Science & TechnologyS


Beaker

Hydrogen peroxide found in interstellar space

rho_ophiuchi
© TG Daily
Hydrogen peroxide has been found for the first time in space, and astronomers are excited - not because it indicates that aliens are bottle blondes, but because it gives clues to how water may be formed.

The discovery was made with the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope (APEX), situated on the 5000-metre-high Chajnantor plateau in the Chilean Andes, which observed a region in our galaxy close to the star Rho Ophiuchi, about 400 light-years away.

This area contains very cold, dense clouds of cosmic gas and dust, in which new stars are forming. While the clouds are mostly made of hydrogen, they contain traces of other chemicals.

"We were really excited to discover the signatures of hydrogen peroxide with APEX," says Per Bergman, astronomer at Onsala Space Observatory in Sweden.

Comment: Indeed, cosmic dust holds many secrets, one of which is that dessicated bacteria and other microbes appear to be seen throughout interstellar space as well. The interested reader might want to check out Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's Analysis of Interstellar Dust.


Info

Storm as Wide as Earth Rages on Saturn

Saturn
© Carolyn Porco and CICLOPS; NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSIAn image of Saturn taken in December 2010 by the Cassini spacecraft shows a storm with a latitudinal and longitudinal extent of 10,000 km and 17,000 km, respectively. The latitudinal extent of the storm’s head is approximately the distance from London to Cape Town. A "tail" emerging from its southern edge extends further eastward.

The Great White Spot on Saturn has been imaged in unprecedented detail and is now yielding clues to how this titanic storm may have formed far earlier than scientists expected.

The staggeringly powerful thunderstorm is approximately 6,200 miles (10,000 kilometers) wide, nearly as wide as Earth, and has a tail of white clouds that encircles all of Saturn.

The storm began forming in the ringed planet's northern hemisphere in December. This is about 10 years early for Great White Spots, which usually recur about every 30 Earth years, when Saturn's northern hemisphere tilts most toward the sun.

Only five similar Great White Spots have been observed in the past 135 years.

To learn more about this mystery storm, researchers employed both ground-based telescopes and observations from the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn. Their findings show it to be packing as much total energy as "the Earth receives from the sun within one year," said researcher Georg Fischer, a planetary scientist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Graz.

Comment: Carolyn Porco, Cassini Imaging Team Leader, had this to say today, regarding the storm:

"July 6, 2011

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Last December, a remarkable thing happened at Saturn. A massive,
hissing, lightning-producing storm violently erupted in the northern
mid-latitudes of Saturn's atmosphere and grew to gargantuan
proportions. By the end of January, it had wrapped itself entirely
around the planet, developing an enormous degree of wavy, even sensuous,
details, reminiscent of the clouds on Jupiter.

Today, a group of Cassini scientists has published its findings in the
scientific journal, Nature, deduced from an examination of information
gathered by several instruments on Cassini. Prior to the planet's
August 2009 northern vernal equinox, when the sun was shining in the
southern hemisphere, the location of all observed storm activity on
Saturn was a band encircling the planet at 35 degrees south latitude
that imaging scientists had dubbed 'Storm Alley'. Well, to our great
puzzlement, this new storm -- now 500 times larger than any previously
seen by Cassini at Saturn and 8 times the surface area of Earth -- has
erupted at 35 degrees /north/ latitude. The shadow cast by Saturn's
rings has a strong seasonal effect, and it is possible that the switch
to powerful storms now being located in the northern hemisphere is
related to the change of seasons and the changing position of Saturn's
ring shadow. But why the obvious hemispheric symmetry in storm eruption
exists is not yet known.

The storm is also a prodigious source of radio noise, which comes from
lightning deep in the planet's atmosphere. As on Earth, the lightning is
produced in the water clouds, where falling rain and hail generate
electricity. The mystery is why Saturn stores energy for decades and
releases it all at once. This behavior is unlike that at Jupiter and
Earth, which have numerous storms occurring at any one time.

Go to ...

http://ciclops.org

... to learn more about this fascinating and spectacular meteorological
phenomenon, to listen to the storm's electrostatic discharges, and to
read an updated Captain's Log.

Enjoy!

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO


Question

Did a Massive Volcanic Event Cause the "Great Dying" 250 Million Years Ago?

Volcanic Eruption
© The Daily Galaxy
The "Great Dying" at the end of the Permian period, some 250 million years ago, was the most catastrophic of the five mass extinctions in Earth's fossil record. More than half of the families of living things died out, and as many as 95 percent of the planet's marine species were lost. At the same time, perhaps 70 percent of the land's reptile, amphibian, insect, and plant families became extinct.

This mass-extinction event may hold clues to current global carbon-cycle changes, according to Jonathan Payne, assistant professor of geological and environmental sciences at Stanford University.

