News Cut Category Archive: 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.

Ten million of us baby boomers are going to develop Alzheimer's. Expect coverage of research to increase. Let's begin with this one that's out today.

At Northeastern University in Boston, researchers say the disease may get its start by an insufficient blood flow carrying sugar to the brain. They suggest that exercise -- now -- may be the answer.

Meanwhile, a researcher at McGill University is out with a study today that says patients who frequently kick or cry out in their sleep may be at an increased risk of developing a neurodegenerative disease, such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's.

There's no simple test for Alzheimer's. The Alzheimer's Foundation of America is suggesting a five-minute test, which others say is hugely controversial. Why? Take it and see if you can figure it out:

Tell someone three random words: car, pencil, banana. Then have the person draw a clock with the correct time, as a distraction. A little later, can he or she recall the words?

As a Chicago Tribune article pointed out, "Failing such a test doesn't mean someone has dementia. But it signals there might be a problem with short-term memory that should be checked by a doctor. Maybe it's something fixable, such as depression or thyroid disease. Maybe it is an Alzheimer's warning sign. Or maybe the person just isn't a good test taker."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

It's always a bad idea to get too far ahead where medical research is concerned, but it's hard not to play "what if" with a science story being reported now.

Researchers have found monkeys, taught to play a computer game, can regain use of paralyzed muscles and even learned to use muscles that previously had nothing to do with wrist movement.

The significance? According to the Associated Press:

Remarkably, the monkeys regained use of paralyzed muscles by learning to control the activity of just a single brain cell.

The result is "an important step forward," said Dawn Taylor of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, who studies the concept of using brain signals to overcome paralysis. She wasn't involved in the new work.

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.