President Obama fires a marshmallow gun and lets robots roam his White House at the White House Science Fair.

Three-year-old Danielle Fairchild probably can’t grasp the magnitude of what she’s enabled. The little girl adopted by Fred and Dale Fairchild in Duluth, Georgia was born with half a thumb and no fingers on her right hand. Half-way across the country a smart teenager and five other girl scouts were looking for a science and technology project to complete.

Danielle Fairchild Writes with Help of Prosthetic Hand

Dale Fairchild contacted Kate Murray and the troop of The Flying Monkeys and a partnership was born. 13-year old Murray was born with a thumb but no fingers on her left hand. Despite this digital abnormality she took up the violin five years ago using a device that clips to the bow and wraps around her left palm. And she thought she could help someone else learn to write.

Upon hearing about little Danielle The Flying Monkeys flew into action, learning all they could about prosthetic limbs, talking to doctors and learning how to build one from scratch.

Fast forward to February 7 as Kate Murray, Gaby Dempsey and Mackenzie Gewell present their prosthetic hand device to President Obama in the White House at the second White House Science Fair.

As the President held the BOB-1.2 plastic device in his hand, he said, “This is outstanding.”

President Obama Pumps Air Cannon at White House Science Fair

The Flying Monkeys won a $20,000 Innovation award from For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Lego League. FIRST is the non-profit organization started by inventor Dean Kamen, who famously brought us the Segway. And for Murray a trip to the White House is “super exciting.”

She says, “I want to be a mechanical engineer when I grow up. I want to design cars to be more fuel efficient and/or rely entirely on wind or solar energy.”

14-year old Joey Hudy unwittingly stole the show providing spectacular photo opportunities as President Obama listened the story about how the Phoenix teen built his marshmallow air gun from PVC pipe with the help of employees at his local Home Depot. Then he asked if the device was operational and decided on the spot that the two should fire it together.

The President asked that everyone in the line of fire move back because this was an improvised activity while strolling through the student exhibits and talking to the winners of over 40 science fairs and competitions.

Joey Hudy with President Obama Impressed by Power to Shoot a Marshmallow Missile

When the gun popped, press cameras clicked wildly and they caught the child-like wonderment in the eyes of the President, which encapsulated the entire White House science fair.

Clearly, the President was impressed by the caliber of projects presented and the students themselves. He said, “Now, as I was walking around the science fair, I was thinking back to when I was your age. And basically, you guys put me to shame.”

President Obama lauded the whip smart students and their clever projects. But he was struck by something more.

He said, “It’s the fact that you recognize that you’ve got a responsibility to use your talents in service to something bigger than yourselves.”

He said some students will develop new products that change the way we live. He pointed out Hayley Hoverter, the winner of the 2011 Network For Teaching Entrepreneurship’s National Challenge. The 16-year-old Los Angeles resident invented a flavorless, colorless sugar packet that dissolves in hot water.

About her invention the President said, “It could potentially save up to two million pounds of trash each year — and that’s just at Starbucks.” Mastercard gave the teen $10,000 to turn her concept into a working business.

Next the President said that some students will see a problem in their town or city and do something about it. After 14-year old Benjamin Hylak was worried that seniors in nursing homes would get lonely he built a robot attached to a computer monitor. His telepresence robot which moves around the center and allows seniors to connect via Skype with their family and friends qualified him as a BROADCOM Masters Competition 2011 finalist.

Angela Zhang Explains Her Nanoparticle Cancer Treatment

President Obama said, “Inventions like Benjamin’s could make life better for millions of families.”

The same holds for the three representatives from California.

Angela Zhang of Cupertino, who has proposed a potential cure for cancer. This year, she won a $100,000 grand prize in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology for her nanoparticle cancer treatment. She says, “I keep saying 60 years from now I will probably be telling my grandkids everything that happened when I was 17.”

Hayley Hoverter of Los Angeles, who developed sugar packets that dissolve in hot drinks is the now the 16-year old CEO of Sweet (dis)SOLVE. She spoke at TEDx SoCal last year.

Neil de Grasse Tyson with Braeden Benedict at White House Science Fair

Braeden Benedict of Ranchos Palos Verdes designed a device to detect concussions in athletes after one of his football teammates experienced prolonged concussion symptoms and had to stop playing contact sports. The 15-year old designed a helmet-mounted sensory detector that turns red when an athlete is hit hard enough to cause a concussion.

He took the top prize in America’s 2011 Top Young Scientist competition at the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge where he won $25,000 for his efforts.

The President spoke of the adversity several groups of students overcame just to be at the science fair. A rocketry team from Presidio, Texas came from the 4th poorest school district in the nation where most students speak English as a second language. Parents raised money to help the students make the trip to Washington D.C. Mr. Obama said they even sold a goat to make the journey to the White House.

He applauded the winners of the Michigan Regional Contest of the National Engineers Week Future City Competition. Three Detroit students imagined a clean energy future for their city and while they were doing so their school burned down, forcing them to merge with another school while they completed their project. The team said, “(Future City) helps me make a better city to live in.” They designed there vision around a city following the theme of “Fuel Your Future: Imagine New Ways to Meet Our Energy Needs and Maintain a Healthy Planet.”

Samantha Garvey Tells President Obama about Mussels

The President also acknowledged 18-year old Samantha Garvey, who has spent a lot of time with the President lately. The high school senior from New York made headlines after winning a spot in the semi-finals of the Intel science talent search. But more than her ingenious project studying mussel predation on Long Island she captured the attention of America because when she found out she was a semi-finalist she was homeless.

Since then she has appeared on television and sat in the First Lady’s box at the State of the Union Address last month. At the White House science fair the President announced that the teen would like to work for NOAA or EPA some day. Pointing at them he said, “This is Dr. Lubchenco. She is the head of NOAA. Lisa Jackson, right there, head of EPA. You might, you know, just want to hook up with them before you leave.”

The President said that all the students who participated in the science fair inspired him. He said, “It’s young people like you who make me so confident that America’s best days are still to come.”

President Obama Tells Science Fair Students They Are Paving the Way to the Future

Dale Fairchild says that before The Flying Monkey’s created BOB-1 for little Danielle to use as she learns to write the toddler used her right hand like a flipper. But after the molded plastic device arrived, complete with a Vel-cro(TM) strap to attached a plastic pencil holder, the girl began using her fingerless hand to pick things up.

The teen engineers have never met Danielle Fairchild but their prosthetic hand device is going through the expensive and lengthy patent process, placing the teen inventors on track to help many more people besides the little girl in Georgia.

C-SPAN coverage of President Obama’s speech to the White House Science Fair, Feb. 7, 2012. (15:13)

When “Nice” Peter Alexis Shukoff and “EpicLLOYD” Lloyd Ahlquist combined their comic genius, knowledge of pop culture and intimate love for rap battles, YouTube sensation Epic Rap Battles of History was born. Now with millions of subscribers and hundreds of millions watching for their next historical pairing, the musical artists (for lack of a more descriptive term) struck a chord with geeks online.

For those unfamiliar with rap battles here’s how it works. First, close your eyes and picture Eminem in the movie 8-Mile. Now the rules. Two rappers stand on a stage armed with microphones in front of an audience hungry for confrontation. Then the battle begins. It generally starts with a funny quip about the rapper’s target, the other rapper. Then after a few extemporaneous (yeah, I went there) rhyming verses the battle heats up and gets personal…but never mean.

Albert Einstein v. Stephen Hawking, Epic Rap Battle of History

As Ahlquist told Geek Out, a CNN blog recently, “While battling is confrontational, most times the people battling are doing so just for the sake of the rapping or the show.” His rap name is EpicLLOYD and his specialty is taking on characters from history — real or imagined.

Why do it?

EpicLLOYD says, “We’ve always liked rap and free-styling. Battle rap is something that is inherently engaging and funny because it’s based on punch lines about the other person.”

Their most famous Epic Rap Battle of History has two well known figures throw down. It’s a classic what if scenario. What would Adolf Hitler say to Darth Vader if he had the chance? Over 45 million people tuned in to find out.

While they have no problem pitting non-fictional character against fictional, occasionally they do put two real life people into a fantasy rap battle. And they even pay homage to science.

Shukoff who prefers the rap handle NicePeter says, “Neither of us knew much about physics going into the Hawking-Einstein battle. We knew it was a cool pairing, a cool matchup that appeals to a section of the Internet who appreciate science and mathematics. We dove into it as much as we could, found out about Einstein and talked to people about Stephen Hawking.”

Now the video the duo debuted last year has garnered over 35 million views.

What’s next for NicePeter and EpicLLOYD? Well, historical twosomes. First up — Mario Brothers v. Wright Brothers. That’s sure to be a high-flying rap battle.

NicePeter says, “We’re gonna explore new stuff. I made a pledge to my father to use a Russian character. That will have to happen. There’s a lot of really good rappers from Russian history.”

Now the science

Okay, this is just a fun little ditty and rather light on the science. But there are a couple of things worth mentioning.

3-D image of 6-dimension Calabi-Yau Spaces That May Lie at the Smallest Scales of Unseen Dimensions in String Theory

1. Einstein came up with the theory of relativity. One tenet of his theory of general relativity is that the Universe is expanding, and the far parts of it are moving away from us faster than the speed of light. That’s a mind-blowing concept which the famous physicist alludes to in the opening salvo of the rap battle.

2. Einstein takes a few personal jabs at Hawking who is confined to a wheelchair and speaks through a computer because he is almost entirely paralyzed by a motor neuron disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

3. Hawking comes roaring back later in the battle to scald Einstein with his wit, calling him a p-brane. This term is a witty physics retort, referring to the size of Einstein’s brain compared to Hawkings while also making a reference to a theoretical physics concept. Here p-brane is a spatially extended mathematical concept that appears in string theory.

4. Einstein retorts with a veiled reference to Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time as he mildly threatens him before attacking his black hole theory, which he continues to revise.

5. But Hawking deals the final blow, starting with a Your Momma insult (a common rap battle tactic) couched in math. He refers to all the known particles in the observable universe — a googol, which is estimated to be more than the 10⁷⁹ and 10⁸¹ atoms. Or as mathematician Edward Kasner famously said a googol is “one, followed by writing zeroes until you get tired.” His nine-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta coined the term. Then in 1980 cosmologist Carl Sagan famously said writing out a googol “would be physically impossible, since doing so would require more space than the known universe provides.”

6. Hawking goes on to reference the historical myth that Einstein’s famous E=MC² formula led to the atom bomb. Then he invokes Sagan from The Cosmos once more, who said, “If you want to bake apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” Hawking delivers the final punch to Einstein by insulting his intelligence (another common rap battle tactic) comparing him to a 1993 Texas Instruments graphing calculator while calling himself a supercomputer. Ouch!

Albert Einstein v. Stephen Hawking

by NicePeter and EpidLLOYD

[Albert Einstein]
When I apply my battle theory minds are relatively blown
So take a seat Steve
Opp, I see you brought your own
What’s with your voice?
I can’t frickin tell
You sound like WALL-E
Having s** with a Speak & Spell
I’ll school you anywhere
MIT to Oxford
All your fans with be like:
“um, that was Hawk-ward”
I’m as dope as two rappers
You better be scared
Cause that means Albert E
Equals M C squared

[Stephen Hawking]
You’ve got no idea what you’re messing with here boy
I got 12 inch rims on my chair, that’s how I roll y’all
You look like someone glued a mustache on a troll doll
I’ll be stretching out the rhyme, like gravity stretches time
When you try to put your little p-brane against this kind of mind
I’m the best
I’m the Snoop Dogg of Science
I’ll be dropping mad apples on your head from the shoulder of giants

[Albert Einstein]
I’m a giant whose shoulders you’d have stood on, if you can stand
I’ll give you a brief history of pain with the back of my hand
You can’t destroy matter or me, for serious
Ripping holes in you bigger than the hole in your black hole theory was

[Stephen Hawking]
There are 10,000,000
Million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million, particles in the universe that we can observe
Your mama took the ugly ones and put them into one nerd
You wanna bring the heat
With the mushroom clouds you’re making
I’m about to bake raps from scratch, like Carl Sagan
And while it’s true
That my work is based on you
I’m a super computer
You’re like a TI-82

Created by NicePeter

As a precaution planes that travel over the North Pole are being rerouted. Satellites are bracing for a direct hit and technicians are watching energy grids with unblinking eyes. The reason for all the hub-bub is a big solar storm. The Space Weather Prediction Center issued a warning on Monday when the sun released a coronal mass ejection and sent it hurtling toward Earth.

At first blush, the NOAA-run prediction center called it the worst solar storm since May 2005. But this morning as the

Sunspot 1402 Releases Large Coronal Mass Ejection Jan. 23

So if you’re cell phone isn’t working quite right for the next couple of days, you’ll know why.

But most people will remember this solar storm because it’s going to produce an incredible light show as the Northern Lights and Southern Lights dance across the sky at lower latitudes.

Reports of stunning Northern Lights visible in England, Ireland and Scotland are already being reported. More pics here.

The space weather prediction center created a map, estimating where the auroras will be visible. And it looks like anyone north of Idaho in the U.S. will be able to see a spectacular show as solar radiation smashes into Earth’s magnetic field, releasing light in the process.

Earth Sky recommends, “To see the aurora, you’ll need a nice clear sky with no obscuring clouds. It’s also good to have no moon, which, luckily, is what we have tonight. The moon is traveling across the sky with the sun today and won’t be visible again until tomorrow night (January 25, 2012) when, by the way, it’ll be spectacularly beautiful near Venus in the west after sunset. Finally, you should do yourself a favor and ride half an hour or so beyond the lights of the city to view tonight’s aurora. You might be able to glimpse it from within the city, but more likely city lights will drown the aurora from view.”

The sun is in an active phase of its 11-year solar cycle. More frequent solar storms are likely as the sun reaches is peak activity next year before slowly settling down again.

Rating Solar Storms

Right now there are about one million magnetized atoms involved in one bit of information. A bit is defined as a variable that can have only two possible values, 1 or 0. In computing those values are interpreted as binary digits. And IBM just lowered that minimum threshold from one million to 12.

For years computer scientists have been trying to figure out how small a storage device can be before it runs into the laws of quantum dynamics. The answer IBM recently learned is 12. Data can be stored and retrieved using just 12 atoms.

While that is all well and good it is not terribly useful in the real world. To figure out the bottom threshold for non-quantum computing researchers had to build the miniscule storage device atom by atom, which is an extremely labor-intensive and expensive process not suited for mass manufacturing. And the whole process is only stable at the mind-freezing temperature of five degrees above absolute zero.

So while the 12-atom hard drive doesn’t make much sense, a larger 150-atom storage device may not have the same limitations. With that in mind pinhead-sized hard drives could store a terabyte of information or a thumb drive could potentially store every movie you’ve ever seen.

Andreas Heinrich, a physicist at IBM’s Almaden Research Lab says, “At IBM we are interested in finding out how the magnetic properties evolve from single atoms to something that might be useful for technology or data storage.”

This figure shows the a magnetic byte imaged 5 times in different magnetic states. A white signal on the right edge corresponds to logic 0 (and is labeled as such) and a blue signal to logic 1. Between two successive images the magnetic states of the bits were switched to encode the binary representation of the ASCII characters "THINK"

Computing follows a theory called Moore’s Law which dictates shrinking the size of computer components over time. The general timeline goes like this. The number of transitors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles every 18-24 months.

Currently, Moore’s Law has indicates one million iron atoms can store one bit of information. After five years of hard work, IBM smashed that incremental process and drove that down to just 12 atoms. They didn’t do it inexpensively as Moore’s Law requires but the experiment does show the limit of this technological trend.

Opposites Attract

In performing this experiment IBM basically put an new spin on the old addage, “Opposites attract.”

Storage devices like hard drives and flash drives use ferromagnetic materials where the spin of the atoms is aligned in the same direction.

IBM figured out how to fit more atoms in less space by using antiferromagnetism, which allows atoms to spin in opposite directions.

Heinrich and his team created an atomic-scale magnet memory device that is at least a hundred times denser than today’s hard drives or solid state memory chips.

By spinning atoms in opposite directions with the help of an scanning tunneling microscope, IBM created iron atoms with opposite magnetization. Atoms with the same spin need space. Opposite spin pulls the atoms more tightly together, making it possible to squeeze more of them in less space.

The team started with just one atom and continued adding atoms until the little magentic memory could store one bit of information. That is the same amount of information stored in one binary digit. Then the team continued building and used 96 atoms to store one byte of information (equivalent to one letter or number on a keyboard.)

To show their proof of concept the team spelled IBM’s signature THINK using 480 magnetized atoms.

While still impractical for computer hardware applications this research proves previous theoretical limits to data storage do not exist.

A spokesman for IBM says that 150 atoms per bit is the most stable configuration at room temperature. For the purposes of this experiment the team used iron atoms on a copper nitrite surface. The spokesman says that other materials would likely yield even better results.