What caused the calamity has long been a source of scientific controversy, due both to the extreme remoteness of the event, and to an absence of geological evidence - the world's seas retreated at the same period, reducing the amount of sedimentary rock entering the geological record.

The recent discovery of sections from the Permo-Triassic boundary in South China has, however, allowed more detailed analysis to take place, leading to a conclusion that the Great Dying was probably caused by poisonous gas, released by a massive volcanic event in Siberia, known as the Siberian Traps, which spewed about 3 million cubic kilometers of basalt lava over vast swathes of the Siberian landmass (to put this in perspective, the largest eruption in historical time, of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, released 12 cubic km of lava onto the island).

Payne, a paleobiologist who joined the Stanford faculty in 2005, studies the Permian-Triassic extinction and the following 4 million years of instability in the global carbon cycle.

Meteor

Mysterious Gamma Flare Observed in High Mass Binary

pulsar
© NASA
Astronomers using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected intense and unexpected gamma radiation in an unusual high mass binary system.

The gamma ray binary, known as PSR B1259-63/LS 2883, is one of only a handful known and consists of a massive Be star which is orbited by a smaller, dense pulsar. The Be class star is 24 times the mass of the Sun and is rotating at a very high rate. A combination of mass loss and rapid rotation results in an equatorial disc of hot gas and, when the pulsar is at the point in its orbit where it is closest to its massive companion - known as periastron - it actually passes through the disc. After periastron, it also makes a second trip through the disc. This voyage through the hot gas creates gamma radiation because particles emitted from the pulsar interact with the disc.

The most recent periastron of the 3.4 year orbit was on 15 December 2010 and during the pulsar's first passage through the disc, normal levels of gamma radiation were observed with Fermi. However, the second passage created massive amounts of gamma radiation that were completely unexpected.

Beaker

When science backfires: Bizarre events, crazy setbacks, mishaps and pain

Image
© Getty ImagesBurnt Trousers
If there's one thing scientists keep discovering it's that there are some hilariously bizarre events surrounding some of their advances.

Take the pesticide that burst on to the scene in 1931 - and went off like a bomb when it reacted with fibres in clothes.

The amusing tale of Farmer Buckley's Exploding Trousers gives its name to a new book full of fascinating stories about how science is littered with crazy setbacks, mishaps and pain.

Farmer Buckley's Exploding Trousers & other odd events on the way to scientific discovery, edited by Stephanie Pain, is published by Profile Books and is priced £10.99.

Those Exploding Trousers

The peace of the New Zealand countryside was shattered in 1931 when men's trousers suddenly began to explode.

Pairs detonated on washing lines, others as they dried in front of the fire.Worse still, a few were occupied when they went up.

Farmer Richard Buckley was lucky.When his trousers blew up he wasn't wearing them.As the local paper reported "although partially stunned he had sufficient presence of mind to seize the garment and hurl them from the house, where they smouldered with a series of minor detonations".

The culprit was soon identified as a new weedkiller containing sodium chlorate.It exploded when combined with organic material, such as cotton and wool.

Magnify

Pacific rare-earth discovery: Actually just gigatonnes of dirt

Take a lot of acid and it might seem valuable

There has been a lot of excitement over a recent paper by Japanese researchers who have discovered billions - hundreds of billions - of tonnes of rare earths under the Pacific Ocean. Those rare earths, you will recall, are essential to so much of modern technology, from those sweet little earbuds of your iPod and the magnets in a hard drive, through to planet-saving windmills and the crystals that make an MRI machine work.

And yes, it's true, scientists have located vast deposits - hundreds of billions of tonnes of rare earths - at a depth of 5,000 metres under the ocean. The paper is here and thanks to the miracles of people with full Nature access I've been able to read it. The basic problem is the difference between what is technically possible and what is economically possible.

What they've found is that there are vast plains of silt in various parts of the ocean where there's a decent concentration of the rare earths: 1,000 to 2,000 ppm sorts of levels, a kilo or two per tonne, 0.1 to 0.2 per cent. They surmise that the cause is iron fumes that come out of the mid-ocean vents collecting and concentrating the rare earths from the seawater before falling to that ocean floor. Some of the beds of these silts are tens of metres high (up to 50 in places), according to their estimates. Yes, there's an awful lot of rare earths there.

Gear

Research Integrity? What a Joke! A New Code of Conduct for Researchers

Image
© Unknown
Fostering research integrity in Europe.

A new European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity will be presented by the European Science Foundation at the World Conference on Research Integrity. The code addresses good practice and bad conduct in science, offering a basis for trust and integrity across national borders.

