Science & TechnologyS


Nuke

Low-flying helicopters over Berkeley are measuring radiation levels

Tracey Taylor
Berkeleyside
Thu, 30 Aug 2012 08:29 UTC
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Many Berkeley residents have been in touch with us today asking about the helicopters that have been flying overhead, across the city and also into Oakland. A call to Berkeley Police Department confirms that the choppers are out measuring baseline radiation levels.

The flyovers are part of research by two federal security agencies - the Department of Homeland Security and the National Nuclear Security Administration - to compare aerial and ground based mapping of radioactivity, according to a story in the Contra Costa Times.

The National Nuclear Security Administration agency says the project will help local, state and federal authorities'measure radiation. Radioactive sources - such as uranium, radon gas and carbon-14 - have been present in the Earth's crust since it was formed. (Read the NNSA press release.)

While the purpose may be worthy, the low-flying choppers - they need to fly at around 300 ft - are not proving popular with everyone. "It's driving me batty," said Berkeleysider Emily Cohen.

Update, 6:00pm: Berkeley Police say the helicopter will be making daily flights for five days, between Aug. 27 and Sept. 1, 2012. "The helicopter will fly in a grid pattern over the locations about 300 feet above the ground," they said in a release.
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Telescope

Planet has two parent stars and a sibling, NASA telescope finds

Irene Klotz
Yahoo! News - Canada
Thu, 30 Aug 2012 02:58 UTC
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© Reuters/NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle/HandoutThe Kepler-47 system diagram is shown in this handout released by NASA August 29, 2012.
In a dazzling and previously undetected display of orbital dynamics, two planets beyond the solar system have been found circling a pair of stars, scientists using NASA's Kepler space telescope said on Wednesday.

Unlike single planets orbiting single stars, the planets in the Kepler-47 system, located about 5,000 light years away in the constellation Cygnus, are flying around a "moving target," San Diego State University astronomer Jerome Orosz said in a paper published in this week's Science magazine.

As a consequence, when and how long it takes for the planets to orbit their parent stars varies, a telltale sign of so-called "circumbinary orbits."

Kepler works by detecting slight dips in the amount of light coming from target stars caused by orbiting planets passing by, or transiting, relative to the observatory's line of sight.

Last year, astronomers announced the first planet found to be orbiting a pair of stars.

The Kepler-47 family is more complex, with at least two planets circling a pair of stars that whirl around each other every 7.5 days.
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Arrow Up

Recycled Plastic Stops Hurricane-Force Projectiles

Jess Emspak
Discovery News
Tue, 28 Aug 2012 15:03 UTC
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© University of Alabama, Birmingham
As Hurricane Isaac heads for shore, people living along the coast are finding ways to batten down the hatches. Nailing sheets of plywood over windows is one such protection. But recycled panels based on the latest military armor might be a better choice.

Uday Vaidya, a professor of materials science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has been testing recyclable, light thermoplastics and resins -- materials similar to those used in modern armored vehicles. Vaidya's plastic is stronger than steel and weighs a fifth as much.

The panels could be used to reinforce a house, not just the windows. They're designed to look like white interior walls and because they're plastic, they don't corrode and never need painting. At Texas Tech University, researchers from the National Storm Shelter Association fired lumber -- two-by-fours weighing about 15 pounds -- at the panels at 100 miles per hour. That's about the speed lumber would reach if tossed about by a category 5 hurricane or a tornado.
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Bizarro Earth

How Average Quakes May Turn Into Giants

Charles Q. Choi
OurAmazingPlanet
Wed, 29 Aug 2012 12:24 UTC
San Andreas Fault
© Scott Haefner, USGSView looking southeast along the surface trace of the San Andreas fault in the Carrizo Plain, north of Wallace Creek. Elkhorn Rd. meets the fault near the top of the photo.
Average earthquakes may turn into mega-quakes when rock in a fault weakens much the same way ice does under ice skates, researchers say.

