News Cut Category Archive: Science

Homeless teen misses science scholarship

Posted at 3:18 PM on January 25, 2012 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Maybe there were smarter people who are finalists in Intel's Science Talent Search, but it's hard to believe there were more deserving candidates than Samantha Garvey, who at least could give the others a run in the "all around" competition.

Garvey was a homeless teen from New Jersey who captured the nation's attention when she became a finalist in the competition for a $100,000 college scholarship.

The list of finalists came out today and Garvey's name was not on it.

Her story has some reward, however. She received a $50,000 scholarship to the college of her choice after an appearance on the Ellen show.

Five Minnesota young people were on the semifinalist list along with Ms. Garvey. One made it to the finals. He's Evan Chen of Wayzata High School who, according to Intel, is "unraveling the mystery behind satellite cell differentiation."

That is: He's trying to help people with Muscular Dystrophy. A classmate with MD motivated him, he told Lake Minnetonka Patch last year.

"Knowing that there is someone in my vicinity that can benefit from some of the research that I'm doing is really inspirational," he said

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With love from the sun

Posted at 11:50 AM on January 25, 2012 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Nothing makes you less inclined to get out of your car and head to your company cubicle than a radio program that reminds you it's only a matter of time before the sun cooks us to a crisp.

Astronomer Bob Berman did the honors today during an utterly fascinating few minutes with Kerri Miller about the bombardment by solar storms, which, he notes, could cripple jetliners flying polar routes, destroy electric grids, and even physically damage oil pipelines. None of that has happened -- yet -- but it could.

So when you see this:

Some of us might be beginning to think of this:

Or not.

Here's the full interview. You'll enjoy it... if you think short-term:

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Study: Few women make men spend more

Posted at 12:45 PM on January 12, 2012 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science

I don't often paste up news releases, but there are particulars in this one about a University of Minnesota Carlson School study that I'd hate to leave out.

The perception that women are scarce leads men to become impulsive, save less, and increase borrowing, according to new research from the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management.

"What we see in other animals is that when females are scarce, males become more competitive. They compete more for access to mates," says Vladas Griskevicius, an assistant professor of marketing at the Carlson School and lead author of the study. "How do humans compete for access to mates? What you find across cultures is that men often do it through money, through status and through products."

To test their theory that the sex ratio affects economic decisions, the researchers had participants read news articles that described their local population as having more men or more women. They were then asked to indicate how much money they would save each month from a paycheck, as well as how much they would borrow with credit cards for immediate expenditures. When led to believe women were scarce, the savings rates for men decreased by 42 percent. Men were also willing to borrow 84 percent more money each month.

In another study, participants saw photo arrays of men and women that had more men, more women, or were neutral. After looking at the photographs, participants were asked to choose between receiving some money tomorrow or a larger amount in a month. When women were scarce in the photos, men were much more likely to take an immediate $20 rather than wait for $30 in a month.

According to Griskevicius, participants were unaware that sex ratios were having any effect on their behavior. Merely seeing more men than women automatically led men to simply be more impulsive and want to save less while borrowing more to spend on immediate purchases.

"Economics tells us that humans make decisions by carefully thinking through our choices; that we're not like animals," he says. "It turns out we have a lot in common with other animals. Some of our behaviors are much more reflexive and subconscious. We see that there are more men than women in our environment and it automatically changes our desires, our behaviors, and our entire psychology."

"The Financial Consequences of Too Many Men: Sex Ratio Effects on Savings, Borrowing, and Spending" will be published this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Co-authors of the study include Joshua Tybur (VU University Amsterdam), Joshua M. Ackerman (M.I.T.), Andrew Delton and Theresa Robertson (University of California, Santa Barbara), and Andrew E. White (Arizona State University).

Sex Ratios Affect Expectations of Women

While sex ratios do not influence the financial choices women make, they do shape women's expectations of how men should spend their money when courting. After reading a news article informing women that there are more men than women, women expected men to spend more on dinner dates, Valentine's gifts, and engagement rings.

"When there's a scarcity of women, women felt men should go out of their way to court them," adds Griskevicius.

In a male-biased environment, men also expected they would need to spend more in their mating efforts.

Population Data Supports Research Findings

In addition to conducting laboratory experiments, the researchers reviewed archival data and calculated the sex ratios of more than 120 U.S. cities. Consistent with their hypothesis, communities with an abundance of single men showed greater ownership of credit cards and had higher debt levels.

One striking example was found in two communities located less than 100 miles apart. In Columbus, Ga., where there are 1.18 single men for every single woman, the average consumer debt was $3,479 higher than it was in Macon, Ga., where there were 0.78 single men for every woman.

Research Implications for Marketers and Society

Whereas previous research has found that merely seeing an attractive woman in advertising would make a man more aggressive or make a man more interested in conspicuously consuming, "The Financial Consequences of Too Many Men" study suggests it may not be that simple. According to the findings, whether a woman is alone or surrounded by many or few men can have a great impact on the reaction it elicits.

Griskevicius says the effects of sex ratios go beyond marketing and influence all sorts of behavior. He cites other studies showing the strong correlation between male-biased sex ratios and aggressive behavior.

"We're just scratching the tip of the iceberg when it comes to financial behavior," says Griskevicius. "One of the troubling implications of sex ratios for the world in general is that it's about more than just money. It's about violence and survival."

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The things you don't need to know about Soyuz

Posted at 12:01 PM on December 23, 2011 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

The Mrs. and I watched the International Space Station fly over Saint Paul last night. Eleven minutes later, the Soyuz space capsule followed (though we couldn't see it) as it was chasing down the space station for today's docking of the two.

Pretty amazing stuff.

"I wonder if they get bored just flying around in a circle for months at a time?" I asked as we watched the overhead show last evening.

One question I didn't ask is the one NASA actually answered today: Why is a dash to the toilet the first thing on the agenda of arriving astronauts?

Pretty amazing stuff, indeed.

By the way, the next directly-overhead sighting of the pair of spaceships will be Monday afternoon at 5:18 pm (in Minneapolis).

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A camera that makes the speed of light seem slow

Posted at 12:36 PM on December 13, 2011 by Molly Bloom (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science, Tech

What happens when you can capture one trillion frames per second? You make the speed of light look really, really slow. Since I don't have a PhD in physics, I'll let the researchers from MIT Media Lab's Camera Culture group explain how they did it:

This imaging system is a spinoff from another Camera Culture project -- developing a camera that can see around corners. Another MIT researcher is developing a radar technology that allows us to see through concrete walls.

Pretty soon, there will be little we can't see -- with the proper technology, of course.

But while being able to see an advancing light wave is really something, I'm still pretty impressed with a mere 1,000 frames per second:

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Unmasking a Klingon ship

Posted at 10:51 AM on December 8, 2011 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Did a coronal mass ejection "uncloak" a Klingon bird of prey ship?

You have to love the YouTube guy who noticed the object saying "it's definitely some sort of manufactured object."

Or not.

Gizmodo seeks out an answer...

It could very well be a glitch on the sensor, a ghost image from the planet Mercury itself. If you pay close attention, you can see that the two lines follow the same direction that the planet does. But if it's a ghost image, why does it end so abruptly? How is it so well delimited? Why does it look like a spaceship?

The answer, according to Nathan Rich, lead ground system engineer at the United States Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, is in the way the images are post-processed.

A series of images shot from another satellite seems to show the same thing.

Definitely Klingons.

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How much does the Internet weigh?

Posted at 3:47 PM on November 2, 2011 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science

The best part about this video, is the typical YouTube flame war it started over the question of whether information added to your computer actually adds anything, or just rearranges what's already there.

(h/t: The Nerdery)

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The surprise from outer space

Posted at 2:04 PM on November 1, 2011 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Science Daily reports today that an asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier is going to pass within a couple hundred thousand mile of earth next Monday.

"What is unique about this asteroid flyby is that we were aware of it well in advance," Jay Melosh, a Purdue expert in impact cratering, said. "Before about 1980 we wouldn't know about an asteroid of this size until it was already making a close pass, but now it is unlikely that such an asteroid will approach the Earth without our knowledge."

The following question is the type that could easily come from the mind of Mary Lucia: Is this knowledge a good thing or a bad thing?

If an asteroid were on its way to hit the earth, would you want to know about it? If it were to hit, what would you be doing today?

Melosh says this particular rock would create a blast equal to 4,000 megatons and if it were to strike the ocean, it would create 70-foot-high tsunami waves 60 miles from the splashdown site.

If it struck, say, Menominee, heat from the fireball would cause extensive first-degree skin burns to everyone in the Twin Cities.

While you're thinking about whether you'd want to know the earth was doomed in such a situation, you'll want to be playing with this neat asteroid impact calculator.

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The science of inspiration

Posted at 10:05 AM on October 12, 2011 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Tired of hearing stories about uneducated, uninterested kids today with no goals and no interest in, say, science? Me, too. Which is why this mini-doc about young people who got jobs for the summer at Exploratorium (a science museum) in San Francisco might be the most inspiring thing you see today. It's also something to remember next year when there'll be more stories about how difficult it is for kids to find summer jobs anymore.

(h/t: Jeanne Souldern)

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Scientists videotape brain's thoughts

Posted at 9:41 PM on September 23, 2011 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Scientists at Berkeley may not only be able to read your mind, they may be able to see what's in it, too.

In a study published this week in Current Biology, the researchers showed video clips to volunteers, then measured their brain activity with an MRI .

Here's an example of what the people watched vs. what their brains revealed:

It could become a powerful tool to communicate with people who cannot verbalize, such as stroke victim and coma patients, Scientific American says. Unfortunately, it's several decades away from being perfected for that use.

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Falling satellite could still provide a show over Midwest

Posted at 2:08 PM on September 23, 2011 by Bob Collins
Filed under: Science

Peru, you're in the clear. Upper Midwest? Maybe. Africa, we have a problem.

The people tracking the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite now say it will likely land in the middle of Africa tonight (11:16 p.m. CT) , give or take 5 hours and lots of other places on the planet.

Yesterday, it was predicted to drop into the South Pacific off the coast of Peru.

Under this updated forecast, it still could provide a reentry show in the Upper Midwest if it stays aloft for an additional hour or so. That would put it over southern Canada, not that far from the Minnesota border.

All the information is here.

Musing on a fourth dimension

Posted at 10:30 AM on September 23, 2011 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Science

This being Science Friday, I'm not ready to let go of the possibility that scientists really did find that neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light, even though I'm probably among the fools (click image for readable laugh):

Physicist Brian Cox, by the way, has a very interesting interview on the BBC on the subject. Maybe, he says, Einstein's theory of special relativity isn't wrong. Maybe it's absolutely correct in three dimensions but this discovery tells us what's happening in another dimension.

Whoa.

So, maybe people are wrong and there really isn't "the most profound discovery of the last 100 years" vying for news attention with mere trivial matters. What's the harm from the initial enthusiasm when it resulted in the one thing science needed: non-scientists to be interested in it for a day? That's still a day when Kim Kardashian isn't considered that important.

Maybe that's what it's like in another dimension.

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Step aside, Einstein?

Posted at 3:19 PM on September 22, 2011 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)
Filed under: Science

If we were more of a science-loving people, maybe this would lead every newscast today:

Einstein proven wrong.

The science community is abuzz today with news from a group of European researchers that neutrinos -- sub-atomic particles -- travel faster than light. Einstein said nothing can travel faster than light.

If his special theory of relativity is proven incorrect, it means that most everything we think about how the world and universe works might be wrong.

Other scientists, however, are lining up to call "shenanigans" on the claim.

Chang Kee Jung, a neutrino physicist at Stony Brook University, says there's an error in the calculations somewhere. "I wouldn't bet my wife and kids because they'd get mad," he says. "But I'd bet my house."

"We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the researchers, told Reuters. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."

"This is so huge that the Europeans are asking us to check it. They haven't done that since the rise of the Third Reich," Alexandra Petri at the Washington Post jokes.

If it's true, what does it mean? The researchers aren't saying. So we turn to the world of science fiction which has long contended that the secret of time travel depends on overcoming the notion that nothing can travel faster than light.

Also, it means we may not don't need roads, and there's a possibility you're dating your mother.

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Satellite to be a no-show

Posted at 1:30 PM on September 22, 2011 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Officials are now issuing predictions of where/when the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite falls back to earth. The headline: There appears to be almost no chance it falls in Minnesota.

The Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris studies released the above map today, saying the predicted reentry time is 22:07 UTC (that's 5:07 p.m. Central Time) tomorrow, give or take 9 hours.

Lesser headline: If that's true, we won't see a thing. The satellite will be in the southern hemisphere at the time.

We admit to being opposed to the idea of getting hit by a falling satellite. On the other hand, we kind of want to see a show. If that describes you, hope that the satellite stays aloft for four more orbits, when its track could take it closer to the Upper Midwest.

Here's the key to the above map:

Yellow Icon - location of object at predicted reentry time
Orange Line - area of visibility at the predicted reentry time for a ground observer
Blue Line - ground track uncertainty prior to predicted reentry time (ticks at 5-minute intervals)
Yellow Line - ground track uncertainty after predicted reentry time (ticks at 5-minute intervals)
White Line - day/night divider at predicted reentry time (Sun location shown by White Icon)
Note: Possible reentry locations lie anywhere along the blue and yellow ground track.

Find more information here.

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You and the falling satellite

Posted at 3:06 PM on September 21, 2011 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Science

The odds of being hit by a falling satellite -- in this case NASA's wobbly Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite -- would seem to be astronomical. But they're not.

Mark Matney, a scientist in the Orbital Debris Program Office (the people who track space junk) says the odds that someone will be hit are 1 in 3,200.

But the odds that you will be that one are somewhere better for all concerned -- one in several trillion, according to Life's Little Mysteries.

To make this calculation, Matney explained, analysts work out how much debris will actually make landfall. (Most falling junk just burns up in the atmosphere.) They then make a grid of how the human population is distributed around the globe. Oceans, deserts and the North and South poles are largely devoid of people, for example, whereas coastlines are brimming with them. In short, they must figure out which patches of Earth have people standing on them.

Throwing in a few more minor details, such as the latitudes over which satellites spend most of their time orbiting, the scientists calculate how likely it is that a piece of space debris will strike the ground where a person happens to be. This time around, the odds are 1-in-3,200, and there's a one-in-several-trillion chance that not only will a person get hit, but that person will be you.

"The annual risk of a single person to be severely injured by a re-entering piece of space debris is about 1 in 100,000,000,000," according to Heiner Klinkrad, head of the ESA's Orbital Debris Office. As near as I can tell 100 billion is a lot smaller than several trillion.

All of these calculations go out the window, of course, if the experts eventually pin the satellite's re-entry path in the vicinity of your cul de sac.

Some experts on the SeeSat Internet mailing list have calculated the satellite will return to earth "Friday at 2004 GMT (3:04 p.m. CDT) plus or minus five hours, and descending on 19.1 degrees north, 128.5 degrees east over the West Pacific near the northwest coast of Japan."

In other words: it'll probably fly over flyover country well before it returns to earth, but put on the show elsewhere.

