Science & TechnologyS


Question

Mystery Ingredient Influences Cloud Formation

Stephanie Pappas
Live Science
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 12:00 UTC
Clouds
© hirekatsu, stock.xchngClouds create colorful stripes across the sky at sunset.

The bad news about clouds: We know even less about them than we thought we did.

The good news: We might be on our way to figuring them out.

A new cloud chamber that contains man-made air and uses a particle beam to mimic cosmic rays has revealed that cloud formation in the lower atmosphere involves at least one ingredient as yet unknown to science. However, the experiment also has uncovered some chemical fingerprints that may help researchers track down the mystery vapor.

The results are important because clouds and their precursors, aerosols, are the largest sources of uncertainty in climate change models. Researchers know that greenhouse gas emissions warm the Earth and that aerosols and clouds could moderate some of that effect by reflecting sunlight back into space. But these particles are so elusive and poorly understood that it's difficult to account for them in computer models of the climate. And now researchers are learning about how little they knew about cloud formation in the first place, said study researcher Jasper Kirkby, a particle physicist at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Switzerland.

"We know even less about aerosols than we thought we did," Kirkby told LiveScience. "So we had problems before and now we've got bigger problems."
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Info

Five Years Later, Pluto's Planethood Demotion Still Stirs Controversy

Mike Wall
Live Science
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 07:59 UTC
Pluto
© David Aguilar / Center for AstrophysicsArtist's impression of Pluto and Charon as seen from one of Pluto's other moons.
Five years ago today, the solar system lost a planet.

On Aug. 24, 2006, Pluto - which had been known as the ninth planet since its 1930 discovery - was demoted to the newly created category of "dwarf planet."

The decision was controversial, rankling some scientists who disagreed with the reasoning behind it. It also upset and confused many laypeople, who had regarded the nine planets as permanent fixtures in the sky - key touchstones for their understanding of the cosmos, and their place in it.

But Pluto's reclassification shows that our knowledge of the world around us is always changing, that scientific truths aren't handed down from on high. And that reminder may be the greatest legacy of the longstanding debate about Pluto's planet status.

"This debate shows people, especially kids, that science is always evolving, and it's exciting," said planetary scientist Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who hunts for faraway dwarf planets. "And you should get involved in science, because there's a lot more to learn out there."
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Saturn

The Dark Planet - Scientists Find Mysterious Jovian-Size Planet That Is Dark As Coal


RTT News
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:26 UTC
Exoplanet
© Unknown

Scientists have found what is considered the darkest planet so far discovered - a body the size of the biggest planet in our solar system, which emits only a "faint red glow," despite orbiting extremely close to its sun. According to data gathered so far, the planet, first discovered about five years ago, is darker than coal or black acrylic paint.

And scientists have yet to figure out how a planet could reflect so little light.

The planet, labeled TrES-2b and located nearly 718 light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Draco, has been determined to reflect far less light than any known planet. Astronomers revealed their findings in a paper accepted for the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Using data from NASA's Kepler Mission, the scientists - David Kipping of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and David Spiegel from Princeton University - found that the Jupiter-sized body has a geometric albedo (a measure of reflectivity) below 1 percent.
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Bulb

Global tsunami monitoring could follow from discovery

Henrique Kugler
AlertNet
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:06 UTC
Tsunami Airglow
© UnknownAirglow waves captured by the Illinois imaging system over Hawaii. The red line represents the location of the ocean-level tsunami at the time of the image.
Researchers from Brazil, France and the United States, using a highly sensitive, wide-angle camera at the top of Haleakala volcano in Hawaii, detected the 'airglow' signature in the atmosphere of the 11 March tsunami that devastated Japan, demonstrating that the genesis of a tsunami leaves a fingerprint in the ionosphere - an ionised zone of the atmosphere more than 80 kilometres up.

Tsunamis usually cause the sea level to rise rapidly by a few centimetres, which displaces the air immediately above it. This creates waves in the air that move quickly upward, eventually reaching and disturbing the ionosphere. Interaction with the charged ionosphere creates a faint red glow, the signature airglow that can be detected.

This effect was predicted in the 1970s, but little progress has been made since then on using these observation methods. The researchers presented their observations in a paper in Geophysical Research Letters last month (7 July).

"We have been studying the ionosphere since 1999, but we didn't expect to end up with a new method for tsunami detection," Jonathan Makela, an electrical engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States, and the lead author of the paper, told SciDev.Net.
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Sun

Stars as Cool as the Human Body


Science@NASA
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:03 UTC
Image
© UnknownThis artist's conception illustrates what a "Y dwarf" might look like. Y dwarfs are the coldest star-like bodies known, with temperatures that can be even cooler than the human body.
Scientists using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have discovered six "Y dwarfs"-- star-like bodies with temperatures as cool as the human body.

Astronomers hunted these dark orbs for more than a decade without success. When viewed with a visible-light telescope, they are nearly impossible to see. WISE's infrared vision allowed the telescope to finally spot the faint glow of a half dozen Y dwarfs relatively close to our sun, within a distance of about 40 light-years.