The finding by two researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, is based on past research on the friction between rocks in an earthquake fault. Their study confirmed that rock can develop weak points under pressure and suggests that the consequent drop in friction could help release energy.

Previous research suggested that during earthquakes, friction between rocks in specific areas of fault zones rapidly lessens, much the way ice skate blades reduce friction by melting icy surfaces as they glide over them.

Such a phenomenon could help solve a longstanding mystery: why major fault zones such as the San Andreas Fault generate so little heat from the grinding of rocks compared with the magnitude of the earthquakes they produce.

"The process allows highly stressed areas to rapidly break down, acting like the weakest links in the chain," said researcher Kevin Brown. "Even initially stable regions of a fault can experience runaway slip by this process if they are pushed at velocities above a key tipping point."

This drop in friction also could help faults release energy. "This may be relevant for how you get from large earthquakes to giant earthquakes," Brown said.
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Chalkboard

Math ability requires crosstalk in the brain


MedicalXpress.com
Wed, 29 Aug 2012 15:44 UTC
A new study by researchers at UT Dallas' Center for Vital Longevity, Duke University, and the University of Michigan has found that the strength of communication between the left and right hemispheres of the brain predicts performance on basic arithmetic problems. The findings shed light on the neural basis of human math abilities and suggest a possible route to aiding those who suffer from dyscalculia - an inability to understand and manipulate numbers.
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© Center for Vital Longevity, University of Texas at DallasExamples of the simple numerical and arithmetic tasks used in the study. Participants were asked to judge whether the numerical operation was correct or not.
It has been known for some time that the parietal cortex, the top/middle region of the brain, plays a central role in so-called numerical cognition - our ability to process numerical information. Previous brain imaging studies have shown that the right parietal region is primarily involved in basic quantity processing (like gauging relative amounts of fruit in baskets), while the left parietal region is involved in more precise numerical operations like addition and subtraction. What has not been known is whether the two hemispheres can work together to improve math performance.
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Bizarro Earth

Japan unveils a worst case disaster scenario - estimates monster quake could kill 320,000


PhysOrg
Wed, 29 Aug 2012 15:39 UTC
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A Japanese firefighter looks for bodies next to a grounded fishing boat in Kesennuma, Miyagi prefecture, on March 21, 2011
Japan's government on Wednesday unveiled a worst case disaster scenario that warned a monster earthquake in the Pacific Ocean could kill over 320,000 people, dwarfing last year's quake-tsunami disaster.

Tokyo's casualty toll estimate was based on a catastrophic scenario in which a powerful undersea quake of about 9.0 magnitude sparked a giant tsunami that swamps Japan's coastline south of Tokyo The Cabinet Office's hypothetical disaster would see the quake strike at nighttime during the winter with strong winds helping unleash waves that reach 34-metre (110 feet), sweeping many victims away as they slept.

Many of the estimated 323,000 victims would be drowned by the tsunami, crushed under falling objects or in fires sparked by the disaster, it said. On March 11 last year, a 9.0 magnitude quake struck seismically-active Japan in the early afternoon, triggering tsunami waves that reached 20 metres. About 19,000 were killed or remain missing while the tsunami slammed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, sending reactors into meltdown and sparking the worst atomic crisis in a generation.
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Blackbox

The Pair of Space Probes That Will Finally Demystify the Radiation Surrounding Earth (We Hope)

Andrew Tarantola
Gizmodo
Wed, 29 Aug 2012 14:17 UTC
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© JHU/APL
Concentric rings of highly charged radiation encircle our planet, and we know surprisingly little about them. But once NASA completes a $686 million mission to launch a twin pair of space probes into the eye of this solar storm, the Van Allen belts should be much less of a mystery.

The Van Allen belts were discovered in 1958 by University of Iowa professor James A. Van Allen. The belts are two layers of the same doughnut of charged plasma - the inner belt stretches from the edge of the atmosphere to a radius of 4,000 miles, and the outer belt stretches from 8,000 miles to roughly 24,000. Thy're held in place by our planet's magnetic field. Nearly all of humanity's communications satellites orbit at the outer edge of the 4,000-mile gap that separates the two belts.

