and psychological support to the miners. Because the rescue mission could take up to four months, officials had called on NASA because of its “long experience in dealing with isolated environments”—including the International Space Station as well as undersea environments and Antarctica—according to NASA's deputy chief medical officer Michael Duncan, of the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
August 2010 Archives
New York Times: Certain materials change their resistance in response to a change in voltage. That simple switching behavior, which arises from the material itself, could form the basis of new, compact computer memory—provided the material is cheap, robust, and convenient to use. In the New York Times, John Markoff reports a recent development toward that goal. Jun Yao of Rice University and his collaborators have built a switch out of silicon dioxide, a bedrock material of current computers whose resistive switching was previously unsuspected. Markoff also reports that an independent team from Hewlett-Packard is set to announce an advance toward the same goal but with a different "memristor" technology.
SPACE.com: The first manned spaceflight to a near-Earth asteroid could be as early as 2025, per President Obama’s April announcement. To discuss the possibilities, NASA held the Exploration of Near Earth Objects Objectives Workshop, 10–11 August, in Washington, DC. The workshop’s goals were “to increase the collective understanding of NEOs, communicate NASA's plans for a human mission to a NEO, and capture external input on proposed mission objectives.” This week, at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Space 2010, representatives from Lockheed Martin will discuss such a mission using the Orion spacecraft, which it has been building for NASA to replace the space shuttle.
Science: Possibly unprecedented in its history, the National Institutes of Health yesterday ordered a shutdown of human embryonic stem cell experiments by researchers in labs on the NIH campus. According to Jocelyn Kaiser of Science, the message came from NIH intramural research chief Michael Gottesman. The action was a response to a court-ordered injunction a week ago, which stated that using NIH funding to study human embryonic stem cells violates a law prohibiting the use of federal funds to destroy embryos.
Nature: A team of engineers and physicists has used lasers to crack the encryption keys of two commercial quantum cryptographic systems—and left no trace. Nature's Zeeya Merali explains the technology involved in this latest hack. Although quantum cryptography had been touted as a secure method to send information, hackers have been busy proving that it is not so. Several months ago, the University of Toronto's Feihu Xu, Bing Qi, and Hoi-Kwong Lo also found a way to hack quantum systems. Now, Vadim Makarov at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim and his colleagues have published the results of their successful hack in Nature Photonics.
Chronicle of Higher Education: James Lang, an English professor and veteran of more than half a dozen faculty searches, offers aspiring university professors advice on an important component of an academic job application: the statement of teaching philosophy. Although a teaching philosophy is an abstract concept, Lang urges applicants to be personal, detailed, and specific when they describe their philosophies.
New Scientist: Researchers may be coming closer to designing a real invisibility cloak. Among the many groups developing the necessary optical metamaterials are Alessandro Tuniz at the University of Sydney's Institute of Photonics and Optical Science in Australia and colleagues, whose results appear in Optics Express. They have been perfecting a method to make thin, flexible threads whose components are smaller than the wavelength of light by heating standard glass rods and metal tubes, then drawing the assembly into a long thin fiber. So far, they have produced threads 10 μm thick, but are working to make them even thinner. According to the group's computer simulations, at only 1 μm thick, the fiber's optical properties would depend on wavelength—the thread would be invisible if seen in red light, but visible in green light.
BBC: A poll conducted by ICM for Britain's Royal Society found that two-thirds of the British public were unable to name a single female scientist from Britain. Despite that ignorance, 20% of respondents to the poll picked "Nobel prize-winning scientist" as a roll model for girls. Earlier this year, a panel of female fellows of the Royal Society created a list of the 10 most influential British women in the history of science.
Economist: Will more-efficient lighting actually increase energy use—rather than save energy? That idea has been proposed by Jeff Tsao of Sandia National Laboratories and his colleagues in a study published in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics. The team has found that improvements in the supply of light stimulate the desire for more light—just as building more roads stimulates traffic growth. With better and cheaper lighting, the researchers note, interior lighting at home and work, which is currently only one-tenth the brightness of outdoors, could be made brighter, and the outdoors at night could be made as light as day.
Science: Theoretical astrophysicist Yousef Sobouti, the founder-director of Iran’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences in Zanjan, was dismissed last week by the Iranian Ministry of Science. In addition, over the past month, at least 17 other leaders of academic and scientific institutions have been replaced. As Science’s Yudhijit Bhattacharjee reports here and last April, many believe that the regime of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinijad has been weeding out political dissidents in Iran’s academic and scientific institutions since his election in 2009. This internal pressure comes at a bad time for Iranian science, as UN sanctions make it harder for scientists there to obtain equipment and attend meetings.
New Scientist: At the American Chemical Society’s national meeting this week, Fernando Galembeck from the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil, presented his controversial research on the ability of hot, saturated air to hold a net electric charge. First reported in 1840 by factory workers, the phenomenon of steam electricity may be due to charge build-up between chrome-plated brass tubes and water in the atmosphere. As described by New Scientist’s Colin Barras, hydrogen ions in the water react with the chrome oxide, leading to an ion imbalance that imparts excess charge onto the metal. Galembeck’s theory that water can store charge could in principle lead to a renewable source of energy, but it violates the long-held principle of electroneutrality. Most researchers remain skeptical.