But officials won't be predicting where that might be until two days, one day, 12 hours, six hours and two hours before the calculated point of return.

Should you be concerned? An average of 13 people die each year from falling vending machines. You don't change your plans because of them, right?

(h/t: Matt Black)

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Science and the things we find on the Internet

Posted at 4:50 PM on September 15, 2011 by Bob Collins (20 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Dr. Stephen Miles did a masterful job of clinically explaining the HPV vaccination and the virus that can lead to cervical cancer in women. He appeared today on MPR's Midday program.

But caller after caller took issue with what he had to say, rarely citing clinical evidence, and it was clear that whatever science-bassed education Miles was trying to provide, it wasn't working.

That seems to be the dilemma in a debate that, like climate change, is too polluted by politics to have an enlightening discussion.

Part of the problem? The Internet, according to some experts. Several decades after it came into our lives, there are still far too many people who think if it's on the Internet, it's got to be true.

The other part of the problem? Well, when's the last time you had a belief and you changed it? It's not something that happens often in public discourse of important issues.

"I recently had a mother who had cervical cancer who refused the HPV vaccine for her child," Dr. Mary Anne Jackson an infectious disease expert at Children's Mercy Hospital & Clinics in Kansas City, Missouri, told Reuters. "I asked her where she got her information and she said, 'the Internet, and innuendo."'

Indeed, one of the callers to today's Midday cited an Internet website that opposes the vaccine as the source of her information, citing claims of 98 deaths from the vaccine Gardisil.

"I've looked at the same website" Miles responded. "The website includes zero medical records. It does not include links to the medical records... its entire board does not include anyone, as far as I can see, with any medical training or experience. Testimonials are important in marketing products and getting products to be not marketed. But that is not a substitute for science."

Science, of late, has a hard time getting much respect.

"What is especially disturbing is you've got organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the American Academy of Family Physicians and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists -- every learned medical organization in the country and indeed around the world -- in favor of immunization," Jackson said.

She said 85 percent of her patients readily accept the vaccine, 12 percent are hesitant, and 3 percent "flat out refuse." She said she's not worried about the daughters in the 3 percent.

"It's not going to impact the flat-out refusers. I worry it is going to impact this group of vaccine-hesitant families," she said.

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The wildfire quandary: Fight or flight?

Posted at 11:43 AM on September 13, 2011 by Bob Collins (16 Comments)
Filed under: Science

The big -- and getting bigger -- wildfire in the Boundary Waters is sure to ignite an old debate: When should the Forest Service just let it burn?

Let's hit rewind and check the excellent Duluth Pack Blog, and its August 31 entry, when the fire was still in its infancy:

The Forest Service strategy is to let this fire burn as long as it is not threatening BWCAW campsites, portages, or private properties to the north. Controlled burn strategies are common when fires are started naturally and don't pose risk to life or property. As this fire burns it is removing or reducing much of the fuel that is lying on the ground; by eliminating that now, future fires won't have fuel to burn.

Today, Eric Thompson of Green Bay -- an MPRNews.org reader -- sent us this e-mail:

I was hiking the Pow-Wow Trail from 09-02-2011 to 09-05-2011. I was four miles from the fire. This fire started on 08-18-2011 by lightning and the US Forestry Service made the decision to let it burn. They say it's good for the wilderness to clean out all the downed wood. Day 1 it was 18 acres, day 3 it was 240 acres. When I started hiking on 09-02 it was over 1000 acres. Now its over 60,000. The USFS needs to jump on top of these fires before letting them grow out of control. Then they whine about the damage they cause when they are to blame for letting it grow in the first place?

The Forest Service began changing its policy toward fire in 1995, when the environmental benefit of fire to a forest became more known, and the cost of suppressing it went up.

Fire clears out underbrush and creates forest openings, which in the long run prevents -- wait for it -- large fires.

The policy had its root in the fact that in the early part of this century, the more effort was made to extinguishing wildfires, the more wildfires there were.

"The mentality is changing," Greg Aplet, a Denver-based fire scientist with The Wilderness Society, told USA Today in 2007, a huge year for wildfires in the U.S. "The obvious answer is not to fight fires we don't need to fight."

But how do you know for sure which fires those are? Except in the most wild of areas, it becomes a gamble that the weather patterns won't promote a significant spread of the fire to the point where homes and businesses are threatened.

We've reached that point.

"The smoke from Pagami Creek has been particularly heavy this Tuesday morning in and around Grand Marais," Paula Marie Powell tells MPR News today. "As a manager at a hotel, I have been checking guests out days before their departure date because of smoke complaints. Cars and deck chairs are covered in ash. Some of the local homeowners have been checking and running their sprinkler systems. The drought conditions are making people anxious, as we all know that it barely takes an effort to start a wildfire right now."

Last week, an environmental group in Oregon filed suit against the Forest Service to require an environmental assessment before deciding whether to fight fires, including considering the cost of human life.

"The thesis of our case is that fighting fires is what has gotten us into the trouble we're in," said Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. "It's time to end the war against fire and learn to live with fire and manage it, rather than fight it."

One of those filing the suit was the father of man who died fighting the Thirty Mile Fire in Washington in 2001.

"It's one thing to die in the service of your country for a justifiable proper cause," Ken Weaver told the Seattle Times. "The problem is we've got these kids out there dying for something that is scientifically bankrupt. We are subverting nature, causing more damage than good, and we are taking kids' lives. That is just so wrong."

(This information was incorrect. I regret the error)

(Photo: Julie Miedtke's 2007 photo of the area of the Cavity Lake Fire via Flickr)

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How to see a supernova

Posted at 11:24 AM on September 8, 2011 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Is it possible for anyone to be more deadpan while talking about a cataclysmic supernova he and his colleagues discovered "in our backyard?"

Peter Nugent explains how you can spot the supernova using a pair of binoculars and looking somewhere near the Big Dipper.

If you should spot it, just remember that you're looking 21 million years back in time.

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Speaking for chimps

Posted at 3:16 PM on September 7, 2011 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Science

What would it be like to never have been allowed to go outside? This German video, making the rounds today on the Intertubes, supposes to be a heartwarming tale of what happened when some chimps, who had been research animals, were sent to a safari camp and allowed to wander on their own.

Good for the chimps above but not so heartwarming once you realize the world from which they come. A week or so ago, the Humane Society in the U.S. released an investigation into the use of chimps in research.

In stories like this, it's hard to shake this amazing photo from National Geographic in 2009 when a dead chimp was wheeled away.

(h/t: Julia Schrenkler)

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Scenes from the sinkhole state

Posted at 12:12 PM on July 28, 2011 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

It's International Sinkhole Day, apparently. A happy one to you and yours.

In Burnsville today, a water main break has triggered a large sinkhole on County Road 11. It's 30 feet deep and crews are trying to fill it and reopen the road. Of course, you never know with sinkholes. Is it the only one in the area? And where does all the dirt go that got washed away?

It's reminiscent of one that appeared on a Saint Paul street last year.

Meanwhile, in Guatemala City, a woman awoke recently to discover a sinkhole in her bedroom. She was just inches from a 40 foot drop. "Thanks to God and the holy Mary that nothing bad happened," she said, a comment that raises questions for another day.

Guatemala is particularly susceptible to these things because it sits on volcanic ash. Remember this baby from last year?

Usually, crews fill the Guatemala sinkholes with cement, although I've been unable so far to find and updated photograph of the location.

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Sea of algae

Posted at 10:23 AM on July 28, 2011 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

How hot and unpleasant does it have to get for you to consider swimming in this muck?

This is Qingdao China, where algae is continuing to spread along China's coast (h/t: Boing Boing)

When the algae dies, it will create a dead zone in which plants and fish will not exist.

Minnesota officials report algae blooms in lakes here are a problem, too, although not nearly as dramatic as the ocean in China. Not yet, anyway.

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Math and the baseball outfielder

Posted at 12:34 PM on July 26, 2011 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science, Sports

This is why I love the Internet.

Rick Ankiel, who used to be a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals and is now an outfielder, threw out two baserunners earlier this season.

Rhett Alain, at dot.physics, has just calculated how fast a person would have to throw the ball to be able to do that.

First, he used Google Earth to calculate how far the ball went each time. Then he used a series of calculations like this...

... that apparently did something other than take me back to Miss Mercer's class in high school where I sat in the back of the class and fretted because I didn't get it....

Then he graphed it...

... and determined that the throw was launched at 123 mph.

He acknowledges, however, that he didn't include the lower gravitational field and air density of Denver. Piker.

What does this tell us? To pay attention in high school.

Here's the whole process.

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Report: We may be the only intelligent life 'out there'

Posted at 3:36 PM on July 25, 2011 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Scientists who have been looking for intelligent -- or any other type of -- life in the galaxy have assumed through various models that there might be as many as 10,000 tech savvy civilizations out there looking for us while we look for them.

But a new report, published on LiveScience.com today, suggests the number may be closer to zero.

Astrophysicist David Spiegel at Princeton University and physicist Edwin Turner at the University of Tokyo debunk the models, based on taking the fundamental laws that established life on earth and calculating that they apply elsewhere, too. The pair argues that the laws don't translate to the rest of the galaxy.

"Although life began on this planet fairly soon after the Earth became habitable, this fact is consistent with ... life being arbitrarily rare in the Universe," the authors state. In the paper, they prove this statement mathematically.

Their result doesn't mean we're alone -- only that there's no reason to think otherwise. "[A] Bayesian enthusiast of extraterrestrial life should be significantly encouraged by the rapid appearance of life on the early Earth but cannot be highly confident on that basis," the authors conclude. Our own existence implies very little about how many other times life has arisen.

In other words: The genesis of life in other worlds is not inevitable.

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A 'misassigned Minnesotan's' last shuttle mission

Posted at 2:20 PM on July 7, 2011 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Aviation, Science

Paul Dye, 52, a Roseville, Minnesota native, (profiled here five years ago) will not have to worry about anyone breaking his record as the longest-serving space shuttle flight director in this country's history. After the Atlantis completes its mission in a few weeks, there won't be any more space shuttle flight directors to break it because there won't be any more space shuttle flights.

I called him today to find out what happens when the major component of the U.S. space program ends.

Q: What's your role in this last shuttle mission and then what will you do?

Dye: I'm going to be one of the three orbit flight directors so I'll have the "Orbit Three" team, which is basically when the crew is asleep. When we first started preparing this mission about a year ago, I was following it through the office and I was temporary lead (flight director), but when it became real... we've got some guys in the office who need the experience and I've had nine or 10 lead flight director jobs over the years so we figured it was time to give someone else the job. I'm kind of mentoring them.

So I'm on when the crew is sleeping and we put the plan together for the next day, which if the mission goes as planned, it's pretty simple, and if we've got to change things around, we can be pretty busy overnight.

Then when we're done with this I go back to my other life which is flying the space station. It's amazing how often people ask, "So when are we going to get some Americans up there, again?" They're always thinking in terms of the shuttle, but we've had Americans in orbit since the space station was first staffed. That's over 10 years. We fly 24/7/365 and that takes a lot of flight controllers and a fair number of directors to keep that staffed.

Listen to a more detailed response.

Q: The last time we talked, you said you would work with a shuttle mission team for about a year before the actual launch, has that schedule changed?

Dye: Since I kind of started this mission and then turned it over to another fellow as the lead, I've been mentoring him as the lead, I've done more than the Orbit 3 would normally do for a flight. But, really, the Orbit 3 person can come in a couple months before flight, take a quick look at it, see what's different, learn those specific differences, and then do one or two simulations. We generally do one that we call an emergency run; it's just a day when we go over with the real crew, the real station crew, our station counterparts in the control center, and our team and we run through emergency scenarios. Then we go fly it.

This particular one, because it's the last shuttle flight, I've been a little more involved with some of the peripheral activities, some public affairs stuff, and helping people outside of the Agency understand what we're doing. This one's taken a little more time than some of the Orbit Threes.

When we were in production mode and flying shuttles a lot, at any one time, you were the lead on one mission coming up, you were flying Orbit Two on somebody else's flight, and Orbit Three on somebody else's flight.

Listen to a more detailed response.

Q: What's the mood? Out here in the real world, there's a sense of sadness that the shuttle program is ending.

Dye: There is, without a doubt, sadness. There is above all an incredible dedication to continuing to do the job right. The flight isn't over until all the parts stop moving. And you have to fly right to the end; you can't let up while you're coasting down the runway.

We've got people who are going to be laid off at "wheels stop." They're going to be gone. I've got people who are five or 10 years into their career starts -- these are people who were right out of college who are the brightest and best who came to work with us -- and I would be training with them and at the end of the day of training, they'd say, "Paul, it's been great working with you."

I'd say, "Yeah, we had a great day." And they'd say, "No, this is my last day of work." And right up until they were done, they did not give a hint that they were walking out the door. That's dedication.

Listen to a more detailed response.

Q: Where do they go? What do you do in your business when the job is over?

Dye: Well, that's tough. In the old Southern California aerospace industry model, Company A gets a contract to build a big, new bomber and they hire 10,000 people to do that and it takes them five years. And when they're done with that production room, everyone gets laid off. But that's OK because Company B got the contract for the next big contract for the new fighter, and they hired all those people. They walked across the street and they went to work for Company B. That's the way the aerospace industry worked for decades.

To a certain extent that works in the space business; there's still engineering jobs out there. There are people building commercial spacecraft, working on commercial space. But for my operations people, people who are dedicated flight controllers, flight trainers and the like, there's nobody else out there doing this right now.

So at the very best, they've got a couple of years before they can shovel that talent back in to , say, the commercial companies.

So what do they do right now? It's pretty tough. Folks are out there looking. There are lots of folks leaving the aerospace industry to go to other types of engineering. There are a lot of high-tech opportunities for people who are creative. If you have flight in your soul, it's hard to find something right now.

Listen to a more detailed response.

Q: In a presentation you gave in Minneapolis a few years ago, you said that as a species, we are designed to be explorers, even if we're exploring things in which the payoff isn't until another generation. Do you still think that?

Dye: As a species, I have no doubt that humanity is a race of explorers. There is a difference between humanity and a nation. I think that we will continue to explore as a species. We will continue to explore this planet, there is a great vast ocean bottom that hasn't been looked at. We will explore low earth orbit some more. We will explore near planets, and we will move out into the stars.

This is not to say the United States of America is going to be the one to lead that charge. Just as British Empire tapered off and the Roman Empire tapered off, sooner or later almost all human institutions end, but that does not end what humankind does.

I'm a student of history and... a lot of folks have said recently, "why are we still messing around in lower earth orbit? We just keep going exactly where we've been for a long time." It took the early exploration cultures -- let's go with the Portuguese -- it took them quite awhile sailing around near coastal areas before they developed the technology to just leave land behind and head out into the deep blue. And to a certain extent that's what we've been doing in lower Earth orbit.

We will, I'm quite confident unless we destroy ourselves as a species, move out into the solar system and beyond that. But it takes baby steps learning how to do it.

Listen to a more detailed response.

Q: Have you had a chance to sit back and reflect on the changes in technology over the course of your career in the space program?

