Science & TechnologyS


Nuke

Nuclear Waste and "Spent Nuclear Fuel" : The Largest Concentration of Radioactivity on the Planet is in the USA

Rady Ananda
Global Research
Sun, 27 Mar 2011 11:32 UTC
Spent fuel pool
© n/aSpent fuel pool at the top of a nuclear reactor
US stores spent nuclear fuel rods at 4 times pool capacity

In a recent interview with The Real News Network, Robert Alvarez, a nuclear policy specialist since 1975, reports that spent nuclear fuel in the United States comprises the largest concentration of radioactivity on the planet: 71,000 metric tons. Worse, since the Yucca Mountain waste repository has been scrapped due to its proximity to active faults (see last image), the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has allowed reactor operators to store four times more waste in the spent fuel pools than they're designed to handle.

Each Fukushima spent fuel pool holds about 100 metric tons, he says, while each US pool holds from 500-700 metric tons. A single pool fire would release catastrophic amounts of radioactivity, rendering 17-22,000 square miles of area uninhabitable. That's about the size of New Hampshire and Vermont - from one pool fire.
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Bomb

UK: 100 Bombs are Washed up by the Supermoon: Lunar Phenomenon Blamed as World War II Devices are Detonated


Mail Online
Sat, 26 Mar 2011 06:37 UTC
100 bombs are washed up by the Supermoon: Lunar phenomenon blamed as Second World War devices are detonated on Hampshire beach

For decades they lay beneath the sea, undisturbed by time or tide.

But after 70 years, almost 100 Second World War bombs finally fulfilled their explosive destiny yesterday, thanks to the power of the 'Supermoon'.

A Navy bomb disposal team detonated them after abnormal tides thought to be caused by the unusual proximity of the moon washed them up on a Southampton beach.
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Beaker

Prehistoric Protein Components Revealed in Reptile Skin

Cassie Ryan
The Epoch Time
Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© N. P. Edwards50-Million-year-old reptile skin from the Green River Formation, USA. A team of researchers led by the University of Manchester in the UK have used modern infrared technology to show that protein residue has survived within the remarkably preserved skin. The small sample is about 8 cm long.
Scientists from the UK's University of Manchester have imaged skin compounds from a reptile that lived 50 million years ago, according to a paper published online March 23 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Known as amides, these chemicals of the ancient life are now visible to the human eye using infrared and x-ray technology to unveil the structure of fossilized soft tissues.

The technique is called non-destructive Fourier Transform InfraRed (FTIR), and results were corroborated using other quantitative methods as well as comparison with the skin of living reptiles.

"Here physics, palaeontology and chemistry have collided to yield incredible insight to the building blocks of fossilized soft tissue," said study coauthor Dr. Phil Manning of the University of Manchester in a press release from the university. "It was a privilege to work with some of the world's top scientists from multiple disciplines, all to help unlock secrets locked in the sands of time."

"The results of this study have wider implications, such as understanding what happens to buried wastes over long periods of time. The fossil record provides us with a long-running experiment, from which we can learn in order to help resolve current problems," Manning said.
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Star

Milky Way's 'twin' discovered as astronomers find a supermassive black hole


Daily Mail, UK
Sat, 26 Mar 2011 09:44 UTC
Image
Lookalike: The centre of spiral galaxy, NGC 253, hosts a twin of Sagittarius A*, the bright radio source at the heart of our own Milky Way
It's enough to make TV's favourite physicist, Brian Cox, excited.

Astronomers have found that the centre of the galaxy nearest to our own hosts a twin of Sagittarius A*, the bright radio source that lies at the core of our Milky Way and which harbors a massive black hole.

Scientists studied the spectacular spiral galaxy, NGC 253, with Chile's Very Large Telescope (VLT) and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope when they made the find.

Andrea Ghez, professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, who studied the stars and planets, told the Daily Galaxy website that through combining these observations they learnt the black hole was born billions of years ago, perhaps as very massive stars collapsed at the end of their life cycles and joined together to create a single, supermassive object.
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Info

Is Homosexuality Based on a Brain Chemical?

Janelle Weaver
Live Science
Fri, 25 Mar 2011 08:26 UTC
Brain Regions
© DreamstimeThe brain chemical serotonin could be responsible for male-male attraction.