Chronicle: Last June researchers and librarians at the University of California threatened to boycott Nature and the other journals published by Nature Publishing Group in response to a 400% jump in subscription fees. NPG countered with a press release that argued that the subscription increase was high only because the University of California had been benefiting from a previous, unusually generous deal. Now, reports the Chronicle's Jennifer Howard, the two sides are working together to strike a new, mutually agreeable deal.
Science: Despite worldwide financial problems, representatives from the 20 nations involved in CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, decided yesterday not to cancel any projects nor lay off any staff members; they will, however, seek to trim the budget by 6%. Three ways to cut costs were proposed by the CERN leadership: delay upgrades to current machines, shut down all eight accelerators in 2012 for repairs, and spend less on research and development for the proposed Compact Linear Collider, CLIC.
Daily Mail: Evidently, the Toyota Prius and other hybrid electric cars are too quiet, particularly at low speeds when only the electric motor is running. So Toyota has decided to produce an “on-board approaching vehicle audible system”—initially in Japan only, where the Prius is the country’s best-selling car. The device will emit a humming sound from a speaker mounted under the hood, and the sound will rise and fall in pitch as the car speeds up and slows down. According to the Daily Mail’s Colin Fernandez, a US study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last year found hybrids were twice as likely to be involved in a pedestrian crash as conventional cars when reversing and parking.
Nature: Cambridge Bay, a town of 1500 people on Canada's Northwest Passage, has been chosen as the site of the country's new $9 million Arctic research station. Experiments in geophysics, ecology, and marine biology are being planned for the station, whose location lies close to where water from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans meets.
SPACE.com: Supermassive black holes are thought to lie at the center of almost every galaxy. Contrary to previous research, scientists are now coming to believe that they formed relatively quickly—less than a billion years after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.7 billion years ago. According to Stelios Kazantzidis, an astronomer at Ohio State University, whose team’s results were published today in Nature, black holes may have formed from mergers between giant protogalaxies. Their findings could alter current theories on the evolution of black holes and galaxies; for example, rather than the galaxy regulating the growth of the black hole, as previously thought, it could be the other way round—the black hole regulates the growth of the galaxy.
Telegraph: On behalf of 33 miners who have been trapped some 700 meters underground in Chile since 5 August, officials sought advice from NASA. The men were caught in a passage by a rock collapse in the San Jose gold and copper mine. Likening the cramped quarters to those experienced by astronauts on the International Space Station, Chilean health ministry officials contacted NASA for technology and rations that could help keep the miners alive and healthy, because it could take as long as four months to dig an escape shaft.
Nature: The Paris-based Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA), which recommends values of physical constants every four years, may be revising the gravitational constant G come 2011. First measured by British physicist Henry Cavendish in 1798, who used a torsion balance, the value for G has increased only modestly since that first experiment. Two different methods are now challenging the most precise measurement made to date, one using a laser interferometer and one using a torsion pendulum—and the two new values are in striking disagreement with both the earlier value and each other. Nature’s Eugenie Samuel Reich discusses the discrepancy.
BBC: A team at the European Southern Observatory has discovered a planetary system 127 light-years away, with at least five planets orbiting a Sun-like star (HD 10180)—and a possible two more planets, one of which could be about the same mass as Earth. The researchers, whose results were published this month in Astronomy and Astrophysics, used ESO’s High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher instrument to measure changes in the movement, or “wobble,” of the star in order to determine the number of planets, their masses, and even their orbits. According to the researchers, the complexity and structure of the system are intriguing, and the discovery indicates a growing trend toward studying planetary systems rather than individual planets.
Science News: A new gel has been developed that causes blood to clot and could substitute for the use of stitches. Developed by biomedical engineer Brendan Casey of the University of Maryland, College Park and colleagues, the substance is a gelatin-like mixture of water and a fibrous polymer. The research team, who reported their results on 23 August at the American Chemical Society’s fall meeting, thinks that it may be the polymer’s positive charge that induces the clotting.
Daily Mail: Two Danish inventors, Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen, hope to launch the world’s first amateur-built rocket for human space travel on 30 August. Built by the Danish firm Copenhagen Suborbitals, the homemade rocket will launch—unmanned—from a submarine in the Baltic Sea. If the launch is successful, Madsen plans to ride in the capsule himself on its next launch.
New York Times: Applied Physics Letters and other physics journals typically take a few months to process a paper from the receipt of the original manuscript to the publication of the final, peer-reviewed version. In the humanities, the publication process typically takes more than a year. If peer review is responsible for the delay, then some scholars have a solution: Dispense with peer review altogether and rely instead on online comments. The New York Times's Patricia Cohen reports this and other experiments in online scholarly publishing.
Independent: The world’s reserves of helium may be completely depleted in 25–30 years, according to Nobel laureate Robert Richardson, professor of physics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Helium, a nonrenewable resource that is extracted from rock, is being sold off too cheaply by the US, where the largest reserves are located. Helium is critical for cooling the machinery in wind tunnels, nuclear reactors, and IR and sub-millimeter detectors, such as those shown here from the Planck observatory. One of the biggest uses of helium is by NASA, which uses it to clean rocket fuel tanks. If a way to recycle the gas is not found soon, Richardson says, it will be “lost to the Earth forever.”