Dye: Every once in awhile I'll open a file drawer and I will find an old cassette tape from an old offline computer that we would've used in the back room of the control center. Or I will find an old 8-inch floppy disk. I still have an 11-inch floppy disk somewhere. The technology that has... I'm sitting here talking on an iPhone, which does almost everything my laptop computer will do for me. All of this capability has happened fairly recently.

It all comes from society assuming that technology is always going to advance. We have a generation of people who have never known a time when mankind could not go to space. To them, you just need to launch another satellite, or just use the microelectronics to make this little widget.

From an aviation perspective, when I started flying the shuttle, all of the instruments were mechanical. About 15-20 years ago, we started replacing all of that with glass cockpit because, frankly, all of the people who knew how to fix all the old mechanical stuff were retired or dying. There was nobody left to redo that stuff.

I reflect quite a bit on the way technology has improved. There may be one or two times when I say, "Guys, get rid of the technology. Pick up a pencil and paper and just write me a note." But most of the time the technology has helped us out. It's amazing what we have developed in the 31 years that we've been flying space shuttles.

Listen to a more detailed response.

Q: Do you and your colleagues ever just sit back and say, "this is cool!"?

Dye: Oh yeah. We do it all the time. There are nights when we've got a (space station) pass over Houston, with the shuttle docked to the station and the like. We will frequently release everybody but two fire guards and everybody else goes outside in the parking lot and watches it fly over. And we stand up there just slack-jawed and say, "Holy smokes! We're going to go back inside and talk to those guys."

The weirdest thing in the world is for me to realize... I meet with a lot of people who are fascinated by the space program . And they would give anything to be even marginally involved with one spaceflight of any kind. And here I've been a flight director on 38 flight missions, I was a flight controller on many more before that. I fly the space station once or twice a month. It's very easy to sit back and realize... and forget about how privileged we've been to be part of this program, and just how incredible it really is.

As we learn from our mishaps like the Columbia, things can go bad very, very fast. And a lot of people live in a simulated world. They play a lot of video games, they see things in simulation, they see things on TV and they don't get out there and realize the real world is moving past you very fast and if something goes wrong, you can get hurt very bad.

I think to some extent, we've gotten into a culture that a lot of folks don't experience the real world directly. It's just been an amazing ride being able to fly the shuttle this long.

Listen to a more detailed response.

Q: Of all the people you've met at NASA over the years, is there one who stands out as being particularly inspiring to you?

Dye: I don't think I could pick one. I can pick several who've been my mentors over the years. Gene Kranz was one. Randy Stone was Gene's successor and he was a mentor to me. There are so many incredible people that I've been able to deal with in our flight control ranks, in the engineering world, in the flight crew ranks; it's been a privilege to work with all of them.

Q: Are you a Minnesotan or a Texan now?

Dye: I'm a temporarily misassigned Minnesotan. I've never truly adjusted to the climate here. It's hot. It's humid. There are good things; the flying weather is good most of the year, I don't have to drain the oil out of the engine in February at the end of the day after flying, then heat it up on the stove the next morning before pouring it back into the engine to go flying the next morning, which I used to do when I was a kid with a J-3 Cub.

But when we're done here, my wife and I have picked out a place out West, out in the mountains that we're going to enjoy.

Q: When will that be?

Dye: A couple more years. I never wanted the shuttle program to end. But if it was going to end, I'm glad it ended before I left so I didn't have to make the difficult decisions to leave it.

My goal is to make sure that everything I was taught by the Apollo veterans who trained me, who came before me, I want to make sure I've passed every bit of that wisdom, plus everything else we've learned, onto the next generation of people so that I can sit on the sidelines and cheer on the next generation of people who are going to take us into space.

Q: What happens when this mission is over? Sheetcake?

Dye: We're going to have a heck of a party. We used to have big splashdown parties after Apollo missions because they landed in the ocean. Then we had "wheels stop" parties in the early days of the shuttle program where we'd all go out in the woods out back. When things got routine, those wouldn't happen quite as much. But I think we're planning a good, old-fashioned "wheels stop" party here.

I personally want to be in the control center for that last "wheels stop" and I want to sit there for a few minutes with my headset on and then we'll go out and drink some beer.

Some questions were submitted via Twitter from NewsCut followers, and Paul Dye responded:

Q: Are any NASA employees moving to other countries' space programs?

"There may be a few folks going to our partner nations - that has always happened , and has helped build mutual relationships. I don't know if the current situations will increase that or not."

Q: In a perfect world, what would he want to see the shuttle replaced with?

"In a perfect world, we'd see the shuttle replaced with a more capable second-generation shuttle that was fully reusable and launch on short notice. We'd take what we learned from the shuttle and build on that. But the world isn't perfect, and we have to live with what the policymakers ask us to do. "

Q: What technology will be most crucial to propel space flight to the next level (interplanetary travel)?

"For interplanetary travel, we need to get away from chemical propulsion, and develop the technology to truly survive in space without resupply. We need to be able to live off the land and operate on our own."

(Image credit: Photo of Mr. Dye in the space shuttle simulator courtesy of Doug Reeves. Top image from Johnson Space Center/NASA)

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NASA: No conclusions about melting sea ice

Posted at 11:08 AM on July 6, 2011 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science

NASA has a whole lot of "who knows" in its release today about sea ice around Antarctica.

It released a series of images today, showing winter and summer sea ice around the continent, none of which appears to show a trend one way or the other.

Since the start of the satellite record, total Antarctic sea ice has increased by about 1 percent per decade. Whether the small overall increase in sea ice extent is a sign of meaningful change in the Antarctic is uncertain because ice extents in the Southern Hemisphere vary considerably from year to year and from place to place around the continent. Considered individually, only the Ross Sea sector had a significant positive trend, while sea ice extent has actually decreased in the Bellingshausen and Amundsen Seas. In short, Antarctic sea ice shows a small positive trend, but large scale variations make the trend very noisy.

The year-to-year and place-to-place variability is evident in the past decade. The winter maximum in the Weddell Sea, for example, is above the median in some years and below it others. In any given year, sea ice concentration may be below the median in one sector, but above the median in another; in September 2000, for example, ice concentrations in the Ross Sea were above the median extent, while those in the Pacific were below it.

Find the images here.

NASA's cautious assessment contrasts with assertions last week that the ice shelf near the Pine Island Glacier in West Antactica is melting at an increasing rate, and could raise sea levels by 25 centimeters -- almost 10 inches.

By the way, it's the dead of winter in Antarctica now. The temperature at the moment in Vostok is -89 °F. There'll be no melting there today.

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Give invasives a chance

Posted at 3:40 PM on June 10, 2011 by Michael Olson (5 Comments)
Filed under: Science

A paper from a Twin Cities professor calls on us to rethink our negative views of "invasive species."

Some of our negative views about the species are informed by warnings like this one from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

Minnesota's natural resources are threatened by invasive species such as the zebra mussel, Eurasian watermilfoil, purple loosestrife, gypsy moth, and garlic mustard. These species, along with new invasive species, could be easily spread within the state if citizens, businesses, and visitors don't take necessary steps to contain them.

Considering the harm these species can do to our environment and the challenge of raising public awareness to stop the spread of these species, it seems like urging tolerance and understanding of non-native species could be a bit misguided.

But Mark Davis, professor with Macalester College, argues that our simplistic nativism perspective that is based on a black and white reading of native species are good, non-natives are bad has had too much influence among conservationists.

"Scientists who malign introduced plants and animals for thriving under favorable conditions seem to be disregarding basic ecological and evolutionary principles," say Matthew Chew, an ecologist and historian of invasion biology, and Julie Stromberg, a plant ecologist, with Arizona State University. "Evaluating whether a species 'belongs' in a particular place is more complicated than just finding out how and when it arrived."

Scientific studies show that while some introduced species have resulted in extinctions, not all natives are beneficial, as in the example of the Pine Bark beetle, which is decimating North American pine forests (Physorg).

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The space shuttle launch up close

Posted at 3:48 PM on June 2, 2011 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Science

If you didn't get your fill of science with last week's "A Day in the Life of a Booster Rocket," NASA has released another compilation of video from the launch last month of the space shuttle Endeavour. It may be some of the most compelling video since the beginning of the human space program. Cranking up the audio on your speakers will make you a favorite in the workplace today, too.

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A day in the life of a booster rocket

Posted at 1:52 PM on May 27, 2011 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Science

NASA has released a 36-minute video of the camera on board the booster rockets attached to the space shuttle at liftoff. They separate after working for about two-and-a-half minutes. so they can't be up that high, right? It takes them 34 minutes to fall back to earth, the video reveals. (Check out the spot at 2:38, a second or two after it separates form the shuttle, the bright spot shows the shuttle, already a long way away.)

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Deadly spiders to march on Minnesota?

Posted at 12:01 PM on May 26, 2011 by Michael Olson (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Photo courtesy PLoS One

Minnesota is among the states that could become part of the expanded territory of "one of the most feared spiders in North America," according to a release from the Biodiversity Institute at the University of Kansas.

The Brown Recluse's venom is highly toxic and comparable to the bite of a rattlesnake. The venom kills tissue and can be deadly if not treated in a prompt manner. The spiders, which are most active at night, are known to hide in clothing and dark spaces making them difficult to spot.

Researcher Erin Saupe authored a study that attempts to predict how the distribution of the spider may be affected by climate changes.

To address the issue of brown recluse distribution, Saupe and other researchers used a predictive mapping technique called ecological niche modeling. They applied future climate change scenarios to the spider's known distribution in the Midwest and southern United States. The researchers concluded that the range may expand northward, potentially invading previously unaffected regions. Newly influenced areas may include parts of Nebraska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, South Dakota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

The Discovery Channel produced a show on just how deadly the venom from this spider can be.

The research is published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal PLoS One.

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Space: The boring frontier

Posted at 12:01 PM on May 23, 2011 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Science

This picture -- NASA's Picture of the Day -- took us a bit by surprise today. Not because spacewalking is surprising, but because these things happen and nobody pays much attention to it, anymore.

Astronaut Andrew Feustel didn't just go for a stroll, he went for a marathon and then some, spacewalking for 8 hours and 7 minutes. It was the the 246th time a U.S. astronaut has walked in space. And that was the sixth-longest spacewalk ever.

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Shuttle launch from an airplane

Posted at 1:44 PM on May 16, 2011 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Here's something people on terra firma -- or above it -- will only see one more time: A space shuttle launch, viewed from an airplane. Stefanie Gordon of Hoboken, N.J., got this shot of the shuttle Endeavour while flying to Florida today

Even after all of these years, this video is still one of the coolest moments ...

It was a cloudy day in Florida, which means all of the people who took the day off for the once-in-a-lifetime trip to see a shuttle launch, saw only a few seconds of it. But what a few seconds! (h/t: @treyratcliff)

Starting with the second orbit today, Roseville native Paul Dye took his spot in Houston as flight director. I profiled his work in this 2006 story.

All of the viewing times of the shuttle from the St. Paul area will be early morning. The next possibility is Sunday May 29th at 4:55 a.m., when the shuttle will pass from 10 degrees above the southwest horrizon to 33 degrees above the Eastern horizon. It will be visible for four minutes.

The best viewing will be in the Austin area. It'll pass nearly overhead.

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Tracking slight radioactivity

Posted at 11:23 AM on March 28, 2011 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Let's get this disclaimer out of the way first: Radiation levels in the U.S. from the unfolding nuclear disasters in Japan are way below any unhealthful level. That said, the spike in radiation -- even with "not unhealthful" levels -- in Massachusetts is intriguing.

Check out this EPA RadNet chart showing the levels post-Japan earthquake (click for larger image):

If you're like me, perhaps you heard the story and figured the radiation got up into the atmosphere and floated across the U.S. to Massachusetts, in which case Minnesota probably would've gotten a little too, right? It doesn't appear so. The EPA monitor near the metro is out of order, but here's Duluth's:

To the west of us, here's Bismarck:

The EPA says Massachusetts and Pennsylvania are the areas where radiation spiked, probably because of rain:

While short-term elevations such as these do not raise public health concerns - and the levels seen in rainwater are expected to be relatively short in duration - the U.S. EPA has taken steps to increase the level of nationwide monitoring of precipitation, drinking water, and other potential exposure routes to continue to verify that.

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The supermoon

Posted at 8:04 AM on March 20, 2011 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Science

The cloud cover prevented most of Minnesota from seeing the "supermoon" last night (one exception appears to be Grand Marais) . The moon was closer to the earth than it's been for 18 years. We couldn't judge for ourselves whether it was the big deal the build-up suggested it would be. Here are some images via Flickr.

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Video break: The shuttle 'cool factor'

Posted at 1:38 PM on March 10, 2011 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Leave it to an organization full of engineers to take a perfectly cool and spectacular view of a space shuttle launch and give it the perfectly horrible name, "Ascent Imagery Highlights."

NASA has released this production of the space shuttle Discovery's launch late last month. The shuttle, as you probably know, landed yesterday for the last time.

The video almost restores the "cool factor" in its entirety to a part of the country's space initiative that seems to have lost it.

Update 4:58 p.m. - In the first hour of NPR's Science Friday tomorrow on MPR, there'll be a segment considering the future of spaceflight.

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The achievement gap in black and white

Posted at 11:08 AM on January 25, 2011 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Schools, Science

It's official. Lots of children are left behind. The "nation's report card" -- the National Assessment of Educational Progress -- is out today, showing the U.S. trailing other nations when it comes to knowledge of science. Science often plays a different fiddle to math and reading in test scores.

While the U.S. ranking compared to other countries is getting the lion's share of attention, the tragedy of the achievement gap isn't getting anywhere near the same amount of notice.

Here, for example, are the test scores by ethnicity for the fourth grade:

In Minnesota, black student had an average score that was 36 points lower than white students. That's not much different than the national average, even though Minnesota's overall scores were slightly higher than the national average.

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Minnesota's 'aflockalypse'

Posted at 1:45 PM on January 7, 2011 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Science

What caused the recent mass deaths of birds? The answer may be found in Worthington, Minnesota more than 100 years ago. It was there in March 1904, an estimated 750,000 Lapland Longspurs died on the mean streets, fields and lakes of Nobles County.

The aflockalypse is detailed in a 1907 article -- A Lapland Larkspur Tragedy -- in the Journal of Ornithology:

A Mr. Drobeck reported that on the morning following the storm he noticed lumps or balls of snow on the roof o f his barn and that when they thawed in the morning sun, they were found to contain live birds. The heads of the birds would first appear, and then, shaking off the snow, they would sit for a time in the sun drying and preening themselves and then fly off. He caught several and took them in the house and it was two of these birds that Dr. Dart saw in his window garden a week later. This curious statement was corroborated by a second observer. Evidently the birds had become wet and snow-laden and falling into the sticky snow had by their efforts rolled themselves in to snow-balls.

Dr. Manson and Dr. Humlston, two physicians of Worthington, gave their testimony along the same lines as above. The former added that he noticed that many of the birds had entered the snoxv head foremost as though they had pitched down head-long rather
than as though they had fluttered down as they probably would have done after striking some obstacle. When these birds were picked out of the snow it was found that the snow was stained with blood that had oozed from their mouths.

