Hot days and melting permafrost

In Russia last week several cases of anthrax were reported in a nomadic reindeer herding community. Eight people have been formally diagnosed with the disease and one 12-year-old boy has died.


Anthrax today is commonly thought of as a biological weapon, but anthrax isn't man-made. The disease, caused by a bacteria, shows up in oblique references in written texts as early as 1250 BC. The bacteria occurs naturally in soil, only becoming dangerous when they enter the body of a human or animal, where they multiply, producing a toxin that can cause a host of unpleasant and deadly symptoms ranging from blisters through high fevers, chills, shortness of breath, and nausea.

It can be treated with antibiotics, and is not contagious, but can be spread when people come in contact with infected livestock or products like meat or animal skins that originate from infected animals.

The sudden spike in Siberian anthrax cases has roots in 1941, when the last outbreak happened in the area. Researchers believe that this year's record-breaking stretch of warm temperatures has contributed to melting permafrost, the previously permanently frozen layer of soil in the tundra.

The F-35's many flaws have been well documented. But according to pilots, one aspect of the fifth-generation fighter works so well that it's actually causing new problems.

After months of delays, the US Air Force is expected to deem its F-35 variant combat ready this week. That status means that the fighters are undergoing new exercises to test the plane's capabilities and prepare pilots.

But the aircraft's state-of-the-art stealth technology is evidently making it difficult for the military to carry out those drills. Exercises performed at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho were meant to test the plane's ability to evade surface-to-air missiles [SAM], but ground units had a difficult time locking onto the aircraft.

"If they never saw us, they couldn't target us," said Lt. Col. George Watkins, according to Defense News.

Gone are the days when evolutionists asserted that life would never produce wheels or gears. It was impossible, they thought, for structures like that to arrive by natural selection, because too many coordinated mutations would be required. A wheel without an axle would provide no fitness advantage. One gear could achieve nothing without a matching gear. That was before we learned about the planthopper with its gear-driven jumping feet and the exquisite rotary engines of cells: the bacterial flagellum and the ATP synthase motor, on which all life depends.

Since ATP synthase earned its discoverers a Nobel Prize in 1997, it has remained an object of fascination. New imaging techniques have been steadily improving the focus on these miniature rotary motors that measure a mere 20 x 10 nanometers (billionths of a meter) yet spin at up to 42,000 rpm (see here), generating 3 ATP per revolution. As some years have passed since we discussed these motors in detail, readers may wish to pause to refresh their memories with our video about these amazing machines (above) before learning about some new discoveries.

NASA is about to launch a $1 billion 7-year mission to probe asteroid Benny, which may carry the building blocks of organic life, but also has a chance of hitting Earth late in the next century.

"It may be destined to cause immense suffering and death," Dante Lauretta, professor of planetary science at Arizona University and the lead researcher on the OSIRIS-REx mission, told the Sunday Times.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have engineered a potentially game-changing solar cell that cheaply and efficiently converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into usable hydrocarbon fuel, using only sunlight for energy.

The finding is reported in the July 29 issue of Science and was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. A provisional patent application has been filed.

Unlike conventional solar cells, which convert sunlight into electricity that must be stored in heavy batteries, the new device essentially does the work of plants, converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into fuel, solving two crucial problems at once. A solar farm of such "artificial leaves" could remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and produce energy-dense fuel efficiently.

"The new solar cell is not photovoltaic -- it's photosynthetic," says Amin Salehi-Khojin, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at UIC and senior author on the study.

Russia's space agency Roscosmos intends to send an orbiter and a lander to Jupiter within the next 10 years.

The main goal of the project is to explore Jupiter's moon Ganymede for the existence of primitive life forms.

I don't know about you, but I've always secretly wanted to serendipitously discover something incredible in one of my lab courses. Well, some students in Japan got to experience just that. A group of astronomers and undergraduate students at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) in Tokyo found a unique galaxy system they dubbed the Eye of Horus.