Detailed explanation of the IBM research in atomic scale magnetic memory

Maggie Arias is on her way to becoming the next iTunes sensation. The Atlanta-area 6th Grader is not your typical pop princess though. She uses “thermosphere” in her song, Aurora, which pays tribute to the beauty and power of the Northern Lights.

When her teacher asked each student to become an expert on a science subject they studied last semester and teach the class, young Maggie chose the aurora borealis. She didn’t want to make a cardboard display or a power point presentation like the other students so she decided to make a song. Since her dad, Chris, is a professional musician, the two collaborated — daughter on science, dad on musicality — to make a hit that kids are downloading.

Maggie tells Fox5 in Atlanta her song “was talking about how big the aurora was and how beautiful it is and how there’s so many different colors. It would be so different if we didn’t have it.”

Her Dad says, “The thing that struck me is how this incredibly powerful cosmic event is turned into such a beautifully serene light show in the sky. If you thought for a second about our magnetic field being different or weaker than it is, yikes!”

To complete her assignment, though the student needed at least five paragraphs of information, including some important science.

Aurora

by Maggie & Chris Arias
Instrument Approach Music, Inc. / ASCAP, ©2011

Iʼm in Alaska
The sky is glowing
Without a sound

Energyʼs growing
Red and green oxygen

Blue and purple nitrogen
Aurora, you never know how much I adore yaʼ
My magnetic field of dreams
Making magic out of photon streams
Those endless nights in the northern lights
Aurora

Inside the beauty
More power than lightning
Intoxicating
It should be frightening

Red and green oxygen
Blue and purple nitrogen

Aurora, you never know how much I adore yaʼ
My magnetic field of dreams
Making magic out of photon streams
Those endless nights in the northern lights
Aurora

The thermosphere erupts in silence
Making beauty of cosmic violence
The sun assaults the skies
You dance before my eyes

You make me wish that I could fly
Aurora, you never know how much I adore yaʼ
My magnetic field of dreams
Making magic out of photon streams
Those endless nights in the northern lights
Aurora

The one idea Maggie wants to convey is that the power of the Northern Lights should not be underestimated. Her dad wrote some of the lyrics with her words ringing in his ears. She says, “20 million amps at 50,000 volts, dad! That’s BIG TIME ENERGY!!!!!!!!”

So they decided to make it a high energy song with a dance beat.

Maggie’s song is available at the iTunes store.
Here’s a preview.

Rosie Redfield, at Home in the Lab

The scientists led by a young researcher named Felisa Wolfe-Simon claimed they were able to get Mono Lake bacteria to substitute arsenic for phosphorus in their physiology and even in their DNA. NASA even hyped the work ahead of the paper’s online publication in the journal Science. The press release announced, “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.”

However, Dr. Redfield read the paper and immediately knew it was wrong. She hopped online and pointed out the problems in her blog, RRResearch, which contains her frequent musings about life in her lab working with graduate students. On Dec. 4, 2010 she wrote a long post (and one she thought would be read by few,) which set off a firestorm over the arsenic paper.

Since then, she has appeared in the media and at science conferences talking about her post-publication comments of Felisa Wolfe-Simon’s arsenic life paper. This year the journal Nature named her one of the ten science newsmakers of the year. In addition to saying what many other evolutionary biologists thought about the veracity of the arsenic DNA experiment, she also decided to use her blog as an open notebook where she has been busily trying to replicate the original arsenic experiment.

Her documentation of the process is not just fascinating from a technical perspective (which it is) but she carefully crafts experiments to test each question she has about the Wolfe-Simon study, slowly poking bigger holes in what many biologists regarded as a weak experiment anyway. Redfield isn’t concerned whether she is wrong or right. She just follows the science and looks for explanations along the way.

Her writings almost appear motherly and it’s easy to imagine her as a thesis or dissertation adviser to her students. In one post where she recounts her criticisms of the now-infamous biology paper, she admonishes lead author Wolfe-Simon for having sloppy experimental habits.

Within two days of reading the original paper in the journal Science, Redfield saw the flaws in the Wolfe-Simon experiment. She sees scientists making mistakes as just part of the process. But she chastises the all the scientists involved in that research for remaining silent and never correcting the problem.

She says, “Scientists in particular need to be able to admit their errors – we’re working not only at the frontiers of knowledge but at the frontiers of our abilities. Failure to admit we’ve been wrong is a betrayal of the scientific process.”

Since Wolfe-Simon didn’t admit making any mistakes Redfield says she had to prove the findings wrong.

Of the original arsenic research, she says, “Lots of flim-flam, but very little reliable information. If this data was presented by a PhD student at their committee meeting, I’d send them back to the bench to do more cleanup and controls.”

So after she completed teaching her genomics class in the spring she turned her attention back to the arsenic experiment, which was clearly nagging at her.

On June 1, she outlined her plan of action for reproducing the original Wolfe-Simon experiment. But from the get-go she said, “If I can’t readily get GFAJ-1 [bacteria cells] growing nicely on the phosphate-based version of the medium the paper specifies, I’ll know that I’m out of my depth. At that point I’ll leave the whole mess for someone else to test.”

Her work revolved around two big questions.

Q. 1. Is the approximately tenfold growth difference between arsenic and phosphorus due to the cells’ use of arsenic in place of phosphorus in DNA, RNA and other biomolecules?

Q. 2. Does DNA purified from cells grown with less phosphorus and more arsenic contain significant amounts of covalently incorporated arsenic?

Just before Christmas, she told me, “This is a really simple experiment, a no-brainer,” which originally she thought might take a couple of weeks. It took her six months.

To start her experiment she sent away for GFAJ-1, the allegedly arsenic-loving bacterium on which Wolfe-Simon based her research of Mono Lake in California. (In some science circles GFAJ stands unflatteringly for Give Felisa A Job).

In September, after several months of open experimentation, Dr. Redfield discovered the arsenic-treated bacteria cells only grew when the cells were streaked out on agar plates. When she tried to use a liquid culture medium, she says, “The cells didn’t look so good.”

But for some reason they grew on the agar plates. And when Dr. Redfield fed the bacteria an amino acid she says they grew like crazy. Once she was able to stabilize the cell growth she grew enough GFAJ-1 to analyze its DNA. She wanted to see if the cells were assimilating arsenic into their DNA in place of phosphorus.

Dr. Redfield didn’t think that such a thing would be possible and for decades chemists have concluded the same thing. Yet, That’s what the Wolfe-Simon experiment concluded. Redfield relies on the chemistry which says that the bonds with the arsenic would be so weak that they would fall apart within a fraction of a second. According to the chemistry, she says, “The DNA will just fall apart and the cells will die.”

But she also refutes the Wolfe-Simon conclusion based on biology. Dr. Redfield imagines DNA is like a zipper. She says, “The teeth of the zipper have to be the same size or the zipper will get stuck.” Arsenic is too big to work in place of phosphorus.

After getting the arsenic-laden bacteria to grow, she figured out that the Wolfe-Simon experiment only worked because the agar plates the original researchers used for the cell growth contained a minute amount of phosphorus, which contaminated the experiment by giving the cells just enough to grow.

She says, “I think they used a reagent that wasn’t purified and discovered it had three or four micro molars of phosphorus.” In the paper and in responding to Redfield and other criticism, Wolfe-Simon says that the bacteria couldn’t grow on the little bit of phosphorus on the agar plate. To that Redfield says, “It was lame. I said, ‘Wait a minute.’”

When she did her own experiment, Redfield used reagent grade chemicals and grew her bacteria in arsenate almost to the specified density. When she added just three micro molars of phosphorus she got the same result as the Wolfe-Simon paper.

Once she was able to stabilize the growth of GFAJ-1 cells containing different amounts of arsenic, she sent the bacteria off for analysis at Princeton to see if any of the arsenic made its way into the DNA of the bacteria, as posited by the Wolfe-Simon paper. She expects those results in a couple of weeks.

She says,” I’ve grown the bacteria with and without arsenic and extracted the DNA and sent it off.” Once she gets the DNA analysis she’ll do some more experiments and then write a paper about the whole process.

For the last year Dr. Redfield has helped demonstrate how science can be self-correcting. In the media coverage, experts quickly reached a strong consensus — that the arsenic paper was flawed. And with her open science experiment on a blog, Redfield invited curious colleagues to contribute to the experiment, which was working at the edges of what is known in biology and experimenting in unfamiliar territory.

Unfortunately, many people look to this newsmaking event as an example of how science gets things wrong. Some people only heard the original arsenic life story and missed the vibrant discussion of the research and its correction.

In the process of the hub-bub around whether arsenic is a building block of life one evolutionary biologist with a popular blog said, “Rosie Redfield must be the tyrant queen of science.” P.Z. Myers, the outspoken atheist blogger biologist gave her the title, which she wears proudly.

Through it all, Dr. Redfield has remained very sympathetic to Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the young post doc responsible for the paper about arsenic life. Redfield has not spoken directly to Wolfe-Simon but sent her an apologetic e-mail after an interview she gave appeared more strident than she intended.

Rosie Redfield understands what it’s like to be a misunderstood scientist. For the last 20 years she has focused on how bacteria reproduce. In 2000 her work raised eyebrows when she wondered, “Do bacteria have sex?” She believes they do, despite what conventional biology says.

To Wolfe-Simon she says, “I understand having an exciting, important idea where everyone thinks you’re wrong.” But, she cautions, “You have to do good science; that’s the only thing that will see you through.”

She feels sorry for how this biological brew-hah went down. Despite what Redfield considers an error in not admitting a mistake, she thinks that the other co-authors on the paper were also complicit in not correcting things before they reached publication and public discourse.

Redfield says, “You can be seen to screw up and it’s not a disaster. That’s just science.”

Science writer David Dobbs followed the story since it broke and says Wolfe-Simon is now caught in the fallout from an over-the-top media press of which she is both part author and something of a victim.

Redfield agrees with his characterization of how both NASA and Wolfe-Simon’s mentors and former lab bosses seem to have abandoned her. In a Wired article in September he notes, “It appears they bought and fueled the bus; put bright lights and banners on it; cheered as Wolfe-Simon drove it a bit wildly honking the horn; and have now thrown her under it.”

Redfield says, “Everyone involved made big mistakes. But the big betrayal wasn’t the errors but the failure to admit them.”

And of her new moniker as tyrant queen of science, she says, “Finally the recognition I’ve been waiting for.”

A new theory posits that an instantaneous light burst at the moment of Jesus’ resurrection left the imprint of his image in the cloth used to bury him.

Just in time for what believers call a Christmas miracle, a team of Italian scientists has concluded that the cloth believed to hold the image of Jesus at the moment of his resurrection was not faked. They studied the chemical properties of the image and found it would be impossible to forge.

Previous attempts to study the cloth concluded that it was not 2,000 years old but part of a Medieval hoax dating back about 700 years. Those vying for the Shroud of Turin to be authentic claim that radio carbon dating in 1988 was flawed because it was done on a section of the cloth that was repaired after fire damage during the Middle Ages.

The current testing of the shroud, which is said to hold the electromagnetic image of Jesus’s face, proves the image was not faked using any known 14th Century technology.

Lead researcher Paulo Di Lazzaro told MSNBC.com science editor Alan Boyle, “It is obvious that a serious scientific work cannot prove any supernatural action.”

But the group of researchers, sympathetic to the story of the shroud as Jesus’ burial cloth, thinks they have proved the image’s chemical authenticity.

The group doing the latest tests on the shroud worked outside of business hours on their “curiosity-driven” research, which was not funded by the ENEA Research Center, where they work.

They team started with a question: could radiation have produced the Christ-like image etched in the cloth?

The short answer is yes. But there’s more to the story.

Di Lazzaro and his colleagues blasted modern-day cloth with an ultraviolent laser and they claim that they were able to reproduce the exact depth of the coloration — .2 micrometers — in the Shroud of Turin. Over five years, the team tested and re-tested, blasting the experimental cloth with laser pulses of varying lengths. They say that pulses lasting less than 50 nanoseconds produce the right “superficial Shroud-like coloration of linen yarns in a narrow range of irradiation parameters.”

Because lasers didn’t exist in the Middle Ages the team concludes that the shroud couldn’t have been faked. Previous studies suggested that the image of the bearded man was painted on the cloth. But Di Lazzaro refutes that, claiming that no brush stroke could be evenly painted at that miniscule depth.

Di Lazzaro and his team conclude, “These processes may have played a role in the generation of the body image on the Shroud of Turin.”

But Joe Nickell, who has been studying shroud science, also known as sindology, for decades says that Di Lazzaro’s research team stacks the deck in favor of the shroud’s authenticity by starting with the premise that the shroud is an impossible image.

Shroud of Turin

He tells MSNBC.com, “Making the assumption of a miracle is a really, really, really, really, really big assumption. That it’s done in the name of science is just astonishing.”

But the shroud team holds strong saying, “The double image (front and back) of a scourged and crucified man, barely visible on the linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin, has many physical and chemical characteristics that are so particular that the staining … is impossible to obtain in a laboratory.”

Nickell argues that the team starts with the answer and looks for scientific evidence to back up the claim. He says the latest tests don’t prove anything new despite their use of lasers and high-tech tests.

The Italian shroud team is careful not to draw conclusions about the shroud itself. And they stop short of offering any supernatural explanation for the image of a crucified Jesus in the cloth.

They say, “When one talks about a flash of light being able to color a piece of linen in the same way as the shroud, discussion inevitably touches on things like miracles and resurrection. But as scientists, we were concerned only with verifiable scientific processes. We hope our results can open up a philosophical and theological debate but we will leave the conclusions to the experts, and ultimately to the conscience of individuals.”

The research was presented at a science conference in May but kept under wraps until the British media pounced on this Christmas story, which will no doubt be an early Christmas present for shroud believers, but is likely to be greeted with a bah-humbug by those who doubt that the sepia-colored, 14ft-long cloth dates back to the date Jesus Christ’s crucifixion 2,000 years ago.

The focus of Lee Cronin’s work is understanding and controlling self-assembly and self-organisation in chemistry to develop functional molecular and nano-molecular chemical systems; linking architectural design with function and recently engineering system-level functions.

Lee Cronin's Lab Searches for Inorganic Building Blocks of Life

In other words, the 38-year old organic chemist started with the very predictable inorganic molecules as a basis to build nano-machines. Somewhere in the process he began to create self-assembling structures that also began to self-oranize and to evolve. He was on his way to creating inorganic life.

In the process he has created large inorganic, metallic cells from polyoxometalates assembled into bubbly spheres. These non-biological cells let chemicals in and out of their membranes. Some have been taught to photosynthesize.

First Inorganic Cell, iCHELL

And Cronin says, “What we are trying do is create self-replicating, evolving, inorganic cells that would essentially be alive. You could call it inorganic biology.”

He tells the BBC, “The grand aim is to construct complex chemical cells with life-like properties that could help us understand how life emerged and also to use this approach to define a new technology based upon evolution in the material world – a kind of inorganic living technology.

“Bacteria are essentially single-cell micro-organisms made from organic chemicals, so why can’t we make micro-organisms from inorganic chemicals and allow them to evolve?

“If successful this would give us some incredible insights into evolution and show that it’s not just a biological process. It would also mean that we would have proven that non carbon-based life could exist and totally redefine our ideas of design.”

His team submitted a paper on Modular Redox-Active Inorganic Chemical Cells (iCHELLs) to the journal Angewandte Chemie.

In his TED Talk Making matter come alive in July, Cronin says that in his lab he is recreating the famous Urey-Miller chemistry experiment which led to the discovery of amino acids, the building blocks of life in the 1950s.

In 2011, Cronin’s own lab looks like something out of Frankenstein as he sends electricity through bubbling flasks filled with chemicals trying to find similar inorganic building blocks of life.

He postulates that we emerged from a primordial soup of chemicals before we had RNA, DNA or proteins. Before we became humans, our genetic makeup had to be contained in cells. Once there it could become self-replicating and evolve into our ancestors and eventually into us.

He is testing this hypothesis in the lab by using an inorganic “LEGO kit” of molecules. Taking the three or four building blocks, he and his team of collaborators in his lab and around the world are aggregating them all together into thousands of large nano-molecular molecules.

These molecules are about the same size as DNA and proteins but they contain no carbon, the element in all living things. The one piece he was lacking was containers to hold the molecules. Much like biology, he needed to make some cells.

So Cronin and his team made iCHELLS to hold these new inorganic molecules.

Once he achieved that over the summer, he began to conduct mini chemistry experiments inside the inorganic cells.

And now he is searching for a way to activate the process of Darwinian evolution within his iCHELLS by getting inorganic molecules to compete with one another.

He says, “Evolution cannot be cut apart. You have to find the fitness function.”

He says if this theory holds true then he will be able to take the idea of the selfish gene — a biological system that wants to survive and replicate — one step further to the notion of selfish matter.

Cronin’s effort to make inorganic matter able to evolve on its own is his way to build a more comprehensive definition of life.