Telegraph: Scientists from Obihiro University in Japan have found that subjecting potatoes to either ultrasound or an electric shock can almost double the levels of antioxidants, making the potatoes more nutritious. As a result, potatoes, the fifth most widely consumed plant staple in the world, could become one of nature’s “superfoods.” The researchers presented their findings at the 240th national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston, Massachusetts, on Sunday. Last month, researchers from Jerusalem's Hebrew University demonstrated that boiled potatoes make better potato batteries.
BBC: The European Space Agency's Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer, which measures Earth's gravity field from space with a precision of 10−5 ms−2, cannot beam down its data because of a computer problem, the second to beset GOCE since its launch in March last year. Despite the interruption in the flow of data, the mission has already produced the most accurate map of Earth's gravity.
BBC: Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has publicly unveiled the country's latest weapon:a pilotless bomber called Karrar. Each Karrar, the president said, can fly 1000 km, carry a payload of 230 kg, and serve as a messenger of death. However, its key message, he added, was one of friendship. A few days ago Iran began loading Bushehr nuclear reactor with uranium. The reactor project, which got its start 35 years ago, is widely regarded as civilian.
SPACEcom: Researchers Audrey Bouvier and Meenakshi Wadhwa of Arizona State University have found that the solar system is 4.5682 billion years old—up to two million years older than previously thought. (The uncertainty in their estimate is around 0.4 million years.) The team, who published their results in Nature Geoscience, studied the lead isotopes in calcium-aluminum-rich mineral inclusions in a meteorite that landed in Morocco in 2004. Those inclusions were created when gases cooled to form the Sun and planets. Previous estimates had been based on the Allende meteorite that fell in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1969, which may have undergone more heating and deformation before striking Earth. Their results are important for further study of how the Sun and planets formed.
New York Times: At present, 3D TVs make up only 2.5% of the market for new sets. As Jared Newman of the New York Times reports, cost is one of the main obstacles to wider adoption. On average, 3D sets cost $1200 more than otherwise comparable 2D sets. Moreover, the 3D sets marketed by Panasonic, Samsung, and Sony require electronic glasses that cost $150 a pair. Technology that enables viewers to use cheaper glasses also raises the price of the set. Still, now that more than half of Americans have seen at least one 3D movie, TV makers are optimistic that adoption will increase as prices inevitably decrease.
Chronicle of Higher Education: Compared with its Asian rival China, India has been less successful in luring its expatriate researchers in the US, Europe, and Canada back home. That shortcoming is being redressed by the newest campus of India's elite Indian Institute of Technology. As the Chronicle's Shailaja Neelakantan reports, IIT Ropar in India's northwestern state of Punjab has former researchers from IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory among its faculty. The recruits cite the university's favorable treatment of young professors as one of its attractions.
Nature: Nitrous oxide concentrations that increase rather than decrease with altitude and soot particles that do not stray as far from their origins as expected are just two of the findings that have resulted from a pioneering set of scientific flights.This past spring a specially equipped Gulfstream V jet flew from the US to the Arctic, turned south to fly over the Pacific to the Antarctic, and then returned to the US. Along its journey, which included excursions in altitude down to 150 m and up to 14 km, the jet's instruments gathered data on a range of atmospheric gases and aerosols. Nature's Jeff Tollefson reports on the results.
Science: Every four years at its international congress, the International Mathematical Union awards its prestigious Fields Medal to up to four mathematicians under the age of 40. The medalists for 2010 have just been announced. They are Elon Lindenstrauss of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ngô Bào Châu of Université Paris-Sud in France, Stanislav Smirnov of the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and Cedric Villani of the Henri Poincaré Institute in Paris. The work of all four has deep connections to theoretical physics. Lindenstrauss, Smirnov, and Villani made advances in various aspects of statistical physics. Ngô advanced an area on number theory, the Langlands program, that makes far-reaching connections to group theory and on to particle theory.
New York Times: Until the Wall Street crash of 2008 and the worldwide recession that ensued, the financial analysts known as quants were in high demand. The algorithms they devised, running on high-speed computers, gave the firms that employed them an edge. Now, as the New York Times's Julie Creswell reports, the quants, many of whom have physics PhDs, are struggling to recover that edge. Bucking the trend, however, is Jim Simons, a former field theorist and the founder and CEO of Renaissance Technologies. Last year, his firm's Medallion fund made $1 billion in profits, the highest of any hedge fund.
Computing Now: Two experts in the software systems used to control oil rigs examine the possibility, raised in a congressional hearing in June, that the faulty software either caused or failed to stop the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. Don Shafer, the chief safety and technology officer of the Athens Group, and Phillip Laplante, a professor of software engineering at the Pennsylvania State University, don't reach any conclusions, but their analysis of what could have gone wrong with the calibration and operation of software-controlled alarms is instructive and illuminating.