These belts shrink and swell in accordance to the larger solar weather patterns in our galactic neighborhood. Increased solar activity can bend these bands closer to the Earth and into the orbital range of our communication satellites. Much like solar flares, these bands of intensely-charged particles can wreak havoc with modern electronics, GPS, power grids, and satellites. The belts tend to knock satellites offline, but NASA has developed a specialized pair of satellites to send in there to figure out why.
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Info

Effects of Einstein's Elusive Gravity Waves Observed

Jason Major
Universe Today
Wed, 29 Aug 2012 13:29 UTC
Two White Dwarfs
© D. Berry/NASA GSFCTwo white dwarfs similar to those in the system SDSS J065133.338+284423.37 spiral together in this illustration from NASA.
Locked in a spiraling orbital embrace, the super-dense remains of two dead stars are giving astronomers the evidence needed to confirm one of Einstein's predictions about the Universe.

A binary system located about 3,000 light-years away, SDSS J065133.338+284423.37 (J0651 for short) contains two white dwarfs orbiting each other rapidly - once every 12.75 minutes. The system was discovered in April 2011, and since then astronomers have had their eyes - and four separate telescopes in locations around the world - on it to see if gravitational effects first predicted by Einstein could be seen.

According to Einstein, space-time is a structure in itself, in which all cosmic objects - planets, stars, galaxies - reside. Every object with mass puts a "dent" in this structure in all dimensions; the more massive an object, the "deeper" the dent. Light energy travels in a straight line, but when it encounters these dents it can dip in and veer off-course, an effect we see from Earth as gravitational lensing.

Einstein also predicted that exceptionally massive, rapidly rotating objects - such as a white dwarf binary pair - would create outwardly-expanding ripples in space-time that would ultimately "steal" kinetic energy from the objects themselves. These gravitational waves would be very subtle, yet in theory, observable.
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Propaganda

Perception Management: NASA asking for ideas about asteroid detectors

Stephen Clark
Spaceflight Now
Wed, 29 Aug 2012 05:41 UTC
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Here comes NASA to the rescue!
NASA is studying the placement of an instrument on a commercial or U.S. government communications satellite to detect and track asteroids near Earth for potential human visits.

The space agency has released a request for information seeking ideas for a sensor to discover a hypothesized set of asteroids very near Earth, opening the possibility for exploration by future astronaut crews.

Instead of funding a dedicated spacecraft to survey asteroid populations, NASA is considering a piggyback instrument on a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, a perch more than 22,000 miles above the equator tailored for communications missions.

The request for information will supply NASA officials with information on what options exist to obtain data on asteroids near Earth, objects which would be easiest to reach on a human expedition.

Comment: This nonsense is put out there to make people feel like our hapless governments can actually DO anything in the face of cosmic climate change. They can't. Or even if they could, they have no intention of doing so. It's all over bar the crying.

The Apocalypse: Comets, Asteroids and Cyclical Catastrophe

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Attention

Last ice age ended 'very quickly'


Cosmos Magazine
Wed, 29 Aug 2012 05:29 UTC
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© ANSTO Research Selections 2011View of the Prince Charles Mountain flanking the Lambert Glacier near Loewe Massif on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.
A novel technique for dating the 'exposure age' of rocks is uncovering how the East Antarctic Ice Sheet responded to past climate change.

"We found two really unexpected results," said Duanne White, a geoscientist at the University of Canberra, who is part of a group of researchers using the new dating technique.

"Previously it had been thought that during the last Ice Age the Ice Sheet expanded all the way out to the continental shelf and was a thousand metres thicker at the margin. But we found quite the opposite - along the whole length of the Lambert Glacier, there was only a relatively small change.

"But the kicker for us was this happened very soon after global temperatures and sea level began to rise at the end of the last Ice Age. So while the response wasn't large at that particular time, it happened very quickly."

Comment: A Different Kind of Catastrophe - Something Wicked This Way Comes

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