He says, “We are really becoming very close to understanding the key steps that makes dead stuff come alive.”

Principia Mathematica, Original Manuscript

Cambridge University Library houses the Newton Papers, which includes the 17th Century thinker’s papers, research and the writings. In a combined grant with the Newton Project at University of Sussex, Cambridge is unveiling many never before seen writings by the man who revolutionized science in the 17th Century.

Grant Young helped digitize the Newton Papers and says that before the works went online this week researchers would have to write to the university librarian and get special permission to go to Cambridge to look at the documents. Now, people from all over the world can see the same documents, written in tight, tiny prose from the comfort of their own homes.

Cambridge librarian Anne Jarvis says, “Cambridge University Library contains evidence of some of the greatest ideas and discoveries over two millennia. We want to make our collections accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world with an internet connection and a thirst for knowledge.”

Since 1998 the Newton Project has created a place for Newton’s work online. It now contains 4.8 billion words comprising over 130 of Newton’s documents, correspondence and notebooks.

Isaac Newton Notes on What Becomes Calculus

The project to put Cambridge’s science superstars online began last year and will continue through 2013 thanks to a generous donation from Dr. Leonard Polonsky.

The Newton Papers is the first foray for the university but will be followed by other science luminaries. In addition to the extensive Newton collections, the library holds the papers of Charles Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Adam Sedgwick, J.J. Thomson, Ernest Rutherford, James Clerk Maxwell and Sir George Gabriel Stokes. The Library also holds the archives of Cambridge’s famous Cavendish Laboratory and is the repository of the Royal Greenwich Observatory archives, which includes the papers of the Astronomers Royal and the Board of Longitude.

Young tells the BBC, “Anyone, wherever they are, can see at the click of a mouse how Newton worked and how he went about developing his theories and experiments.”

The university says that another 8,000 pages of the Newton Papers will be added over the next few months so the archive will be grow over time until most of Newton’s works are online.

For physicists the search for the elusive subatomic particle that gives all things mass is tantamount to the search for the Holy Grail. That’s one reason why scientists call the much-theorized but never seen Higgs Boson the God particle.

Now an update on research from the European nuclear agency CERN indicates that particle phsycists are hot on the trail of the Higgs and will either observe it or rule out its existence by next year.

But that’s what they thought last year at this time. And again in April of this year. The elusive Higgs Boson is proving to be more elusive than ever. But scientists are certain they have narrowed the search.

Here’s what they have discovered.

The latest data show the mass of the Higgs probably falls somewhere in the lower end of the spectrum of mass that is produced as the Large Hadron Collider busily smashes atoms beneath the Swiss-French border. Scientists believe the Higgs most likely has a mass of 124 to 126 billion electronvolts. Two separate teams at CERN pegged the boson in the 114 to 130 billion electron volts range. But there is an outside chance that the mass may be much larger, somewhere above 476 billion electron volts, according to teams at the A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS or ATLAS detector.

Fabiola Gianotti, an Italian physicist who runs the ATLAS project says the hottest region to find the Higgs Boson is in the lower mass ranges of the collider. She says, “The most important result is that we have been able to restrict the most likely mass region to a very narrow range.”

But what does that narrow range really mean?

Well, first of all an electronvolt in physics is measured as a unit of energy, a unit of mass, a unit of momentum, a unit of distance and sometimes a unit of temperature. Using some very complicated math these different uses of the eV are justified. For the sake of this explanation, I’ll describe an electonvolt as a unit of mass, since that’s how the particle physicists at CERN are treating it as they search for the Higgs Boson.

In particle physics it is common to interchange mass and energy. the mass of one proton is about one billion electronvolts. The kinetic energy created by a mosquito in flight is about one trillion electronvolts of energy or 1 TeV. The size or mass of that energy is also measured as 1 TeV.

The Higgs Boson hunters are looking for something less powerful than a flying mosquito but bigger than a proton. They are searching for something with a mass of between 124 and 126 billion electronvolts or 124-126 GeV.

CERN’s Director General Rolf Heuer says, “The window for the Higgs mass gets smaller and smaller.” But he warns while physicists are all atwitter over finding where in the mass spectrum the Higgs lives, no one has been able to actually find it yet.

British physicist Peter Higgs and others theorized the existence of the tiny particle more than 40 years ago to explain why fundamental particles have mass. Fundamental particles are building blocks of atoms–protons, neutrons and electrons. Throughout the 20th Century phsycists discovered even more elemental particles, including quarks and leptons. But long ago, the atom itself was viewed as the most elementary of particles, as its name means indivisible.

Now the most elemental particles physicists can imagine are either fermions or bosons. Particles associated with matter are called fermions and particles associated with the fundamental forces (electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear interactions and gravitation) are bosons. The direction of the particle’s spin determines is classification as a fermion or a boson. Bosons have integer spin while fermions have half-integer spin, which is broken into 12 flavors.

All of this theory is part of the current Standard Model of Particle Physics. And by answering this one big question–where does everything get its mass?–scientists will be able to put another piece of the universal puzzle together and come closer to understanding if Albert Einstein’s theory of Relativity holds firm.

In addition to the Higgs Boson, gravitons and sparticles are other theorized but never seen subatomic particles that scientists would like to find. Elementary bosons that mediate the strong and weak forces have been found. And the Higgs could explain why particles have mass. Gravitons are the theorized particles that carry the gravitational force and sparticles are the supersymmetric counterparts to ordinary particles.

MIT Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek wants someone to find the Higgs in order to tie up an important loose end of the Standard Model. He says proving the existence of the Higgs Boson would be “a vindication of the equations we’ve been using all these years.”

He views the $10 billion CERN experiment at the Large Hadron Collider to be a giant clerical project of theoretical physics. When it comes to the Standard Model he says, “It’s really nice to dot the i’s and cross the t’s.”

But beyond validating the Standard Model of physics finding the Higgs in the projected low mass range would also support a few other theories — like supersymmetry — that not just confirm the Standard Model but expand and improve it. He says, “That will mean the Large Hadron Collider will have another wave of brilliant discoveries in the future.”

Wilzcek told the Associated Press that the mass range reported on Tuesday is “perfect” to meet that requirement. He says, “It fits so beautifully with everything we know.” He’s a believer who calls this week’s announcment “awesome, just beautiful work.”

CERN’s Heuer says a Higgs Boson with a mass of between 124-126 billion electronvolts “is not so bad for supersymmetry.”

And by next year he hopes to have some solid answers. He says, “We need to get a lot more collisions next year to get a definitive answer to the Shakespearean question, ‘To be or not to be.’”

The question is the subject of movies, science fiction novels and our own curious minds. Are we alone in the universe? Prevailing scientific wisdom says yes but more and more the answer appears to be no.

With the advent of more sensitive cosmological equipment to scan the night sky, astronomers are able to see smaller objects with ever greater detail. The Kepler space telescope has been focused on a region of space containing over 100,000 stars. Scientists have been watching those stars for the tiniest hint of a wobble, indicating those stars could be hiding planets.

Now, the hunt for exoplanets — planets being discovered outside of our own solar system — is on and the results are startling.

Ten years ago, two University of Washington astrobiologists postulated that Earth is a rare planet indeed. In their book Rare Earth, Don Brownlee and Peter Ward suggested that for life to exist elsewhere in the universe very specific conditions must be met. They called this the habitable or Goldilocks zone, where a planet wasn’t too hot or too cold to support life. It had to have a certain amount of sunlight from its nearby star. So it had to be located in a solar system with other planets a certain distance from its star.

Building on that set of criteria, professional astronomers, undergraduates, citizens and curious skywatchers are all becoming planet hunters. Now the science is improving to the point where a new discovery yields the planets size, mass and even its average surface temperature.

Finding a Planet in a Star Stack

Kepler 22 Star System, Showing Kepler 22b in the Habitable Zone

British author and astronomy expert Ian Ridpath explains the way astronomers find new exoplanets.

“NASA has this space telescope called Kepler which has been staring for the past couple of years at this one particular area of sky containing over 100,000 stars. And it’s been looking for very slight dips in the star’s brightness as something goes across in front of the stars.

“It’s called the transit method. Now if it does that three times in succession then the NASA scientists think that is good enough to conclude that what is causing the dip in light is a planet.”

That’s why astronomers are so excited about the confirmation of a new exoplanet, Kepler 22b. By all calculations it is located in a habitable zone around its star, known as Kepler 22. The star, which is smaller and cooler than our sun is located between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. Kepler 22b orbits around the star and may be the right distance from the star to support life. But the size of the planet — about 2.4 times that of Earth, really excites scientists. It is rare for a discovery to find a planet in the same size range as our own blue planet. Of the 28 planets found so far his is the smallest planet ever confirmed by Kepler.

Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA says, “This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin.”

It’s much easier to spot a big planet, like a gas giant the size of Jupiter. But those are not likely candidates for the search for life, microbial or intelligent. Kepler 22b is about the right size and appears to have a liquid water surface. In fact, it looks like the entire planet is covered in water.

That coupled with measurements pointing to the temperature being about 72 degrees gives astronomers hope that life may exist there.

NASA Artist Rendering of Kepler 22b, Covered in Water and with Clouds

William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at NASA Ames Research Center says the Kepler team got very lucky in detecting this planet. He says, “The first transit was captured just three days after we declared the spacecraft operationally ready. We witnessed the defining third transit over the 2010 holiday season.”

Last week, a Minnesota science class got more than they bargained for when a combustible demonstration being done by the physical sciences teacher caught chemicals on a lab table on fire and burned several students, including 15-year-old Dane Neuberger.

The burned student says, “I started screaming and he was on me fast to put the fire out and my shirt and face were on fire.” The 9th Grade teacher, Matt Achor wrapped Neuberger in a fire blanket, smothering the flames as soon as they erupted.

The student was sitting in the front row of his science class with three others when a methanol experiment went terribly awry, putting him in the hospital with second-degree burns covering his hands, face and neck. Luckily the resilient teen is stable and could be released by mid December and doctors say he may not require skin grafts and could have no permanent scarring.

But the Maple Grove Junior High School teacher who conducted the experiment is on paid administrative leave until the school can conduct a full investigation of the accident.

Neuberger’s father wants the school to implement stricter safety policies governing science labs.

A week after Thanksgiving students gathered in Mr. Achor’s class for a final at the end of the term. After the test was over the teacher rewarded the students with a dangerous display, demonstrating how methanol vaporizes into the air and becomes combustible. This demonstration is dangerous and should only be conducted under the proper circumstances. And even then, something can go wrong.

In this case, left over chemicals from another experiment dotted the lab table where the combustion experiment was being done. The flash of methanol flame didn’t stay in the five gallon water jug as planned. It escaped and mixed with the chemical residue on the lab table, burning the students closest to the flash fire.

Neuberger says it caught his shirt and some papers on fire. A fire extinguisher in the room was used to stop the burning papers.

The school district says the school is no longer conducting the lab experiment that led to the students getting burned.

The Internet has about 300 videos of this experiment being done, including one by science educator Steve Spangler. He suggests the demonstration makes a great classroom experiment because it allows a teacher to show students how combustion works. They get to see a flash of fire and an impressive spectacle. But they also learn that the fire which heats the vaporized methanol releases carbon dioxide and leaves water as a byproduct.

The latest additions to the periodic table of the elements finally have placeholder names. It was earlier this year when elements 114 and 116 were admitted onto the coveted list of elements. At the time they were referred to by their numerical Latin ununquadium and ununhexium.

They might be called flerovium (Fl) and livermorium (Lv), unless the public can come up with better names. Now that the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has accepted these two names, the public gets to weigh in on these heavy elements.

The IUPAC and its physics equivalent have spent years sifting through data and in June decided to admit the two new elements which were jointly created by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and at the Russian Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna.

But naming the elements has been just about as difficult as confirming their existence. Each lab decided it would get to name one of the elements.

The team at Livermore submitted three names and out of that Livermorium became one contender. Since Dubnium already occupies the 105th element on the periodic table, the Russian team decided to submit their suggested name based on the scientist who started the lab, Georgii Flerov. Thus Flerovium was submitted as the other contender.

For the next five months, the IUPAC will take suggestions from the public, allowing citizens to get in touch with their inner scientist. Anyone can comment on these names or raise objections before the two selected names become official.

Terry Renner, the chemistry union’s executive director says, “It’s a desire to be fair and recognize everyone’s right to contribute as a scientist.”

And silly or serious all suggestions will be considered. To submit your thoughts about the proposed elements Livermorium and Flerovium leave a comment below.

After the five-month public comment period, the inorganic chemistry division will review the comments made and either revise the recommendations or recommend approval by the full IUPAC Council.

Dr. Renner says that barring any naming issues that arise in the meantime the new elements will be confirmed and officially become part of the periodic table next May.

In 2006, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began monitoring the Arctic region, creating an annual report card to mark rapid change occurring there. Five years in and the news isn’t good.

The 2011 Arctic Report Card shows that the entire region is changing dramatically. Ice, both on land and at sea, is melting at record pace. That is upsetting the Earth’s albedo, allowing more of the sun’s energy to be absorbed by dark, open water and not be reflected back to space as it bounces off snow and ice.

2011 Arctic Sea Ice Extent, courtesy of NOAA Arctic Report Card

According to the report card, “The 2011 minimum is the second lowest, only 0.16 million km2 greater than the 2007 record minimum.” Overall, the 2011 minimum reached on September 9 was 31% (2.08 million km2) smaller than the 1979-2000 average. The report says, “The last five summers (2007-2011) have experienced the five lowest minima in the satellite record, and the past decade (2002-2011) has experienced nine of the ten lowest minima.”

All of the newly exposed water is allowing atmospheric carbon dioxide to sink into the Arctic waters and it is changing the chemical makeup of the ocean. As a result, the Chukchi and Beaufort seas have lower pH values. In other words the waters are becoming more acidic, which makes it difficult for tiny sea animals that rely on calcium carbonate shells to survive. The higher acid level makes shell formation more difficult.

The report card says, “The increased amount of open water enhanced the uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere and the freshening of the upper ocean decreased alkalinity, inorganic carbon and calcium ion concentrations.” The melting sea ice exposed more water to the open air, allowing more atmospheric carbon dioxide to sink in the ocean, making the ocean more acidic. The report notes, “Although CO2 concentration in surface waters in 2010 and 2011 was not as high as in 2008, these waters have continued to be undersaturated with respect to aragonite.” By monitoring the aragonite levels scientists can determine if phytoplankton is having trouble forming shells.

In addition to watching the ocean and the atmosphere change, NOAA also monitors shorter term weather patterns and tracks the impact they have on the Arctic region as a whole. And the last few years, pressure over the North Pole shifted, pushing the coldest Arctic air far south to the United States and Europe while warmer air filtered over Greenland, rapidly speeding up the melt rate of glaciers there.

For the first time, the 2011 Arctic Report Card measured changes in Greenland. As a result of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) switching from positive to negative, caused unusually warm weather during Winter 2010-2011 and last summer. Those weather conditions in turn sped up the melt rate from the Greenland ice sheet.

The report says, “The area and duration of melting at the surface of the ice sheet in summer 2011 were the third highest since 1979.” According to satellite data, the Greenland ice sheet melted to its third lowest point since 1979 when record keeping began. Only 2010 and 2007 exceeded that ice loss.

NOAA principal deputy under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere Monica Medina says, “This report, by a team of 121 scientists from around the globe, concludes that the Arctic region continues to warm, with less sea ice and greater green vegetation.”

Using a familiar image of a stoplight, NOAA classified the five chapters of the report card according to level of change. The findings show that Atmosphere, Sea Ice & Ocean, Hydrology & Terrestrial Cryosphere have experienced significant change while Marine Ecosystems and Terrestrial Ecosystems have experienced some change. No coverage area received a greenlight, meaning little or no change.

The Report Card tracks the Arctic atmosphere, sea ice, biology, ocean, land, and Greenland. This year, new sections were added, including, greenhouse gases, ozone and ultraviolet radiation, ocean acidification, Arctic Ocean primary productivity, and lake ice.

It concludes, “Sea ice and ocean observations over the past decade (2001-2011) suggest that the Arctic Ocean climate has reached a new state, with characteristics different than those observed previously.”

And, “In 2011 there was continued widespread warming in the Arctic, where deviations from historical air temperatures are amplified by a factor of two or more relative to lower latitudes. This phenomenon, called Arctic Amplification, is primarily a consequence of increased summer sea ice loss and northward transport of heat by the atmosphere and ocean.”

(no audio to accompany video)

After the earthquake in Japan or Haiti robots were pretty useless in sifting through rubble to find survivors. They also didn’t do well in off-road situations where the environment had shifted and they couldn’t maneuver over obstacles.

But a chemist at Harvard has been leading the charge to overcome this massive challenge. By studying the locomotion of squid, starfish, worms and other creatures that undulate, slither, creep and crawl, George M. Whitesides has pioneered a new class of robot, called soft-bodied robots.