New Scientist: A recent study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates that efforts to encourage people to cut their energy consumption should emphasize the range of ways that they can do so effectively, according to Shahzeen Attari at the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University in New York. When it comes to trying to save energy, she says, many people make wrong assumptions. For example, most people assume that turning off lights and appliances when they are not using them is more effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions than switching to more energy-efficient devices, when really it’s the other way around. Because households and personal travel account for about one-third of US energy consumption and emissions, individuals have a huge impact on the environment and need to be made more aware of what they can and should do to reduce their carbon footprint.
Nature: Last year's largest earthquake took place on 29 September in the Samoan islands and, with its 12-meter-high tsunami, killed 192 people in American Samoa, Samoa, and Tonga. As Nature's Richard Lovett reports, evidence from buoys tethered to the sea floor, seismographs, and GPS monitors indicates that the seismic disturbance consisted of three earthquakes: one of magnitude 8.1, which struck first, and two of magnitude 7.8, which followed in the next two minutes. The mostly horizontal displacement of the 8.1 quake would not have unleashed a deadly tsunami on its own, but it did trigger the other two quakes, whose mostly vertical displacement caused the tsunami.
Times of India: In India and elsewhere, high-school physics classes are based mostly on the physics of the 19th and earlier centuries. But as Utpal Sarkar of the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, India, found out when a group of students visited his lab, students are interested and inspired by unsolved problems at the frontiers of physics. The result of Sarkar's epiphany is a new book, Flavours of Physics, which he and other Indian physicists wrote with support from the Indian National Science Academy.
SPACE.com: China plans to launch the first module for its space station next year. The third country in the world, after Russia and the US, to have launched humans into space, China has big plans for its space program. 
Once the first module is in place, China plans to add more, with the goal of having, by 2011, a fully assembled space station where manned spaceships can dock and crews take up residence.
Once the first module is in place, China plans to add more, with the goal of having, by 2011, a fully assembled space station where manned spaceships can dock and crews take up residence.
Chronicle of Higher Education: Jonathan Dorfan, a particle physicist and a former director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, will leave California later this summer to become the first president of the newly established Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. In a Q&A with the Chronicle's David McNeill, he explains what attracted him to the new job, which mainly entails building an international graduate research center from stratch.
New Scientist: Peter Meijer, a physicist and inventor in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, has developed a device that allows blind people to “see” via hearing. His device, called vOICe (the “OIC” stands for “Oh, I see”), translates visual images into “soundscapes.” It consists of sunglasses that contain a tiny camera connected to a netbook PC, and a pair of headphones. The camera scans the horizon, and software converts the images to sound: Bright images are louder, and frequency denotes whether an object is high up or low down. The device is proving to be an intriguing research tool for understanding both how the brain processes information and its capacity for adaptation.
Daily Mail: Scientists at Edinburgh Napier University have developed a new biofuel made from whisky byproducts. It uses the two main byproducts from whisky distilling—pot ale (the liquid from the copper stills) and draff (the spent grains)—to produce butanol. Although the fuel could be used in its pure form, the most likely use will be as a blend with gasoline or diesel. As whisky is one of Scotland’s biggest exports, creation of the new biofuel would use up the copious waste products and reduce the environmental impact of whisky production.
Los Angeles Times: During a third spacewalk at the International Space Station on Monday, NASA astronauts Doug Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson (shown here) successfully replaced the cooling pump that had broken on 31 July. The station uses two pumps to keep it from overheating; with one pump out of commission, the crew had shut down nonessential equipment to avoid taxing the system until the repair could be effected. Tests showed that the new pump was working and that everything should be back to normal in a few days.
Las Cruces Sun-News: Until he retired recently, Robert De Kinder taught physics at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. Before then, he worked for Boeing Aerospace, Texas Instruments, and at the Army Atmospheric Science Laboratory at White Sands Missile Range. Now, De Kinder runs Delta Films, a small production company. He's also campaigning to coax private and government investors to beef up southern New Mexico's film production infrastructure.
New York Times: Several wind power projects are in the works to help New York and New Jersey reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. Within three years, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey hopes to build five wind towers on the west side of New York Harbor. Nearby, Bayonne, New Jersey's Municipal Utilities Authority has already begun construction of an 80-meter-tall turbine, which should be up and running by September. And the New York Power Authority, in partnership with utility companies, is planning to build a wind farm spread over 250 square kilometers of the Atlantic Ocean. The Mid-Atlantic Coast is a good location for wind farms because winds tend to be at their highest when demand for electricity is at its peak. Moreover, the centers of population are close to the coast, so the power produced does not have to travel far to reach consumers.
Washington Post: The University of Maryland has announced that Wallace Loh, currently the provost at the University of Iowa, will assume the presidency of the university's College Park campus on 1 November. College Park is home to one of the biggest physics departments in the US. According to its website, the Maryland physics department is engaged in more than 30 areas of physics research. Loh was born in Shanghai; grew up in Lima, Peru; and earned degrees in social sciences from Grinnell College, Cornell, the University of Michigan, and Yale.
New York Times: Has the recent spate of extreme weather—floods in Pakistan and Northwestern China, wildfires in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, and the heatwave in the Eastern US—been caused, or worsened, by manmade climate change? Justin Gillis of the New York Times interviewed climatologists and meteorologists to find out. The answer: probably. Readers of Physics Today might remember that MIT's Kerry Emanuel considered the impact of climate change on hurricanes in his August 2006 Quick Study article.
