Science & Technology

Haumea: Mysterious radioactive rugby-ball world

Lewis Page
The Register
Fri, 13 May 2011 11:41 UTC

Boffins probe secrets of bizarro Kuiper belt denizen

The fifth "dwarf planet" of the solar system, Haumea, is shaped like a rugby ball 2,000km long and its icy surface is warmed by radioactive uranium and thorium ores in its interior.

The strange ellipsoid world is thought to have a day just four hours long, and is attended by a brace of moons as it circles the Sun far out in the distant Kuiper belt beyond the planet Neptune.

These new revelations on Haumea, which was only discovered in 2005, come to us courtesy of a team of international astronomers who have been probing the strange object using the aptly-big Very Large Telescope operated by the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

According to the latest observations, the surface of Haumea and its moon Hi'aka are covered with crystalline water ice. Normally, considering the outrageously chilly temperatures which prevail out beyond Neptune, the ice would have become glass, without a crystalline structure: there must be some form of heating present.

Caves and their dripstones tell us about the uplift of mountains

Michael Meyer
EurekAlert.org
Mon, 02 May 2011 04:53 UTC

© Michael Meyer
In a recent Geology paper, geologists from the universities of Innsbruck and Leeds report on ancient cave systems discovered near the summits of the Allgäu Mountains that preserved the oldest radiometrically dated dripstones currently known from the European Alps.

In one of his songs Bob Dylan asks "How many years can a mountain exist before it is washed to the sea?", and thus poses an intriguing geological question for which an accurate answer is not easily provided. Mountain ranges are in a constant interplay between climatically controlled weathering processes on the one hand and the tectonic forces that cause folding and thrusting and thus thickening of the Earth's crust on the other hand. While erosion eventually erases any geological obstacles, tectonic forces are responsible for piling- and lifting-up rocks and thus for forming spectacular mountain landscapes such as the European Alps. In reality, climate, weathering and mountain uplift interact in a complex manner and quantifying rates for erosion and uplift, especially for the last couple of millions of years, remains a challenging task.

In a recent Geology paper Michael Meyer (University of Innsbruck) et al. report on ancient cave systems discovered near the summits of the Allgäu Mountains (Austria) that preserved the oldest radiometrically dated dripstones currently known from the European Alps. "These cave deposits formed ca. 2 million years ago and their geochemical signature and biological inclusions are vastly different from other cave calcites in the Alps" says Meyer, who works at the Institute of Geology and Paleontology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

Thirty Supernovas per Second in the Observable Universe! Is the Red Giant Betelgeuse Next?

The Daily Galaxy
Thu, 12 May 2011 20:47 UTC

Betelgeuse, one of the brightest stars in the sky, could burst into its supernova phase and become as bright as a full moon -- and last for as long as a year. The massive star is visible in the winter sky over most of the world as a bright, reddish star, could explode as a supernova anytime within the next 100,000 years.

Most astronomers today believe that one of the plausible reasons we have yet to detect intelligent life in the universe is due to the deadly effects of local supernova explosions that wipe out all life in a given region of a galaxy.

While there is, on average, only one supernova per galaxy per century, there is something on the order of 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe. Taking 10 billion years for the age of the Universe (it's actually 13.7 billion, but stars didn't form for the first few hundred million), Dr. Richard Mushotzky of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, derived a figure of 1 billion supernovae per year, or 30 supernovae per second in the observable Universe!

The red giant Betelgeuse, once so large it would reach out to Jupiter's orbit if placed in our own solar system, has shrunk by 15 percent over the past decade in a half, although it's just as bright as it's ever been.

Biologists Announce Discovery of an Entirely New Branch of Life

Clay Dillow
PopSci
Thu, 12 May 2011 16:50 UTC

In further proof that we never know just how much we don't know, a paper published in Nature suggests that biologists in the UK have discovered an entirely new and unique branch in the tree of life. A group of mysterious microscopic organisms related to fungus are actually so different that they make up their own kind of fungal group. Another way to say that: there are so many of these distinctly different kinds of organisms living in so many diverse places, that the biodiversity among this new group might be as vast as the entire known fungal kingdom. In fact, they might not actually be fungi at all.

The scientists who have discovered this new clade--a clade is like a branch on the tree of life that consists of an organism and all of its descendants--have named it cryptomycota, which loosely means "hidden from the kingdom Fungi" so we're told. And indeed the cryptomycota have remained hidden from sight even though it turns out they are everywhere, living in many different environments, including freshwater lakes and sediments, as well as pond water.

UK Police buy software to map suspects' digital movements

Ryan Gallagher and Rajeev Syal
The Guardian
Wed, 11 May 2011 16:21 UTC

© John Anderton/AP
Police have bought software that maps suspects' movements in space and time, in a step towards the futuristic crime detecting imagined in Minority Report.

Geotime software, bought by the Met, collates data from social networking sites, satnavs, mobiles and financial transactions

Britain's largest police force is using software that can map nearly every move suspects and their associates make in the digital world, prompting an outcry from civil liberties groups.

The Metropolitan police has bought Geotime, a security programme used by the US military, which shows an individual's movements and communications with other people on a three-dimensional graphic. It can be used to collate information gathered from social networking sites, satellite navigation equipment, mobile phones, financial transactions and IP network logs.

Police have confirmed its purchase and declined to rule out its use in investigating public order disturbances.

Campaigners and lawyers have expressed concern at how the software could be used to monitor innocent parties such as protesters in breach of data protection legislation.