Lovely, indeed.

Worthington's electric streets lights were initially suspected, but birds were dropping in nearby Slayton, too. There were only gas lamplights in Slayton, where every family in the town had gathered at least three dozen still-live birds.

Dead birds were also found in Luverne, Lakefield, and Pipestone.

Why? The author says all of the birds had impact injuries, leading to the theory that while migrating from Iowa north, they got confused by some snow, and then were attracted by the lights of the town.Some hit objects, some were weighted by the snow, and some just dropped dead from exhaustion. (Read the entire article here)

Fast forward to 2011. What's going on? The DiscoBlog at Discover.com takes a crack at it:

Causes ranging from UFOs, monsters (our personal favorite), fireworks, secret military testing, poison, shifting magnetic fields, and odd weather formations have been blamed for the deaths, but researchers are saying these types of die-offs are normal. It's simply a coincidence that a few big ones happened right around the new year-and once the global media started paying attention to wildlife mortality, we saw examples everywhere.

In other words: It happens all the time.

But it might be an intergalactic death ray.

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Bullying and the 'empathy gap'

Posted at 12:17 PM on January 3, 2011 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Why isn't "bullying" being taken more seriously? There's an "empathy gap," according to a study out from Northwestern University today.

"The research suggests that people have difficulty appreciating the full severity of social suffering unless they themselves experience it," the study says. "The findings show that an understanding of this empathy gap, especially in the case of bullying, is crucial because it has implications for how outsiders react to socially distressing events and the degree of punitive measures that are taken in support of victims."

In his study (documented on LiveScience.com), professor Loran Nordgren had students play a ball-tossing game with scenarios in which some of the students were included and some who weren't. In assessing other scenarios, those who were "excluded" were more able to understand the pain of bullying than those who were "included."

He did it again with teachers, and found the same result.

It may be a scientific example of the bottom line of a study being: "some people just don't get it."

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Climate, Wisconsin style

Posted at 11:41 AM on December 30, 2010 by Bob Collins
Filed under: Science, Weather

These last few weeks have not been a particularly good time to discuss climate change -- although I do note that it's December 30th and it's raining out there -- but the Web site Climate Wisconsin is providing some fabulous reminders about how much our culture is linked with the weather. Sure, there's the usual political debate to be had, but let's face it: few people are going to give an inch right now on what they believe.

So maybe we should just back up a little bit first and assess this culture of ours, and maybe get back to the question of whether the climate is changing, and so what if it is, and save the why for a bit later.

Here's the Climate Wisconsin website, which culminates a project that started last February. Check out the videos; they are really quite fascinating. Here's one:

Great Lakes Shipping | Climate Wisconsin from ECB on Vimeo.

I'm not opening up comments on this one. Go spend some time exploring the site, then come back and we can talk about it later.

At least we're not reduced to eating penguins

Posted at 12:00 PM on December 14, 2010 by Eric Ringham (2 Comments)
Filed under: Science, Weather

Last evening I noticed that the snow mountain I'd built next to my driveway was beginning to fracture. A fissure had developed along the approximate line of the chain-link fence buried deep within the mountain.

I recognize this. I've seen it in videos from Alaska. It's called "calving."

But a better video to help put things in perspective is this one: the trailer for a PBS documentary about the fateful (but, miraculously, not fatal) Antarctic expedition of Ernest Shackleton and his ship Endurance in 1914. Have you had some anxious moments when your car was stuck in a snow bank? Imagine having your ship stuck in an ice floe - with no prospect of rescue.

If the kids need something to do on their snow day (doubtful), set them to reading the story of the Endurance. Or give them shovels and send them out to work on the driveway.

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Know your frost!

Posted at 11:18 AM on December 14, 2010 by Nate Minor
Filed under: Science, Weather

Yes, I know all you Twin Citians are sick of the weekend snowstorm and its aftermath. (I'm sitting in MPR's bureau in Moorhead, where our streets are quite clear, thank you very much.) But I'm going to take this opportunity to remind you of the pretty (and educational!) side of winter weather, courtesy KAXE, a great community radio station in Grand Rapids, Minn.

Life as we didn't know it

Posted at 1:10 PM on December 2, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

NASA didn't announce the discovery of extra terrestrial life today. Would it be exciting to you, though, if I told you it discovered a way that might allow wastewater treatment plants to operate without phosphorous? Or, to put it in terms of the NASA news release:

NASA-funded astrobiology research has changed the fundamental knowledge about what comprises all known life on Earth.

NASA discovered an organism that's figured out how to do without phosphorous. Phosphorous is necessary for life -- at least the kind of life with which we're most familiar. The "green revolution," for example, was fueled by phosphorous, reserves of which are declining rapidly on earth because of fertilizer. It's also the chemical backbone of our DNA.

Now, an organism has been discovered that apparently doesn't need phosphorous, it uses arsenic to build itself.

We know that some microbes can breathe arsenic, but what we've found is a microbe doing something new -- building parts of itself out of arsenic," said Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA Astrobiology Research Fellow in residence at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., and the research team's lead scientist. "If something here on Earth can do something so unexpected, what else can life do that we haven't seen yet?"

Pamela Conrad of NASA called the discovery "delightful" because it expands her thinking of what life beyond Earth might look like. "It opens up a whole new line of chemistry. The implication is we still don't know everything there is to know about what might make a habitable environment on another planet."

Will this answer questions about how we got here and are we alone? "Probably not in our lifetime," Wolfe-Simon said. But without the discovery, earthlings looking for life on another planet could go to all the trouble of getting somewhere, only to not recognize life that exists there as life at all.

For example, was there life in this picture, but we didn't know it?

Here on earth, another scientist said, the discovery could lead to a creation of bioenergy organisms without needing to deplete the phosphorous supply on Earth.

One excited scientist said today the discovery should inspire more U.S. students to study science.

That would be a new form of life, too.

By the way, ever wonder what gets a roomful of science reporters excited while they're covering a news conference at which new forms of life are revealed ? Seeing themselves on a monitor:

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Your daily dose of awesome

Posted at 10:44 AM on November 18, 2010 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Isn't this just the greatest picture ever?

It's astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson looking out the window of the International Space Station. Click for a larger image, especially if you ever had a dream of going into space, and looking back at our home.

The Daily Mail has more images.

One of the attached comments is equally thought-provoking:

Why can't people just stop for a moment, take a deep breath, and just look at the beauty of our planet just for a few minutes; to see it in all it's wonder.

But so is another:

Very beautiful who would have thought it was full of crazies.

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Whose missile? Nobody's

Posted at 3:47 PM on November 9, 2010 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Some answers to the question of "whose missile was it that got shot into space off the Pacific Coast?" are presenting themselves.

The Navy says it wasn't its missile. The Pentagon says it doesn't know what it was or where it came from.

It wasn't anybody's missile. It wasn't a missile.

A Harvard astronomer says it was "probably" just an airplane.

"If it's coming over the horizon, straight at you, then it rises quickly above the horizon," he told New Scientist. "You can't tell because it's so far away that it's getting closer to you - you'd think it was just going vertically up," he says.

Preposterous? It would seem so. There are lots of jets in southern California, so why only one contrail?

But then you look at a photo off Key West in 2009, which actually was a jet contrail, and the notion becomes more believable (from Boston.com).

If that doesn't convince you, maybe this formula from Contrail Science will.

It appears to show (we're taking their word for it ) that any object traveling horizontally eventually goes below the horizon, and a contrail would give the appearance of something going vertical.

Or it's the Romulans.

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Signs of the secrets of the universe found

Posted at 2:44 PM on October 27, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Scientists may have discovered actual evidence of dark matter.

Up to now, the notion that "dark matter" is the glue that holds the universe together has been only a theory, but Space.com is reporting today that two Illinois researchers -- one of them a mere grad student -- have discovered evidence of dark matter in several explosions.

What does it matter? We know that atoms are a big part of matter, but it's also believed that they only make us up 20% of matter.

Says Space.com:

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which has scanned the heavens in high-energy gamma-ray light since it was launched in 2008, has observed a signal of gamma-rays at the very center of the galaxy that was brighter than expected. Hooper and Goodenough tested many models to explain what could be creating this light. They ultimately concluded it must be caused by dark matter particles that are packed in so densely that they are destroying each other and releasing energy in the form of light.

Physicists have theorized that dark matter particles might be their own antimatter partners, and thus when two dark matter particles meet under the right circumstances, they would destroy each other. Alternatively, dark matter particles might be meeting anti-dark matter particles at the galactic center.

The search for the very secret of the universe has a definite Minnesota connection. One of the biggest projects is based in the Souhan Soudan Mine in northern Minnesota. Another is based in Rome. Both have previously reported some measure of particles that may be evidence of dark matter.

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Einstein and the frequent flier

Posted at 11:33 AM on October 25, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Frequent fliers may age faster than those who keep their feet on terra firma, some research suggests. But it's unlikely anyone would notice.

It's an Einstein principle at work, the Discover blog says. Time doesn't pass equally for everybody. A fast-moving clock will tick at a slower rate than a stationary one. It's called time dilation.

People on commercial flights are subject to both predictions of time dilation. They're going fast, at speeds of around 500 miles an hour, and because they're about six miles from the ground, they're also feeling a weaker gravitational pull. So do airline passengers age more slowly, since they're traveling at high speeds? Or do they age more quickly, since they're subject to less gravity?

Chou did the math, and it turns out that frequent fliers actually age the tiniest bit more quickly than those of us with both feet on the ground. Planes travel at high enough altitudes that the weak gravitational field speeds up the tick rate of a clock on board more than the high speeds slow it down.

But even if you traveled as much as the George Clooney character in Up in the Air, the blog says, you'd still only age 59 microseconds.

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Asteroid fly-by

Posted at 12:29 PM on October 11, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Another asteroid is whizzing by earth this week. It was only discovered on Saturday, according to Discover Magazine's website. It's the size of an SUV and will miss earth by 28,000 miles.

The comments section of the post, filled with wonderful nerdiness, calculates that the asteroid's chances of hitting Earth at some point are on the order of eight magnitudes less than this.

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Irresponsibility and the new planet

Posted at 3:29 PM on October 4, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Now that summer has mercifully left us, we have a clear view of the night sky on the morning dog walks. It's impossible to look at the stars without thinking of last week's report that a planet has been discovered that could support life.

So NBC Brian Williams had a little typical TV-anchor fun with it:

Is there a sense of humor there? That would be refreshing.

David McConville, said to be a space and science educator, called Williams' remark at the end "irresponsible," and sent a letter to NBC News.

What are the odds that there's life on this planet? Greater than the odds that people would actually adjust the way they live on this one because they've got a "fallback planet" 180,000 years away?

(h/t: Discover)

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Live-blogging Midmorning: Distracted driving and taking risks

Posted at 9:55 AM on October 4, 2010 by Bob Collins (15 Comments)
Filed under: Science

On the heels of last week methodology-flawed and poorly reported study that distracted driving laws in Minnesota and other states don't work, we're talking risky driving today and looking for your feedback.

I'm looking for your stories of encounters with the distracted driver, or -- if you are looking for absolution -- your confessions. But beyond that, we're talking about the risks you take that you know have a high chance of misfortune, but you take them anyway.

The guests on today's show are:

* David Pizarro: is Assistant Professor of psychology at Cornell University.
* Craig Fox: is Professor of Policy and psychology at UCLA.
* Kathleen Vohs: is Professor of Marketing at the University of Minnesota.

Listen on the radio and talk with us in the comments section below.

Here are Kerri's questions:

Can we bring the kind of social pressure that eventually built against drunk driving.. to bear on distracted driving? Can we make texting while you drive the kind of social no-no that smoking has become? Do we need to combine tougher laws with ethical arguments?

9:09 a.m. - Prof. Fox says in matters of economics, we don't like risk so much. People would take a guaranteed $5,000 over the chance of winning much more. "We're all given to positive illusions; people think they're safer drivers than average. They think the odds don't apply to me.

9:11 a.m. - Mr. Pizarro says one of the reasons distracted driving doesn't get the same response that anti-drunk-driving efforts have is that people haven't processed the numbers. And it won't change, he says, until someone you know is killed or injured in a distracted driving accident.

Here's the Distracted Driving Summit Web page for additional resources.

9:15 a.m. - Interesting observation. Because we saw 9/11 unfold, the visions forced us to stop flying and start driving more, even though driving is more dangerous.

9:22 a.m. - Caller says he started writing a motorcycle five years ago and that changed all of his driving habits. He says because he's more vulnerable, he drives better. "I never text and drive, I'm just so much aware having been on a bike."

9:24 Mr. Pizarro says he gets annoyed when he sees someone texting, but he texts while driving.

9:26 a.m. - The producer says a caller on hold admits to being "addicted."

9:28 a.m. - Just read Brooke's comment (below) that over time changed behavior fades. Prof. Fox agrees and says employing a psychological device is the only thing that's going to change people for good.

Caller Chris says he doesn't have to think about driving any more because newer cars take over a lot of the work. He says he's excited about the technology "assisting" with texting "because I can't stop it myself."

Pizarro says there either needs to be a stiff penalty or your chances of getting caught get higher. He admits getting two tickets for talking on the phone while driving. "Now I have a GPS on my phone and I think how can they -- the police -- know the difference between whether I'm entering an address or texting. There's no radar for this sort of thing. So the possibility of getting caught goes way down."

9:33 a.m. - Professor Fox is done. We're taking a news break. After the break we'll be joined by Prof. Vohs over at the U of M.

9:35 a.m. - Joking with Kerri that I should be doing this while driving around the Twin Cities. As with so many things on News Cut, it would be a veiled psychological test to see if that repulses you or entertains you.

9:38 a.m. - We're back and Prof. Kathleen Vohs at the U of M is joining us. Maybe we'll devise an anti-texting marketing plan. "You want to make people have the visceral reaction of "I want to pick up the phone, ooooh that's a bad idea." She says she'd tried to use people's will-power and get them to see it as an act of self-control. So there you have it: You're texting? You're weak. Prove us wrong.

"What's the reward for exercising willpower," Kerri asks.

"It gets hard for people to imagine," Vohs says. "It's like saying, 'you don't want to be like your mother.' She says they try to give people alternatives. One way is to think of it as a goal, and next is give yourself a rewarding behavior as a result.

>> Inside glimpse. While Kerri is listening to the guests, she's also looking at the list of people on hold -- the list has the point they want to make -- and directing the producer to stack the calls in a certain order depending on whether the question advances the discussion. It's very impressive juggling. <<

9:43 a.m. - You don't have to send a text message back right now, just because someone sent you a text message, a guest says. But I've been with drivers who get a text message and if they don't, there's another one...and then -- ding -- another one... and another one.

9:45 a.m. - Caller Tyler says he's dating a woman who's "a notorious text and driver." He was inclined to text her about this conversation. "Communication is paramount. You just have to tell people about things."

9:47 a.m. - Prof. Vohs says texting and driving will be passe in two years and says people who do it will be seen as foolish. She brings up the old seat belt campaign, which reminds me of one of the original seat belt ads which said, "Nobody wearing seat belts has ever been killed within 25 miles of their home." That has nothing to do with the conversation, of course, but I was distracted by my memories.