Nature: For the first time, researchers have used a laser beam to control a heartbeat. Michael Jenkins, a biomedical engineer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and his team report in Nature Photonics that they succeeded in syncing the heartbeats of embryonic quails with infrared lasers. More studies are needed, but their initial results indicate that lasers could be used to study how hearts form and such conditions as congenital heart defects and could possibly lead to the development of light-based pacemakers. Although it has been known for some time that light can stimulate nerve activity, researchers still don't know how light controls heart rate.
SPACE.com: Astronomer Frank Drake, the man who 50 years ago founded the SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) Institute, was honored Saturday in California at SETIcon. The convention featured talks and panels centering on the science, and science fiction, of extraterrestrial life. In Drake's first experiment in 1960, called Project Ozma, he pointed a radio telescope located at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, toward two nearby Sun-like stars, to try to detect a signal that might indicate intelligent life. Drake also formulated an equation to calculate how many intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations are likely to exist in the Milky Way. At 80, Drake is still active in SETI.
New Zealand Herald: Using a wide-field CCD camera at the Mt John University Observatory in New Zealand's Southern Alps, Steve Smith of Boston University and his collaborators have observed what could be first detection in the Southern Hemisphere of an atmospheric feature known as a stable auroral red arc. SAR arcs arise when fast electrons from the solar winds are funneled toward Earth's polar regions by the planet's magnetic field. The electrons excite the oxygen atoms, causing them to emit red light. Unlike other auroral emissions, SAR arcs are too faint for human eyes to see.
Science News: Home computers in Iowa and Germany, as part of the Einstein@Home project, recently helped astronomers discover a rare kind of pulsar, one that’s isolated and has a low magnetic field. Einstein@Home uses computer time donated by home and office computer owners to process the mountains of data coming from gravitational wave and radio wave detectors. The computers, onto which programs have been downloaded, process data when not being used for other computer applications. Researchers say that the donated electrical power would cost more than $4 million per year, and the combined computer time can add up to a power greater than a supercomputer. Started five years ago, the Einstein@home program has been downloaded to some 500 000 computers around the world. A paper describing the new pulsar, which has a pulse frequency of 40.8 Hz and is named PSR J2007+2722, appears in today’s issue of Science.
Guardian: The Royal Institution in London is shortening its popular Christmas lecture series, launched in 1825 by Michael Faraday. Instead of five days, the series will span only three days—a cost-cutting measure by the institution. The lectures present scientific subjects for a general audience in an entertaining fashion, and have been broadcast on television since 1966. A video archive of past lectures is available on the RI website.
Nature: Harvard University’s Charles Lieber and his colleagues have developed an electrical probe that’s so tiny it can be inserted into a cell’s membrane without disrupting it. To make the probe, Lieber’s team took a silicon nanowire, bent it into a hairpin, coated it with lipids (the same type of molecules make up the membrane), and attached it to a tiny field-effect transistor. A paper describing the probe’s fabrication, operation, and performance appears in today’s issue of Science.
Chronicle of Higher Education: For a variety of reasons, the grant-giving system in the US favors established researchers. The median age of the recipients of major research grants from the National Institutes of Health is 42. To help young scientists start research programs, David Vitrant, a Pittsburgh-based former genetics researcher, founded Fund Science. As the Chronicle’s Sophia Li reports, Fund Science works as a charity. The public makes donations, which Fund Science distributes via a competitive application system to researchers.
Science: Boston University's Matthew Jackson and his collaborators have analyzed the helium isotope content of lava that spewed onto the surface of Canada's Baffin Island 62 million years ago. Based on their analysis, which was published today in Nature, the geophysicists conclude that the lava is 4.5 billion years old and must therefore have originated from a deep pool of magma that had escaped adulteration for the rest of Earth's life.
New Scientist: Thirty years after the introduction of the Rubik’s Cube, researchers have determined that the number of moves required to solve any of its 43 quintillion possible positions is no more than 20. 
Tomas Rokicki of Palo Alto, California, and his team used the methods of computational group theory and the supercomputing powers of Google to speed up the process of solving this complex and formidable mathematical problem.
Tomas Rokicki of Palo Alto, California, and his team used the methods of computational group theory and the supercomputing powers of Google to speed up the process of solving this complex and formidable mathematical problem.
Physics Today: A novel technique that uses ultracold atoms to image microwave magnetic fields has been developed by a team at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. The atoms can serve as the basis of a sensitive microwave imager because they respond so readily to external magnetic fields. Wireless communications technology depends on the generation and detection of microwaves by integrated circuits, so the cold-atom technique could provide a noninvasive way to test the many components in laptops, cell phones, and other mobile devices. The results appear in the current issue of Applied Physics Letters.
Nature: The French National Radioactive Waste Management Agency (ANDRA) is testing the feasibility of storing the country's high-level radioactive waste in an underground site outside the town of Bure in northeastern France. As Nature's Declan Butler reports, finding a safe, long-term repository is imperative for France, which generates 80% of its electricity from 58 nuclear power stations. ANDRA picked the site because the area's Jurassic rock formations are thought to be stable.
