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Lab finds new method to turn biomass into gasoline

Jasmin Melvin
Reuters
Tue, 21 Apr 2009 23:41 UTC
Washington - U.S. scientists have combined a discovery from a French garbage dump with breakthroughs in synthetic biology to come up with a novel method for turning plant waste into gasoline, without the need of any food sources.

A synthetic biology lab at the University of California San Francisco identified a compound able to use biomass to produce a gas that can be converted into a gasoline chemically indistinguishable from fossil-fuel based petroleum.

Their method allows for a variety of feedstocks to be used that are nonfood sources, such as agricultural waste products like corn stover and sugar cane bagasse.
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Sherlock

Germany to Excavate Yard Said to Hold Remains of 753 Jews Killed by Nazis


Haaretz
Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:21 UTC
A birch-lined back yard believed to hold the remains of more than 750 former Jewish prisoners slain by the Nazis in the final days of World War II will be excavated by German authorities starting Wednesday.

The work on the site of the former Nazi labor camp Lieberose, a subcamp of the better-known Sachsenhausen concentration camp, follows a lengthy battle with the former landowner.

Joerg Schoenbohm, interior minister of Brandenburg state, said officials hope the efforts will help bring closure to any relatives of victims and send a signal to neo-Nazis and others seeking to deny the Holocaust.

"We want to have clarity," Schoenbohm told reporters Tuesday. "We need to end the uncertainty surrounding the crime so that we will have time for mourning and remembering."
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Sherlock

New Ancient Egypt Temples Discovered in Sinai

Hadeel Al-Shalchi
The Associated Press
Tue, 21 Apr 2009 20:14 UTC
Ramses
© AP Photo/Egypt's Supreme Council of AntiquitiesPharaonic King Ramses II, right and Geb, god of earth, carved on a wall at one of four recently unearthed new temples in Qantara amidst the 3,000-year-old remains of an ancient fortified city that could have been used to impress foreign delegations visiting Egypt.
Archaeologists exploring an old military road in the Sinai have unearthed four new temples amidst the 3,000-year-old remains of an ancient fortified city that could have been used to impress foreign delegations visiting Egypt, antiquities authorities announced Tuesday.

Among the discoveries was the largest mud brick temple found in the Sinai with an area of 70 by 80 meters (77 by 87 yards) and fortified with mud walls 3 meters (10 feet) thick, said Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The find was made in Qantara, 2 1/2 miles (4 kilometers) east of the Suez Canal. These temples mark the latest discovery by archaeologists digging up the remains of the city on the military road known as "Way of Horus." Horus is a falcon-headed god, who represented the greatest cosmic powers for ancient Egyptians.
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Brick Wall

Great Wall of China 'Even Longer'


BBC News
Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:00 UTC
Great Wall
© AFPThe structure is a series of walls first linked up more than 2,000 years ago.
The Great Wall of China is even greater than previously thought, according to the first detailed survey to establish the length of the ancient barricade.

A two-year government mapping study found that the wall spans 8,850km (5,500 miles) - until now, the length was commonly put at about 5,000km.

Previous estimates of its length were mainly based on historical records.

Infra-red and GPS technologies helped locate some areas concealed over time by sandstorms, state media said.
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Blackbox

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

Catherine Brahic
New Scientist
Mon, 20 Apr 2009 22:11 UTC
Image
© Modified from Turner/AGUWinds circle clockwise around Antarctica, whip off Victoria Land and create a vortex of cold storms (dark blue) off the Ross Sea, where sea ice is expanding. The vortex also draws in warm (red) air from South America, which warms the Antarctic Peninsula.
It's the southern ozone hole whatdunit. That's why Antarctic sea ice is growing while at the other pole, Arctic ice is shrinking at record rates. It seems CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals have given the South Pole respite from global warming.

But only temporarily. According to John Turner of the British Antarctic Survey, the effect will last roughly another decade before Antarctic sea ice starts to decline as well.

Arctic sea ice is decreasing dramatically and reached a record low in 2007. But satellite images studied by Turner and his colleagues show that Antarctic sea ice is increasing in every month of the year expect January. "By the end of the century we expect one third of Antarctic sea ice to disappear," says Turner. "So we're trying to understand why it's increasing now, at a time of global warming."