9:50 a.m. - A paralegal calls to say she works on a lot of car crashes and the first thing attorneys do is ask for a driver's cellphone records.

9:52 a.m. - I'm intrigued by the idea that someday texting will be as societally-negative as drunk driving. But 1 in 7 Minnesotans have a DWI. Have the anti-DWI efforts really worked?

9:54 a.m. - A Duluth school bus driver says he's been nearly hit many times by people on their cellphones. Several have failed to see the stop arms on his bus. He doesn't see it changing because students in high school are joined at the hip with their cellphone.

9:57 a.m. - Prof. Vohs mentions this PSA -- graphic.

Listener Sasha writes:

I have two babies with me in the car all the time. And every time I see somebody texting I just wanna call the police. I believe we should have the right to call the police EVERY time we see somebody texting. I just recently visited Germany and drivers next to you will literally honk and wave and even call the police if they see you texting or talking.

This concludes our distract driving broadcast day.

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The Exodus explained

Posted at 2:17 PM on September 21, 2010 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Religion, Science

The National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado have figured out how the Red Sea could part, allowing Moses and the Israelites to leave Egypt as described in the Book of Exodus.

The two have released a study that says it could have been the wind.

The computer simulations show that a strong east wind, blowing overnight, could have pushed water back at a bend where an ancient river is believed to have merged with a coastal lagoon along the Mediterranean Sea. With the water pushed back into both waterways, a land bridge would have opened at the bend, enabling people to walk across exposed mud flats to safety. As soon as the wind died down, the waters would have rushed back in.

"People have always been fascinated by this Exodus story, wondering if it comes from historical facts," researcher Car Drews says. "What this study shows is that the description of the waters parting indeed has a basis in physical laws."

Previous researchers have claimed that a 74 mph wind from the northwest could've exposed a reef.

Researchers did not hazard a guess as to what -- or who -- caused the wind.

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Troubled waters at the U

Posted at 1:02 PM on September 16, 2010 by Bob Collins (10 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Want to see the definition of a heck of a story? Read the Twin Cities Daily Planet's report into why a University of Minnesota-funded documentary about the Mississippi River got pulled shortly before it was to premiere. It focuses on agriculture, pollution, and sustainable solutions.

The suggestion in the story -- impossible to prove because the people who could clear up the controversy either aren't talking, appear to fibbing a bit, or don't seem to know answers to legitimate questions -- is that the university didn't want to upset ties to big agriculture. The few people at the U who are talking say the Bell Museum wanted a scientific review of the project, but the show's producer says that's not true.

Now, according to reporter Molly Priesmeyer, there's another angle that's surfaced on the "isn't it a coincidence?" list: The U's vice president of university relations is married to the owner of a public relations agency whose client is the Minnesota Agri-Growth Council, which supports practices that are apparently criticized in the film.

The agency is the same one that was -- until recently -- partly owned by Tom Horner, a candidate for governor.

Priesmeyer doesn't have the smoking gun, but she's at the very least got circumstantial evidence that could only be explained away by the university fully explaining why it pulled the documentary at the last minute.

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For melting glaciers, size matters

Posted at 10:12 AM on August 27, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

We're running out of ways to describe the size of ice chunks breaking off in the Arctic and Antarctica, especially given our geographically-challenged nature.

When a huge chunk broke off in Antarctica, experts described its scale as the size of Connecticut.

Today, LiveScience.com reports, a "Bermuda-sized" chunk of ice broke off from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in Canada. Is that big? It's hard to say: There are 200 islands in Bermuda. But if you add them all together, they add up to only 21 square miles.

So it's either the size of a huge chunk of the ocean. Or it's equivalent to two-thirds the size of Woodbury, which doesn't really sound that big. For the record: You can fit 168 Woodburys into Connecticut.

Here's what it looked like 8 years ago:

Here's what it looked like a week ago:

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Carp attack

Posted at 12:59 PM on August 26, 2010 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Science

If the Asian carp succeed in their journey to the Great Lakes, and then into the rivers, you can apparently forget about kayaking.

Exhibit A today comes from the Missouri 340, a canoe and kayak race that started this week. A Texas man, one of the favorites to win the race, was knocked out of the competition -- literally -- when a 30 pound Asian carp jumped out of the Missouri River and struck him in the head.

It's definitely a risk of being out on the river," said Tracy Hill, a project leader for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's local fisheries office. "It's extremely serious. Those things can kill you."

It is a serious threat, of course. It also is the most entertaining threat we face.

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Science and the vested interest

Posted at 12:36 PM on August 24, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

A headline science paper on ScienceExpress today requires us to read the fine print. The study says oil-eating microbes have suddenly flourished as a result of the BP oil "spill" in the Gulf of Mexico.

Based on these results, the potential exists for intrinsic bioremediation of the oil plume in the deep-water column without substantial oxygen drawdown.

Translation supplied by the Associated Press:

Scientists also had been concerned that oil-eating activity by microbes would consume large amounts of oxygen in the water, creating a "dead zone" dangerous to other life. But the new study found that oxygen saturation outside the oil plume was 67-percent while within the plume it was 59-percent.

The fine print, however, is a caution to reserve judgment:

The research was supported by an existing grant with the Energy Biosciences Institute, a partnership led by the University of California Berkeley and the University of Illinois that is funded by a $500 million, 10-year grant from BP

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What killed Lou Gehrig?

Posted at 1:45 PM on August 17, 2010 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Among the most startling news stories of the current news cycle, this one may be tops: Lou Gehrig may not have died from Lou Gehrig's Disease.

Gehrig held the record for the most consecutive games played in baseball until Cal Ripken broke it a few years ago. Over that time, he brushed off plenty of injuries. That may be what killed him, according to researchers from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Massachusetts, who will present their findings tomorrow.

Gehrig might have suffered instead from brain trauma. The researchers said markings in the spinal cords of two football players and a boxer showed that they didn't die of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, even though that was their diagnosis.

How could this be? "Most A.L.S. patients don't go to autopsy -- there's no need to look at your brain and spinal cord," Dr. Brian Crum, an assistant professor of neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, told the New York Times. "But a disease can look like A.L.S., it can look like Alzheimer's, and it's not when you look at the actual tissue. This is something that needs to be paid attention to."

But, far too many people have ALS for real. Over the weekend, for example, Eric Obermann was buried. He was one of the youngest people ever diagnosed with ALS. He was struck by the disease when he was only 18. He died last week at 28. You may remember him from emotional testimony before a Congressional panel in 2005, or as a spokesperson for ALS research.

There will be no doubt what killed him.

"We just have so much respect and admiration for what he did ...," Stuart Obermann said of his son. "He gave everything he had left. His last selfless act was donating his brain and spinal cord to ALS research."

Update 2:53 p.m. U of M's Gary Schweitzer isn't buying the NYT story quite yet.

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The myth of climate change myths

Posted at 10:52 AM on August 12, 2010 by Bob Collins (27 Comments)
Filed under: Science

The Upper Midwest remains in the grip of record-setting heat. Just to our south -- Iowa -- a flooding disaster is unfolding. In Russia, drought and heat has spawned massive wildfires. There's flooding in Pakistan. What's going on here? Is it just the natural cycle, or are we seeing the effects of a changing climate?

Continue reading "The myth of climate change myths"

Bees vs. mosquitoes

Posted at 3:29 PM on August 11, 2010 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Science

A line in a news release about mosquito spraying in Grand Forks tomorrow evening jumped off the page of the inbox this morning:

Continue reading "Bees vs. mosquitoes"

What are mosquitoes for?

Posted at 2:39 PM on July 28, 2010 by Jon Gordon (2 Comments)
Filed under: Science

A world without mosquitoes? Nature posits that wiping out the Minnesota state bird might not have horrible consequences for our fragile ecosystem as most biologists would maintain.

...in many cases, scientists acknowledge that the ecological scar left by a missing mosquito would heal quickly as the niche was filled by other organisms. Life would continue as before -- or even better. When it comes to the major disease vectors, "it's difficult to see what the downside would be to removal, except for collateral damage", says insect ecologist Steven Juliano, of Illinois State University in Normal. A world without mosquitoes would be "more secure for us", says medical entomologist Carlos Brisola Marcondes from the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil.

News Cut talked with PZ Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris and proprietor of the science blog Pharyngula, about the Nature article.

Myers: It was a bizarre article because, for one thing, we simply cannot do this. We do not have the capability to eradicate entire species of insects, intentionally at least. And then, mosquitoes have tremendous impact all across the ecological spectrum. Wiping them out would have all kinds of unintended consequences.

@NewsCut: So in what ways are mosquitoes helpful?

Myers: Fishing for one, which I guess is kind of important in Minnesota, right? This is what fish live on, is aquatic insect larvae for the most part. We'd like to keep that going. They transfer materials from terrestrial species to aquatic forms, so they're essentially shuttling protein, chemical compounds, etc., across the ecosystem. In the most unpleasant way possible of course. But it's still a valuable function. In the arctic, caribou are being bled by clouds of mosquitoes sucking up 300 ml of blood from each animal every single day. Which is impressive. The caribou are are suffering but they're also taking their blood and transferring it to these insects and spreading it around to the ecosystem.

@NewsCut: If we were able to make mosquitoes go away, what happens?

Myers: We don't know what the consequences would be. One possibility is that other species would step in and fill the same role. And maybe these species would be better for us because they wouldn't be transferring diseases like malaria. On the other hand we don't know what species it would be, so it could be something genuinely awful. In Minnesota we have something called no-see-ems. What if they or biting black flies stepped in?

@NewsCut: So what can we do, short of wiping out mosquitoes?

Myers: There's been some interesting work in producing mosquitoes that don't carry the malaria parasite, and intentionally going out at replacing disease-spreading mosquitoes with this modified variant that doesn't carry malaria. That sounds a lot more productive to me.

@NewsCut: How much tampering can a species like this tolerate before we get unintended consequences?

Myers: What this may mean is you get mosquitoes that don't don't spread malaria but you get healthier mosquitoes that do more biting. There's nothing we can do that wouldn't have unintended consequences. Biology is a tangled snarl. Everything you do affects everything else.

@NewsCut: As a biologist, when you get attacked by a cloud of mosquitoes, do you think about them differently than the rest of us?

Myers: No. I hate them. They're a real pain in the butt.

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Record temps in Lake Superior near

Posted at 11:11 AM on July 19, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

If it's true that Lake Superior is a "canary in a coal mine," as some scientists suggested last week, perhaps it's time to shop for a new pet.

The New York Times today reports on the warming of Lake Superior

Total ice cover on the lake has shrunk by about 20 percent over the past 37 years, he said. Though the change has made for longer, warmer summers, it's a problem because ice is crucial for keeping water from evaporating and it regulates the natural cycles of the Great Lakes.

But the warming shows no sign of abatement. This year, the waters in Lake Superior are on track to reach -- and potentially exceed -- the lake's record-high temperatures of 68 degrees Fahrenheit, which occurred in 1998.

The lake's temperature could reach a record high by this time next month.

In other canary news, June was the hottest month on record, the fourth month in a row of record warmth.

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Climate change and the bunker mentality

Posted at 12:23 PM on July 10, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

The head of an organization focusing on cleaning up a developing environmental catastrophe is urging its workers not to talk to the media. BP? Nope. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The whistle is being blown by a member of the so-called Working Group II, Edward R. Carr, on his blog, "Open the Echo Chamber."

Part of the problem for the IPCC is a perceived lack of openness - that something is going on behind closed doors that cannot be trusted. This, in the end, was at the heart of the "climategate" circus - a recent report has exonerated all of the scientists implicated, but some people still believe that there is something sinister going on.

There is an easy solution to this - complete openness. I've worked on global assessments before, and the science is sound. I've been quite critical of the way in which one of the reports was framed (download "Applying DPSIR to Sustainable Development" here), but the science is solid and the conclusions are more refined than ever. Showing people how this process works, and what we do exactly, would go a long way toward getting everyone on the same page with regard to global environmental change, and how we might best address it.

Carr has posted a letter he received yesterday from the head of the group:

"I would also like to emphasize that enhanced media interest in the work of the IPCC would probably subject you to queries about your work and the IPCC. My sincere advice would be that you keep a distance from the media and should any questions be asked about the Working Group with which you are associated, please direct such media questions to the Co-chairs of your Working Group and for any questions regarding the IPCC to the secretariat of the IPCC."

Perhaps the panel will recommend bunkers as a solution to climate change.

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Music of the sun

Posted at 4:35 PM on June 21, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science

What would it sound like if you could stand in the corona of the sun? It would sound like this, according to scientists at the University of Sheffield in the UK:

"The harmonious sounds are caused by the movement of giant magnetic loops in the solar corona - the outermost, mysterious, and least understood layer of the Sun's atmosphere. Most importantly, the team studied how this sound is decaying, giving an unprecedented insight into the physics of the solar corona," according to a release from the university's Project Sunshine.

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Flyover country is for flying over

Posted at 1:32 PM on June 1, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

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A fish-eye view of an earthquake

Posted at 1:58 PM on April 28, 2010 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Science

What does an earthquake look like if you're a small fish in a big pond?

It looks like this:

The U.S. Geological Survey has just released this video of the April 4th earthquake's effect on the Devils Hole Pupfish, which lives on a ledge of a pool in the Mojave Desert.

More details here.

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A star is born

Posted at 2:51 PM on April 23, 2010 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Science

NASA today released this new image from a star-birthing region of the universe.

This new Hubble photo is but a small portion of one of the largest seen star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula. Towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula. Reminiscent of Hubble's classic image of the Eagle Nebula dubbed the 'Pillars of Creation' this image is even more striking in appearance. Captured here are the top of a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and the dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being pushed apart from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks like arrows sailing through the air.

Suddenly, it doesn't seem that significant whom the Vikings choose in the NFL draft. (Click for a larger image)

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The science of earthquakes

Posted at 12:45 PM on April 19, 2010 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)
Filed under: Science

What causes earthquakes?

"Earth scientists believe that most earthquakes are caused by slow movements inside the Earth that push against the Earth's brittle, relatively thin outer layer, causing the rocks to break suddenly," according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Or women who wear immodest clothing and behave promiscuously.

"Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes," Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi said today. He's a "senior cleric" in Iran.

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Are we 'up' for a meaningful space program?

Posted at 4:24 PM on April 15, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

President Barack Obama outlined his plan for the U.S. space program today, arguing he doesn't want the country "to do the same old thing," and indicating that he wants the country to put a human on Mars.

His comments echoed those of a guest on MPR's Midmorning on Monday, who said the manned space program now consists primarily of "going around in circles."

There's more to a space program, though, than just pointing a spacecraft at an object and hitting "go," as Monday's program pointed out. There's also more to space than just visiting another planet. One guest on the program noted that the idea of "mining" an asteroid for many of the precious minerals we're trying to find on earth is not -- pardon the expression -- pie in the sky.

Indeed, Mr. Obama mentioned that landing on an asteroid could be accomplished by 2025; landing on Mars could happen by 2035.

