Science & TechnologyS


Better Earth

Earth's Mantle: Untapped Oil Source?

Michael Reilly
Discovery News
Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:13 UTC
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New Source for Black Gold?
Oil, one of the most important, valuable substances on the planet may form in an unexpected place, according to a new study -- the crushing hot furnace of Earth's mantle.

The petroleum we rely on to fuel our cars and heat our homes were formed over millions of years as ancient, dead algae and plankton were compressed in layers of sediment and heated. Because of this, oil companies know to look for new reserves in places that are, or once were shallow marine environments.

See this link for the original article.

Comment: Will this be yet another piece of evidence ignored by the mainstream media about the abiotic origins of oil?

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Bizarro Earth

Flashback The strange heresies of Thomas Gold: if the maverick astronomer's theories about oil are right, we'll be able to drive for a long time

Sonia Shah
Playboy
Tue, 01 Nov 2005 18:26 UTC
Sometime next year, from off the coast of Japan, we should find out if he is right. Working onboard the Chikyu, a 210-meter ship equipped with a huge drilling platform, a team of geologists, engineers and oceanographers led by Japan's Center for Deep Earth Exploration hopes to drill the world's deepest hole. The 8.5-inch aperture will penetrate seven kilometers under the earth's crust to pierce its mantle and solve some of our most profound mysteries. For the first time, human eyes may see the molten rock that makes up 84 percent of Earth's volume. According to astronomer Thomas Gold, they may tap into the source of the planet's energy and the cradle of life itself.

If correct, Gold's theory will change the way we think about everything from energy to our role in the universe. Corporate and state power contingent on the vagaries of the oil market could disintegrate. Environmental policies would have to adjust to a new paradigm. Even cultural values premised on the uniqueness of life would have to be made anew. For decades Gold's theory has enraged the scientific establishment. "Every fact is against him," says an Amoco geochemist. "Completely absurd," adds a Colorado School of Mines geologist. "A waste of time," says another, "on about the same level as saying sugarplum fairies will cure cancer."
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Better Earth

Flashback Test backs creation of oil deep in Earth

Stephen Strauss
The Globe and Mail
Tue, 13 Aug 2002 18:12 UTC
Russian and American researchers have come up with a radically new recipe for making oil.

Take some rusty iron, add a soupçon of marble, throw in a bit of water, then heat and squeeze the mixture at temperatures and pressures thought to exist more than 100 kilometres below the surface of the Earth. At the right pressures and temperatures, some of the iron, marble and water turn into methane, ethane, butane, propane and a host of other hydrocarbons.

The successful experiment, reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is thought by its authors to be the most conclusive laboratory evidence for what is called the abiotic theory of oil formation.
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Magnify

Tracing King Tut's Roots

Dr. Zahi Hawass
Asharq Alawsat
Tue, 25 Aug 2009 23:11 UTC
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© Unkown
Al-Awsat- Tutankhamen, the golden pharaoh, continues to bedazzle the Cairo, Asharq entire world. The discovery of King Tut's tomb, which took place around 85 years ago, remains the most important archeological discovery of our time, not just in Egypt, but in the entire world.

This was the first time that a royal tomb of one of Egypt's pharaohs was discovered untouched, and with the complete set of funeral furniture which was buried with the King. In addition to this, there was also the treasures and jewelry which blinded anybody who set eyes on them. It is hard to believe that these beautifully crafted and delicate jewels were made over 3,500 years ago.
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Info

Ancient Map Offers Key to Mesoamerican History

Francisco Miraval
Latin American Gerald Tribune
Tue, 25 Aug 2009 23:00 UTC
Denver - A map painted by Mexican Indians in the mid-16th century has become a key document for understanding the migration of Mesoamerican peoples from their land of origin in what is now the U.S. Southwest, according to a scholar at Harvard University Divinity School.

"Five years of research and writing (2002-2007) by 15 scholars of Mesoamerican history show that this document, the Map of Cuauhtinchan 2, with more than 700 pictures in color, is something like a Mesoamerican Iliad and Odyssey," Dr. David Carrasco told Efe in a telephone interview.
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Info

Staggering ancient structure speaks to us down the ages

Ron Ferguson
The Press and Journal
Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:51 UTC
And so it goes on - yet another spectacular archaeological find in Orkney, but this one is a real "biggie", an astonishing discovery which is really exciting archaeologists. VisitScotland is also pretty chuffed, especially as tourism is expected to take a bit of a knock in the aftermath of the al Megrahi business.

So, what's it all about? Experts have unearthed a Neolithic "cathedral" - a massive building of a kind never before seen in Britain. It has left archaeologists stunned.

This is not like finding a couple of bits of broken pottery. This is literally groundbreaking.
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Saturn

LSU professor finds alternate explanation for dune formation on Saturn's largest moon

Ashley Berthelot
Louisiana State University
Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:47 UTC
Baton Rouge - A new and likely controversial paper has just been published online in Nature Geoscience by LSU Department of Geography and Anthropology Chair Patrick Hesp and United States Geological Survey scientist David Rubin. The paper, "Multiple origins of linear dunes on Earth and Titan," examines a possible new mechanism for the development of very large linear dunes formed on the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon.
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Bug

Carnivorous Clock eats bugs, begins doomsday countdown

Thomas Ricker
Engadget
Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:17 UTC
It's not enough that humans gave robots a place to congregate to plan our demise, now we've adapted them with the ability to extract fuel from the very nectar of life.

All that innocent experimentation with fuel cells that run on blood has led to this, a flesh-eating clock. This prototype time-piece from UK-based designers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau traps insects on flypaper stretched across its roller system before depositing them into a vat of bacteria. The ensuing chemical reaction, or "digestion," is transformed into power that keeps the rollers rollin' and the LCD clock ablaze.
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Magnify

Diving Deep for a Living Fossil

William J. Broad
New York Times
Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:10 UTC
For 33 years, Peter A. Rona has pursued an ancient, elusive animal, repeatedly plunging down more than two miles to the muddy seabed of the North Atlantic to search out, and if possible, pry loose his quarry.

Like Ahab, he has failed time and again. Despite access to the world's best equipment for deep exploration, he has always come back empty-handed, the creature eluding his grip.

The animal is no white whale. And Dr. Rona is no unhinged Captain Ahab, but rather a distinguished oceanographer at Rutgers University. And he has now succeeded in making an intellectual splash with a new research report, written with a team of a dozen colleagues.

They have gathered enough evidence to prove that his scientific prey - an organism a bit larger than a poker chip - represents one of the world's oldest living fossils, perhaps the oldest. The ancestors of the creature, Paleodictyon nodosum, go back to the dawn of complex life. And the creature itself, known from fossils, was once thought to have gone extinct some 50 million years ago.
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Network

Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts

Alex Wright
The New York Times
Sun, 23 Aug 2009 01:31 UTC
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© Minh Uong / The New York Times
Computers may be good at crunching numbers, but can they crunch feelings?

The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window onto the collective consciousness of Internet users.

An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world's unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data. This is more than just an interesting programming exercise. For many businesses, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency that can make or break a product in the marketplace.
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