A male mouse's desire to mate with either a male or a female is determined by the brain chemical serotonin, scientists report in a new study. The finding demonstrates for the first time that a neurotransmitter governs sexual preference in mammals.

Serotonin is known to regulate sexual behaviors, such as erection, ejaculation and orgasm, in both mice and men. The compound generally dampens sexual activity; for instance, antidepressants that increase the amount of serotonin in the brain sometimes decrease sex drive.

Neuroscientist Yi Rao of Peking University and the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing, and his collaborators have now shown that serotonin also underlies a male's decision to woo a female or another male. They published their results in the March 24 issue of the journal Nature.

Rao and his team genetically engineered male mice to lack either serotonin-producing neurons or a protein that is crucial for making serotonin in the brain. Both types of altered mouse couldn't make serotonin.
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Telescope

Looking Up: Waiting for the Next Supernova

Peter Becker
GateHouse News Service
Fri, 25 Mar 2011 07:58 UTC
Supernova
© European Southern ObservatoryThis photo shows the newly discovered Supernova 1992C in the barred spiral galaxy NGC 3367. The supernova is the bright, star-like object in the lower left area (southeast of the centre of the galaxy), at the tip of a spiral arm. The 16.5-magnitude supernova was discovered by ESO astronomer Hans van Winckel on January 28, 1992.

One of these days we might see a supernova. It might seem more correct to say "one of these nights," but a star exploding in our galaxy as a supernova would easily be so bright it would be seen in a blue daytime sky, outshining any star or planet in the night sky.

We are long overdue. Supernovae are very rare, although astronomers say they should occur on the average every few hundred years. The last one seen in the Milky Way Galaxy was in 1680.

A supernova can become so bright - for a brief time- that the star outshines every star in the galaxy. The one in 1680 was not particularly brilliant as seen from Earth, but some have been- notably the great supernova of 1572 in Cassiopeia and another in the year 1054 in Taurus.

Several notable supernovae have been recorded through history, but none in our own galaxy since the early days of the telescope! Much of what we know today about these cosmic catastrophes come from observations of other galaxies.

Distant galaxies generally are so far away we cannot discern individual stars, although large professional observatories have photographed faint stars in nearer galaxies such as the great Andromeda Galaxy, visible to the unaided eye as a hazy patch.

While we wait for the next supernova in our home galaxy to dazzle our eyes, for both professional and amateur backyard-variety astronomers, it is a wonder to see a star within the faint smudge of a far away galaxy, where no star had been seen before.
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Sun

Scientists' Research Warns Humanity May be Facing 'Vortex of Death'

Terrence Aym
Salem-News.com
Wed, 23 Mar 2011 15:59 UTC
Solar Cycle March
© cleveland.indymedia.org
Solar Cycle 24 has begun. NASA and other space agencies worldwide have been warning about it.

Professor Raymond Wheeler, from the University of Kansas, at first almost stumbled into the frightening data. The connection was initially discovered by noted Russian scientist Alexander Chizhevsky during 1915: solar storms trigger conflict, wars and death. A vortex of death.

Chizhevsky found after intense research that the rise and fall of solar activity - interacting with the earth's magnetic field - causes mass changes in human's perspective's, moods, emotions and behavioral patterns. All are affected by sunspots and solar flares.

Building upon the Russian scholar's research, Wheeler applied a numerically weighted ranking system during the 1930s to separate wars and even individual battles assessing them on length and severity.

He then correlated the impressive data he'd amassed with the 11-year sunspot cycle.

The results were revealing...and horrifying.

When the 11-year solar cycle peaked, so did human unrest, uprisings, rebellions, revolutions and all-out wars between nations. It was almost as if the intense magnetic upswing directly affected the human brain and drove Mankind into deadly emotional tantrums and frenzied killing sprees.

Assaults skyrocket. Murders increase. And bloody wars and rebellions erupt with a fury across the face of the globe.

Wheeler's research revealed the pattern spanned human history as far back as 2,500 years.
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Telescope

Suzaku Shows Clearest Picture Yet of Perseus Galaxy Cluster


Science@NASA
Thu, 24 Mar 2011 15:08 UTC
X-ray observations made by the Suzaku observatory provide the clearest picture to date of the size, mass and chemical content of a nearby cluster of galaxies. The study also provides the first direct evidence that million-degree gas clouds are tightly gathered in the cluster's outskirts.