Then, again, in the '60s, babyboomers were told they could go into space someday and, of course, our time has run out on that dream.

Even in 2000, a Time Magazine article claimed mankind would be on Mars by 2007.

So what's the problem? Simple. We don't know how, as Nancy Atkinson at Universe Today so cleverly explained a few years ago:

"The great thing about Earth," said Manning "is the atmosphere." Returning to Earth and entering the atmosphere at speeds between 7-10 kilometers per second, the space shuttle, Apollo and Soyuz capsules and the proposed Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) will all decelerate to less than Mach 1 at about twenty kilometers above the ground just by skimming through Earth's luxuriously thick atmosphere and using a heat shield. To reach slower speeds needed for landing, either a parachute is deployed, or in the case of the space shuttle, drag and lift allow the remainder of the speed to bleed away.

But Mars' atmosphere is only one per cent as dense as Earth's. For comparison, Mars atmosphere at its thickest is equivalent to Earth's atmosphere at about 35 kilometers above the surface The air is so thin that a heavy vehicle like a CEV will basically plummet to the surface; there's not enough air resistance to slow it down sufficiently. Parachutes can only be opened at speeds less than Mach 2, and a heavy spacecraft on Mars would never go that slow by using just a heat shield. "And there are no parachutes that you could use to slow this vehicle down," said Manning. "That's it. You can't land a CEV on Mars unless you don't mind it being a crater on the surface."

Perhaps one of the reasons President Obama mentioned 2025 and 2035 is because it creates the notion that something we try in this lifetime, will have a payback in this lifetime (See NPR's "Why have a space program at all?"). But increasingly, meaningful exploration in space is going to require the expenditure of money and effort in this lifetime, for a payback in someone else's lifetime.

That's not our strong suit.

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Soichi Noguchi's world

Posted at 11:45 AM on February 25, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

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Fresh Eye on the Radio: Communicating with the near-dead

Posted at 4:47 PM on February 3, 2010 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Fresh Eye on the Radio (with Mary Lucia), Science

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The end of the 'space race'?

Posted at 3:44 PM on January 27, 2010 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Are we done with space exploration?

Discover blog reports on rumors that the Obama administration is cutting funding for two rocket systems, eliminating any possibility of going to the moon again, as a step toward an eventual mission to Mars.

This is in addition to the end of the Shuttle program, which has forced American astronauts to hitch rides to the International Space Station from Russia.

Says the Discover blog:

And finally, space exploration is important. I find it difficult to believe Obama doesn't know that; he's proven himself to be both pro-science and understanding of the inspiration it provides. And the rumor is that this year's budget for NASA actually goes up a little bit, it just cuts Constellation and Ares. But if this really does gut NASA's future, cutting way back on what they can do, then it's a mistake.

Is it important? For clues, we might look to the United States' fastest gaining global competitors. India today announced its first manned space mission. It also plans a mission to Mars in 2030.

Maybe, that's not "our thing" anymore because of the sacrifice that exploring deeper space would take. "We estimated our odds (then) of not coming back at 1-in-70. Those are not very good odds," former astronaut John Grunsfeld of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore tells PhysOrg.com. "It only gets worse as you go further out."

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A journey to the Big Bang

Posted at 1:39 PM on January 6, 2010 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Let's see, how can we put Bert Blyleven failing to make the Baseball Hall of Fame in proper perspective?

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The war against asteroids

Posted at 3:17 PM on December 30, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

I pointed out on Monday that statistics expert Nate Silver has calculated that your odds of being on a flight that is the target of a terrorist in the last 10 years is 10,408,947 to 1. You could board 20 flights a year, and still have better odds of being struck by lightning.

Fine. You want an even better bet?

How about something like this hitting us?

It's the Apophis asteroid and it's heading our way. NASA calculates that there's a 1 in 45,000 chance the asteroid will hit Earth on April 13, 2036. Another calculation puts it at 1 in 233,000. Whatever. We're doomed in the long run.

That doesn't concern you? Tell it to Russia. Today, Russia announced it's beginning a project to -- in the understated words of Pravda -- "save Earth." The head of the Russian space federation said his organization is developing plans for a spacecraft to intercept the asteroid.

Depending on what happens when the next measurements are taken in 2013, scientists think it will pass within 49,000 miles of Earth.

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The mystery of the vanishing seals

Posted at 2:46 PM on December 29, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Science

If you've ever been to San Francisco, you probably realize why this image is so haunting. It's the "world famous Pier 39," where sea lions have been a tourist attraction since they arrived after the big earthquake in 1989.

Suddenly -- and no one seems to know why -- they're gone.

Here's a live Web cam if you'd like to watch for their return.

Environmental experts say the weather in San Francisco has been normal, and there seems to be no change in the bay itself.

(h/t: Andy Carvin, NPR)

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To Pluto: Are we there yet?

Posted at 2:39 PM on December 29, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

The Obama administration is considering the future of the U.S. space program, a difficult concept for many politicians to grasp because there's little chance of an immediate payoff.

Take the New Horizons Pluto probe, which was launched on January 19, 2006.

That was nine months before then Sen. Barack Obama announced his intentions to run for president. It will reach its destination -- Pluto -- on January 19, 2006 July 14, 2015. If he's re-elected, it would be the beginning of his last two years in office.

Today -- December 29, 2009 -- the probe reached the point at which it's now closer to Pluto than Earth.

But it's not "halfway there" yet, Discover.com notes:

New Horizons is halfway in distance to Pluto, but the mission timeline halfway point isn't until October 16, 2010 (if I've done the math correctly). The probe was launched at high speed, slowed down due to the Earth's and Sun's gravity, picked up a kick from Jupiter in early 2007, and has been slowing ever since. Since it was moving faster before, it reached the distance halfway point before the schedule halfway point.

New Horizons is now 16.37 AU - 2.449 billion km, or 1.522 billion miles -- from home. But maybe now, home is no longer Earth. Once it crossed that line today, home became deep space. Even Pluto and its moons Charon, Nix, and Hydra are only milestones for it. It won't be stopping when it gets there; New Horizons will sail on by, continuing into deep space. It'll become one of several other spacecraft we've sent out of the solar system itself, set to wander interstellar space forever.

When the probe was launched, of course, Pluto was still considered a planet.

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A dying sun

Posted at 1:54 PM on December 15, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

This being the season of little sunlight in Minnesota, I find myself thinking deep thoughts like, "What will it be like when the sun burns out?".

Apparently, it will be like this:

It's a sun about 550 light years from here and it's burning out. It's growing larger and pulsating -- it could swallow everything from here to Mars, according to Science Daily -- and it's flickering like a light bulb about to burn out.

So we'll apparently have plenty of warning that the end is near.

But not to worry! The odds of it happening anytime soon are almost as staggering as ABBA being enshrined in the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame.

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Copenhagen's footprint

Posted at 12:38 PM on December 15, 2009 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Who's generating the biggest increase in carbon this week? The people who have flocked to Copenhagen to protest the world's carbon footprint and its effect on climate change, according to a report.

The report was commissioned by Denmark:

Deloitte included in their calculations emissions caused by accommodation, local transport, electricity and heating of the conference center, paper, security, transport of goods and services as well as energy used by computers, kitchens, photocopiers and printers inside the conference center.

Accommodation accounted for 23 percent of the summit's greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen, while transport caused 7 percent. Seventy percent came from activities inside the conference center, she said.

Dozens of people from Minnesota have flocked to Copenhagen. Terrapass' carbon footprint calculator estimates that a non-stop roundtrip airline flight from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Copenhagen created 3,777 pounds of CO2.

How much would it take to offset that?

-- You'd have to install 35 lightbulbs in place of incandescent bulbs.
-- Someone with a 15 mpg car would have to drive a 30 mpg car for six months.
-- Someone would have to replace an old water heater with a newer, more energy efficient model. You could also reduce your water temperature by 10 degrees for the next four years.
-- You'd have to drop your home by 5 degrees for the next year.
-- If you normally drive 75, you'd have to drive 65 for the next two years.
-- Nine people who are not now car-pooling, would have to do so for the next year.

Meanwhile, a Brown University professor is trying to figure out where all the money goes that's given to poor countries by rich countries to help them adapt to climate change.
He's developing a database to track it all, the Boston Globe reports:

Perhaps you would think, with the billions of dollars in aid flowing back and forth between nations for generations, that there would be a highly evolved system to make sure the money gets where it's supposed to go. No. Roberts says there are many reasons, including the reality that funding can be expensive to track and that some governments do not want it to be tracked. Regardless of why, he said, the result is enormous sums of money are swallowed up by consultants, middlemen, and corruption long before the money gets even part of the distance it needs to go.

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Spinning the marijuana story

Posted at 3:39 PM on December 14, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Politics, Science

If you didn't know any better, you'd think marijuana is making a big comeback among teenagers.

Study shows pot more popular among teenagers, the headline on the Associated Press story (on the MPR Web site) says today. The story claims "smoking marijuana is becoming even more popular among U.S. teens." It cites a news conference held by the National Institutes of Health, based on research from the University of Michigan.

But is marijuana use really on the upswing? It depends on whom you listen to.

According to the NIH news release, "no."

Marijuana use across the three grades has shown a consistent downward trend since the mid- 1990s, however, the decline has stalled, with rates at the same level as five years ago. In the 2009 survey, reported past year marijuana use was about the same as the previous year: 32.8 percent of 12th graders, 26.7 percent of 10th graders, and 11.8 percent of eighth graders. However, marijuana use is still down significantly from its peak in the mid-late 1990s.

But the University of Michigan news release suggests otherwise:

Marijuana use among American adolescents has increased gradually over the past two years (three years among 12th-graders) following years of declining use, according to the latest Monitoring the Future study, which has tracked drug use among U.S. teens since 1975.

Two agencies, same data, two different headlines. Which is it?

It's all in how you characterize things. The "increase" cited by the Michigan researchers was only for two or three years, and it averaged a 2-3 percent increase over that time. That may be statistically insignificant, so the NIH compared the current results to five years ago and found a less troubling trend.

Both, however, acknowledge that marijuana use by teenagers is well off the highs -- so to speak -- of the '90s.

Keep in mind that these sorts of studies can be 'spun" to accomplish political goals. Take the AP story, for example:

"The increase of teens smoking pot is partly because the national debate over medical use of marijuana can make the drugs seem safer to teenagers, researchers said."

Researchers said that? What researchers? The University of Michigan news release mentions nothing about the effects of the debate over medical marijuana. And the data it provides indicates no such research took place.

Today, Dr. Lloyd Johnston, the principal researcher for the study, told me in an e-mail:

The issue you mention came up in answer to a question at today's press conference. We know that there has been a decline in the degree to which young people see marijuana use as involving a risk to the user, what we have called "perceived risk". I was asked why I thought the change in this belief has taken place. I said that one possible explanation is that the widespread debate about the desirability of medical marijuana use may well have led some teens to think that is is not as dangerous as their predecessors did, since it is now being portrayed as a medicine. It's a conjecture on my part.

That's something to keep in mind if debate over the issue resurfaces when the Minnesota Legislature resumes its work in February. Medical marijuana has been an issue in the last several sessions and last spring Gov. Tim Pawlenty vetoed a measure that would have allowed it in Minnesota.

The other thing to keep in mind is we're not necessarily talking about the same kids here. Since the surveys don't appear to track the same kids from year to year (I couldn't find the actual methodology), we don't really know whether the individual opinions and attitudes toward pot have changed. We only know that the kids surveyed last year may have had different attitudes than the kids who were surveyed this year. That doesn't mean that individual attitudes have shifted.

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Is the secret to the universe hiding in Minnesota?

Posted at 12:47 PM on December 10, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Is it possible that Minnesota is about to become famous for something other than a really big mall and pilots who forget to land their jet?

The science world is buzzing with rumors that deep below the crust in northern Minnesota, dark matter has been found. Dark matter is believed to make up 90 percent of the universe. The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search has been underway in the Soudan mine to try to figure out how the universe was (and is) created.

Science bloggers have seized upon a report that the discovery will be announced next week.

That gives you a few days to bone up on the subject.

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Shuttle landings made easy

Posted at 9:40 AM on November 27, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Aviation, Science

Whether it's a money-sucking waste of time or a necessary vehicle to lay the groundwork for space exploration is a debate that will continue until the U.S. gets out of the space shuttle business five flights from now.

But for pure technological artistry, nothing beats today's landing of the space shuttle on a perfect morning in Florida, as witnessed via NASA's TV feed.

It's all the more remarkable when you consider that this happened only a little more than 100 years ago.

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Exploring us exploring the moon

Posted at 3:27 PM on October 30, 2009 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Science

The The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter may have solved one mystery.

Does this flag still "wave"?

It's the flag planted by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972, the last manned mission to the moon.

The "LRO" has been exploring the site and has determined that the flag -- as well as the lunar rover tracks -- are still there. (Click following image for larger view)

The Apollo landing sites are the only entirely undisturbed historic sites of man's quest to explore, what with there being no air and all. Or are they?

Discover Magazine notes:

Back to the flag, there's a curious thing about it. The flag itself was nylon, and that tends to get brittle when exposed to ultraviolet light -- which is relentless and plentiful on the airless Moon (the thermal pounding it's taken between day and night can't help either). I've often wondered what we'll find when we go back to the Apollo landing sites; I half-expect to see red, white, and blue powder off to one side of the flagpole, and no actual flag left on the pole. This picture, as frakkin' amazing as it is, is still just barely too low resolution to be able to say for sure, I think. The shadow is only a pixel or so in size and so it's hard to say what's what.

There's an extensive online collection of the Apollo 17 landing site.

Do these latest pictures also prove that man really did walk on the moon?

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What killed the bees?

Posted at 12:03 PM on October 19, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Don't be saying you're not interested in what has caused the huge die-off of the bee population. A third of the total human diet depends on the critters.

Now, then: Discover Magazine reports we now know what has caused a third of all commercial honeybees to die: Commercial bee agriculture. Bee inbreeding, basically. They once were a hardy sort, with the queen adapting to the variety of male drones with which she would breed.

All that began to change in the early 20th century, when farms and orchards started enlisting honeybees to pollinate their crops. Bees that were adapted to harvesting pollen from a variety of plants suddenly spent a month or more at a time surrounded by nothing but almond or apple trees. Farmers eager to increase their crop yields turned to commercial beekeepers, who offered up massive wooden hives stocked with queen bees genetically selected to produce colonies of good pollinators. These breeding practices slashed the genetic variety that helps any species survive infections, chemicals, and other unforeseen threats.

Ironically, the cause turns out to be the very sort of person who raised the alarm in the first place.

Bee experts are trying to adopt practices that lead bees to lead a more natural life. "Bees have been doing this for 80 million years," one says. "All we have to do is get out of their way."

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Hubble's eyesight

Posted at 12:28 PM on September 9, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science

NASA today released the first images taken by the Hubble space telescope since a repair mission repaired its lens a few months ago.

A nebula around a dying star, a clash among members of a galactic grouping, the crowded core of Omega Centauri, and the birth of a star in the Carina Nebula are the -- pardon the pun -- stars of the release. Click on the image for a better view.