Designed to edge into tight spaces, under doors or through slightly opened windows, soft robots or softbots can change their shape depending on the situation they are in. MIT roboticist Matthew Walter tells the Associated Press, “The unique ability for soft robots to deform allows them to go to places that traditional rigid-body robots cannot.”

The current softbot resembles a drunken Gumby character. Then it ambles to life when air is pumped into its rubber body and four limbs. Its gait is somewhat unsteady as it lopes along dragging wires to an external power source with it as it goes. But it looks a lot more like a slimy sea creature than a robot.

And that’s just the look scientists were going for. Like many other fields of science robotics uses Mother Nature as a source of inspiration. Unmanned military flying vehicles or drones get their agility, body shape and other characteristics from birds and bugs.

Now a new generation of soft-bodied robots resembles invertebrate animals, including a slug.

After years of experimentation a four-inch catepillar-shaped silicone robot emerged from a cocoon at Tufts University and showed it could roll into a ball and propel itself forward.
(no audio to accompany video)

Right now the Harvard softbot has mastered traveling on several surfaces, including felt cloth, gravel, mud and even Jell-O. But it drags wires around wherever it goes. Making the robot self-contained is the researchers’ next challenge. That and increasing its speed. Right now it takes just under a minute to slither under a pane of glass.

The research appears in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Science has proven it’s possible to make the Back to the Future II hover board a thing of the future. But first scientists need to overcome the need to flash freeze the object in order to turn it into a superconductor, which makes quantum levitation possible.

Team Demonstrates Quantum Levitation Above A Magnetic Track

You’d have to be zipping through the cold of space before quantum levitation would work on a practical scale.

But for now, a demonstration from a group at Tel-Aviv University shows a frozen superconducting disc floating above a magnetic track. It’s enough to conjure thoughts of smooth commutes on magnetic roads.
Think of the high-speed Maglev trains that Japan, China and Korea use to race people around using a frictionless system of magnets to propel the cars just inches above the track.

Using the quantum levitation instead of magnetic levitation would allow a Quantlev train to be suspended beneath the track as well as on top.

How Quantum Levitation Works

First you need a superconductor. In this case a sapphire crystal wafer coated in a ceramic barium copper oxide layer. Then supercool the material to below 301 degrees F. And voila, you’ve built a superconductor, a material that conducts electricity without resistance, with no energy loss.

Then you need to understand that superconductors don’t like magnetic fields and magnetic fields don’t like superconductors either. Using this mutual disdain to your advantage, simply put a superconductor into a magnetic field and watch as it becomes locked in place.

The Meissner effect explains how this works. Superconductive material will try to expel a magnetic field from inside. Because the superconducting wafer is thin the magnetic field can penetrate the disc. But as it does so, a quantum disruption takes place, pushing the magnetic field to the periphery of the superconductor and destroying the superconductivity in very localized areas, which physicists call flux tubes.

The superconductor keeps the flux tubes pinned in weak areas allowing any movement of the superconductor to carry the flux tubes with it. Since the disrupted magnetic field, now turned into a field of flux tubes moves with the superconductor, the material is trapped in midair.

Here’s a more detailed explanation of how quantum levitation works.

At the 2011 Association for Science and Technology Centers conference a physics research team led by Tel-Aviv University professor Guy Deutscher demonstrated the concept to the top brass in the science center circuit.

Right now Steve Jobs is being remembered as the man who made technology personal and pleasing. But as time passes the iPod, iPhone and iPad will become part of our lives, no longer remarkable. This is the same journey that other inventions took, from bright, new concept to items in everyday use.

iPad, by Apple Computer

The London Science Museum is taking a close look at ordinary items like pencils, paperclips and zippers to highlight the geniuses behind their invention. In the exhibit, Hidden Heroes: The Genius of Everyday Things visitors get the story behind the items in life we take for granted, like rubber bands.

The companion online exhibit includes 44 common objects like light bulbs and clothespins and is a great way to learn the history and innovation of things we see all the time.

Sheep Marked with Graphite

Graphite Pencil

In the 1950s a couple of engineers were monkeying around with a new type of wallpaper with a textured plastic surface. On a plane trip, Al Fielding and Marc Chavannes noticed that the clouds around them seemed to cushion the plane as it descended. That’s how they got the idea for sealing air into plastic to use in packing. That’s the story of the birth of Bubble Wrap.

Bubble Wrap

Paper Clips, from W.M. Welch Co. Catalog, 1912

Martin Keyes was fascinated by what he could do with left over wood chips. He learned how to make pulp by adding steam. Then he figured out he could mold the fibrous material into any shape. That’s how the egg carton hatched.

Waste Paper Used to Make Egg Cartons

Zipper

By mixing caoutchouc with sulfur, Charles Goodyear discovered how to vulcanize rubber. About the same time British Rubber baron Thomas Hancock began licensing the process and one of his licensees created the rubber band. Stephen Perry’s invention has demonstrated the combined the elasticity of rubber with simple, elegant appeal that has remained largely unchanged for over 150 years.

Rubber Band Ball, courtesy of Sam Hunt

Not every bright idea has remained the same over time.

Building off the innovation of the zipper Robert Vergobbi applied the mechanism to plastic bags using heat or adhesive in 1954 and not to store food but to carry pencils. Then a clever 5th Grade student named Robert LeJeune discovered that sealed plastic bags can store food and slow the spoiling process. Nine years later Dow Chemical patented the Ziploc bags and the rest is history.

Just because the complexity of products and technology is increasing rapidly doesn’t mean that the simpler things all around us don’t have stories to tell.

The things we marvel at today will be forgotten in the future or relegated to the same footing as the tin can, tea bag or bar code.

Photo: Rubber Band Ball, by Sam Hunt.

Global warming has become so politicized that many people forget there is science underlying the concept. The camps sort out like this. Climate scientists for the most part agree that the world is heating up thanks to man-made or anthropogenic global warming, largely caused by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which increases the greenhouse effect and heats the planet. There are a few climate scientists who are considered skeptics of the the science.

They argue that the land surface temperatures — where the increase has been measured — are highly unreliable for a couple of reasons. First the weather stations that record the temperatures are not always accurate and the record-keeping over the years has been far from complete. Some stations have instrument problems which lead to further data problems. And second, climate skeptics think that cities, which trap heat causing what is known as the urban heat island effect, are skewing global temperature readings.

But in what is perhaps the most comprehensive land surface temperature analysis, a group of scientists at University of California Berkley gathered all the raw data from 15 separate data archives consisting of 1.6 billion temperature records. They merged the information into one, large data set, called Berkley Earth, and put the whole thing online for the world to see.

Comparison of All Major Climate Data Sets Shows Berkley Earth in Black

What makes this project significant is that the man behind the experiment is Richard Muller, a prominent physicist and self-ascribed climate skeptic. After the “climategate” e-mail hacking scandal in November 2009 he wanted to see for himself what the temperature record said.

He told the Associated Press, “The skeptics raised valid points and everybody should have been a skeptic two years ago.”

Dr. Muller and his daughter Elizabeth, who is the executive director of the Berkley Earth Surface Temperature project approached the project from a skeptical point of view. They even received a quarter of their $623,000 funding from the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, a non-profit organization that gives money to climate skeptics and conservative political groups like the Tea Party. Some money also came from other private foundations, including $100,000 from the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research created by Bill Gates.

At the completion of the project, Dr. Muller declared that climate change is real. He says, “And now we have confidence that the temperature rise that had previously been reported had been done without bias.”

Most scientists aren’t very impressed that he came to the same conclusion they did decades ago. But they do appear impressed to have converted a skeptic by letting the data speak for itself.

Science depends on the ability to reproduce results. And while science calls for dispassion and objective thinking, skeptics have been accusing many climate scientists of being alarmists and of manipulating data to show the problem is worse than it is. When it comes to climate science, politics, personal agendas and motivations have polluted the process. Now every discovery, paper published or statement made is applauded by some and denounced by others. That makes it difficult for the science to shine through the politics and even harder for the public to grasp any significance.

But Dr. Muller’s BEST project only goes so far. It analyzed all the available data and demonstrates that the climate has been warming consistently and considerably for the past 50 years. Muller and his team found that the world is 1.6 degrees F warmer now than it was in the 1960s.

This landmark study does not point any fingers at the cause of the warming. It merely points out that warming is indeed real. It carefully stays away from taking a position on whether the warming is part of a natural cycle or whether it is being exacerbated by man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

But Muller now says, “Greenhouse gases could have a disastrous impact on the world.” He doesn’t believe that case has been scientifically proven yet, however.

In March, Dr. Muller testified before Congress (PDF) saying, “I believe that the systematic biases that are the cause for most concern can be adequately handled by data analysis techniques. The world temperature data has sufficient integrity to be used to determine global temperature trends.”

Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, is the climatologist at the heart of the “climategate” scandal. He was accused of fraud but since cleared of all charges. He helped build one of the three climate data sets that scientists around the world regularly use, the Hadley Centre Climate Research Unit. The other two are the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the NOAA National Climate Data Center.

Speaking of Muller and the Berkley Earth project Dr. Jones tells New Scientist magazine, “These initial findings are very encouraging and echo our own results, and our conclusion that the impact of urban heat islands on the overall global temperature is minimal.”

The BEST research also confirms the so-called hockey stick graph. First unveiled in 1998 by Penn State University paleoclimatologist, Michael Mann, the graph became an icon of global warming after it was featured in the summary of a crucial report by a United Nations climate panel in 2001. A version also appeared in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Mann’s hockey stick graph also became the symbol climate change skeptics loved to use to body check scientists to keep the debate alive. Even Muller once called the graph “the poster child of the global warming community.”

Now Mann says, “I think it’s at least useful to see that even a critic like Muller, when he takes an honest look, finds that climate science is robust.”

Generally people in the far northern latitudes get to see the solar wind dancing with the magnetic field around Earth. But because of increased solar activity, the northern lights have been more visible further south, including Alabama, Georgia and even Florida.

An automated NASA camera that takes a picture of the sky every minute in Huntsville, Alabama captured 20 minutes of the vibrant red and green aurora borealis.

Northern Lights in Arkansas, courtesy of Brian Emfinger, realclearwx.com

Arkansas photographer Brian Emfinger called the view “extremely vivid, the most vivid I have ever seen.” And he says this is only the second time he’s seen the northern lights so far south in a decade.

NASA scientist Bill Cooke found the aurora photos in the Alabama camera’s archive and posted them on the Marshall Space Flight Center’s blog. He says, “They are very rare events and we don’t see them this far south that often.”

Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado monitors solar activity and solar storms, which trigger the colorful auroras. Space weather chief Bob Rutledge says that the solar storm that created the vivid light show was only in the moderate range and shouldn’t have been visible south of Iowa. He also says the storm was unusual because it arrived 8 hours ahead of schedule.

An aurora begins when the sun blasts a magnetic solar wind toward Earth. The wind hits the Earth’s magnetic field, compressing it. That compression excites electrons of oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere. When those excited electrons return to their normal state, they release a photon burst seen as red and green colored light.

The most commonly seen northern lights color is green, often seen in nighttime pictures of Norway and the Arctic. Green results from excited oxygen.

Monday night’s display featured the not often seen red light. In fact, most of the sightings in northern Michigan described seeing a blood-red sky. Red auroras also result from excited oxygen atoms. The difference in color comes from the altitude of the excited atoms returning to their ground state. Red northern lights occur higher in the atmosphere while green is at a lower altitude.

The strongest color emissions from nitrogen are in the deep violet end of the rainbow spectrum, which are generally invisible to the human eye. A Nitrogen excited state can also create a red lower border to the northern lights.

According to NOAA this storm was classified as a G2 on a scale of G1-G5. It was spectacular but didn’t pose a threat to satellites or power grids. As solar activity increases in this new 11-year solar cycle more solar storms will give way to more brilliant sky shows. And some will even be seen as far south as the Gulf Coast.

So keep your eyes peeled.

The voice of nature Sir David Attenborough is featured explaining Iceland musician Bjork’s latest venture — Biophilia. It’s part music album reflecting the connection points between sound, nature and technology. It’s an app for iPhones and iPads. It’s a creation generator for fans of Bjork’s music to tinker and play with sound to make an instrumental backdrop for the singer’s powerful a capella voice.

…but much of nature is hidden from us, that we can neither see nor touch. Like the one phenomenon that can be said to move us more than any other in our daily lives: sound. Sound, harnessed by human beings, delivered with generosity and emotion, is what we call music. And just as we use music to express parts of us that would otherwise be hidden, so too can we use technology to make visible much of nature’s invisible world. In Biophilia, you will experience how the three come together: nature, music, technology. Listen, learn, and create. — Sir David Attenborough, intro to Biophilia

This experiment is described as a multimedia exploration mother application, comprising a suite of original music, and interactive, educational and musical artifacts.

The journey begins deep in the cosmos where galaxies form. Fly through homemade constellations that connect to ten songs, each with a different app and activity. The theme song Cosmogony plays as users decide where to begin their experience.

Biophilia Project Moon App

In Moon, Björk explores the lunar cycles and the effect they have on Earth. The song is based on four different sequences played by four different harpists: Zeena Parkins, Shelley Burgon, Sara Cutler, Carol Emanuel.

About the song, Björk explains, “With each new moon we complete a cycle and are offered renewal — to take risks, to connect with other people, to love, to give. The symbolism of the moon as the realm of imagination, melancholy, and regeneration is expressed in the song.”

The sequences of the song repeat, reflecting the lunar cycles.

18-year-old programmer Max Weisel designed the Moon app for Biophilia. The song is constructed in 17/8 time measure, a far cry from the musical standard 4/4 time. For that reason the app features a musical sequencer with 17 musical moons. Change the position of each moon to change the note it produces. Anyone can create a new melody each time which can be played with Björk’s voice.

Biophilia Virus App

In Virus, Bjork tells the love story between a virus and a cell. And of course the virus loves the cell so much that it destroys it. An interactive game in the app challenges the user to halt the attack of the virus, although the result is that the song will stop if the player succeeds. In order to hear the rest of the song, the players will have to let the virus take its course. Taking some artistic license, the cell nuclei will also mouth along to the chorus.

In her song Thunderbolt the Icelandic impresario uses arpeggios, inspired by the time between when lightning is seen and thunder is heard. She also demanded the creation of new instruments in order to properly show the interdependence of nature, innovation and technology. When she debuted Thuderbolt at the Manchester International Festival in June, she used two Tesla coils as core instruments.

Biophilia Crystalline App

Cyrstalline is the lead single on the Biophilia album and it required a new instrument as well. For this Bjork created the gameleste, a hybrid created by combining a gamelan (gong) and a celesta (organ), giving the singer the option of playing the gong remotely like an organ from her iPad. Crystalline tells the story of structure.

Bjork says of the app, “Travel through tunnels and collect crystals to make your own structure of the song.” Each move changes the way the song plays as you pick crystals along the way. Different crystals have a different effect, making the song a living, evolving structure. At the end, each play sees the crystal aggregation they have made and can save and share their structure with others.

The song and app explore structural similarities in crystals and music, using them to express changes between closed and open systems and emotional states in an effort to unify the external and internal worlds.

Cosmogony embodies the harmony of musical and planetary systems. It’s a song inspired by wonder at the cosmos and the question of how the universe came to be. the app acts as the navigation tool to explore the universe of Biophilia in 3D audio by traveling with your fingertips through space.

Bjork Cosmogony Cover

The Cosmogony app also alerts users when new apps are available, by highlighting them within the constellations. It exists to expand on the cosmological and unifying aspects of the mother app function and draws on the lyrics of the song which center around creation myths from different cultures.

Laura Sterritt at Transchordian says, “In this sense, ‘mother’ app takes on an additional meaning by relating to the birth of the universe.”

With her Biophilia project Bjork is embracing technology, collaborating with Apple and National Geographic to break new ground merging music with science to create a new appreciation for both.

Bjork Rocks Science with Biophilia

She tells the Guardian she has a three-year educational tour planned, inspired by Biophilia. The paper reports that in addition to the album, the free mother app and its 10 accompanying song apps, the Icelandic singer is mapping out a string of eight six-week residencies, comprising live performances, scientific expositions, and children’s workshops on nature and music.

Growing up, Bjork says, “My rock star was David Attenborough”. Now the rockstar is helping to reinvent the rockstar, herself.

According to Corey Tate at Spacelab, “The Biophilia experience will have central themes of science, earth, and space; it seems to be at the forefront of the new interactive music cool, with the combination of digital music and interactive experiences on the rise.”

Through 2014, Bjork will visit eight cities around the world, spending a month and a half in each. She will do twice-weekly performances of the album and host scientific exhibitions and classes for students. She says, kids will be able to “try out the instruments on the iPad and write songs and take them home.”

For leaf peepers Fall is the time for the best leaves. They turn from bright green to yellow, then orange and if the conditions are right red and purple too. But what makes fall colors so spectacular?

Science can explain.

