Science & TechnologyS


Better Earth

Sea Level May Have Dropped in 2010

ocean waves
© Franklin O'Donnell
Based on the most current data it appears that 2010 is going to show the largest drop in global sea level ever recorded in the modern era. Since many followers of global warming believe that the rate of sea level rise is increasing, a significant drop in the global sea level highlights serious flaws in the IPCC projections. The oceans are truly the best indicator of climate. The oceans drive the world's weather patterns. A drop in the ocean levels in a year that is being cited as proof that the global warming has arrived shows that there is still much to learned. If the ocean levels dropped in 2010, then there is something very wrong with the IPCC projections.

The best source of sea level data is The University of Colorado. Only government bureaucracy could put the sea level data in one of the places farthest from the ocean, but that is where it is. I use both data sets that includes the seasonal signal. So with and without the inverted barometer applied. This is the source of the data that is used to show that the oceans are rising. Of course the rate of rise is greatly exaggerated and if the rate from 1993-2010 is used there will be a 1m rise in the year 2361.

Evil Rays

Single Worm Neurons Remotely Controlled with Lasers

Worm Image
© Samuel Lab at Harvard University

Scientists have come a step closer to gaining complete control over a mind, even if that mind belongs to a creature the size of a grain of sand. A team at Harvard University has built a computerized system to manipulate worms - making them start and stop, giving them the sensation of being touched, and even prompting them to lay eggs, as seen in the video above - by stimulating their neurons individually with laser light, all while the worms swim freely in a petri dish. The technology may help neuroscientists for the first time gain a complete understanding of the workings of an animal's nervous system.

The worm in question, Caenorhabditis elegans, is one of the most extensively studied organisms in biology: researchers have completely mapped and classified its cells - each individual has exactly 1,031 - including its 302 neurons and the 5,000 or so connections among them. But science still does not know exactly "how neurons work together in a network," says Andrew Leifer, a graduate student in biophysics at Harvard, For example, how does the worm coordinate its 100 or so muscles to relax and contract in a wave pattern as the worm swims?



Inducing a worm to lay eggs with laser light from Samuel Lab on Vimeo.

Beaker

Microfluidics and sunlight combined to purify water


Researchers have created a microreactor that purifies water utilizing sunlight and microfluidics
Image Gallery (3 images)

It has been known for some time now that sunlight can be used to purify drinking water. The practice of Solar Water Disinfection (SODIS) basically involves just leaving water sitting in direct sunlight, where a combination of heat and UV rays kill off waterborne pathogens - the process is called photocatalysis, and it's what's at work behind both the Solaqua water purification device, and a system recently created by students from the University of Washington. Now, researchers from Hong Kong Polytechnic University have taken things a step further, by combining photocatalysis with microfluidics in a microreactor.

The team from Hong Kong Polytechnic created a planar microfluidic reactor, which consists mainly of a rectangular chamber made up of two facing glass plates, each coated with titanium dioxide (Ti02) - this is the active ingredient in many sunscreens. Tainted water passes between the plates via microchannels, to maximize the surface-to-volume ratio. When exposed to sunlight, the Ti02 releases electrons, which in turn break down contaminants in the water.

Telescope

Forget Planet X - New Technique Could Pinpoint Galaxy X

Galaxy X
© Sukanya Chakrabarti/UC BerkeleyThe distribution of HI hydrogen in the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) as determined by the THINGS VLA survey extends far beyond the visible stars in the galaxy and its satellite NGC 5195 (marked by cross), which is situated in the short arm of the spiral. Analysis of perturbations in the hydrogen distribution can be used to predict the location of such satellites, in particular, those satellites that are composed primarily of dark matter and are thus too faint to be detected easily.

Planet X, an often-sought 10th planet, is so far a no-show, but Sukanya Chakrabarti has high hopes for finding what might be called Galaxy X - a dwarf galaxy that she predicts orbits our Milky Way Galaxy.

Many large galaxies, such as the Milky Way, are thought to have lots of satellite galaxies too dim to see. They are dominated by "dark matter," which astronomers say makes up 85 percent of all matter in the universe but so far remains undetected.

Chakrabarti, a post-doctoral fellow and theoretical astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a way to find "dark" satellite galaxies by analyzing the ripples in the hydrogen gas distribution in spiral galaxies. Planet X was predicted - erroneously - more than 100 years ago based on perturbations in the orbit of Neptune.

Earlier this year, Chakrabarti used her mathematical method to predict that a dwarf galaxy sits on the opposite side of the Milky Way from Earth, and that it has been unseen to date because it is obscured by the intervening gas and dust in the galaxy's disk. One astronomer has already applied for time on the Spitzer Space Telescope to look in infrared wavelengths for this hypothetical Galaxy X.

Blackbox

Water on moon 'originated from comets'

Image
© Unknown
Researchers at the University of Tennessee have suggested that lunar water may have originated from comets smashing into the moon soon after it formed.

Larry Taylor, a distinguished professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, was the one last year to discover trace amounts of water on the moon.