Nature: In 2000 the Clay Mathematics Institute announced it would give $1 million to whomever solved any of seven difficult math problems. So far, only one of the Millennium Prizes, the Poincaré Conjecture, has been cracked, although the victor, Grigori Perelman, declined the prize money. Now, as Nature's Geoff Brumfiel reports, Vinay Deolalikar, a researcher at Hewlett-Packard, claims he has solved another of the prize problems: Whether one kind of difficult-to-solve computation, NP (for non-polynomial), can be broken down into another, easier-to-solve kind of computation called P (for polynomial). Deolalikar's proof says no.
New York Times: The burning forests, grasslands, and peat fields in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine have been sending soot into the atmosphere for days, endangering the health and lives of people in huge areas of those countries. Now, as the New York Times's Michael Schwirtz reports, the health threat could be compounded as the fires reach areas that remain contaminated by radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986.
New Scientist: Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have tapped into the problem-solving abilities of computer gamers with an online game called Foldit, the results of which they published in Nature. Foldit is a multiplayer game in which players are given proteins whose amino acids they can manipulate to change the protein’s shape. So far, players working collaboratively have devised new strategies that have eluded both experts and protein analysis software. The game could have practical applications, such as the design of proteins that have a therapeutic role.
Chronicle of Higher Education: Eight years ago, the American University of Beirut made sustainability a key part of its 20-year master plan. Since the plan was formulated, the campus in the Lebanese capital has implemented a host of energy- and resource-saving measures, including water recycling. University administrators estimate they'll save $350 000 a year on their energy and water bills.
New York Times: A year from now, Portugal will derive 45% of its energy from renewable sources. That impressively large share reflects a host of factors, including the country's lack of fossil fuels, the European Union's energy policies, and the determination of the Portuguese government to revamp the systems for generating and distributing electricity. As the New York Times's Elisabeth Rosenthal reports, Portugal's enthusiasm for green energy has also boosted its exports. She writes:
Indeed, Portugal’s engineers and companies are now global players. Portugal’s EDP Renováveis, first listed on stock exchanges in 2008, is the third largest company in the world in wind-generated electricity output. This year, its Portuguese chief executive, Ana Maria Fernandes, signed contracts to sell electricity from its wind farm in Iowa to the Tennessee Valley Authority.
New Scientist: The spines of the sea mouse, or Aphrodita aculeata, have been used to create nanowires 100 times longer than existing methods allow—and much more cheaply. The sea mouse, whose body is covered in a dense mat of hairs, is actually a marine worm found in oceans such as the North Atlantic. 
Its iridescent setae, or threads, are made of millions of submicroscopic crystals that reflect light, causing the distinctive red, green, and blue sheen. Florian Mumm and Pawel Sikorski at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim used the sea mouse’s setae as a mold to grow the wires by placing a gold electrode at one end and firing copper or nickel ions into the hollow channel from the other end. Their team has published its results in the June 2010 issue of the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.
Its iridescent setae, or threads, are made of millions of submicroscopic crystals that reflect light, causing the distinctive red, green, and blue sheen. Florian Mumm and Pawel Sikorski at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim used the sea mouse’s setae as a mold to grow the wires by placing a gold electrode at one end and firing copper or nickel ions into the hollow channel from the other end. Their team has published its results in the June 2010 issue of the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.
SPACE.com: Astronauts on the International Space Station are gearing up for a second attempt to repair its cooling system, which shut itself off on 31 July. Their first attempt last Saturday was cut short because of leaking ammonia coolant and a stuck hose. Astronauts Douglas Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson will make a second spacewalk tomorrow to disconnect some hoses and then a third spacewalk is planned for Sunday to replace the pump. Construction on the space station began in 1998 and is slated to be completed next year.
Daily Mail: Apple has filed a patent for a futuristic “smart” bike that has a docking station on the handlebars for an iPad or iPhone. The device would connect to the bike to provide real-time feedback to riders regarding their performance as well as share information with other bikers about traffic or routes. What’s more, the same principle could be “applied to any suitable vehicle or mode of transportation,” such as cars, motorcycles, or trucks, or even walking, running, or horseback riding, according to Patentlyapple.com, Apple’s patent applications blog.
The Independent: Ecuador is negotiating a novel green energy deal, whereby it would agree not to drill for the some 846 barrels of crude oil beneath its surface, provided that rich nations invest half the market value of the oil—about $3.6 billion—in renewable energy developments to help the country further cut its carbon emissions. The oil in question lies beneath the Yasuni National Park, one of the most biodiverse rainforests on Earth and home to two of the world's last remaining uncontacted indigenous tribes. The plan is backed by Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, and the oil-producing OPEC countries, and the United Nations Development Programme has agreed to be the independent administrator for the project's trust fund.
Daily Mail: Earth's northern latitudes have been experiencing spectacular aurorae because of a 1 August eruption on the Sun that emitted a cloud of electrically charged particles—a coronal mass ejection. The first solar flare in a long while that has been aimed directly at Earth, the “solar tsunami” was really the result of two simultaneous events from different locations on the Sun: a huge flare above a giant sunspot and an even larger eruption across the Sun’s surface. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, launched in February, captured some high-quality views of the solar event, and Earth-based photographers captured some beautiful views of the resulting aurora.
