January 20, 2012
Category: Ground-Based Astronomy • STEM
On the USA Science and Engineering Festival blog, founder Larry Bock addresses the "declining number of young Americans entering the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)." The Festival expo will take place April 28th and 29th, aiming to "inspire the next generation of science and technology innovators through exciting unforgettable ways." Bock says that waning student interest in STEM subjects is not "a problem for our schools to tackle alone. It will take all of us—from involved parents and teachers to employers, government entities, STEM professionals and civic and community organizations—to help inspire the next generation of innovators." So read about the expo's star-studded itinerary, and bring a kid to Washington DC or one of the satellite events around the country. Meanwhile, Ethan Siegel bemoans the prospects for budding astronomers in light of the National Science Foundation's 2012 budget. In 2011, funding for astronomy was "about equal to the least valuable team in the NBA," and in this new year threatens to shrink to zero.
Posted by Wesley Dodson at 10:29 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 13, 2012
Category: Einstein Ring • Exoplanets • Vesta
When the stars align, the results can be nothing short of spectacular. On Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel shows us an "Einstein ring" photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. This celestial halo surrounds a massive red galaxy, and is in fact light from a much more distant galaxy focused by gravity. Ethan explains, "gravity will bend spacetime, forcing light into a curved path. If a very distant galaxy is properly lined-up with us and a less distant—but very massive—galaxy, its light will not only be bent into a ring if the alignment is perfect, but its light will be greatly magnified, making a dim galaxy appear very bright." The newly-imaged LRG 3-757 "makes about 80% of a full ring: a cosmic horseshoe." A never-before-seen galaxy is also visible on Greg Laden's Blog: GN-108036. Greg says this galaxy produces stars "at the rate of about 100 per year. In contract, the Mikly Way (our galaxy), even though it is 100 times bigger in mass than GN-108036, produces about 30 new stars per year." Amazingly, we are seeing this galaxy as it existed only 750 million years after the big bang. Greg also has the first low-altitude images of the massive asteroid Vesta, taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft. And on Starts With a Bang, Ethan covers Kepler's discovery of the first exoplanet smaller than Earth, whose very hot year is shorter than a week.
Posted by Wesley Dodson at 10:25 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 12, 2012
Category: Higgs Boson • Standard Model
The Higgs Boson, an elementary particle thought to give mass to all other particles, remains an elusive final piece of the Standard Model of physics. On The Weizmann Wave, Professor Eilam Gross writes "many scientists believe that the Standard Model will stand or fall on the discovery of Higgs boson particles or proof that they don't exist." Titanic efforts at the Large Hadron Collider over the last year have been geared toward observing the Higgs, but despite suggestive data released on Tuesday, the indisputable remains out of reach. Kostas Nikolopoulos writes on Brookhaven Bits & Bytes that the LHC will restart in spring 2012 and "should be able to double the available dataset in time for the summer conferences." Until then, evidence for a Higgs particle at a mass of 126 GeV could be considered a statistical fluke. Ethan Siegel provides detailed insight into the science on Starts With a Bang, considering the theoretical consequences of not finding the Higgs, or finding it at different masses. A Higgs would be hard to create, and quickly decay into less exotic particles, blending into the elementary soup created by the proton collisions. And due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, "a very short-lived particle actually picks up an intrinsic uncertainty in its mass." So while the early data is compelling, Ethan concludes "it takes a 99.99995% certainty in order to call something a discovery these days."
Posted by Wesley Dodson at 8:33 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 11, 2012
Category: Alternative Energy • Cold Fusion • Sustainability
Renewable energy sources could allow for a prudent decrease in CO2 emissions while still powering a populous, electrified global economy. On The Pump Handle, Mark Pendergrast examines the proverbial canary in the coal mine, Japan. Wary of imported fossil fuels and burned by nuclear disaster, Japan is looking toward solar, geothermal, wind, water, and biomass-powered alternative energy sources. Wind, for example, could provide 10% of Japan's energy needs, but with blade-busting typhoons and fierce winter lightning storms, turbines must be more robust and adaptable than ever. Mark writes, "wind power could literally begin to replace nuclear power plants, which are all located by the ocean with a good infrastructure in place to deliver power to the grid." Mark takes an in-depth look at all of Japan's wide-ranging energy efforts, and has also published a new book on the subject. Meanwhile, Ethan Siegel considers the latest claim of cold fusion on Starts With a Bang! He explains that atomic nuclei are quantum mechanical objects whose wavefunctions can overlap, meaning they "can tunnel into that energetically favorable state, and fusion can occur!" This improbable event befalls 1038 protons every second in the Sun, but has never been observed at cold temperatures. And while Ethan says it's theoretically possible, the recent claims of Andrea Rossi shouldn't raise your hopes.