This discovery debunked beliefs held since the return of the first Apollo rocks that the moon was bone-dry.

Taylor and his fellow researchers conducted their study by analyzing rocks brought back from the Apollo mission.

Using secondary ion mass spectrometry, the researchers measured the samples' 'water signatures', which tell the possible origin of the water-and made the surprising discovery that the water on the Earth and moon are different.

"This discovery forces us to go back to square one on the whole formation of the Earth and moon. Before our research, we thought the Earth and moon had the same volatiles after the Giant Impact, just at greatly different quantities. Our work brings to light another component in the formation that we had not anticipated-comets," said Taylor.

Bizarro Earth

Hunting the Ocean for BP's Missing Millions of Barrels of Oil

black goo
© Brian Zelinski
"Dolphins off the bow!"

I race to the front of the WeatherBird II, a research vessel owned by the University of South Florida. There they are, doing their sleek silvery thing, weaving between translucent waves, disappearing under the boat, reappearing in perfect formation on the other side.

After taking my fill of phone video (and very pleased not to have dropped the device into the Gulf of Mexico), I bump into Gregory Ellis, one of the junior scientists aboard.

"Did you see them?" I ask excitedly.

"You mean the charismatic megafauna?" he sneers. "I'll pass."

Ouch. Here I was thinking everyone loves dolphins, especially oceanographers. But it turns out that these particular marine scientists have issues with dolphins. And sea turtles. And pelicans. It's not that they don't like them (a few of the grad students took Flipper pictures of their own). It's just that the charismatic megafauna tend to upstage the decidedly less charismatic creatures under their microscopes. Like the bacteria and phytoplankton that live in the water column, for instance, or 500-year-old coral and the tube worms that burrow next to them, or impossibly small squid the size of a child's fingernail.

Normally these academics would be fine without our fascination. They weren't looking for glory when they decided to study organisms most people either can't see or wish they hadn't. But when the Deepwater Horizon exploded in April 2010, our collective bias toward cute big creatures started to matter a great deal. That's because the instant the spill-cam was switched off and it became clear that there would be no immediate mass die-offs among dolphins and pelicans, at least not on the scale of the Exxon Valdez spill deaths, most of us were pretty much on to the next telegenic disaster. (Chilean miners down a hole - and they've got video diaries? Tell us more!)

Info

Space Plasma Exploration by Active Radar (SPEAR)

SPEAR
© UNISThe SPEAR antenna array.
SPEAR is a revolutionary new high power radar system which is designed to carry out research into the Earth's upper atmosphere and magnetosphere, in the vicinity of the polar cap. This research will help us answer some key questions about our aerospace environment, particularly the interaction of the solar wind and the upper atmosphere as well as help work out whether solar cycle effects do contribute to climate change on Earth.

Currently, scientists know that energy and particles which are constantly emitted by the Sun affect the Earth. This energy is primarily deposited over several different altitudes extending from the upper atmosphere to the outer reaches of the Earth's magnetic field (called the magnetosphere), which encompasses an altitude range of 10's of km to several thousand km. The energy affects the Earth in many different ways from inducing huge magnetic storms (which produce the aurora) to electrical currents (which can affect power grids which provide us with electricity). However, the unpredictability and the type of processes makes it very difficult for scientists to study them in detail.

SPEAR (Space Plasma Exploration by Active Radar) is located on Svalbard above the arctic circle at 78.15°N and has been in operation since 2004. The system was designed and built by the Radio and Space Plasma Physics Group at the University of Leicester, UK. UNIS took over ownership of the facility in October 2008.

Beaker

The Truth Wears Off

Image
© The New YorkerMany results that are rigorously proved and accepted start shrinking in later studies.
On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Abilify, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects' psychiatric symptoms. As a result, second-generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. By 2001, Eli Lilly's Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. It remains the company's top-selling drug.

But the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren't any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. "In fact, sometimes they now look even worse," John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.

Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it's known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It's a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

Sun

SOHO Far Side Coronal Mass Ejection - January 2011

For the second day in a row, an active region on the far side of the sun is exploding and hurling CMEs into space. Watch the video below:


Today's eruption was almost as dramatic as yesterday's, and suggests that more eruptions are in the offing.

Info

Mammoth 'Could Be Reborn in Four Years'

Clone a Mammoth
© The Telegraph, UK

The woolly mammoth, extinct for thousands of years, could be brought back to life in as little as four years thanks to a breakthrough in cloning technology.

Previous efforts in the 1990s to recover nuclei in cells from the skin and muscle tissue from mammoths found in the Siberian permafrost failed because they had been too badly damaged by the extreme cold.

But a technique pioneered in 2008 by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology, was successful in cloning a mouse from the cells of another mouse that had been frozen for 16 years.

Now that hurdle has been overcome, Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University, is reactivating his campaign to resurrect the species that died out 5,000 years ago.

"Now the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth," he told The Daily Telegraph.

He intends to use Dr Wakayama's technique to identify the nuclei of viable mammoth cells before extracting the healthy ones.