First just about everybody knows that chlorophyll gives leaves their green color. But chlorophyll is more than just a molecule that gives plants a green pigment. Chlorophyll absorbs sunlight and uses its energy to create carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water. Trees drink in water through their roots and they breathe in carbon dioxide from the air.

That process we all know is called photosynthesis. It’s what all land-based and many sea-based plants rely on for food. That’s why we call leaves nature’s food factories.

Like all things in nature plants and trees are built for efficiency. As the hours of sunlight decrease during the second half of the year deciduous trees begin to conserve energy so they don’t freeze during the winter. They accomplish this by shedding their leaves. But each tree doesn’t consciously decide to drop the excess baggage. That’s also part of the process which leads to fall foliage being so brilliant.

Before dropping their leaves, trees slow down production in their food factories by producing less chlorophyll. That allows other colors to become visible. First, the yellow pigment which was there all along begins to emerge. That is created by molecules called carotenoids. The two common leaf carotenoids are carotene and xanthophyll.

They are the pigments that gives carrots and sweet potatoes their color. Carotenoids are masked by chlorophyll until fall approaches. When the chlorophyll production slows down carotenoids become visible. They are responsible for yellow and orange leaves.

Ever present but hidden by other colors is another pigment called anthocyanin. Anthocyanin is part of a third pigment family called flavonoids. Lycopene is a flavonoid that gives tomatoes their red color. But anthocyanin acts as the natural sunscreen for plants, blocking harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun. As chlorophyll production shuts down for the year, anthocyanin production ramps up. These give tree leaves their deep red, magenta and purple colors. That increase in anthocyanin is in response to surging sugar concentrations, building up in the leaves.

That glucose glut tends to concentrate where leaf meets stem, making the extra weight a target point for wind or rain to knock the leaves from the trees. After all, that’s the trees’ goal. Get rid of the leaves so they can survive the sunless winter without dying of starvation or freezing to death.

While trees go through this incredibly complicated process to get ready for winter, we marvel at their transformation from vibrant green blowing in the mid-summer sun to yellows, oranges, reds and purples buffeted by fall storms. Perhaps we watch in awe as the slow and steady march of time goes on before our very eyes.

Key Leaf Chemistry

The color of leaf we get is highly dependent on the types and amounts of pigments that are present. Internal plant chemical interactions, especially from variable soil acidity or pH level can have a dramatic impact on leaf color.

With the steadily decreasing length of day and cooler temperatures as fall approaches trees biologically trigger the formation of a corky layer of cells called the abcission layer across the base of the leaf where it attaches to the tree. This formation gradually decreases the supply of water and minerals to the leaf, reduces the manufacture of chlorophyll and traps sugars in the leaf.

In some trees, like maples, glucose is trapped in the leaves after photosynthesis stops. Sunlight during the day and the cool nights of autumn cause the leaves turn this glucose into a red color. With enough sunny days, those anthocyanins turn leaves bright reds and purples.

The muted brown color of oak leaves is made from wastes left in those leaves.

Why is so hard to predict when the leaves will be the best and brightest? In short, it depends on the weather.

Warm wet springs, summers that don’t scorch and bright sunny fall days with cool nights all lend to the brilliance of fall color. The degree of visual splendor and leaf vibrancy requires a lot of variables lining up just right. And when they do, the beauty is unparalleled.

Phenology of Fall Foliage

Phenology is the study of the timing of nature. This ranges from the dates that tulips bloom in the spring to the fall migration of Canadian geese. And it definitely includes watching the leaves turn color in the fall.

But scientists have been struggling to find a direct link between later leaf drops and climate change in the U.S. Europe and Asia have been conducting studies that seem to point to later fall foliage. But it’s been a difficult case to prove in the U.S. Part of that reason could be the wildly fluctuating weather from year to year.

A wet spring, followed by the deluge of Hurricane Irene, a mind-summer drought and normal-ish fall have trees in New England all confused. Some tree leaves are bypassing fall colors, turning brown and dropping early. Some plant biologists believe that’s due to a fungus that relished the wetness and took hold.

Those factors make identifying long term trends difficult at best.

Several organizations are enlisting the help of the public to collect data in hopes of finding the signal for such change in the noise or fluctuating weather.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

“There are signs everywhere that things are changing — how is the question. Some species are being affected while others are not,” said Esperanza Stancioff of the University of Maine cooperative extension and Maine Sea Grant, who has trained 195 citizen scientists to enter data online in her “Signs of the Season” phenology project.

To assist both backyard observers and researchers alike, the National Phenology Network has spent the last four years coming up with standards to be used by observers in reporting foliage color changes. Final tweaks on the uniform reporting standards should be completed in a few weeks, Weltzin said.

Another part of the effort to study climate change through the lens of fall foliage is being conducted from space by the U.S. Geological Survey utilizing satellites from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Right now, the effort is focused on Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, where scientists are attempting to understand the factors that go into the metrics to ensure proper analysis of the photos taken from above, said John W. Jones, a research geographer with the USGS outside of Washington, D.C.

Pee pressure, beer bottle-humping beetles and a wasabi-flavored fire alarm were among the top prizes awarded at Harvard University’s 21st Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, a more laid back version of the Nobel Prize ceremony. Nobel Prize laureates present the Ig Nobels to scientists and philosophers who have made legitimate contributions toward the sillier side of science.

Top honors in literature went to a researcher who 15 years ago wrote a paper about procrastination. Waiting a ridiculous amount of time before honoring the man is indicative of the Ig Nobel prizes. His theory holds that even the best procrastinator can successfully execute a complex task if he believes that he is working on it to avoid an even greater task.

Stanford University philosophy professor John Perry says, “To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.”

A Japanese team decided that during an emergency people would much rather be awoken or alerted using a fire alarm that produces the horseradishy smell of wasabi rather than a blaring sound. They won the Ig Nobel Chemistry prize for determining the correct and patent-pending density for airborne wasabi, a feat fit for a sushi restaurateur.

A group from the beer-swilling nations of Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. stumbled upon a species of beetle that is convinced it can mate with beer bottles. And not just a particular brand either.

Male Jewel Beetle Mates with Stubbies

Another Ig Nobel prize went to an international team from Europe, the U.S. and Australia who tested the idea that people with an overwhelming need to urinate make decisions differently. During their full-blattered research they discovered that those in greatest need to relieve themselves actually exhibited the same level of clarity as a drunk person. One of the papers is titled “Inhibitory Spillover.” (PDF) Just don’t hold it and drive.

Finally, the Math prize went to a group of people predicting the Apocolypse, including Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end again on October 21, 2011). They won the prize “for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.”

The Nobel laureates who physically handed the Ig Nobel Prizes to the new winners:

Dudley Herschbach (chemistry, 1986)
Rich Roberts (physiology or medicine, 1993)
Roy Glauber (physics, 2005)
Eric Maskin (economics, 2007)
Peter Diamond (economics, 2010)
Louis Ignarro, (physiology or medicine, 1998)

Cover Photo: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania and winner of the Ig Nobel Peace Prize for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.

Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman has won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Shechtman “for the discovery of quasicrystals.”

Until his 1982 discovery, Dr. Shechtman, who has joint appointments at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology and Iowa State University believed that crystalline matter was defined as a regular and repeating pattern of atoms tightly packed within a material. Chemists used that belief to explain why crystals only come in certain shapes.

But then Dr. Shechtman discovered crystals with forbidden shapes, ones that science determined were impossible.

His discovery came after he observed a mix of aluminum and manganese under an electron microscope. What he saw he thought was impossible. He saw a distinct pattern — similar to that of traditional Islamic mosaics — that seemed to contradict what chemists understood as the laws of nature.

Instead of thinking that he had erred, as is so common among scientists making big discoveries, he concluded that the science was wrong. That didn’t go over very well with his colleagues, who mocked him and expelled him from his own research team.

It took years for chemists to consider the impossible not only possible but useful. Now as a result of this Nobel Prize winning discovery, quasicrystals have been found in the most durable kinds of steel, which are made into products like razor blades and thin needles used in eye surgery. They are also being studied for use in new materials that convert heat to electricity. And, in 2009 quasicrystals were first discovered in nature in Russia.

Despite initial ridicule and rejection by the scientific community the Nobel Prize committee says Shechtman’s discovery, “fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter.”

After receiving the big news this morning, Dr. Shechtman told a news conference, “The main lesson that I have learned over time is that a good scientist is a humble and listening scientist not one that is sure 100 percent in what he reads in the textbooks.”

After wrestling with his discovery, the chemistry community eventually realized that he had stumbled on an entirely new type of matter, a quasicrystal. Atomic patterns show a more subtle type of repetition than traditional crystals which allows for so-called forbidden shapes.

Quasi Crystal Gallery

For scientists it doesn’t get any bigger than the Nobel Prize. This year’s winners in the Physics category receive the honor for work they did on the biggest subject available to them or anyone — the universe.

Three U.S. scientists are sharing the prize for their theory of a rapidly expanding universe. Saul Perlmutter receives half the prize for his role in discovering that the light from a specific kind of supernova was dimmer than predicted. Fortunately, another team studying the same thing made up of Brian Schmidt and Adam Reiss came to the same conclusion.

For over 100 years physicists — most notably Albert Einstein — had been working with the idea that the universe was expanding, stretching outward as a result of the Big Bang 14 billion years ago. But until the new Nobel Prize winners used better technology, more powerful computers and telescopes in the 1990′s the theory lacked observation.

In 1998, the universe was still rapidly expanding and the answer to that big question was literally written in the stars.

In a telephone interview this morning with the Nobel Prize committee, Dr. Reiss remembered first seeing the sign that proved Einstein and others’ theory.

After sifting through all the data he gathered for his experiment looking at class 1a supernovae, he says, “I remember thinking the sign of the answer was I would have said, wrong. I remember thinking, ‘uh, I made a terrible mistake.’”

At the time, Reiss and his team at John Hopkins were seeing the same thing that Perlumutter and his team at University of California Berkeley were observing. Both teams thought there were errors in their calculations and it took a long time to confirm the results. Once the teams shared their results with each other, they knew their discovery was big.

Now the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences says Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess will share the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics. The trio was honored Tuesday for their work confirming that the universe is indeed expanding but also for realizing that the rate is ever-accelerating over time.

According to the Nobel press release, “The research teams raced to map the Universe by locating the most distant supernovae. More sophisticated telescopes on the ground and in space, as well as more powerful computers and new digital imaging sensors (CCD, Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009), opened the possibility in the 1990s to add more pieces to the cosmological puzzle.

“The teams used a particular kind of supernova, called type Ia supernova. It is an explosion of an old compact star that is as heavy as the Sun but as small as the Earth. A single such supernova can emit as much light as a whole galaxy. All in all, the two research teams found over 50 distant supernovae whose light was weaker than expected – this was a sign that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. The potential pitfalls had been numerous, and the scientists found reassurance in the fact that both groups had reached the same astonishing conclusion.”

Science and art collide (sometimes literally) in Group Intelligence, a new flash mob performance art piece that asks the question, “How did life begin?”

Out of Hand Theater in Atlanta combined forces with the NASA/NSF Center for Chemical Evolution to explore the formation of molecules. But rather than confining it to a petri dish, the group decided to scale it up so that individual people can represent individual atoms.

Group Intelligence requires a lot of space, a lot of people and an MP3 player. Each participant becomes part of the moving pieces that make up the cell, molecules and other microscopic phenomena. Together all the participants synchronize their audio players and begin at the same time, following instructions to guide them through the exercise.

Adam Fristoe, the founder of Out of Hand Theater says, “Once they become public knowledge, once these ideas spread out into the public mind are going to transform the way we think about ourselves as human beings.”

According to the website, Group Intelligence, “While the audience follows the narration, their movements mimic the self-assembly patterns of molecules that created life. The event draws parallels between a mob of people and a pool of molecules: in both, individual behaviors of selfishness or cooperation create a collective intelligence, the very properties that allowed the molecules of early Earth to self assemble to form life.”

Last week, the world’s biggest physics lab unveiled a shocking finding: that one type of subatomic particle was clocked going faster than the speed of light. If true, it could undercut Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Since 1905 the C in Einstein’s famous equation E=MC2 has stood for the speed of light. Until now, that has always been a constant amount which can always be measured at 186,282.397 miles per second.

The new announcement coming from the European nuclear research facility CERN surprised a lot of scientists, including those who made the observations.

CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci says, “When an experiment finds an apparently unbelievable result and can find no artifact of the measurement to account for it, it’s normal procedure to invite broader scrutiny, and this is exactly what the OPERA collaboration is doing, it’s good scientific practice.”

Antonio Ereditato of the University of Bern and a spokesman for the OPERA project says the result came as a complete surprise. But rather than just accepting such an unsual measurement, the team went to work, trying to find a reasonable explanation. He says, “After many months of studies and cross checks we have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement. While OPERA researchers will continue their studies, we are also looking forward to independent measurements to fully assess the nature of this observation.”

In 2006 the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) project began with the goal of studying the rare transformation (oscillation) of muon neutrinos into tau neutrinos.

Neutrinos, like the ones above, have been detected travelling faster than light, say particle physicists. Photograph: Dan Mccoy /Corbis

To better understand this here are the basics on neutrinos.

Neutrinos are elementary subatomic particles. They are so small that they have almost no mass. They are still considered matter and therefore described as particles. Neutrinos are electrically neutral which means they can pass through matter, including people and the planet without leaving much of a trace. There are three flavors of neutrinos: electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos.

Most of the 65 billion neutrinos that pass through every centimeter of the solar-facing side of Earth every second emanate from the sun, where they form as a result of radioactive decay interacting with atoms. On Earth, nuclear reactors can create neutrinos like those measured at CERN.

It took just 3 milliseconds for these particles to travel from Geneva, Switzerland to Gran Sasso, Italy, nearly 500 miles away.

Brian McLaughlin, Geek Dad, told Wired News, “In the experiment, neutrinos are generated at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) particle accelerator at the CERN LHC complex in Geneva and further accelerated down a 1 km beam line toward the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. At Gran Sasso, a detector instrument called OPERA measures the neutrinos. The distance from CERN to Gran Sasso is 732 km straight through the Earth, traveling up to 11.4 km below the Earth’s surface. Remember, neutrinos don’t interact with matter so the Earth is invisible to the tiny particles.

The distance between the two systems is known to within 20 cm. Time is also measured with extreme precision utilizing GPS timing signals and a cesium atomic clock. The GPS used in timing also allows the team to track any small movements in the Earth itself. This even allowed consideration of the effect of the L’Aquila Earthquake that moved the OPERA detector 7 cm. Due to the nature of the experiment, the time is not calculated with a simple, stopwatch style, start to finish measurement. It instead relies on measurements and comparisons of probability distribution functions at the source and the detector. In other words, there is a lot of math involved. In addition to understanding the timing and position variations in the experiment, the physicists also took into account many other variables, such as day versus night and seasonal changes. The sensitivity of this experiment is roughly an order of magnitude better than previous experiments.”

In 2010, the OPERA team observed its first neutrino oscillation event, proving the unique ability of the experiment in the detection of the elusive signal of tau neutrinos.

And in studying the precise movement of these particles between CERN and the lab in Gran Sasso, the team noticed that the neutrinos were arriving faster than they calculated. It’s not a whole lot faster–just 60 nanoseconds ahead of schedule. But that means they were traveling faster than the speed of light.

Immediately the team thought there was a miscalculation somewhere so they went to work ruling out the possibility that a neutrino could travel faster than the speed of light. After validating their calculations they realized the magnitude of this observed measurement. With a clear margin of error of 10 nanoseconds, suddenly the 60 nanosecond difference became significant.

Scientists won’t know just how significant this is until they are able to confirm the measurement at a couple of separate labs. Already the Fermilab in Illinois and the T2K neutrino experiment in Japan (which was pushed offline after the big quake there this year) have volunteered to re-measure and replicate the experiment to confirm the neutrinos’ speed.

“I don’t want to call this a discovery. I want to say this is a measurement. It’s an intriguing measurement. It’s a precise measurement. And in order for this measurement to become a discovery we will need more work.”–Antonio Ereditato, OPERA team member at CERN

Far far away, toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy sits a true diamond in the rough. Astronomers haven’t been able to see a newly discovered exoplanet but it may prove to be a real gem.

Using deductive reasoning based on crucial pieces of evidence, an international astrophysics team led by Australian space scientists believe they have discovered a planet, five times the size of Earth that weighs about the same as Jupiter. They have decided that the planet is made up of crystallized carbon. In other words, it’s the galaxy’s largest diamond.

Just like diamonds on Earth, the formation of this big bit of bling took some unusual circumstances. The planet used to be a star. That is until a neighboring pulsar stripped the faraway sun of its outermost layers, leaving just its carbon core as a remnant. Acting as a high powered diamond cutter, the pulsar likely absorbed the nearby sun while heat and pressure turned the carbon core into a diamond.