In a new study, Turner and colleagues show how the ozone hole has changed weather patterns around Antarctica. These changes have drawn in warm air over the Antarctic Peninsula in West Antarctica and cooled the air above East Antarctica.
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Blackbox

Did lead cause global cooling?

Jeff Hecht
New Scientist
Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:17 UTC
Previous generations unwittingly found a way to cool the Earth, but it's an approach we won't want to reprise. Research suggests that particles of lead from gasoline exhaust may have offset warming in the 20th century.

It's well known that particles in the atmosphere such as mineral dust, pollen, heavy metals and even bacteria can act as seeds for the nucleation of ice crystals. These crystals form clouds that can affect the Earth's energy balance by reflecting the sun's rays back into space, for example.

Dan Cziczo and colleagues of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, created artificial clouds in the laboratory to explore the ice nucleation efficiency of various particles. Over a third of the ice nuclei generated contained lead, suggesting it is a highly-efficient nucleator. They found similar proportions of lead in atmospheric mineral dust samples collected in Switzerland.

Cziczo argues that lead "supercharges" ice-nucleating dust particles in the atmosphere. According to his calculations, global infrared emission would be 0.8 watts per square metre higher if all atmospheric ice crystals contained lead compared with none.
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R2-D2

Robots are narrowing the gap with humans

Robert S. Boyd
McClatchy Newspapers
Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:48 UTC
Image
© I-robotHello. Soon we will replace you
Robots are gaining on us humans.

Thanks to exponential increases in computer power - which is roughly doubling every two years - robots are getting smarter, more capable, more like flesh-and-blood people.

Matching human skills and intelligence, however, is an enormously difficult - perhaps impossible - challenge.

Nevertheless, robots guided by their own computer "brains'' now can pick up and peel bananas, land jumbo jets, steer cars through city traffic, search human DNA for cancer genes, play soccer or the violin, find earthquake victims or explore craters on Mars.
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Magnify

Archaeologists hunt for Cleopatra's tomb

Will Rasmussen
Reuters
Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:00 UTC
Alexandria, Egypt - High on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, buried deep under the crumbling limestone of a temple to the goddess Isis, archaeologists believe the body of Queen Cleopatra may lie.

The tomb of the Egyptian queen has never been found but archaeologists are discovering more evidence that Cleopatra's priests carried her body to the temple after her suicide, where it could lie with her lover Marc Antony.

"This could be the most important discovery of the 21st century," Zahi Hawass, Egypt's chief archaeologist, told reporters on a tour of the temple on Sunday. "This is the perfect place for them to be hidden."
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Meteor

The International Space Station and Meteor Cross Paths


Space Weather
Mon, 20 Apr 2009 21:25 UTC
Image
© Stan Nelson
On April 2nd, ham radio operator Stan Nelson of Roswell, New Mexico, was listening to the radar's signals when the International Space Station and a meteor passed through the beam in quick succession.

The slowly descending tone at the beginning of the soundtrack is the radar's doppler-shifted reflection from the ISS. It sounds like the whistle of a train racing past a stationary bystander. Indeed, the basic physics of the doppler shift is the same in both cases.

The rapidly descending tone near the end of the soundtrack is the radar's doppler-shifted reflection from a meteor. Because meteors travel through space some two to ten times faster than Earth-orbiting spacecraft, their radar reflections are much more sharply doppler shifted.

Click on the dynamic spectrum to listen.
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Sun

Best of the Web: Low sunspot cycle fascinates scientists

Sue Vorenberg
Santa Fe New Mexican
Sat, 18 Apr 2009 21:48 UTC
Image
© SOHO/MDISpotless sun
Unusual trends - especially astronomical ones - are a great way to cause the public to panic.

But for those worried about a strangely long trend of missing sunspots, scientists have a message: Don't expect the sun to change its spots overnight.

Sunspots are dark areas on the sun's surface caused by intense magnetic activity. They indicate a natural sort of churning caused by the rotation of plasma inside the sun. And they are often associated with things like solar flares, mass ejections and other phenomenon indicating increased solar activity.

Since 2004, the sun has been in a prolonged period of low sunspot activity, which has led some to fear that the phenomenon could lead to global cooling, a new ice age, the death of the sun or even to the end of the world predicted by the Mayan calendar.
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