CTV News: Canada has created a new kind of park, a "dark sky preserve," where stargazers can congregate to view the heavens without light pollution from cities. Right now, the parks are gearing up for the upcoming annual Perseid Meteor Shower on 12 August. Although there are plenty of dark places in the world to stargaze, the sky preserves provide knowledgeable staff for guided tours of the event. The first sky park was founded in Ontario in 1999, and now there are more than 30 protected astronomy areas around the world—a dozen in Canada alone.
Science: In her Issues and Perspectives column, Elisabeth Pain describes the ways that scientists can participate directly in debates about policies that affect or are affected by their research. Nanotechnology, climate change, and human stem cells are three currently controversial areas where it could be in scientists' best interests to engage policymakers. On the other hand, as Pain points out:
Be aware that, as you align your research questions more closely to policy issues, you're also exposing yourself publicly. As the public debate about climate change reminds us, it can get nasty, so you'd better be prepared.Pain's article provides links to resources than can provide that preparation.
New Scientist: Researchers are struggling to combat the growing global trade in meteorites. Recently, Mario Di Martino of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Turin, Italy, noticed that the Kamil crater in the Egyptian desert, which his team has been studying, had been infiltrated and specimens taken. Samples of the Gebel Kamil meteorite have since shown up at the annual market in Ensisheim, France. Some meteorite samples can be very important to science; yet, the scientists scrambling to buy them have been criticized for fueling the very trade that they’re trying to combat.
Chronicle of Higher Education: Late last month, the House of Representatives' subcommittee on information policy, census, and National Archives called witnesses to testify on whether the scientific papers that result from government-funded research should be freely available—even when they appear in scientific journals that must charge subscriptions to recoup their expenses. As the Chronicle's Jennifer Howard reports, the issue hinges on weighing the public's interest in gaining access to research that it has ultimately funded and the publishers' interest in being compensated for curating the medium through which those results are presented and preserved.
SPACE.com: A robot destined for the International Space Station has made a hit on Twitter—attracting more than 7600 followers since it started posting messages last month. Created by NASA and General Motors, Robonaut 2 (or R2 for short) is scheduled to travel on NASA’s space shuttle Discovery in November. R2 has no legs—just a torso, arms, hands, and head. Neither does it have a voice, just a Twitter account, and its NASA handlers do the posting. The first humanoid robot to go into orbit and work on the space station, R2 is capable of operating the same tools as the astronauts and will help them by performing the more mundane or risky tasks. To follow R2, go to http://twitter.com/AstroRobonaut.
Science: In her Life and Career column, Vijaysree Venkatraman looks at what could be a growing and welcome trend: male scientists taking more time off work to look after their children. Scientists tend to have freer working arrangements than other workers, which favors fathers' greater involvement in child care. On the other hand, science is a competitive field. Some male scientists worry about the impact to their careers if they become stay-at-home dads. Women scientists continue to cite child care as one of the most time-consuming and unequally shared household responsibilities.
Nature: As the Large Hadron Collider approaches its full operating strength, the question of who might win a Nobel Prize for predicting the existence of the accelerator's main quest, the Higgs particle, is becoming more fraught. The "problem" is that six theorists working in three groups made essentially the same prediction at around the same time. Alfred Nobel's will stipulates that no more than three people may share a prize. Nature's Zeeya Merali reports on the brewing controversy in the particle-physics community.
China Hush: To combat its ever-increasing traffic woes, China may be adding a high-tech bus to its public transit system. The “straddling” bus, first exhibited at the 13th Beijing International High-Tech Expo in May, has 2 levels and is 15 feet tall. The upper story carries passengers, while the lower is essentially a tunnel that allows surface automobile traffic to pass through it. It is also environmentally friendly: It runs on a combination of electric and solar power. A prototype is scheduled to be put in use in Beijing’s Mentougou District in the near future.
Science: A new mathematical model has been developed to explain the bizarre behavior of auxetics—materials that grow thicker when stretched and thinner when released. Discovered nearly a century ago, auxetics have perplexed scientists and only recently has a team of researchers at the University of Malta been able to come up with an explanation, which they published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. Their model is based on one particular type of auxetic, represented by rectangles and squares, which rotate relative to one another such that as the thickness increases the density decreases (see animation). Their research could lead to such diverse applications as bandages that dispense medication when a wound swells, better car bumpers, and earthquake-resistant buildings.
New York Times: Last week, a team led by Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the director of the US Geological Survey, Marcia McNutt, issued an estimate of the amount of oil that had flowed into the Gulf of Mexico from the now-stopped Deepwater Horizon oil rig: 4.9 ± 0.5 million barrels (0.8 gigaliters). A followup report by USGS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provided estimates of where that oil ended up. Justin Gillis and Leslie Kaufman of the New York Times report that both estimates are proving controversial, especially given that the numbers imply that the damage caused by the oil spill is less than originally feared.