A pulsar is a tiny, dead neutron star that is just over 12 miles across and spins hundreds of times per second, emitting radio waves. In a binary star system like this the pulsar starts to spin faster as it consumes the neighboring star’s plasma. This increases the speed of the pulsar until it becomes a millisecond pulsar, spinning at more than 10,000 times per second. Once the star is stripped it is called a white dwarf and is only one percent of its former self, turning from a star to a planet.

Those radio waves that pulsars emit periodically reach Earth, allowing radio telescopes in Australia, Hawaii and Britain to detect pulsar J1719-1438. Astronomers have also detected a slight modulation in its movement, indicating the gravitational pull of an as yet unseen planet.

Taking detailed measurements of the planet’s chemical composition, pressure and dimensions astronomers determined that the diamond planet is largely made of carbon but because it is so dense it must be in a crystallized form.

Professor Matthew Bailes at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia says the new planet is far denser than any yet discovered.

He says, “The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised of carbon — i.e. a massive diamond orbiting a neutron star every two hours in an orbit so tight it would fit inside our own Sun.”

Before De Beers goes into the deep space business to get a closer glimpse of the diamond planet, they should know that it lies about 4,000 light years away from Earth.

And it might not look like your run of the mill diamond here on Earth.

Astrophysicist Ben Stappers of the University of Manchester says, “I don’t imagine that a picture of a very shiny object is what we’re looking at here.”

Hurricane Irene was never a wind maker. Just ask any meteorologist tracking the storm since it began developing. But it was big, even for a hurricane. At one point Irene stretched over 610 miles across and hovered over half of the eastern seaboard as it roared up the U.S. Atlantic coast Saturday and Sunday. But the storm never developed a strong eye-wall so dangerous winds didn’t cause the widespread damage they could have.

Hurricane Irene was all about the water. The widespread flooding from New Jersey to Vermont places Irene in the hurricane history books. Vermont is still assessing the damage but is already blaming Tropical Storm Irene for the worst flooding in over a century. Roads in one town washed away turning the the town into an island. Babbling brooks turned into raging torrents that ripped through quaint New England villages, wiping out historic covered bridges and carrying cars, buildings and other debris away in the rapids.

Supersoaker

Rain totals are still coming in but this storm was a soaker. And soggy ground made it easier for the strong winds to knock down big trees. So far 30 people lost their lives in seven states, mostly from being crushed by trees. Dozens are still missing.

As the hurricane tracked north from the Bahamas, forecasters warned the largest number of people in U.S. history to prepare for the tropical onslaught. In all 65 million people lay in the path of the mammoth storm. Major populations centers, including Washington D.C., New York, Philadelphia and Boston were all put on high alert and evacuations began days ahead of the storm’s arrival.

In the end, the worst case scenario didn’t bear out in Washington D.C. or New York where fears of coastal flooding and damaging winds prompted airports to close and trains to suspend service. The subways were halted in case storm surge pushed rivers over their banks and into the transit systems. Though Irene wasn’t as bad as she could have been, five million people are still without power.

While forecasters accurately predicted the storm’s track and even figured out its timing it missed when it came to determining Irene’s intensity. For as much as scientists know about hurricanes that is the biggest remaining scientific uncertainty. In the last 20 years the ability to track a storm’s path has improved greatly but that doesn’t mean forecasters know ahead of the hurricane making landfall what it will do.

Hurricane Irene was no different. The storm came ashore in the outer banks of North Carolina as predicted as a strong Category 1 storm, giving all indications that it would stay organized and pick up intensity as it returned to sea before making landfall a second time in Virginia and Maryland.

But somewhere in North Carolina it hit a dry patch of air which sucked some of the power from the hurricane, which was then downgraded to a weaker Category 1 as it set its sights on Washington D.C. It tore flags on federal buildings to shreds, downed trees and powerlines but left the U.S. capital relatively unscathed.

Then Irene began to bear down on New York City. A direct hit from a hurricane poses big problems for the 9 million people who live in the low-lying city surrounded by water. Storm surge from a storm like Irene is enough to push rivers over their banks, flooding large sections of lower Manhattan. To make matters worse, Irene was on track to hit New York about high tide.

But the real fear though was high winds. As it churned in the warm Caribbean it grew into a strong Category 3 hurricane. If Irene had roared into Manhattan that strong officials predicted that skyscraper windows would shatter and litter the streets with glass. Fortunately, the wind wasn’t the problem in New York but water was, even though it wasn’t even as wet as it could have been.

The Battery Park and East Village neighborhoods of Manhattan saw significant flooding as did parts of Brooklyn and Queens. So Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s decision to evacuate 300,000 New Yorkers from coastal areas appears to have been the right one.

Across the swollen river, New Jersey also experienced significant flooding. Some towns there may not get power for at least a week.

After Irene left the New York area as a tropical storm, the east coast seemed to let out a collective sigh of relief. And then reports of people stranded upstate began to filter in as Irene made her way through New England.

By far Vermont fared the worst, getting the lion’s share of the flooding. Partly because of a wet summer, the ground was already saturated, leaving the inches of rain that Irene dropped with nowhere to go. It pooled and poured into brooks and streams, turning them into raging rivers.

Here are some of the rain totals.
Bunyan, North Carolina–15.66 inches
New Bern, Williamston, Washington and Greenville, North Carolina–12+ inches
Suffolk and Newland, Virginia–11 inches.
Maryland cities of Plum Point–12.96 inches, Easton–11.34 inches and Hickman–10.5 inches
Tuxedo Park, New York–12 inches
Ellendale and Adamsville, Delaware–10+ inches each
Stockton and Wayne, New Jersey–10+ inches
Berlin, Vermont–10 inches
Savoy, Massachusetts–9+ inches
Lakewood, New Jersey–8.27 inches
Burlington and East Hartford, Connecticut–8+ inches
Philadelphia–6 inches (on top of 13 inches for the month of August where 3 inches is average)

Even before Irene dropped any rain on the mid-Atlantic states, August had already been a record-setting soggy month.

Here are the rainfall totals for the month following the storm, according to AccuWeather.com. New York City (18.95 inches), Newark (18.79 inches), Trenton (14.85 inches) and Philadelphia (19.31 inches), all have set new records for the wettest month on record, thanks in part to Irene.

Some hurricane dynamics

Hurricanes start as tropical depressions, generally blown off the northwest coast of Africa as a tropical wave of low pressure. When a line of squalls along the West African Disturbance Line move offshore the ocean begins to pick up moisture. Meteorologists get a glimpse of what’s coming down the pipeline weeks in advance of a hurricane forming.

Currently, tropical weather forecasters are watching Tropical Depression 12 spin away from Africa toward the Caribbean. By later this week, the depression could work it’s way into Hurricane Katia.

Once a tropical depression forms the coriolis effect helps it begin to rotate. Think of it like the spinning of a buzz saw blade. The storm begins to turn as it sucks up moisture from the warm ocean surface. When it pulls in that moisture it pulls down cooler air from above which gets trapped under the warm, wet and rising air. that continuous feedback loop makes the storm rotate and strengthen.

To turn into a hurricane a tropical depression needs energy. The way it derives that is also from the ocean surface. The warmer the water, the more energy is created, which leads to bigger storms. That is why the hurricane season stretches from June to December. Those are months when the ocean is warmest.

For the most part, hurricanes need ocean surface temperatures of at least 80 degrees to grow. When water temperatures are below 80 degrees hurricanes tend to lose energy and intensity.

Kevin Trenberth is a senior scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He told Grist, “Owing to higher SSTs [sea surface temperatures] from human activities, the increased water vapor in the atmosphere leads to 5 to 10 percent more rainfall and increases the risk of flooding. He says that water vapor in addition to ocean surface temperature makes hurricanes more ferocious. He adds, “However, because water vapor and higher ocean temperatures help fuel the storm, it is likely to be more intense and bigger as well.”

Meteorologist Jeff Masters says the range of the warm sea surface temperatures have a wider range this August, which gave Irene more power. Before she made landfall in the U.S. Masters said, “This year sea surface temperatures one to three degrees warmer than average extend along the East Coast from North Carolina to New York. Waters of at least 78 degrees F extend all the way to southern New Jersey, which will make it easier for Irene to maintain its strength much farther to the north than a hurricane usually can.”

As the storm hit land and cooler waters Irene lost her punch. By the time she hit New England the wind and rain had effectively separated into two storms. The rain submerged much of Vermont while powerful winds raked north, exploding windows in Montreal office buildings, 300 miles north of New York where that was part of the forecast worst case scenario.

Once the tropical characteristics were gone, Irene became a fast-moving mid-latitude storm racing its way toward the Canadian maritime provinces and out to sea where cold northern waters will suck any remaining strength from her.

But she’ll be remembered as a wet and wild dry run for a major hurricane making landfall on the eastern seaboard and will likely inspire a disaster movie or two.

Is Hurricane Irene a Product of Global Warming?

While emergency managers are feeling lucky to have avoided the worst, they are still concerned that more storms like Irene could rear their damaging heads in densely populated areas. And everyone is remembering that this hurricane came one day shy of the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans.

As scientists watch sea levels rise, storm surge from hurricanes becomes the biggest threat. The sea has risen 13 inches around New York, turning moderate storm surges associated with tropical storms into major flooding events.

MIT Atmospheric science professor Kerry Emanuel thinks that we are beginning to see a climate signal form in the Atlantic, meaning that after decades of prediction, evidence is emerging that climate is changing and the effects are starting to be felt. Extreme weather seems to be on the rise, including massive hail storms, tornado outbreaks and strong hurricanes.

He says, “One begins to wonder, if you add all those up, maybe you are seeing a global warming effect.”

But science writer Michael Lemonick says asking if Hurricane Irene is a direct result of climate change is actually the wrong question.

He believes we should be asking is climate change making Hurricane Irene worse than it would have been otherwise? To that he says a definitive, Yes.

He says, “For one thing, sea-surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean are higher now than they used to be, thanks to global warming, and ocean heat is what gives hurricanes their power. All other things being equal, a warmer ocean means a more powerful storm. It’s hard to say that all other things are exactly equal here, but it’s certainly plausible that Irene would have been a little weaker if precisely the same storm had come through, say, 50 years ago.”

An experiment itself, the Quantum Circus was born out of a collaboration between some Finnish quantum physicists and a group of circus performers. After three five-day workshops in 2009 and 2010, the idea grew into a performance, telling the story of quantum phsyics.

Broken into two distinct parts, the first act tells the imaginative story of conceiving the quantum world before powerful microscopes and technology could see what individual atoms were doing. The other piece of the performance takes place in a lab and works through some key discoveries of modern quantum physics.

Theoretical physicist Sabrina Maniscalco decided that she wanted to show people that science doesn’t have to be dry and dull. Worried that her chosen field was considered to abstruse for general consumption she wanted to infuse physics with the same poetic, mysterious and fascinating elements generally reserved for art or literature.

She says, “Many people see science as sterile and so constrained by the ropes of logic to prevent any form of creative thinking.”

So she teamed up with artist Davide Giovanzana to bring the artistry to the project. By getting circus performers to work with physicists the workshops helped develop a language to communicate science through the medium of performance.

He says, “Circus with its desire to challenge gravity, to surpass human abilities and to surprise to audience is therefore the perfect medium to convey the puzzling principles of quantum physics.”

The Quantum Circus performed as part of the Future Circus Festival in Turku, Finland last week. Through the collaboration both the scientists — who appear on stage during the show — and circus performers came to understand that both physics and the circus are all about discovery, surprise and amazement.

“It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in Science.” — Sabrina Maniscalco, theoretical physicist and founder of Quantum Circus

Photos by Kari Vainio

The growing garbage problem may have a new solution–fungus that eats plastic. For years mounting mounds of plastic have been choking landfills and polluting the ocean. Now an annual undergraduate trip to the rain forest may have found a solution to the plastic problem.

Unleashing creativity in science sometimes has amazing results. That’s what a group of Yale students discovered after they took a trip to the Amazon rainforest in search of fungus that could hold medical or scientific promise. Upon their return they tested the fungus to see if they could detect any biological activity.

One undergrad started the project in 2010 and then graduated. Another 2011 participant in the Yale Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory course picked up where she left off and that led to the isolation and discovery of an enzyme in a fungus that helps degrade polyurethane and turns it back into carbon.

Dr. Scott Strobel says, “The average third grader asks all kinds of great questions; they probe, poke and manipulate. Then somewhere around fourth grade we drive the interest in science right out of these kids. People conclude they can’t do science, but in reality they have been doing science all their lives.”

He teamed up with Howard Hughes Medical Institute to create the class and create opportunities for students to apply what they learn in the classroom to the real world. HHMI gave a $1 million grant to fund the program for four years.

Yale biochemist Kaury Kucera is a post doctorate researcher who co-leads the annual rainforest trek. She told the New Haven Register, “We take 15 undergraduates into the Ecuadorean rain forest and collect plant samples.”

Each year, students collect organisms called endophytes found in rainforest plants and then take them back to New Haven to test them for biological activity. The whole program is student-generated so they decide what they want to study. Once back in the lab, students analyze the endophytes that show biological activity to see whether they might have any medical or other practical use.

In 2008 Pria Anand was part of the trip to Ecuador where she gathered plants and later extracted part of a fungus to test its affect on plastic. Her goal was to help reduce the piles that are swelling in landfills, also known as bioremediation. She graduated in 2010 before getting the results she wanted.

Jeffrey Huang in the same class was studying which endophytes were most effective at breaking down chemical bonds.

This year, Jonathan Russell tested one of Huang’s best endophytes on Anand’s bioremdiation task. From there Russell focused on locating the enzyme in the fungus that is most effective on breaking down plastic.

All three undergrads are listed as lead authors on the forthcoming paper Biodegradation of Polyester Polyurethane by Endophytic Fungi in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

This is not the first time a particular agent has broken down polyurethane. But this enzyme can operate in an oxygen-free zone, such as those found underground in landfills.

Since the discovery students in another class are looking at different endophytes to see which if any will be most effective at dissolving polystyrene or styrofoam, one substance that is designed to stick around indefinitely.

Two different Yale students in the 2009 Rainforest Expedition class have had other fungal breakthroughs which could lead to a new “myco-diesel” biofuel and another which could protect agricultural farms from pathogens.

Breaking Down the Degradation of Common Items in Landfills

Decomposition Timeline, from Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge, WA, photo by: Hadley Maris

*Undergraduates at Yale are working to find enzymes in rainforest fungus to reduce the decomposition timeline

Ferrofluid Morpho Towers from Jason Peters on Vimeo.

Morpho Towers–Two Standing Spirals is a 2007 installation that consists of two ferrofluid sculptures that moves synthetically to music.

The two iron spiral towers stand on a large plate holding ferrofluid, also known as liquid magnets. When the music starts, the magnetic field around the tower is strengthened. Spikes of ferrofluid are formed at the bottom of the plate and move up, trembling and rotating around the edge of the iron spiral, forming a constantly musically-driven sculpture.

Do It Yourself

To make your own ferrofluid there are several different ways to do it. You can use any of the following techniques.
1. Toner Ink Ferrofluid
You need: toner ink (from an office supply store), olive oil and a rare earth magnet
2. Steel Wool Ferrofluid
You need: steel wool cleaning pad, 9-volt battery, scrap metal (or old cheese grater), olive oil and a magnet
3. Magnaflux Ferrofluid
You need: Magnaflux iron powder, olive oil and a magnet

Steps to make ferrofluid (same for all techniques)
Take your iron powder and mix with oil until it reaches a thin consistency. Use a rare earth magnet to move the liquid and watch the forms you can create just by activating magnetic fields and watching the black liquid respond.

When you’ve made your ferroliquid, shoot the video of your liquid iron sculpture, set it to music and then send it to REALscience. We’ll post your creations on the site.

Images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are sending back new and exciting pictures for NASA scientists to study.

Scientists believe dark finger-like streaks in the soil on Mars indicate underground, seasonal liquid water streams. It’s not definitive proof that water exists in a liquid form on Mars but it is encouraging news for those hoping to find signs of life on the red planet.

What puzzles astronomers and astrobiologists most is that no NASA sensors have picked up the chemical signature for water. But that may be because there isn’t a lot of it and the thin Martian atmosphere makes it hard to detect once it reaches the surface.

It will be several years before a Mars rover will be able to probe beneath the surface and see if there is flowing water on our planetary neighbor.

Until then encouraging photos of dark streaks that seem to ebb and flow with the seasons will have to keep Mars life hunters happy.

“NASA’s Mars Exploration Program keeps bringing us closer to determining whether the Red Planet could harbor life in some form, and it reaffirms Mars as an important future destination for human exploration.” — Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator

The theme of the summer meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers is Communicating Physics Outside the Classroom. Unwittingly that’s exactly what a participant from Oregon did. A PhD student shut down the entire airport in Omaha, Nebraska where Creighton University was hosting the week long conference.

Around noon yesterday TSA agents found a suspicious item in a piece of carry on luggage during a routine x-ray screening. They immediately evacuated the entire terminal and made several hundred people stand outside until they could determine the threat level.