Posted by Wesley Dodson at 8:33 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 10, 2012
Category: Global Warming • Kyoto Protocol • Oil
Not one to let physical and economic reality get in the way of a good one-liner, Newt Gingrich recently remarked that the United States could "open up enough oil fields in the next year that the price of oil worldwide would collapse." But as Sharon Astyk reports on Casaubon's Book, it can take years to develop such resources. And, as demonstrated by the hurdles that have tripped up the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, getting far-flung crude to the right refineries can be a logistical nightmare. Sharon says that most of the interred oil "won't be economically viable to extract or move," and would probably end up in China anyway. Meanwhile, on Class M, new research shows "that the global climate may not be as sensitive to rising atmospheric CO2 levels as everyone has assumed." In fact, the median rate of temperature increase may be about 20% less. James Hrynyshyn writes, "the lower estimate implies we have one or two more decades than previously thought to play with before hitting the 2 °C mark, which is where most estimates say the bad stuff kicks in." Also on Class M, James reports that Canada will withdraw from the Kyoto protocol, which despite increased emissions from the U.S. "will meet its modest goals."
Posted by Wesley Dodson at 9:03 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 6, 2012
Category: Neutrinos • OPERA • Speed of Light
After announcing in September that they had detected neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light, OPERA researchers immediately set out to replicate their results. On Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel says they reconfigured the neutrino beam, which originally fired 10,000-nanosecond pulses, "to produce much, much shorter pulses—less than 10ns. And while they've only been running this way for a few weeks, they've already got 20 neutrino detections from the shorter pulses, and they see exactly the same timing anomaly." This confirmation rules out problems with the original experimental design, showing that the OPERA results are at least self-consistent. On Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel says there could still be a "systematic error in their expected delay calculations, which may be due to something like the atomic clocks, the measurement of the baseline distance, an electronics triggering mishap, or some other mundane reason akin to these." Independent results from an experiment called MINOS could confirm or contradict OPERA's findings in two years, but for now we can wonder: why would a subatomic particle exceed Einstein's speed limit by .0002 percent?
Posted by Wesley Dodson at 9:20 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 3, 2012
Category: Extinction • New Species
On Greg Laden's Blog, we learn that "a subspecies of 'Black Rhino' also known as the 'browsing rhino'" has gone extinct in Africa, while Northern White Rhinos and Javan Rhinos have likely met the same fate. Dr. Dolittle says the last known Javan rhinoceros in Vietnam was found "with its horn cut off, most likely a victim of poachers. Another subspecies, The Indian Javan rhino (R. sondaicus inermis), is believed to have gone extinct in the early 20th century." Fifty individuals still linger in West Java, and thousands of White Rhinos still roam in Africa, but on the whole this family is being hunted to extinction. On Life Lines, Dr. Dolittle also introduces us to six newly-discovered species, such as the "deep sea toadfish" and "the blue-eyed spotted cuscus (Spilocuscus wilsoni)." Researchers are documenting new species by the thousand, but for big animals (and especially those with horns) it may soon be good night forever or else lights out at the zoo.
Posted by Wesley Dodson at 11:04 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 23, 2011
Category: Entropy • Isaac Newton • Planck's Constant
On Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel counts down to—what else?—Isaac Newton's birthday. Opening a link on this advent calendar yields not a chocolate, but an equation and an important piece of the physics puzzle. For December 19th, we come to "one of the most revolutionary moment in the history of physics," Max Planck's "formula for the spectrum of the 'black-body' radiation emitted by a hot object at temperature T." Chad writes that Planck's initial mathematical trick became "the opening shot of the quantum mechanical revolution that completely changed physics." For the 18th, Chad delves into statistical mechanics and entropy, writing "The key realization that makes it possible to extract predictions without needing to know the state of all 1027 atoms making up some object is that such huge systems can be described statistically." But we're working backwards; if you want the whole story, start on December 1st with "the absolute cornerstone of what's now known as classical mechanics," Newton's second law of motion. The most recent items are below, and don't hesitate to get excited as the 25th draws near.
Posted by Wesley Dodson at 10:45 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 19, 2011
Category: Anthrax • HPV • Influenza • Malaria • Vaccines
On The Pump Handle, Liz Borkowski examines the ethical dilemma of testing the anthrax vaccine in children. If a widespread attack were to occur, we would want to know the safety and efficacy of the vaccine beforehand. But is an attack likely enough to warrant testing the vaccine on children? On ERV, Abbie Smith explains how vaccines are made: "Sometimes we use dead viruses. Sometimes we use crippled viruses. Sometimes we dont need to use whole viruses at all—little chunks of the virus are fine. Sometimes we just need chunks of the virus, but we keep them dressed up in hollow membranes." Sometimes none of these approaches work (against diseases such as HIV, TB, and malaria). However a new vaccine against malaria may prevent about half of infections. Other vaccines can be nearly 100% effective. Such is the case with the HPV vaccine, which the CDC is now recommending for boys as well as girls. The vaccine protects against several variants of human papillomavirus, which can cause changes in a cell's DNA that lead to cancer. In fact, from 2001 to 2004, HPV caused 71.7% of oral cancers. Finally, on Respectful insolence, Orac considers the efficacy of the flu vaccine, which reduces the infection rate from 2.7 out of 100 adults to 1.2 out of 100. Orac writes, "our current generation of vaccines are far from perfect, but they do pretty well and, given how safe they are, currently represent the best defense we have against influenza."
Posted by Wesley Dodson at 10:31 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Maintained by the ScienceBlogs Overlords, Page 3.14 points you in the direction of some of ScienceBlogs' finest offerings, plus the tastiest tidbits of science news and opinion from around the web.