Direct Air Capture Is Pricey Fix for Climate Change

Jeremy Hsu
InnovationNewsDaily
Wed, 11 May 2011 20:23 UTC

Capturing carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere makes little sense compared to dealing with greenhouse gas sources such as coal and natural gas power plants, according to a new report. But direct air capture might prove more cost-effective down the road.

Scrubbing CO2 from the smokestack of a coal power plant costs about $80 per metric ton, whereas removing a metric ton of CO2 from the atmosphere might cost an estimated $600 under optimistic scenarios. That's because the CO2 emissions from power plants have 300 times greater concentration than the CO2 in the atmosphere.

Doppler effect found even at molecular level - 169 years after its discovery

Nano TechWire
Wed, 11 May 2011 19:18 UTC

Whether they know it or not, anyone who's ever gotten a speeding ticket after zooming by a radar gun has experienced the Doppler effect - a measurable shift in the frequency of radiation based on the motion of an object, which in this case is your car doing 45 miles an hour in a 30-mph zone.

But for the first time, scientists have experimentally shown a different version of the Doppler effect at a much, much smaller level - the rotation of an individual molecule. Prior to this such an effect had been theorized, but it took a complex experiment with a synchrotron to prove it's for real.

"Some of us thought of this some time ago, but it's very difficult to show experimentally," said T. Darrah Thomas, a professor emeritus of chemistry at Oregon State University and part of an international research team that today announced its findings in Physical Review Letters, a professional journal.

Most illustrations of the Doppler effect are called "translational," meaning the change in frequency of light or sound when one object moves away from the other in a straight line, like a car passing a radar gun. The basic concept has been understood since an Austrian physicist named Christian Doppler first proposed it in 1842.

But a similar effect can be observed when something rotates as well, scientists say.

EPA Whistleblower Criticizes Global Warming in Peer-Reviewed Study

Christine Hall
Big Sky Business Journal
Wed, 04 May 2011 15:21 UTC

Claims of Catastrophic Warming Are Overwhelmingly Contradicted By Real-World Data

The scientific hypotheses underlying global warming alarmism are overwhelmingly contradicted by real-world data, and for that reason economic studies on the alleged benefits of controlling greenhouse gas emissions are baseless. That's the finding of a new peer-reviewed report by a former EPA whistleblower.

Dr. Alan Carlin, now retired, was a career environmental economist at EPA when CEI (Competitive Enterprise Institute) broke the story of his negative report on the agency's proposal to regulate greenhouse gases in June, 2009. Dr. Carlin's supervisor had ordered him to keep quiet about the report and to stop working on global warming issues. EPA's attempt to silence Dr. Carlin became a highly-publicized embarrassment to the agency, given Administrator Lisa Jackson's supposed commitment to transparency.

Dr. Carlin's new study, A Multidisciplinary, Science-Based Approach to the Economics of Climate Change, is published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. It finds that fossil fuel use has little impact on atmospheric CO2 levels. Moreover, the claim that atmospheric CO2 has a strong positive feedback effect on temperature is contradicted on several grounds, ranging from low atmospheric sensitivity to volcanic eruptions, to the lack of ocean heating and the absence of a predicted tropical "hot spot."

UBC lab seeks process to convert greenhouse gas emissions to fuel

Randy Shore
The Vancouver Sun
Wed, 11 May 2011 19:44 UTC

© Jason Payne, PNG, Vancouver Sun
David Wilkinson of UBC's Clean Energy Research Centre is working to lower CO2 emissions by converting the gas into methane, methanol and other chemicals for combustion or electric cells.

Catalyst could use solar radiation to create carbon-neutral source.

University of B.C. scientists are working to harness the sun's energy to power a process that converts the planet-threatening greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into a useful fuel.

David Wilkinson, executive director of the Clean Energy Research Centre at UBC, says concentrated CO2 emissions from power plants combined with water can be converted to methane, methanol, formic acid and other fuels suitable for combustion or electric cells using known chemical processes.

Huge Gamma-ray Flares Mystify World's Astronomers

The Daily Galaxy
Wed, 11 May 2011 13:44 UTC

The Crab Nebula has stunned astronomers by emitting an unprecedented blast of gamma rays, the highest-energy light in the Universe, from a small area of the famous nebula. The cause of the 12 April gamma-ray flare, which lasted for some six days, hitting levels 30 times higher than normal and varying at times from hour to hour, described at the Third Fermi Symposium in Rome, is a complete and total mystery. The Crab's recent outburst is more than five times more intense than any yet observed.

Nasa's Fermi space observatory is designed to measure only gamma rays, that emanate from the Universe's most extreme environments and violent processes. Since its launch nearly three years ago, Fermi has spotted three such outbursts, with the first two reported earlier this year at the American Astronomical Society meeting.

The Crab Nebula is composed mainly of the remnant of a supernova, which was seen on Earth to explode in the year 1054. At the core of the brilliantly coloured gas cloud is a pulsar - a rapidly spinning neutron star that emits radio waves which sweep past the Earth 30 times per second. But so far none of the nebula's known components can explain the signal Fermi sees, said Roger Blandford, director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, US.

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Science & Technology

Haumea: Mysterious radioactive rugby-ball world

Caves and their dripstones tell us about the uplift of mountains

Thirty Supernovas per Second in the Observable Universe! Is the Red Giant Betelgeuse Next?

Biologists Announce Discovery of an Entirely New Branch of Life

UK Police buy software to map suspects' digital movements

Direct Air Capture Is Pricey Fix for Climate Change

Doppler effect found even at molecular level - 169 years after its discovery

EPA Whistleblower Criticizes Global Warming in Peer-Reviewed Study

UBC lab seeks process to convert greenhouse gas emissions to fuel

Huge Gamma-ray Flares Mystify World's Astronomers

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