The blog at Discover Magazine does a good job of dissecting what each of these photos is. And when's the last time you used quintillion in a sentence?

Of course, the space telescope actually looks back in time. The telescope's current mission is to look back in time to when the universe was less than 500 million years old. If it works, we'll be able, perhaps, to figure out what to do with a new photograph that shows 13 billion years ago.

It's difficult to think of such things and not get all philosophical on the possible. For example, if we can figure out how to look back in time 13 billion years, what can't we do?

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The moss solution

Posted at 9:48 AM on August 30, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Here's a pretty interesting video from St. Paul's channel on YouTube. Moss as a substitute for chlorine:

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Your cellphone's prying eyes

Posted at 4:09 PM on August 17, 2009 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Maybe it's not Big Brother we should be worrying about; maybe it's the little friend in your pocket.

A five year study out today finds "the gadgets we carry day-to-day can accurately record the nuances of our relationships. Using cellphones for social science research could replace interviews, which are laborious and sometimes unreliable, to find out about people's lives."

"There are very serious privacy issues," says Gueorgi Kossinets, who researched online social networks at Cornell University.

Or maybe there's a public benefit to the data your cellphone reveals about you and the people you know. Here, for example, is what happened the night the Red Sox won the first of their two (tainted) World Series championships in recent years:

"Suddenly all our subjects became unpredictable; they all flooded into downtown Boston to a rally in the centre of the city.

"City planners approached us because they wanted to know how people were using urban infrastructure, to know when the people left the rally, how many walked across the bridge and how many took the subway, how many biked or took the bus.

"We can give them some real insight with the idea of helping them build a better city that reflects people's actual behaviour."

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The future of paper

Posted at 1:29 PM on August 17, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Remember when the computer was to usher in the "paperless society?" The Kindle is supposed to usher in a bookless -- hence, paperless -- world. Newspapers are going belly up.

Mo Rocca, the panelist on NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, reports the use of paper doubled after the prediction of the paperless society. It's part of the debut of an online show, The Tomorrow Show.

Watch CBS Videos Online

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Science!

Posted at 3:15 PM on August 11, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Last month, MPR's Midmorning tackled the question of why Americans are comparatively down on the American scientific community. Just 17% of the public thinks that U.S. scientific achievements rate as the best in the world, according to a Pew Research study.

"Fully 85% see the public's lack of scientific knowledge as a major problem for science, and nearly half (49%) fault the public for having unrealistic expectations about the speed of scientific achievements."

Clearly, we're not blowing up enough stuff.

More science here.

(h/t: Open Culture)

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Exit the butterfly

Posted at 4:12 PM on August 10, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science

First bees. Now butterflies.

A Minot State University professor says butterflies are declining.

"Everybody I've talked to says the numbers are down dramatically," Ron Royer told the Associated Press, an observation confirmed in the News Cut Perennial Garden.

About six butterfly species found in North Dakota have been considered candidates for the endangered species list.

The Dakota Skipper, for one, may be on its way out. The Powesheik Skipperling probably is already gone for good, despite a few sightings.

It was too cold this year, Royer says. Nature's cycles are out of whack and the dirty little secret of nature is that everything has to go just right for species to survive. The cold weather delayed plants that butterflies depend on. Bugs on land and water showed up too late this year, so there's a shortage of toads, frogs and salamanders, too.

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At the speed of science

Posted at 5:34 PM on July 14, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

This is one of those stories that makes you wonder what the world would be like if everything moved at the speed of science. More so than any other facet of our lives, hope doesn't seem pointless when the subject is science.

The heart can heal itself, researchers have written in a British medical journal.

Ten years ago, doctors transplanted a heart into Hannah Clark, but didn't remove her faulty one because "she also needed a lung transplant, and her doctors wanted to avoid doing two risky transplants at once," Discover Magazine reports.

After 10 years with two blood pumping organs, and cancer caused by rejection drugs she had to take, doctors discovered her old heart is new again.

Says the Associated Press:

Miguel Uva, chairman of the European Society of Cardiology's group on cardiovascular surgery, called Clark's case "a miracle," adding that it was rare for patients' hearts to simply get better on their own.

"We have no way of knowing which patients will recover and which ones won't," Uva said.

But you know some day they will.

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In one ear...

Posted at 11:22 AM on June 24, 2009 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Science

If somebody ripped off your copy of Naturwissenschafte, let me help you out with the top story:

Hemispheric asymmetries and side biases have been studied in humans mostly in laboratory settings, and evidence obtained in naturalistic settings is scarce. We here report the results of three studies on human ear preference observed during social interactions in noisy environments, i.e., discotheques. In the first study, a spontaneous right-ear preference was observed during linguistic exchange between interacting individuals. This lateral bias was confirmed in a quasi-experimental study in which a confederate experimenter evoked an ear-orienting response in bystanders, under the pretext of approaching them with a whispered request. In the last study, subjects showed a greater proneness to meet an experimenter's request when it was directly addressed to the right rather than the left ear. Our findings are in agreement both with laboratory studies on hemispheric lateralization for language and approach/avoidance behavior in humans and with animal research. The present work is one of the few studies demonstrating the natural expression of hemispheric asymmetries, showing their effect in everyday human behavior.

Sorry. I spilled coffee on the News Cut AcademicSpeak-O-Meter this morning and it hasn't been working quite right. Let's try this again.

You're in a loud and sweaty Italian dance club when a woman approaches you. To be heard over the techno, she leans in close and yells into your ear, "Hai una sigaretta?"

If she spoke into your right ear, you would be twice as likely to give her a cigarette than if she asked by your left ear, according to a new study that employed this methodology in the clubs of Pescara, Italy. Of 88 clubbers who were approached on the right, 34 let the researcher bum a smoke, compared with 17 of 88 whom she approached on the left.

You have to love science. This is the latest study to show that the brain translates things uttered into your right ear differently than your left ear.

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Imponderables: Fingerprints

Posted at 12:08 PM on June 12, 2009 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Among the day's unanswerable questions -- why can't the Twins win on the road or when will the Minnesota Senate race end, for example -- we add one more this afternoon: Why do we have fingerprints?

Up until now, it's been theorized that fingerprints exist to create friction when we grab things.

Scientists today announced the theory is invalid, according to the BBC.

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Bird sense

Posted at 12:35 PM on June 3, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Great discoveries in science (continued).

Scientists at Aberystwyth University in the UK "have found that male great tits in 20 UK towns and cities sang at a higher pitch to be heard above the man-made noise."

According to the BBC, researchers have also found that the city birds don't understand rural birds very well.

Fill in your own joke.

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Grilled

Posted at 1:40 PM on April 21, 2009 by Than Tibbetts (4 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Science

MPR's Lorna Benson reports on a new University of Minnesota study that shows eating charred or burned meat may increase your risk of pancreatic cancer by 60 percent.

Nearly four years ago (recognize the byline?) the same team showed an association between people who ate burned meats and a higher rate of pancreatic cancer, which is among the hardest cancers to detect and diagnose early and, as a result, treat successfully.

Now before we haul the Weber off to the dumpster and bang down the doors of the Food and Drug Administration with demands to start regulating barbecues, there's a simple solution for all you carnivorous News Cut readers.

As U of M researcher Kristin Anderson told me in 2005, "Just use common sense; slow down."

Which, by the way, are the two cardinal rules of barbecuing to begin with.

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Itching and scratching

Posted at 3:48 PM on April 6, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science

University of Minnesota researchers are on a bit of a roll. Last month, they got some international attention with research showing an inexpensive and common substance could halt the spread of the HIV virus in monkeys.

Today neuroscientists at the U have tackled a more common problem : the itch. They report both the itch and the relief from scratching comes from cells in the spinal cord, rather than an impulse in the brain.

And, again, monkeys are at the heart of the research, the New York Times reports:

In the study, led a postdoctoral student, Steve Davidson, researchers isolated in monkeys cellular connections that run from the surface of the foot to the spinal cord and then to the thalamus, a clearinghouse for sensations in the brain, down through the spinal cord to the surface of the foot. They induced the sensation by injecting histamines under the skin.

The scientists took single-cell recordings in an area at the base of the spinal cord, in the lower back, in so-called spinothalamic neurons. These cells are sprinkled throughout the spinal cord. Most are sensitive to pain, and some to both pain and itch. The cells apparently detected the injection and began firing immediately afterward. And when the researchers scratched the itchy skin on the monkeys' feet, it quieted the cells' activity.

Stories about the findings also reveal this nugget: Scientists don't call it "itching." It's known as pruritus.

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One big step for a Minnesotan

Posted at 7:54 PM on March 15, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

It's worth noting that the space shuttle, which launched Sunday night, is under the control of a Minnesota lad.

"It's always the thing that you think you have down, that's routine, that comes back and bites you," Paul Dye, lead shuttle flight director said, according to the blog The Future of Things. "It'll either be routine or it will be heart stopping, like always."

Dye is a Roseville native, whom I profiled a few years ago. We became acquainted because we've both built -- or are building -- our own airplanes.

His family still lives in the area.

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Why are we good?

Posted at 9:34 AM on March 14, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Economy, Science

The Boston Globe jumps on the theme we discussed the other night (and was broadcast on Midday on MPR on Friday): the job outlook for graduating college seniors.

It found the same thing I picked up (and wrote about) during the News Cut on Campus tour: that more students are turning toward working for the social good.

Fourteen percent of this year's senior class at Harvard applied to Teach for America, a nonprofit organization that sends graduates to work in low-income urban and rural public schools. The proportion was 9 percent last year.

"There's always that push to make money and be comfortable, but the financial crisis made me think that there's a lot more in life than going to get that corporate job," said Matthew Clair, a Harvard government major who will spend the next two years teaching at an Atlanta primary school. "It gave me a good excuse to take some more time off to do what I'm really passionate about."

But the situation brings up another question: To what extent are graduating seniors heading off in this direction out of a sense of altruism, and to what extent are they heading in that direction because that's where the jobs are?

All of which brings me today to this week's News Cut pick of the week of all the offerings that came out of your radio. It's Thursday morning's Midmorning appearance by Dacher Keltner, the professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, and the author of "Born to be Good." Pay no attention to the misnamed headline on the page ("The science of emotional survival") because the heart of the show (zip ahead about halfway through the audio), was the discussion of altruism, and why we're good (mostly).
It even took on last week's appearance by Richard Dawkins.

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What did the Big Bang look like?

Posted at 9:53 AM on February 12, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science

What did the Big Bang look like?

This...

Scientists at Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology, have recreated the "Cosmic Dawn" - the formation of the first big galaxies in the Universe.

"We are effectively looking back in time and by doing so we hope to learn how galaxies like our own were made and to understand more about dark matter. The presence of dark matter is the key to building galaxies - without dark matter we wouldn't be here today," Alvaro Orsi, a research postgraduate in Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology tells Science Daily

The green depicts "dark matter", which is believed to make up 80 percent of the universe.

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The Greenwash Brigade

Posted at 1:13 PM on February 3, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science

I'm not sure how I missed the existence of The Greenwash Brigade, seeing as how it's happening -- more or less -- within earshot of the News Cut World Headquarters. American Public Media's Marketplace has assembled a team of "environmental professionals" to grade the "eco-friendly claims of corporations."

Janne K. Flisrand, the program coordinator for Minnesota Green Communities, spotted a troubling corporate effort. Sharp Electronics employees are volunteering to teach 5th graders about climate change and renewable power, she writes, and has focused it on solar power.

That's not necessarily bad, depending on the larger context. A lesson focused on solar power is appropriate IF the class had already learned about conservation, AND there are classes dedicated to other renewable energy sources. As a stand-alone, it's simply self-interested marketing.

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The space race

Posted at 10:50 AM on February 3, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Sputnik was a little tin can that beeped. "The public feared that the Soviets' ability to launch satellites also translated into the capability to launch ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear weapons from Europe to the U.S.," NASA's history archive says.

"Omid," launched today by Iran, can do a little more. It's a data processing and television transmission satellite, although concerns of dual-use technology and the potential for the combination rocket to be converted to carry a warhead will likely raise fears around the world," an Indian news site says today.

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The LED solution?

Posted at 5:05 PM on January 30, 2009 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)
Filed under: Energy, Science

The Brits are further ahead of us in the development of the next generation of light bulbs. They've banned the sale of incandescent light bulbs, and they're already -- reportedly -- moving past the newfangled CFL bulbs.

The next step is LEDs. I bought one of those LED worklights a year or so ago and it's heading for the trash. The light, while cheaper to produce and relatively bright, is too narrowly targeted as a work light and certainly as a replacement for home light bulbs.

So I was interested today when the BBC reported that a professor has developed an LED light bulb that will last for 60 years and be appropriate for home use. Alas, it was a most disappointing presentation.

It's easier to develop an eco-friendly light bulb than it is to develop an eco-friendly light-bulb that works well.

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The curse of memory

Posted at 11:44 AM on January 27, 2009 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Science

This morning's MPR Midmorning's discussion about forgetting and memory was fascinating in a this-is-the-day-I-figure-out-time-travel sort of way.

You have to give host Kerri Miller credit for pluckiness and persistence because it started out the way too many math classes started when I was in school: Too hard. Checking out.

Early on, one of the guests Dr. Gayatri Devi, director of New York Memory and Healthy Aging Services, tried to differentiate between forgetting and memory, when Kerri asked why we're able to consciously remember something, but we can't consciously forget something?

"Forgetting has to occur constantly and if we had to consciously remember what we forget, we would not be able to function. It would overwhelm our mental capacity."

Like, umm, now.

But James McGaugh, a neuroscientist and founding director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California-Irvine, took another tack in explaining why the brain forgets things. Otherwise, it would be a curse, as in the case of Jill Price.

"She's a prisoner of her memories," McGaugh acknowledged. "She can remember her 13th birthday but when she remembers it, she'll also remember that someone there insulted her... She is able to call up all sorts of good information, in doing so she unearths a lot of unpleasant things."

Give the show a listen:

If you could remember everything, would you want to?

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Flyable cars

Posted at 3:10 PM on January 22, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Regular News Cut reader Brian Hanf sends me news that, in his words, "My flying car is coming."

His link reveals that a Boston-area company is planning flight tests of a two-seater airplane that doubles as a car.

Either way, it boils down to this: You sit down behind the steering wheel, drive to the runway, unfold two wings and take off. You can fly 500 miles on a tank of gas -- regular unleaded -- and when you land, you simply fold up the wings and drive where you want to go. At the end of the day, you fly back, drive home and park inside your garage.

It's an idea that many have considered but nobody has yet perfected. Judging by an article last May, this project is already behind schedule.

Terrafugia wants to deliver the first Transition to a customer by the end of 2009 and go into large-scale production by 2012. If you were just building a new type of plane or a new type of car, that schedule would be ambitious enough. But the Transition is both--and if, as the company intends, pilots are to land the vehicle on an airport runway, fold up the wings, and tool right out onto public highways, then this hybrid-of-a-different-color will have to meet federal standards for both aviation safety and highway safety.