Masayuki Tanaka (NAOJ) and several students were looking at images taken with the Hyper Suprime-Cam at the Subaru telescope when they found the odd-looking system.

Once Tanaka saw the warped light, he immediately recognized it as a strong gravitational lens — where a galaxy's gravity bends the light from a background galaxy. Strong lensing helps probe the distribution of matter around galaxies.

A closer look at the images showed one reddish ring and another with a blue tint. The two colors suggested that not just one but two galaxies were being lensed, something that's rarely observed. There are only a handful of systems like this currently known, but the distant galaxies haven't been measured because they're too faint.

Based on data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, light from the lensing galaxy takes 7 billion years to arrive at Earth. Astronomers conducted follow-up observations on the Magellan Telescope and confirmed that light from the background galaxies take 9 and 10.5 billion years, respectively. The data confirm that there are two galaxies at two different distances. They also show that one of the galaxies seems to be made of two distinct clumps, according to Kenneth Wong (NAOJ), which could indicate a pair of interacting galaxies.

With 300 nights of data, the Hyper-Suprime Cam's survey is the largest observing program ever approved at the Subaru Telescope. The survey, still in its early phases, hopes to address outstanding astrophysics questions about the nature of dark energy, how galaxies evolve, and when galaxies first started pumping out stars. The team expects to find about 10 more double-lensed galaxies in the survey.

The paper on the discovery was published in the July 25th issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The atmosphere above the gas giant's famous storm is hundreds of degrees hotter than anywhere else on the planet and scientists are on the case. Temperatures 500 miles above Jupiter's famed Great Red Spot are far warmer than anywhere else on the planet, raising suspicions that the massive storm is the mysterious energy source that is heating the giant planet's upper atmosphere.

Scientists have yet to understand why Jupiter's upper atmosphere is about the same temperature as Earth's though the planet is five times farther away from the sun. A new study points to the Great Red Spot, a gargantuan storm that astronomers have been watching with telescopes on Earth for more than 300 years, as the heat source.

Scientists used NASA's NASA Infrared Telescope Facility at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii to study Jupiter for nine hours in December 2012. They found a spike in temperatures over the Great Red Spot, a storm big enough to swallow three Earths that is the largest storm in the solar system.

Members of the successful Apollo space program are experiencing higher rates of cardiovascular problems that are thought to be caused by their exposure to deep space radiation, according to a Florida State University researcher.

In a new paper in Scientific Reports, FSU Dean of the College of Human Sciences and Professor Michael Delp explains that the men who traveled into deep space as part of the lunar missions were exposed to levels of galactic cosmic radiation that have not been experienced by any other astronauts or cosmonauts. That exposure is now manifesting itself as cardiovascular problems.

"We know very little about the effects of deep space radiation on human health, particularly on the cardiovascular system," Delp said. "This gives us the first glimpse into its adverse effects on humans."

A self-powered waste water treatment plant using microbes has just passed its biggest test, bringing household-level water recycling a step closer

They're miraculous in their own way, even if they don't quite turn water into wine. Personal water treatment plants could soon be recycling our waste water and producing energy on the side.

Last month, Boston-based Cambrian Innovation began field tests of what's known as a microbial fuel cell at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Maryland. Called BioVolt, in one day it can convert 2250 litres of sewage into enough clean water for at least 15 people. Not only that, it generates the electricity to power itself - plus a bit left over.

This is a big deal, as conventional treatment plants guzzle energy - typically consuming 1.5 kilowatt-hours for every kilogram of pollutants removed. In the US, this amounts to a whopping 3 per cent of the total energy demand. If the plants could be self-powered, recycling our own waste water could become as commonplace as putting a solar panel on a roof.

Existing treatment plants use bacteria to metabolise the organic material in waste water. "There's lots of food for them, so they reproduce fast," says Cambrian chief technology officer Justin Buck. At the end of the process, the microbes can make up a third by weight of the leftovers to be disposed of. Before being put in landfill, this "microbe cake" itself needs to be heat-sterilised and chemically treated, which uses a lot of energy.