FBI spokeswoman Sandra Breault says, “The device had a legitimate purpose and was harmless but had a suspicious appearance, which triggered an appropriate response by TSA and law enforcement.”

Breault said the student is working on a doctorate, but did not release the student’s name or other details — such as the type of science project that prompted the scare. Conference organizers also refused to identify the student, who authorities say was embarrassed for inconveniencing so many people.

When Michael Cherney saw the news, he had a feeling it was related to his physics teachers conference.

He says, “We didn’t get much coverage during the week and this probably brought us more attention than the time we had the 1,000 people here.”

Omaha field office agent Weysan Dun says no crime was committed and the item had an innocent purpose. He did say it was, “related to a university level science project.”

Dr. Cherney says the conference was about teaching everything from mechanics to electronics to optics. He says the item that caused all the commotion probably had a lot of electronics attached to a little box.

He is disappointed that despite having 1,000 physicists and physics teachers descend on Omaha for a week there was very little community coverage about the conference except for the accidental media attention that one participant drew at Eppley Airfield.

In his book Physics of the Impossible, Dr. Michio Kaku ranked time travel among the most impossible of science fiction staples. And now a team of scientists in Hong Kong has ruled it out altogether.

This is something Albert Einstein rejected long ago. In his theory of general relativity he described the speed of light as a constant, making it impossible to go any faster. He did view space-time as a fabric that can stretch and shrink. And under certain conditions, called special relativity the fabric could theoretically stretch faster than the speed of light.

For the last ten years, physicists have been trying to test that theory by attempting to measure an individual photon, the particle that makes up light.

The Hong Kong team thought if an individual photon could exceed the speed of light then time travel would be possible. They found that a photon travels the same speed as light itself, 186,000 miles per second.

Experimental physicist Shengwang Du, who led the experiment at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology says, “By showing that single photons cannot travel faster than the speed of light, our results bring a closure to the debate on the true speed of information carried by a single photon.”

Scientists began studying individual photons as a way to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity in 1999 after a team thought they discovered superluminal travel in a small group of photons. That means the photons appeared to be traveling faster than the speed of light. It turns out that was just an illusion, called the superluminal effect.

Until now, there was no way to test Einstein’s theory in the lab. In their experiment the Hong Kong team separated and detected the optical precursor of the photon, a wave-like movement in the front of the particle and which is the fastest part of a single-photon wave packet.

At the same time they discovered that time travel can’t be achieved by traveling faster than the speed of light, they also confirmed Einstein’s theory of causality, showing that effect cannot precede its cause. That rules out the possibility of backward time travel, too.

Gender stereotypes about math and science abound. Boys are known for performing better in math and science while girls tend to excel in history and language arts. Though the U.S. still leads the world in scientific discovery and vision, another stereotype is that the U.S. education system is failing students and allowing other countries to out compete citizens for global jobs.

The results of the six-month long Google Science Fair blew both of those stereotypes right out of the water. Three girls, all from the U.S. won the first annual science competition. They beat out 10,000 other students from 90 countries, demonstrating female and U.S. prominence in science.

But perhaps more notable than breaking stereotypes is the potential real science that these young women are doing. One has discovered a way to make ovarian cancer treatments more effective. Another wants to revise the Clean Air Act using her model, quantifying air pollution among asthmatics. And the third winning project could lead to a barbeque meat marinade that reduces carcinogens.

Shree Bose, Age 17

When not in the cancer lab, Bose enjoys a good cattle drive near her home of Fort Worth, Texas.

For her ground-breaking science project, she won $50,000 from Google as well as a trip to the Galapagos Islands on the National Geographic Discovery research ship. She will also have an opportunity to have a once in a lifetime internship experience at CERN, the nuclear physics lab in Switzerland.

Alice Bell, one of the judges for the Google Science Fair and a writer for the UK paper The Guardian says that the teens she met through the judging process are not the public. She says, “It is perhaps best to think of schoolchildren as holding a liminal position with respect to science and the rest of society. They are not quite inside the scientific community or squarely outside it either. They are both science and ‘the public’, and they are neither of these things, yet. Their lives could go in a range of directions.”

One thing is for sure, after winning this new scientific accolade, none of these girls lives will ever be the same.

Naomi Shaw, Age 16

In her project she quotes a common saying among environmentalists, “The genetic make-up is like loading a gun. The environmental pollutants represent the trigger!”

Shah noticed that doctors are quick to prescribe steroids and other inhalers, instead of addressing the quality of the air asthma sufferers are breathing. She learned that’s because nobody had figured out how much air pollution affects lung function. So she did.

Online environmental magazine Grist calls Shah awesome, not because she is a budding scientist but because she “let’s her green flag fly.” Shah describes herself as an environmentalist as well as an objective scientist in training.

She says, “Air quality doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves, and should be one of the top sustainability goals for the coming future.”

Shah took first place at the Intel Science Fair earlier this year. Since then she has sent President Obama and Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Lisa Jackson a letter asking for her mathematical model to be used to revise the Clean Air Act.

Lauren Hodge, Age 14

She found that lemon juice and brown sugar cut the level of carcinogens sharply, while soy sauce increased them.

Shah and Hodge each received $25000 scholarships and internships at Google and LEGO.

Girl power ruled the day at the first Google Science Fair.

Bose is proud of that fact. She told the New York Times, “Personally I think that’s amazing, because throughout my entire life, I’ve heard science is a field where men go into.” She added, “It just starts to show you that women are stepping up in science, and I’m excited that I was able to represent maybe just a little bit of that.”

Google science fair judge Vint Cerf was secretly pleased by the female sweep in all three age groups. Of the 15 finalists, there were 9 boys and 6 girls.

Though the competition was completely gender neutral, he says, “I was secretly very pleased to see that happen. This is just a reminder that women are fully capable of doing same or better quality work than men can.”

For planetary scientists one of the biggest mysteries is trying to figure out where all the heat Earth pours into space originates. The planet ejects about 44 Tera watts of power of heat into space every second.

New research from Japan’s Kamioka Liquid-scintillator Anti-Neutrino Detector (KamLAND) detector may have accounted for about half of that by studying a giant balloon filled with mineral oil. For seven years geophysicists have been looking for rare antimatter particles called antineutrinos that are created when decaying nuclear elements interact with protons in the oil. During that time they saw 100 antineutrinos.

By doing some quick calculations they discovered that based on the number of events they collected, half of the energy Earth is continuously producing is from radioactive elements in the center of the planet.

Heat from the center of the Earth drives many natural processes including sea-floor spreading, continental drift and the planet’s magnetic field.

Scientists discovered that the heat generated from radioactive decay of elements such as uranium and thorium emits about 20 Tera watts of power per second. Known as geothermal energy in renewable energy circles this could be a constant source of power that won’t run out for a long time.

Scientists estimate that capturing geothermal heat from natural nuclear fission could power the entire planet for hundreds of millions of years thanks to the long half lives of many of the elements.

The rest of the heat comes from primordial heat, left over from the planet’s formation 4.5 billion years ago. Geophysicists aren’t sure if there are other processes in the Earth’s core to explain that additional heat source but you can be sure they will keep looking.

When Alex de Voogt couldn’t get a crumbling sheath to release an early 20th Century Egyptian knife, he turned to a cutting-edge, high resolution, computed tomography (CT) scanner for help. Using the advanced x-ray technology he was able to see inside the knife covering and reveal writing on the knife blade without disturbing the artifact.

Museum scientists around the world are continually studying parasites, people, or planets. And to learn more about their subject of choice, they routinely use cutting-edge imaging technologies such as infrared photography, scanning electron microscopes, and CT scanners to make it possible to examine details that were previously unobservable.

Now the American Natural History Museum in New York City is offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of science as told through the pictures scientists capture in pursuit of their science.

This exhibition, called Picturing Science was the brain child of Mark Siddall, curator in the museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology. He gathered more than 20 sets of large-format images that showcase the wide range of research across many different scientific disciplines being conducted at the Museum. The exhibit also showcases how various optical tools are used in scientific studies.

Picturing Science: Museum Scientists and Imaging Technologies is on exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History from June 25, 2011 – June 24, 2012 and is free with Museum admission.

“Very rarely do you find a scientific paper that doesn’t have a picture in it, a scientific figure of some sort. But there’s this wonderful aesthetic that goes with some of these pictures that are just beautiful to look at.” — Mark Siddall, Invertebrate Zoology Division Curator, American Natural History Museum.

The record snow pack melt combined with cool, heavy spring rains forced reservoirs in northern states to release extra water into rivers, creating a big flood which is now surging south, from North Dakota to Nebraska where the Missouri River is over its banks and threatening two nuclear power plants.

The Ft. Calhoun plant near Omaha has been offline for maintenance since April, after getting a bad safety report card last year. One of the marks against the plant was lax flood protection, which is now being tested as the Missouri River laps at its front and back doors, leaving part of the facility swamped while the rest stands like a castle surrounded by a moat.

Downriver, the Cooper Nuclear Station has built a ten-foot wall and is still operating normally. That station looks to be adequately protected from the rising flood waters.The head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is visiting the power plant personally to inspect the facility, himself.

A no-fly zone was imposed over the Ft. Calhoun plant a few days ago but regulators say that no radioactive material has escaped. It was likely imposed to prevent news helicopters from flying too close to the facility and into power lines as they do flood coverage.

In northern New Mexico, it is fire not flooding that has members of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Radiological Assistance Program heading for Los Alamos National Laboratory. The team will assess whether any danger exists for radioactive material to escape into the atmosphere from the encroaching 93 square mile wildfire.

As power plants face eminent threats from fire and flood, a year-long investigation by the Associated Press has found that the licensing process at the nation’s 104 nuclear power plants is not very strict.

Most of the nuclear power plants were built during the 1960s and early 1970s. At the time it was common knowledge that nuclear reactors were built to run for 40 years and then be replaced. That entire life-span was based on the assumption that major upgrades and improvements would be made along the way.

Now the Associated Press is saying that nuclear regulators and the nuclear power industry are rewriting history. The AP says industry and regulators are telling a different story — that reactor units were built with no expiration date.

This historical about face is making it easier for plant owners to automatically extend the lives of dozens of reactors in a licensing process that amounts to a nuclear rubber stamp.

The AP’s investigation uncovered documents showing that the process lacks independent safety reviews. It relies on paperwork, especially from NRC, which sometimes matches verbatim language used in the plant operator’s application. The AP also discovered the relicensing process required very little on-site verification or inspection.

The AP found that 66 of the 104 U.S. reactors have been granted license renewals — most for an extra 20 years of operation. The NRC has yet to reject a single application.

Regulators say that the 40-year lifespan was chosen for economic reasons and to satisfy antitrust laws not for safety reasons. The AP reports that regulators insist nuclear reactors have no technical limits on their use.

But engineers, including those who designed many of these plants, tell a different story.

In 1982, Clark Gibbs was the chair of an early nuclear industry group’s safety committee. The AP quotes him, saying, “Most nuclear power plants, including those operating, under construction or planned for the future, are designed for a duty cycle which corresponds to a 40-year life.”

International Atomic Energy Agency Deputy Director General for Nuclear Energy Yury Sokolov told a nuclear industry conference in Shanghai in February that plant life management (PLiM) is a an effective tool to safely and cost effectively manage aging effects in systems, structures, and components. He says, “Even though the design life of a nuclear power plant is typically for 30 or 40 years, it is quite feasible that many nuclear power plants will be able to operate in excess of their design lives.”

Last September Germany decided to extend the life of its aging nuclear power plants by as much as 12 years, even though a poll of Germans found that 6 in 10 want the plants phased out by 2020. Chancellor Angela Merkel says that renewable energy sources are not developed enough yet to get rid of nuclear power.

Then in March, everything changed. When Japan faced a significant nuclear crisis in the wake of the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that shook the island nation to its core, other nation’s rattled by what happened in Japan reconsidered their nuclear power position.

Since then, Germany closed seven plants and will phase out all nuclear power plants by 2022 Earthquake-prone Chile is considering doing the same and China put 50 power plant applications on hold. But the U.S. is still gung-ho for nuclear power.

In a report from Scientific American last week science investigative journalist Karl Grossman says President Obama embraced nuclear power — even picking a pro-nuclear Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu — after initially expressing concerns about its safety while he was running for office in 2007.

Two weeks after the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant crisis in Japan, President Obama pledged that nuclear power should be revived in the U.S., as it provides “electricity without adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.”

Congressman Edward Markey has asked for a moratorium on nuclear licenses until new safety standards can be put in place, incorporating the lessons learned in Japan.

Now floods from the north, fires in the southwest and a relaxed relicensing process — in addition to tornadoes, earthquakes and tsunamis — threaten the future of nuclear power in this country and our safety. Nuclear power currently provides about 20% of the nation’s electricity.

New evidence of muon neutrinos turning into electron neutrinos could pave the way for spotting differences between matter and antimatter. That may not mean much to most people but scientists think it might be a big clue in the search for why matter is everywhere and antimatter is not.

Physicists believe matter and antimatter should behave the same way to preserve the symmetry outlined in the standard model of physics. But matter dominated over antimatter following the Big Bang.

Here are the basics on neutrinos. They are tiny, invisible particles that pass through our bodies millions of times a day. They leave no trace because they are so fast and so light, traveling constantly through space all the time. This characteristic also makes them very difficult for physicists to detect.

Generally, a neutrino detector has to be constructed in an underground bunker where cosmic rays can’t penetrate. One such experiment was just barely underway in Japan when the big 9.0 earthquake disrupted the island nation and brought an abrupt halt to the big physics experiment.

There are three types of neutrinos theoretical physicists have determined but direct observation of Muon neutrinos, electron neutrinos and tau neutrinos has been fleeting to say the least.

The Japanese T2K experiment, which was pushing neutrinos from one coast of Japan to another may have captured the first evidence of the three neutrinos changing into one another en route.

In physics that’s a big deal. And now that physicists have observed the three types of flip-flopping neutrinos scientists just need to study how often this happens so they can apply the same experiments to anti-neutrinos.

The Japanese experiment should be back online by the end of the year.

“People sometimes think that scientific discoveries are like light switches that click from ‘off’ to ‘on’, but in reality it goes from ‘maybe’ to ‘probably’ to ‘almost certainly’ as you get more data. Right now, we are somewhere between ‘probably’ and ‘almost certainly’.” — Dave Wark, Science and Technology Facilities Council in the United Kingdom and Imperial College London and head of the UK Group at the T2K experiment

How black holes form is one of the biggest questions facing astronomers. For years super-massive black holes have provided a laboratory for physicists to study the light-strangling phenomenon.

Now a six-week study has revealed the first direct evidence that massive black holes were common in the early universe. Using the high-powered orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory pointed into deep space, scientists looked back in time to when the universe was just under one billion years old.

This composite image combines the deepest X-ray image ever taken with optical and infrared data from Hubble. Astronomers obtained what is known as the Chandra Deep Field South by pointing the Chandra telescope at the same patch of sky for over six weeks of time. The Chandra sources of this small section of the CDFS are shown in blue. Two "stacked" images, which represent a technique used to find the most distant galaxies in X-ray light, are on the right. The results from this dataset include that black holes are found to be actively growing between 800 million and 950 million years after the Big Bang.

They were surprised to discover that black holes were very common. A team of top astronomers from around the world stumbled onto an x-ray signal from the early universe. Using the deepest x-ray image ever taken, the team led by University of Hawaii’s Ezequiel Treister discovered that massive black holes were present near the beginning of the universe.

Black holes are regions of space where the gravitational pull is so great that not even light can escape from them. Before this discovery astronomers had no idea what black holes in early galaxies did or if they even existed.

Treister says, “This is a big step, not a baby step, getting us closer to understand[ing] where the black holes form and when they were created, when they started.”

The new x-ray image not only gave these astronomers a never-before-seen peek into a younger universe but it revealed the presence of black holes that had been previously obscured.

Mitchell Begelman, an astronomer from University of Colorado says, “We never saw before now the smaller black holes that must have existed before these quasars formed.”

Quasars are the brightest spots in the universe. After being mistaken for stars the strange cosmological phenomenon was discovered in the 1960s. Since then further study has shown astronomers these luminous dots are actually powered by massive rotating black holes.

Looking deep into space is like looking back in time because of the finite speed of light. So the higher the power of telescopes and imaging technology the better glimpse we will get of the earliest universe.

This discovery confirms decades of theory.

Begelman says, “Now, we are seeing the first direct evidence of these smaller black holes.”

Astronomers study the developmental stages of black holes in the same way as sociologists study people. They put the lifespan of a black hole into phases of childhood, adolescence and adulthood. These observations are the first images of young black holes. They are like seeing their high school pictures.

But like gawky teens these black holes grow quickly and powerfully, eating up all matter within reach.

Kevin Schawinski from Yale University says, “These hungry black holes are feeding on material — gas — at the centers of these galaxies and they will continue to grow from adolescence to adulthood.”