Of course, the only thing worse than the new-car market right now is the small-airplane market, but putting that aside, what other challenges does this idea face? The skies are one of the few areas where there's not gridlock, and the government seems to have no plan at all for flying cars.

>>The developer points to the new "light sport aircraft" rules as a way to get FAA approval for his machine. But planes licensed under those rules can't fly at night.

>> It's only a matter of time before some neighbor decides the cul de sac would be a great thing to use as a runway.

>> Shouldn't Minnesotans learn how to merge on the highway first?

A lot of the focus of these stories is on the airplane-side of the equation. But it's the car side that's notoriously undependable. On your way home from work tonight, count the number of cars broken down by the side of the road.

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Salmonella outbreak started months ago

Posted at 9:01 AM on January 9, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Yesterday, the Centers for Disease Control confirmed to the Associated Press that, indeed, a salmonella outbreak is racing across the country, puzzling health officials over its source. It sounds like something that just happened, doesn't it? But, no, it started in September, and most of the people got sick after December 1.

After the Associated Press story from the Centers for Disease Control hit the Internet, the Minnesota Department of Public Health confirmed that 30 people in Minnesota have gotten sick from salmonella and one 70-year-old woman with other underlying health conditions has died.

Health officials across the country are scrambling to talk to people who've been affected, hoping to be able to connect the victims to a common source .

But at least in Massachusetts, health officials have been slow on the uptake. One 7-year-old girl was affected just before Thanksgiving, spent 4 days in the hospital, and her mother is upset that health officials still have not contacted the family.

Presumably, the states have known about the outbreak, but until the Associated Press story, there was no public announcement of it. Anywhere. As of this morning, there is still nothing on the Minnesota Department of Public Health Web site about the outbreak, although there is valuable information there .

"It is often difficult to identify sources of foodborne outbreaks. People may not remember the foods they recently ate and may not be aware of all of the ingredients in food. That's what makes these types of investigations very difficult," according to CDC spokesman David Daigle.

Says the CDC's update:

"In outbreaks like this one, identification of the contaminated product requires conducting detailed standardized interviews with persons who were ill and with non-ill members of the public ("controls") to compare foods they recently ate and other exposures," the CDC's update says. "Using statistical methods, the contaminated item is identified as one to which significantly more ill persons than controls were exposed. ... The investigation is labor intensive and typically takes weeks. It is not always successful."

Scientific American says there may be good reason why news of an outbreak that started last fall is just now being made public.

The agency's disease trackers, who were criticized for taking three months to trace another large salmonella outbreak last spring to Mexican Serrano peppers, haven't determined the latest outbreak's origin. They mistakenly blamed tomatoes for last year's scourge, costing growers $100 million in sales.

Meanwhile, the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy says an initial suggestion that chicken may be a cause is not correct:

An online newspaper report yesterday that said the CDC had activated its emergency network to investigate the outbreak was incorrect, CDC spokeswoman Lola Russell told CIDRAP News today. She also said a report that chicken was suspected as the source of the outbreak was wrong.

"We're not in emergency status with this," Russell said. As for the source, she added, "We don't know what it is yet. It would be very premature to indicate that it's chicken or anything else."

The Center's director, former state epidemiologist Mike Osterholm will be on MPR's Midday at 11 to discuss the outbreak.

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What's love got to do with it?

Posted at 3:03 PM on January 7, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Science

An Emory University professor, Larry Young, writes in the journal Nature that love involves a series of neurochemical events that happen in a specific part of the brain.

If true, one will no longer need oysters, chocolates, or even cheap wine and some Barry White to create "a loving mood," as the BBC calls it.

Under Young's theory, scientists, some of whom can't currently get a date, could create chemicals that would make people fall in love with the first person they see, or even refall in love with someone.

"It may actually enhance our ability to form relationships, and so it is a very real possibility that something like oxytocin could be used in conjunction with marital therapies to bring back that spark," he says.

In the future, you may have to take a pill to stay married.

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The power of the pinhole

Posted at 6:39 PM on January 6, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Reader Derek Schille writes, "For whatever reason this screamed news cut to me."

It's a six-month time-lapse image of a bridge, taken with a pinhole camera. The lines are the travels of the sun in relation to the planet.

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One giant leap for biofuels

Posted at 9:17 AM on December 31, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Science

In a slow news week, this should've gotten bigger play.

Fuel from the weed jatropha powered an Air New Zealand jet on a two-hour flight today--the world's second flight of a commercial jet on biofuel. One out of the four Rolls Royce engines on an Air New Zealand Boeing 747-400 burned a 50-50 blend of regular jet fuel and a bio-version made from jatropha.

The flight more than doubled the air time of the first biofuel flight--a 40 minute jaunt between London and Amsterdam in February. The plane climbed to an altitude of 35,000 feet and the engine performed normally, according to chief pilot Capt. David Morgan.

Details are in Scientific American.

Of course there remains a big problem:

Biofuels don't contain the oil necessary to help seals and rings in engines swell. So the lief of an aircraft engine would be reduced. That's a big deal. The GE engine on a 777 could go for as high as $10 million apiece.

This issue is playing out in all forms of aviation, including general aviation. I have this thing sitting in a hangar -- a new airplane engine.

It runs on fully leaded gasoline, which is being phased out. It may be a huge paperweight in a short period of time. These engines can run on auto fuel, but Minnesota's ethanol content will rot the seals and reduce its life.

Researchers are trying to solve problems like this but so far there doesn't appear to be a solution. Most of the small airplanes you see in the air are flying on borrowed time.

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Not ready for prime time

Posted at 1:40 PM on December 30, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Science

The Israeli consulate is holding a "press conference" via Twitter this afternoon in what surely is a first. People post messages with the @israelconsulate address in the message.

The format has a way to go before it becomes valuable, however. Unlike most press conferences, with this one you have to read the answers first and then work your way back to find out the questions.

However, the "answers" so far, make the questions as obvious as the answers are predictable.

Here are some of the major points highlighted so far (with the actual answers):

The longest day

Posted at 7:35 AM on December 29, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Apparently, I don't have enough to worry about. The economy stinks. The Wild look like an expansion team. I don't remember how to drive on dry pavement.

Now this: The earth is slowing down. It's gotten so slow that the Department of Time is going to add a second to 2008, which has already been acting like the drunken relative who didn't know when to leave.

The second will be added on Wednesday at 5:59:59 p.m.

According to the experts, the earth is slowing because of the braking action of tides, snow or the lack of it at the polar ice caps, solar wind, space dust and magnetic storms, although I've always suspected the Foshay Tower was somewhat responsible.

At the present rate, it'll be billions of years before the earth stops rotating -- around the time the Minnesota U.S. Senate recount ends -- and inhabitants of Planet Earth engage in the interstellar version of Wheel of Fortune.

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The final frontier

Posted at 9:29 AM on December 12, 2008 by Than Tibbetts (3 Comments)
Filed under: Politics, Science

Everything about being the incoming administration is tough, and President-elect Barack Obama will have no shortage of tough decisions about science policy.

The Orlando Sentinel reports that NASA is already digging a moat, lifting up the drawbridge and preparing for a siege.

NASA administrator Mike Griffin is not cooperating with President-elect Barack Obama's transition team, is obstructing its efforts to get information and has told its leader that she is "not qualified" to judge his rocket program, the Orlando Sentinel has learned.

...

Griffin's resistance is part of a no-holds-barred effort to preserve the Constellation program, the delayed and over-budget moon rocket that is his signature project.

NASA's budget is small potatoes compared to some recent government programs — at around $17 billion is only about 40 times smaller than the $700 billion Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. But, it sets up an interesting question.

Are the programs worthy scientific endeavors, a critical pseudo-extension of our national security and national pride into the great beyond and a extension of the infrastructure the Obama administration says should be invested in?

Or are they an overindulging slate of geek hubris, a chronically over-budget and poor investment when money would be better spent on more terrestrial matters?

NASA has had its share of successes and failure, and a higher failure rate is probably more tolerable when working at the extreme limits of human exploration and knowledge. And while President Bush laid out his Vision for Space Exploration plan in 2004 with ambitious goals of returning humans to the moon by 2020 and putting people on Mars shortly (in NASA terms) after that, the burden will be on Obama to determine what is a worthy investment and what's a waste of money.

My guess is that greeting the transition team with a mix of confrontation and paranoia isn't going to help your chances in preserving your programs.

Soon after, [Obama space transition team head Lori] Garver and Griffin engaged in what witnesses said was an animated conversation. Some overheard parts of it.

"Mike, I don't understand what the problem is. We are just trying to look under the hood," Garver said.

"If you are looking under the hood, then you are calling me a liar," Griffin replied. "Because it means you don't trust what I say is under the hood."

Aside: If you've ever wondered about the breathtaking scope of the U.S. federal budget, spend your coffee break looking over this massive interactive graphic.

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The conjunction

Posted at 5:53 PM on December 1, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Science

We've got a conjunction up there. Venus, Jupiter and the Moon are all near each other as viewed from terra firma, creating a "frown," as National Geographic puts it. But in the above picture from Kenya, it looks more like a smile.

We haven't done this since the the eclipse months ago (Good grief, it was February! Was it really February? It seems like only recently.) and I probably should've asked earlier today but if you take a picture, send it to me and I'll post it.

Update 7:23 p.m. Just took this from the runway at South St. Paul airport. Lame camera, though. And ignore Flight 837 from wherever.

The conjunction is not only a frown, but appears to be crying, in this picture from Sharon Stiteler. It's actually quite Van Gogh-like.

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Just one more thing to worry about

Posted at 5:38 PM on November 25, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Science

The Current's Mary Lucia and I were chatting a bit ago about what we would do if we learned an asteroid was heading for earth. Today, a conference got underway in Vienna to try to set up a global plan for diverting an asteroid heading for earth's midsection.

Mary said "at least it will be quick." But maybe not. Theoretically, according to experts, it should be possible to determine 15 years ahead of time that an asteroid is heading our way. Fifteen years. In fact, there's one roaming around around out there right now, experts say, that could hit us in 2029 if it goes through a small "keyhole" of space enough to deflect its orbit right into us.

I'll be 75 then, and not terribly concerned, although it may make me rethink the whole "long term" strategy for dealing with the stock market.

Oh, one of Mary's many listeners sent this video in which has nothing to do with asteroids but must've been frightening on its own. It happened in Edmonton last week and was captured by a dashboard camera on a police car. (link fixed)

You have to give credit to a cop who doesn't even slow down while driving toward a fireball from space that sure seemed as if it was heading straight for him.

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From toilet to tap

Posted at 1:02 PM on November 25, 2008 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Science

There are some headlines you just can't ignore.

Like this one from the BBC today.

Nasa jubilant at urine solution

If you haven't been following this closely, NASA is testing a system of providing drinking water to astronauts that is filtered from their urine. And if you have been following this closely, well, don't tell me you haven't been thinking about this because I know you have.

"Not to spoil anything, but I think up here the appropriate words are 'Yippee!'," space station Commander Mike Fincke told mission control early on Tuesday morning.

He supervised work on the malfunctioning water regeneration system - which distils, filters, ionises and oxidises wastewater including urine, perspiration and bath water, into drinkable water.

Nobody's taking a swig of anything yet. The sampled brew will be tested by NASA when the astronauts return. But let's be indelicate here for just a moment in the interest of science. Suppose this thing works, and the thing spits out lovely drinking water in bottles that say "Pluto Springs." What if at some point in the future, it breaks again. How will they know?

This concept is not limited to space. More and more communities are considering tapping their sewage treatment plants as a source of drinking water.

In California, a plant is already working, as described by the New York Times in an August article:

When you flush in Santa Ana, the waste makes its way to the sewage-treatment plant nearby in Fountain Valley, then sluices not to the ocean but to a plant that superfilters the liquid until it is cleaner than rainwater. The "new" water is then pumped 13 miles north and discharged into a small lake, where it percolates into the earth. Local utilities pump water from this aquifer and deliver it to the sinks and showers of 2.3 million customers. It is now drinking water. If you like the idea, you call it indirect potable reuse. If the idea revolts you, you call it toilet to tap.

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The cold facts

Posted at 1:48 PM on October 28, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Science

File this in the "news you'd hear if it weren't for politics" file.

At a conference on infectious diseases today, University of Virginia researchers released a study of the common places where people pick up colds.

The researchers started with 30 adults with early symptoms of colds and retraced the things they touched in the previous 18 hours, using DNA tests to hunt for rhinovirus, which causes about half of all colds.

"We found that commonly touched areas like refrigerator doors and handles were positive about 40 percent of the time" for cold germs, said Dr. Birgit Winther, an ear, nose and throat specialist who helped conduct the study.

The culprits:

Scotch Tape science

Posted at 10:23 AM on October 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Science

On one of yesterday's visits with Mary Lucia on the Current, I mentioned the finding that under the right circumstances, you could use a roll of Scotch Tape to make an X-Ray.

Here's the story on Nature News.

As long ago as 1953, a team of scientists based in Russia suggested that peeling sticky tape produced X-rays. But "we were very sceptical about the old results," says Escobar (the researcher). His team decided to look into the phenomenon anyway, and found that X-rays were indeed given off, in high-energy pulses.

When the researchers placed a small plastic window in their vacuum chamber, they were even able to take an X-ray image of a finger, using a dental X-ray detector. Their results are published in Nature.

What can science do with this newfound knowledge? "The researchers suggest that the high charge density generated by peeling the tape could be great enough to trigger nuclear fusion," the article said.

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Mining the moon

Posted at 11:07 AM on October 22, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Science

India's planned spaceshot to the Moon is an easy one to ignore -- it's just another country not named the United States ramping up its space program while the only country to actually land and walk on the moon seems increasingly content to keep its feet on terra firma.

"When completed, this mission will put India in the very small group of six countries which have thus far sent space missions to the moon," said Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan, a member of the Indian parliament, reinforcing the narrative that this is about prestige and a place at the scientific table.

And maybe it is. But tucked into the New York Times story today is this nugget:

The Indian mission is scheduled to last two years, prepare a three-dimensional atlas of the moon and prospect the lunar surface for natural resources, including uranium, a coveted fuel for nuclear power plants, according to the Indian Space Research Organization.

The moon as strip mine? It's not that far fetched. A 2004 Popular Mechanics article from former astronaut Harrison Schmitt.

It is not a lack of engineering skill that prevents us from using helium-3 to meet our energy needs, but a lack of the isotope itself. Vast quantities of helium originate in the sun, a small part of which is helium-3, rather than the more common helium-4. Both types of helium are transformed as they travel toward Earth as part of the solar wind. The precious isotope never arrives because Earth's magnetic field pushes it away. Fortunately, the conditions that make helium-3 rare on Earth are absent on the moon, where it has accumulated on the surface and been mixed with the debris layer of dust and rock, or regolith, by constant meteor strikes. And there it waits for the taking.

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The tipping point

Posted at 6:34 PM on September 28, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Here's a new video that's recently been uploaded explaining climate change and, more precisely, a recalculation of the "tippping point."

Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.

The script is posted here. The author says the answer is to consume less, which is never going to happen, at least in my lifetime.

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