Washington Post: Two weeks ago, the US Senate's Democratic leadership dropped provisions in a climate bill that would have tackled climate change. In principle, the White House can now step in, thanks to a 2007 Supreme Court decision that allows the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants. The Washington Post's David Fahrenthold and Juliet Eilperin look at whether the White House will use the EPA option and, if it does, what political and legal battles could ensue.
Science: In his Career Advice column, Chris Tachibana explores the advantages and practical challenges of spending a postdoc or sabbatical abroad. The pros outweigh the cons, according to Tachibana's interviewees. Irene Kouskoumvekaki is from Greece and works at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby. "Working in another country gives you ideas and experiences that you can't get by staying in one place," she says. Some things will be stressful, she notes, but "the excitement is bigger than any of the negatives, so just go for it."
The State News: Michigan State University’s free residential summer physics camp—the Physics of Atomic Nuclei Program—has proven popular. The outreach program, held at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, offers one week for science teachers and one week for high-school students. In 2010, some participants came from as far as California, and the camp enrolled its first international students—one from the UK and one from France. All participants attend a series of lectures, demonstrations, and tours; participate in cosmic-ray research; and present a poster at the end of the week.
New York Times: On 8 April 2010 in the Czech capital of Prague, Presidents Barack Obama of the US and Dmitry Medvedev of Russia signed New START, a bilateral arms treaty that would reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the two countries' arsenals by more than half. A two-thirds majority vote by the US Senate is needed to ratify New START (or any other international treaty), and before a treaty is ratified, the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee holds a meeting to consider it. That meeting, which would have taken place today, has been postponed indefinitely after the committee's chair, John Kerry (D-MA), agreed to Republican requests for more time to examine the treaty.
Science: After a year and a half of negotiating and a 29-hour bargaining session that ended early Saturday, the union representing the more than 5000 University of California postdocs reached a tentative agreement on its groundbreaking first contract. Among the decisions were the adoption of the pay scale used for postdocs funded by the National Institutes of Health, wage increases, and layoff protections. If approved, the contract will bring "definite economic improvements and important gains in rights, protections, and working conditions,” according to union spokesman Matthew O’Connor.
New Scientist: The latest in computer graphics and animation was on display last week at the SIGGRAPH2010 conference and exhibition in Los Angeles. New Scientist focuses on several of the extraordinary displays at the conference, such as a headset that can make a cookie taste like whatever the wearer chooses through a combination of smell and visual texture.
(Image: Takuji Narumi)
ABS-CBN News.com: Two teachers from the Philippines, both of whom hold doctorates in physics, were among the seven recipients of the 2010 Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Christopher Bernido and Maria Victoria Carpio-Bernido were recognized for their revolutionary science teaching method and "their purposeful commitment to both science and nation, ensuring innovative, low-cost, and effective basic education even under Philippine conditions of great scarcity and daunting poverty."
New Scientist: To make recharging an electric car more convenient, a company has developed a plug-free system. Introduced last week at the Plug-In 2010 conference in San Jose, California, Evatran’s Plugless Power system can be fitted to a garage floor, and all the user has to do is park the car over the charging station and it will be recharged automatically—if it needs it. A drawback to the wireless system is that it is only 90% as efficient as plug-in recharging systems.
Discovery News: Two Earth-orbiting satellites, nearing the end of their two-year design life, were given a second chance as Moon-orbiting satellites. Launched by NASA in 2007 as part of the THEMIS five-satellite mission to study how solar geomagnetic storms impact Earth, the two solar-powered spacecraft were about to spend prolonged periods in Earth’s shadow, which would have drained their batteries. A team at the University of California, Berkeley, however, was able to alter the spacecraft’s orbits enough that the Moon’s gravity started pulling them in. The first will reach a preliminary orbit in August, and the second will follow in October.
Space News: The US House of Representatives failed to vote—before going on summer break—on a NASA authorization bill that would set funding levels for the space agency. The bill would have authorized NASA to spend $19 billion per year through 2013. Controversially, it would have restored NASA’s space shuttle replacement program, Constellation, which had been targeted for termination by the Obama administration. Several space organizations, such as the Commercial Spaceflight Federation and the Planetary Society, had argued against rushing the measure to a vote. Even if the authorization bill had passed, Congress still has to pass an appropriations bill to fund NASA.
Nature: Leo Gross of IBM's research center in Zurich, Switzerland, and his coworkers have used an atomic force microscope (AFM) and a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to determine the structure of cephalandole A, an organic molecule found in a deep-sea-dwelling bacterium. Cephalandole A contains three six-membered benzene rings and one five-membered pyrrole ring. Four possible structures had previously been identified. As Nature’s Philip Ball reports, Gross and his team immobilized molecules of cephalandole A on a crystal surface, then probed their electronic structure with an STM and their shape with an AFM. Drug companies are interested in cephalandole A. One of its chemical relatives, camptothecin, showed promise as an anticancer drug.
New York Times: A critical coolant system on the International Space Station shut itself off on Saturday. The system is one of two that remove heat generated by the lab’s electronics. To avoid the risk of overheating, mission controllers had to turn off several electric-powered systems, including two of the station’s gyroscopic stabilizers. Fortunately, the station is equipped with a spare coolant system, which, according to a NASA statement, will be swapped in no earlier than Thursday this week.