Image
© NASA/ISAS/DSS/A. Simionescu et al.; inset: NASA/CXC/A. Fabian et al.Suzaku explored faint X-ray emission of hot gas across two swaths of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster. The images, which record X-rays with energies between 700 and 7,000 electron volts in a combined exposure of three days, are shown in two false-color strips. Bluer colors indicate less intense X-ray emission. The dashed circle is 11.6 million light-years across and marks the so-called virial radius, where cold gas is now entering the cluster. Red circles indicate X-ray sources not associated with the cluster. Inset: An image of the cluster's bright central region taken by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is shown to scale.
Suzaku is sponsored by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) with contributions from NASA and participation by the international scientific community. The findings will appear in the March 25 issue of the journal Science.

Galaxy clusters are millions of light-years across, and most of their normal matter comes in the form of hot X-ray-emitting gas that fills the space between the galaxies.

"Understanding the content of normal matter in galaxy clusters is a key element for using these objects to study the evolution of the universe," explained Adam Mantz, a co-author of the paper at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
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Blackbox

Physicists create heaviest form of antimatter ever seen

Stephen Battersby
New Scientist
Tue, 22 Mar 2011 14:59 UTC
Image
© STAR/RHICSmashing time
A newly created form of antimatter is the heaviest and most complex anti-thing ever seen. Anti-helium nuclei, each containing two anti-protons and two anti-neutrons, have been created and detected at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in Upton, New York.

Anti-particles have the opposite electrical charge to ordinary matter particles (anti-neutrons, which are electrically neutral, are made up of antiquarks that have the opposite charge to their normal quark counterparts). They annihilate on contact with matter, making them notoriously tricky to find and work with. Until recently, the most complex unit of antimatter ever seen was the counterpart of the helium-3 nucleus, which contains two protons and one neutron.

But experiments at RHIC are changing that. RHIC collides heavy atomic nuclei such as lead and gold to form microscopic fireballs, where energy is so densely packed that many new particles can be created.

Last year RHIC announced the creation of a new variety of antimatter. Called the anti-hypertriton, it is made of one anti-proton, one anti-neutron and one unstable particle called an anti-lambda. The anti-hypertriton was then the heaviest antiparticle known, but the 18 nuclei of anti-helium-4 seen at RHIC now takes the record.
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Info

NASA tests Mars space suit in Argentine Antarctica

Luis Andres Henao
Reuters
Tue, 22 Mar 2011 09:01 UTC
Image
© Reuters/NASAArgentine aerospace engineer Pablo de Leon, a NASA team member, tests a space suit designed for possible use in Mars at Argentina's Marambio base in Antarctica. The NDX-1 space suit, designed by De Leon, endured frigid temperatures and winds of more than 47 mph (75 kph) as researchers tried out techniques for collecting soil samples on Mars.The $100,000 prototype suit, created with NASA funds, is made out of more than 350 materials, including tough honeycomb Kevlar and carbon fibers to reduce its weight without losing resistance.
A NASA team has tested a space suit in a setting with extreme conditions akin to some of those found on Mars -- an Argentine base in Antarctica -- for possible use on a visit to the Red Planet.

The NDX-1 space suit, designed by Argentine aerospace engineer Pablo de Leon, endured frigid temperatures and winds of more than 47 mph (75 kph) as researchers tried out techniques for collecting soil samples on Mars.

"This was the first time we took the suit to such an extreme, isolated environment so that if something went wrong we couldn't just go to the store" and buy a repair kit, De Leon told Reuters recently after returning from the one week expedition.

The $100,000 (61,331 pound) prototype suit, created with NASA funds, is made out of more than 350 materials, including tough honeycomb Kevlar and carbon fibres to reduce its weight without losing resistance.

During the "Mars in Marambio" mission, named after the Argentine air force base, a team of NASA scientists went on simulated spacewalks, operated drills and collected samples while wearing the gear.

De Leon himself wore the pressurized suit, which he said was bound to make anyone feel claustrophobic with its helmet and built-in headset for communicating with the outside world.
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