This Europe-wide code offers a reference point for all researchers, complementing existing codes of ethics and complying with national and European legislative frameworks. It is not intended to replace existing national or academic guidelines, but represents agreement across 30 countries on a set of principles and priorities for self-regulation of the research community. It provides a possible model for a global code of conduct for all research.

"Science is an international enterprise with researchers continually working with colleagues in other countries. The scientists involved need to understand that they share a common set of standards. There can be no first-class research without integrity," said Marja Makarow, Chief Executive of the European Science Foundation. "Researchers build on each other's results so they must be honest with themselves, and with each other, and share the same standards of fairness, which makes the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity a vital document."

Comment: Personal integrity, love of truth, fairness, conscience, no conflicts of interest, taking responsibility, unbiased scientific research, etc. These are pretty words that we all learned to associate with members of scientific community. And why not? After all, they are supposed to be the brightest of us all; the ones that help to create a better future.

The problem with such association is, that it is no more than an illusion, and a dangerous one at that, especially when we provide scientists and whoever funds their research with a silent consent to shape, control and influence our lives any way they see fit. Take a look at the following quotes to understand what is really going on in the scientific community:
Choosing research problems can be likened to an investment process (Bourdieu 1975, 1988). Scientists have available a certain amount of "capital" - knowledge, experience, time and effort - that they can invest in different ways. A conservative investment strategy is to pursue small, incremental innovations, with a high likelihood of success and a modest return of investment.[...] A risky strategy is to pursue a speculative idea: the likelihood of success may be low but the returns, if the idea pans out, can be huge.[...]

A different investment calculation comes into play, though, when it comes to someone else's ideas. To examine or even promote someone else's challenge to orthodoxy requires significant time and energy, yet the major returns go to another person, if they are recognized as the innovator. If the idea is a promising one, the temptation is to grab credit, for example by domesticating the radical idea and publishing in orthodox journals. It is no surprise that many innovators are afraid of having their ideas stolen. (Challenging Dominant physics paradigms by J.M Campanario and B.Martin)
In 1951, the U.S Congress established the National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide financial support for post-World War II scientific research. Soon thereafter, someone at NSF or on the National Science Board, which is charged with oversight of NSF, had an idea, a really corrosive idea, the implementation of which would lead to the perversion and corruption of American science for decades ahead. The idea was that reviewers of scientific proposals to NSF for government research grant money should be anonymous; the crux of the idea being that anonymity would encourage honesty in evaluation even when those reviewers might be competitors or might have vested interests. Thus the concept of anonymous peer review was birthed.[...]

For decades, the use of anonymity within NSF, NASA, and elsewhere has been gradually corrupting American science. Unethical reviewers - secure, camouflaged, masked and hidden through anonymity - all too often make untrue and/or pejorative statements to eliminate their professional competitors. Nowadays, it is a pervasive, corrupt system that encourages and rewards the darkest elements of human nature. (Basic Cause of Current Corruption in American Science, Herndon, J. Marvin, 2008)
The most common view about how science works is that new ideas are judged on the basis of evidence and logic: if a new idea explains more data or provides more precise agreement with experiment, this counts strongly in its favor.

Karl Popper claimed that science advances by falsification (Popper 1963). In his view, it is the duty of scientists to attempt to disprove theories, confronting them with experimental data and rejecting them if they do not explain the data. Theories that cannot be falsified are, according to Popper, not scientific. Many scientists believe in falsificationism.

These conventional views were challenged by Thomas Kuhn (1970). Kuhn argued that scientists - and physicists in particular, since most of his historical examples were from physics - adhere to a paradigm, which is a set of assumptions and standard practices for undertaking research. If an experiment gives results contradictory to theory, then instead of rejecting the theory all together, alternative responses include rejecting the experiment as untrustworthy and modifying the theory to account for the new results (Chia 1998; Chinn and Brewer 1993).

When anomalies accumulate, the paradigm can enter a state of crisis and be ripe for overthrow by a new paradigm. This process of scientific revolution does not proceed solely according to a rational procedure but involves social factors such as belief systems and political arrangements. [...]

In any case, the idea of paradigms puts a different spin on the problem of new ideas in science. Rather than being dealt with according to logic and evidence, challenging ideas may be ignored or rejected out of hand because they conflict with current models. In effect, the logic and evidence used to establish the paradigm are treated as definitive and are unquestioningly preferred over any new logic and evidence offered that challenge the paradigm. During periods of "normal science", the ideas developed by mainstream scientists originate from current paradigms: they add more and more pieces to standard puzzles. Given that the paradigm is the source of ideas, it is not surprising that challenges to the paradigm - the framework that allowed mainstream scientists to contribute to the development of science - are seldom greeted with open arms. If a theory is not considered physically plausible, it may be rejected even though it makes successful predictions. (Challenging dominant physics paradigms, J.M Campanario and B.Martin, 2004)
In 2007 Professor Richard Lindzen described in the Wall Street Journal the tremendous pressure upon scientists to conform to the manufactured consensus of Global Warming:
Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.