Now astronomers can move much close to the moment of birth and understand where both galaxies and super massive black holes come from.

Schawinski says, “We’ve only just scratched the surface of the first billion years of the universe with their help and there are great prospects of further discovery.”

There are no names or even symbols for the two latest members to be admitted to the exclusive chemistry club — The Periodic Table of the Elements. Numbers 114 and 116 now have a place on that familiar chemical chart that everyone in high school sees but may not understand. Both are highly radioactive and exist for less than a second before decaying into more familiar elements.

After a three-year review a joint commission made up of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics determined that the two new elements, tentatively named ununquadium and ununhexium, met the strict criteria for inclusion in the periodic table.

Periodic Table, courtesy of www.ptable.com

During the last few years, there have been several claims by laboratories for the discovery of new chemical elements at positions 113, 114, 115, 116 and 118 on the periodic table. But until now, none met the standards for full inclusion.

In 1999, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory claimed to discover elements 116 and 118 while blasting lead with krypton particles. But that discovery was later retracted after several confirmation experiments failed to yield the same results.

Now, the periodic table has two more members of the transuranic element family. Those are elements heavier than uranium, which can generally only be produced artificially in either a nuclear reactor or a particle accelerator.

Current tables represent the theorized elements, including 114 and 116 already, but this is the first true addition in over ten years.

The new elements have temporary titles of ununquadium and ununhexium, but final names will be decided later. A movement afoot on online wants the public to choose the new names. It started on Wired.com and quickly migrated to Twitter.

Actually, the members of the U.S. and Russian team that confirmed the discovery will have the first shot at naming the new elements but it will have to go through a rigorous element naming approval process before the final names are selected.

Element 114 had several groups around the world claiming they had produced it in a lab. But a team from Dubna, Russia and a team from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California offered sufficient proof of its existence. The two groups who collaborated on this project were also credited with proving the existence of element 116.

They proved the existence of both elements by hurtling lighter atoms into heavier ones to see what would result. To discover 116 they smashed curium (atomic number 96) into calcium (atomic number 20). It rapidly decayed into element 114. They created element 114 by the collision of plutonium (atomic number 94) with calcium.

Why are teams of chemists and physicists doing this?

There is a theory about a so-called island of stability that exists where new heavy elements can exist for minutes, hours, days or weeks before decaying into lighter elements. Finding new out-of-the-box elements is the Holy Grail of chemistry and if it is found could open up the periodic table to a large range of new elements.

Chinese farmers are scratching their heads after fields of watermelons turned into exploding land mines. The official cause remains unknown but some believe that the farmers sprayed a rapid growth chemical on the fruit too late in the season and after an extremely wet period. The combination of factors could lead to exploding fruit, as the cells expand so rapidly the fruit bursts out of its rind.

State-run Chinese TV reports that acres of watermelons have been destroyed by the mysterious fruit explosions.

In China the chemical forcholorfenuron is commonly used to give fruits a burst of growth. The chemical is only approved for use on kiwis and grapes in the United States. But using the chemical incorrectly can cause problems — like exploding watermelons.

In 2004 the Environmental Protection Agency added forcholorfenuron to a list of newly created pesticides. The agency classified the growth accelerator as a phenyl urea compound but found that it is unlikely carcinogenic in humans. Due to the small amounts required to accelerate fruit growth, the agency decided to approve the chemical.

Though it did include a warning.

“The Agency‘s major concern is forchlorfenuron‘s persistence and its possible chronic effects to terrestrial organisms. It is highly persistent in the environment with laboratory half-lives ranging from 226-578 days in terrestrial environments and stable in aquatic environments. While forchlorfenuron rapidly photodegrades in sensitized water, the Agency does not believe that this route of dissipation is significant in the environment. Suspended sediment and shading prevent photodegradation.”

This plant growth regulator should be used two to three weeks after bloom. If applied properly (in low amounts) Forchlorfenuron results in an increase in fruit size, but does not affect the number of fruit or the keeping quality of the fruit.

Farmer error is likely behind the Chinese exploding watermelons. Although some Chinese officials say that the seeds, which were imported from Japan, might be the culprit. In ten fields, farmers who claimed not to use forchlorfenuron also experienced combustible fruit.

Even though Albert Einstein’s theory of Relativity was proven accurate during a solar eclipse in Africa in 1919, the many predictions Einstein made are still being tested experimentally.

After 52 years of planning, delays, experimentation and building a Stanford University team with NASA becomes the latest group to prove that Einstein’s theory is correct.

NASA’s Gravity Probe B mission has confirmed two key predictions derived from Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which the spacecraft was designed to test.

Einstein predicted that the mass of Earth, with its own gravitational force, is enough to bend space-time. Gravity Probe B proved the so-called geodetic effect. Using ultra-precise gyroscopes, NASA scientists confirmed Einstein’s prediction.

He also said that a spinning object pulls space and time with it as it rotates. He called this frame-dragging

This news is enough to make your head spin. Literally.

The European Space Agency is already working on that project, called Space-Time Explorer Quest. Scientists are testing test the effect of gravity at the sub-atomic level and hope to have some exciting results that will help the the two theories come together to form the much-sought-after Unified Theory in about 10 years.

Did the Large Hadron Collider Find the Higgs?

British physicist Brian Cox told The Sun that his colleagues at the European nuclear research facility CERN may have found the first evidence of the Higgs Boson, a particle that may or may not exist. It is also known as the God particle because the Higgs if it does exist could explain three of the four forces of nature that account for all matter.

The Higgs has been theorized since 1964, when Peter Higgs decided that something had to give all matter its mass. Since then no one has come up with a better idea. But despite strong theoretical evidence, the key to validating the theory is to observe the particle in action.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is the most powerful atom smasher, having just set a new world’s record last week for the number of proton collisions. Shortly after setting that new luminosity record, rumors of a big discovery began to circulate.

The field of physics is not generally subject to casual speculation related to big discoveries. But the search for the Higgs Boson is the Brangelina of science. And getting a picture of it is worth a lot.

How the Rumor Surfaced

The Associated Press says says that CERN is down playing claims of “a big discovery after an internal memo was leaked to science enthusiasts.”

The internal memo is really an abstract for a paper. It first appeared as a comment on Columbia University physicist Peter Woit’s blog, Not Even Wrong. After noticing the comment on April 22, he elevated the note to its own post, drawing speculation from a wide cross-section of the physics community.

Dr. Cox works on the ATLAS experiment and he says there is so much data that must be sifted through that it will be some time before the Higgs can be confirmed or denied.

“I am a member of the experiment, ATLAS, from which the leak emerged and am making no comment on whether you should take the story seriously. The reason for this is not politics – it’s because I don’t know.” — Brian Cox

But, he says an optimistic particle physicist could get pretty excited based on the initial information coming out. The measurements are at the outer range but still within bounds for what scientists predicted about where the elusive particle would be found.

Dr. Tomasso Dorigo, who writes A Quantum Diaries Survivor blog at Science 2.0 is so convinced that the discovery will be proven false that he is betting $1,000 to a credible physicist who proves him wrong, using data.

What is the Higgs Boson?

As Dr. Cox, a member of the particle physics group at University of Manchester says, “The leak is, in precise scientific language, about a bump in the di-photon invariant mass spectrum observed in proton – proton collisions at a particle accelerator.”

This tiny particle is so small that subatomic barely describes it. After all, if proven real, it is the singular thing that gives all other things mass. So trying to detect one is like trying to find a needle in a galaxy. That search for something so small and so fleeting has consumed vast resources and energized the field of particle physics, turning scientists into rock stars.

If the Higgs Boson is the foundation of all matter, then it must exist as an important part of an atom. Physicists have been trying to harness enough power and energy to blast apart protons to study the particles that appear for an instant before decaying. Since going online a few years ago, the Large Hadron Collider was believed to be the best hope to find the Higgs.

Now that it is ramped up to the 115 GeV level, some remarkable things have begun happening. But even if that range could contain a Higgs, finding the event is just as rare, believed to be one in a trillion collisions. That gives scientists the mountain of data to comb before the discovery of the Higgs Boson can be confirmed.

False Positives

The leaked memo indicates that the frequency of the Higgs is about 30 times greater than what scientists had predicted. That falls at the absolute upper end of the range of likelihood and has signaled to Dr. Tomasso and others that this discovery will be disproved.

Particle physics is a very tricky business. Dr. Cox says, “The search for new and exciting discoveries is hard and fraught with traps for even the most experienced of scientists.”

That is why 3,000 scientists are working to validate the results. And this is why these types of internal memos are supposed to stay private.

Whether the rumor proves true or not, this event is shining a bright light on particle physics that will help explain the origins of the universe and everything in it.

On Monday, Fabiola Gianotti, a spokeswoman for the Large Hadron Collider told CBS News, “Only … results that have undergone all the necessary scientific checks by the [ATLAS] Collaboration should be taken seriously.”

Caltech physicist Sean Carroll tweeted on April 21, “Don’t worry, Higgs boson! I would never spread scurrilous rumors about you. Unlike some people.”

Fish ear bones are just like tree rings. The otolith bone inside a fish’s ear records the creature’s growth. Micro slices of sliver-sized ear bones can give scientists clues to the chemistry of the water in which fish swim. They can measure carbon dioxide levels and one year after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, researchers at University of South Florida are inspecting the tiny ear bones of different species of fish for signs of oil.

The answers they find may hold keys to restoring the Gulf of Mexico after the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

Dr. Ernst Peeble’s research team is looking to see if the growth rates of fish changed after coming into contact with oil in the gulf. They can also measure which species of fish were most affected by the spill and which are relatively unharmed.

BP promised $500 million over the next 10 years for research to study the effects of the oil spill that sent 4.9 million barrels of oil spewing unchecked into the Gulf of Mexico from April 20-July 15, 2010. So far, the ear bone science team has only seen $10 million of the $50 million it was promised.

A BP spokesman says that because the research is new, there are some growing pains associated with the projects. The oil company says it will fulfill its promise to fund research but it’s not clear on the time line.

For now, the researchers are in limbo, waiting for more funding to complete their work.

It sounds like the plotline for a young boy’s bedtime story. But real-life laser weapons are being tested by the U.S. Navy and their first target is modern day pirates who are tormenting shippers and sailors on the northeast coast of Africa.

A ship-based laser could seriously turn up the heat on Somali pirates. Last week the Navy successfully tested a solid-state high-energy laser from a ship.

While it didn’t have the high-pitched movie laser sound found in the movies, the laser was aimed at a small boat and disabled the engines without any other damage. Bullets from traditional guns don’t have the precision of a laser and tend to ricochet off targets and strike bystanders. The new laser can also be dialed up or down to go from lethal beam to just a nuisance, says the Office of Naval Research.

British defense contractor BAE Systems has been working on the non-lethal version of the laser to be used on commercial ships to protect them from pirates.
These Free Electron Laser (FEL) guns are also likely going to be a big part of the Navy’s future fight against pirates.

“From a science and technology point of view, the marriage of directed energy and kinetic energy weapon systems opens up a new level of deterrence into scalable options for the commander.” — Navy Rear Admiral Nevin Carr.

Workers in Japan have started dumping more than three million gallons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. Tokyo Electric officials spent about two days dumping out all that water from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in northeastern Japan, following the devastating March 11 earthquake. That water contains unsafe levels of radioactive iodine and cesium but it is a necessary move to make room to store more radioactive water used to cool superheated fuel rods after the quake.

The water will disperse in the ocean and become less radioactive as it decays. Since the most common form of radioactive iodine loses half of its potency in just eight days radioactive water heading toward Hawaii and the U.S. mainland will be so diluted by the time it reaches the shores it likely won’t pose any risk.

Some concerned residents in Hawaii have stopped eating seafood and stopped drinking bottled water. Scientists say that is unnecessary at this point because it will take weeks or months — depending on ocean currents — for any radioactive water to reach detectable levels near the islands.

A physicist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa has already begun monitoring water off Waikiki Beach for any signs of radioactivity. So far, nothing has been observed. Henrieta Dulaiova expects some radioactive material to be detectable in Hawaiian waters in the coming weeks but she is not concerned about seafood or water contamination.

The three million gallons of water dumped from the Fukushima Daichi power plant is about enough to fill five Olympic-sized swimming pools. The Pacific Ocean holds enough water to fill about three trillion of those same pools. In other words, the size of the ocean will make radioactive water less of a threat to fish and people.

The Food and Drug Administration is carefully watching all fish and food imported to the U.S. from Japan, looking for any signs of radioactivity.

In Japan, radioactive food is unfortunately inevitable, but very manageable.

James Acton says the first radioactive fish has been found with unsafe levels of radioactive iodine and cesium. But he says radioactive contamination is a manageable problem because strict monitoring will keep dangerous food off of people’s tables.

The Carnegie Endowment nuclear physicist says that radioactive material released into the water and atmosphere is becoming so diluted already that even twenty miles away from the nuclear power plant, radiation levels are undetectable.

For those of us part way around the world, the risk of radioactive contamination is very low. On the west coast of the U.S. iodine-131 has been detected in milk but experts and public health officials haven’t raised any warnings that those amounts present any risk whatsoever. Several experts have been equating the amount of radiation in the air and in food to being about the same dose any airline passenger receives when going on a trip.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it’s SmartBird — the avian robot. German engineers claim they have succeeded in unlocking the secrets of bird flight.

For centuries man has tried to imitate nature by mimicking flight. Capturing the energy efficiency and subtlety of bird flight has proven to be tricky — until now. The German company Festo has created a bionic network where it takes what nature does best and tries to find automated applications, ranging from an elephant trunk-inspired handling assistant to jellyfish undulation and now the SmartBird.

From the company’s Bionic Learning Network engineers were able to solve the mystery of bird flight.

The herring seagull inspired the SmartBird, which not only can take off and land without any additional drive unit but it can flap its wings up and down. But the real breakthrough is an active articulated torsional drive unit that allows for extreme agility by letting the bird’s wings twist at specific angles while flapping up and down. This helps to maximize airflow around the bird and optimize the efficiency of its flight.

“In my estimation SmartBird is far more efficient and reliable than anything else ever before built in this field.” — Wolfgang Send, theoretical physicist, flight expert and scientist on the SmartBird project.

After a six-and-a-half-year and 93-million-mile journey the Messenger spacecraft has reached its target — Mercury, the planet closest to the sun.

After a tricky maneuver to use gravitational force to enter into the fast-spinning orbit of Mercury the probe began sending back the clearest and closest pictures of the little planet.

Messenger now begins a one-year mission of snapping about 75,000 pictures of Mercury’s surface, which is hot enough to melt iron but may contain ice in permanently shadowed craters that dot its exterior.

The only other time we’ve seen images from Mercury was 30 years ago, when another probe — Mariner — did a brief flyby. Then only blurry, low-resolution pictures captured a tiny bit of the planet’s surface.

Messenger’s second look at the first planet from the sun will be much more detailed and give scientists a treasure trove of new information to better understand Mercury and other planets in our solar system and beyond.

“We are already seeing Mercury with a new eyes and with eight sets of eyes.” — Eric Finnegan, Applied Physics Lab, John Hopkins University

]]> http://www.realscience.us/2011/03/31/mercury-comes-into-view/feed/ 0 http://www.realscience.us/2011/03/30/nasa-mission-to-study-polar-climate-change/ http://www.realscience.us/2011/03/30/nasa-mission-to-study-polar-climate-change/#comments Wed, 30 Mar 2011 16:59:02 +0000 Michael Bradbury http://www.realscience.us/?p=4071

The earth’s climate is getting a checkup thanks to NASA’s Operation Ice Bridge. It’s a six year mission to study the earth’s polar region from on board an airplane. NASA scientist Tom Wagner explains the mission from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

While the space agency is known for it’s work in outer space, in recent years it has used satellites and other tools to monitor what is happening here on Earth. After Earth-pointing satellites first noticed a major shift at the poles, NASA has been tracking those changes.

Now, planes outfitted with a number of scientific instruments and sensors will begin measuring the height of ice to determine its thickness in the polar regions. Radar will be used to measure the seabed under the ice to see how fast it’s flowing into the ocean.

A gravimeter will measure the shape of seawater-filled cavities at the edge of some major fast-moving major glaciers while a
magetometer will help to see the shape of Earth’s crust and how oceans interact with the ice.

This six-year study will monitor the dramatic changes occurring at the poles, which are also causing changes and affecting climate around the world.

“We’re having an interesting experiment happen on Earth as these places melt.” — Dr. Tom Wagner, NASA Goddard Flight Center

Climate Fact: Greenland is able to grow broccoli for the first time.

]]> http://www.realscience.us/2011/03/30/nasa-mission-to-study-polar-climate-change/feed/ 0
Warning: Unknown: open(/var/sessions/sess_f32d55de08ebaca26bbced61eb7fdcf5, O_RDWR) failed: No such file or directory (2) in Unknown on line 0

Warning: Unknown: Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (/var/sessions) in Unknown on line 0