"WISE scanned the entire sky for these and other objects, and was able to spot their feeble light with its highly sensitive infrared vision," says Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The Y's are the coldest members of the brown dwarf family. Brown dwarfs are sometimes referred to as "failed" stars. They are too low in mass to fuse atoms at their cores and thus don't burn with the fires that keep stars like our sun shining steadily for billions of years. Instead, these objects cool and fade with time, until what little light they do emit is at infrared wavelengths. The atmospheres of brown dwarfs are similar to those of gas giant planets like Jupiter, but they are easier to observe because they are alone in space, away from the blinding light of a parent star.
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Saturn

Dwarf Planet Pluto Holds Big Surprises for Speedy NASA Probe

Charles Q. Choi
SPACE.com
Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:30 UTC
New Horizons
© Dan DurdaTo be dispatched early 2006, the outward bound New Horizons spacecraft will throw new light on distant Pluto and its moon, Charon, as well as Kuiper Belt objects.
Pluto may be small, but it is proving to be big on surprises. With NASA's New Horizons spacecraft now speeding toward it, our understanding of the dwarf planet should transform even further.

"We've never had a reconnaissance of a dwarf planet such as Pluto before, and every time we've been to a new type of planet, we find nature is much richer than we expected," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., told SPACE.com.

New Horizons, which was sent aloft in 2006, has been billed by NASA as its fastest spacecraft ever launched from Earth, having sped from our planet at about 36,000 mph (nearly 58,000 kph). The probe should reach Pluto and its moons in July 2015.
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Magnify

Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors: A New Piece to the Puzzle of Brain Function


Science Daily
Sat, 20 Aug 2011 17:19 UTC
brain
© Unknown
Researchers at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen have collaborated with the company NeuroSearch to generate new knowledge about an important part of the brain's complex communication system. The discovery could form the basis for future development of better medicines for patients with psychiatric disorders.

The results were recently published Journal of Neuroscience.

New knowledge challenges established scientific ideas about the function of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, which play an important role in the health of the brain. As its name suggests, the class of receptors is significant for the effects of nicotine and is linked to addiction -- however, life-threatening conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease are also linked to the electrical impulses that are mediated by nicotinic acetylcholine receptors.
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Beaker

Evidence of elusive 'God particle' fades


Raw Story
Mon, 22 Aug 2011 16:51 UTC
god particle
© NA

Washington - International scientists searching to solve the greatest riddle in all of physics said Monday that signs are fading of the elusive Higgs-Boson particle, which is believed to give objects mass.

Just last month, physicists announced at a European conference that a big atom-smasher experiment had shown tantalizing hints of the Higgs-Boson, as the search to identify the particle enters the final stretch with results expected late next year.

Sometimes described as the "God particle" because it is such a mystery yet such a potent force of nature, the Higgs-Boson -- if it exists -- represents the final piece of the Standard Model of physics.
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Question

Growth of Egg Freezing Blurs 'Experimental' Label

Alison Motluk
Nature
Tue, 23 Aug 2011 13:59 UTC
Frozen Eggs
© L. VAN LIESHOUT / AFP / GettyFreezing eggs in liquid nitrogen to extend women’s reproductive years is becoming commonplace, but data are lacking about outcomes from older eggs.

The first thing that Alison Hopkins did after finishing her PhD was freeze 14 of her eggs. She knew she wanted children, but she was 38 and didn't have a partner. "It buys you time, it eliminates any pressure," she says. "I thought it was a really good insurance policy."

For such women, however, egg freezing is "a shot in the dark", says Hopkins' fertility specialist, John Jain, who heads Santa Monica Fertility in California. Very few of the older women who have frozen eggs to beat the clock have tried to use them, says Jain. He estimates that, worldwide, fewer than ten babies have been born from eggs frozen for women aged 38 or over. And no one knows how successful the freezing and thawing of older eggs will be - despite the fact that most women now seeking the service are over 38.

These uncertainties are reflected in the recommendations of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) - the advisory body to the fertility industry - but not in the practices of its members, even some of those who formulate the guidelines. The ASRM states clearly that oocyte cryopreservation should not yet be offered to older women as a way of extending their fertility. It also says that all egg freezing should be considered experimental, and be performed as part of a research project governed by an institutional review board (IRB), which is supposed to monitor, review and approve the research.
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Einstein

Did Einstein Discover E=MC2?

Philip Ball
Physics World.
Tue, 23 Aug 2011 13:46 UTC
Einstein
© Physics WorldWho got there first?

Who discovered that E = mc2? It's not as easy a question as you might think. Scientists ranging from James Clerk Maxwell and Max von Laue to a string of now-obscure early 20th-century physicists have been proposed as the true discovers of the mass - energy equivalence now popularly credited to Einstein's theory of special relativity. These claims have spawned headlines accusing Einstein of plagiarism, but many are spurious or barely supported. Yet two physicists have now shown that Einstein's famous formula does have a complicated and somewhat ambiguous genesis - which has little to do with relativity.

One of the more plausible precursors to E = mc2 is attributed to Fritz Hasenöhrl, a physics professor at the University of Vienna. In a 1904 paper Hasenöhrl clearly wrote down the equation E = 3/8mc.2 Where did he get it from, and why is the constant of proportionality wrong? Stephen Boughn of Haverford College in Pennsylvania and Mark Rothman of Princeton University examine this question in a paper submitted to the arXiv preprint server.

Hasenöhrl's name has a certain notoriety now, as he is commonly invoked by anti-Einstein cranks. His reputation as the man who really discovered E = mc2 owes much to the efforts of the antisemitic and pro-Nazi physics Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard, who sought to separate Einstein's name from the theory of relativity so that it was not seen as a product of "Jewish science".
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