To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let's start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn't just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming.



Meteor

Hazards of Occupation? Meteorite hunter: My two months in an Omani jail

Image
© Robert WardTroublesome rock
Michael Farmer tells the tale of his quest for extraterrestrial geology and how it landed him in prison, and explains why he eats bits of the moon and Mars.

Why did you head to Oman in the first place?

On 31 December last year I went on my 20th meteorite hunting expedition in Oman with my fellow hunter Robert Ward. I have studied the law there since the arrest of Russian and American hunters back in 2005 and I understand the practice to be legal.

How did your meteorite hunting trip go?

I found 35 meteorites, including three more pieces of the Dhofar 1180 Lunar, which I'd originally found in 2005, and other nice things. On the last day we headed towards Dubai. At 1pm on 13 January we arrived at a roadblock in the town of Adam. There was nothing out of the ordinary, until the police rushed my car with M16 rifles. They were nice and did not seem to know why we were being arrested but they forced us out of our cars and ripped them apart, finding the meteorites. We were taken to the police station and interrogated for 10 hours. They had intelligence that we were coming. I think I know who had told them.

Igloo

When Antarctica's Vegetation Vanished: Pollen Reveals Glacial History

icebreaker Antarctica
© Science/AAASResearchers used the NSF's Nathanial B. Palmer icebreaker vessel for their research along the Antarctic Peninsula. Here, a similar vessel, the NSF's Gould icebreaker navigates the waters adjacent to Palmer base station in the western shelf of the Antarctic Peninsula.
The last remnant of vegetation in Antarctica vanished about 12 million years ago, suggests a new study of tiny pollen fossils buried deep beneath the seafloor.

That last bit of plant life existed in a tundra landscape on the continent's northern peninsula, the researchers found.

The results, detailed this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paint a detailed picture of how the Antarctic Peninsula first succumbed to ice during a prolonged period of global cooling.

In the warmest period in Earth's past 55 million years, Antarctica was ice-free and forested. The continent's vast ice sheets, which today contain more than two-thirds of Earth's freshwater, began forming about 38 million years ago.

The Antarctic Peninsula, which juts farther north than the rest of the continent, was the last part of Antarctica to succumb to ice. It's also the part that has experienced the most dramatic warming in recent decades; its average annual temperatures rose as much as six times faster than the global average.

Comment: There's a lot of reasons which might cause the rise in temperatures in the Antarctic. The effects can be local:

Volcanic vents found in Antarctic waters

While the net result is still in favour of global cooling:

Why Antarctic ice is growing despite global warming - Damage Control?


Nuke

US: Mall Uses Airport Body Scanning Technology for Clothes Shopping

Image
© geniusbeauty.comUnique Solutions Limited's "mybestfit" kiosk
Unique Solutions' newest technology is called "mybestfit," and it utilizes the body scanning technology used in airports -- except it keeps your clothes on

There has been a lot of controversy surrounding body scanners at the airport since they began producing nude photos of the public. While many have complained about the new technology, Unique Solutions Limited has found a new use for it that keeps the public's clothes on.

Unique Solutions Limited, which was established in 1994, specializes in personalized shopping. It originally started out as a company that provides custom sewing patterns tailored to fit customers' body shapes perfectly. Its goal is to provide clothing that fits an individual, since many clothing stores offer set sizes that may or may not fit the way they should. The company has expanded to offer technology that can provide this convenience.

Unique Solutions' newest technology is called "mybestfit," and it utilizes the body scanning technology used in airports -- except it keeps your clothes on.

Mybestfit was developed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Unique Solutions Limited licensed the technology from Batelle, which manages the laboratory.

Mybestfit utilizes radio waves to penetrate clothing and "bounce" signals off the body. These signals are then sent to a computer, and the data is used to calculate exact measurements of your waist, hips, arms, legs and weight. These measurements are given to the user, and they use such measurements to decide which sizes to buy at the store.

The mybestfit kiosk was first placed at the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania, and is a free service. It was made to increase shopping convenience, since some shoppers either do not know what size they are, or are too embarrassed to reveal their size and weight to store assistants.

Comment: "..it utilizes the body scanning technology used in airports.."

"..except it keeps your clothes on"

And who is at the controls that you know and trust isn't going to dial through your garments? How do they get a good idea of what will fit well if they are not getting a contoured look of a persons external anatomy? Do any of these 'mall shoppers' realize the affects of this scanning on their DNA?