When legendary marine biologist Sylvia Earle started exploring the ocean 50 years she couldn’t fathom anything people could do to hurt the pristine blue waters that dominate the globe. In her 2009 TED Prize talk she says, “Then, not Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cousteau or Rachel Carson could imagine we could do anything to harm the ocean by what we put into it or what we took out of it.”

Back then, she says the leading oceanographic minds considered the world’s ocean to be a sea of Eden. But now she says, “We are facing a paradise lost.”

As the recipient of a TED Prize, she called upon the world to recognize that we have fished 90 percent of the big fish in the last 50 years. We are losing sharks, squid, blue fin tuna and other species at a rapid rate. There are dead zones appearing in the oceans that affect not just the animals and plants that call it home but all of us.

She says, “I hope for you help to explore and protect the wild ocean in ways that will restore the health and in so doing secure hope for human kind. Health to the ocean means health for us. And I hope Jill Tarter’s wish to engage Earthlings like us includes dolphins, whales and other sea creatures in this quest to look for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And I hope Jill that we will find evidence one day that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet.”

She says, “Nothing else will matter if we fail to protect the ocean. Our fate and the ocean are one.”

As the winner of a TED Prize, Dr. Earle received $100,000 and a wish to change the world.

Young Sea Turtle Swims in Sea of Plastic

After her inspiring talk the work to fulfill her wish began immediately. VeriSign (the web encryption software) founder Addison Fischer gave $1 million to fund a project which grew into Mission Blue Voyage. The TED Prize team worked with Fischer and other offers to build on Earle’s wish.

Then just 14 months after she made her wish Sylvia Earle led a four-day Galapagos sea-voyage of 100 peopleLeonardo DiCaprio, Edward Norton, Glenn Close, Elizabeth Banks, Steve Case, Ted Waitt, Bill Joy, Jackson Browne, Damien Rice, Chevy Chase, Jean-Michel Cousteau and 30 of the world’s leading marine scientists.

That’s where Jackson Browne began thinking about the role of the ocean in our lives and that connection to Sylvia Earle and her TED wish prompted him to go on to write his song, If I Could Be Anywhere.

Browne says he started the song on the Galapagos trip but finished it the night before presenting at TEDx Great Pacific Garbage Patch in November 2010.

His song grew out of a talk that Jeremy Jackson gave on the trip. Browne says, “When he said we need to change who we are I really got that.” He says we are going to have to eat differently, consume differently and travel differently because business as usual is hurting the planet and the ocean in particular.

Since that trip Browne, who has long been a supporter of the environment and social movements (including Occupy Wall Street) has begun touring on a bus powered by biodiesel and he has banned all disposable plastic backstage at his concerts.

He says, “I’m committed to carry as much of what I’ve learned here and heard here back into my everyday life and my work.”

Huffington Post Interview with Jackson Browne aboard the National Geographic Endeavor, April 2010.

Plastic in the Ocean

In 2010 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute published a 22-year study that found a huge amount of plastic accumulation in the western North Atlantic and Caribbean Sea in addition to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch we’ve been hearing about for years. In this study, the researchers examined their haul of 6136 surface plankton net tows between 1986 and 2008. During that time they found over 60 percent of them contained some plastic. Students sifted through and hand-picked the millimeter-sized fragments with tweezers. They collected over 64,000 pieces in total.

So plastic does break down in the ocean. Generally it breaks into smaller and smaller pieces until plastic particles resemble jellyfish food, plankton or even grains of sand. And over 400 years the material does degrade fully. But in the meantime it is contributing to the deaths of albatrosses on low-lying atolls. It is killing turtles and other surface-dwelling creatures who get tangled or just slurp up some plastic with a fish they are eating. Larger plastic gets lodged in animal throats while babies often get fed plastic by their mothers which leads them to starve since there is no nutritional value in plastic.

Five Ocean Gyres and Home of Five Global Garbage Patches

After learning about the gyres and the vast amount of plastic pollution, Jackson Browne was moved to sing about the dire straits of the ocean.

If I Could Be Anywhere

Music and Lyrics by: Jackson Browne

Sliding through the shimmering surface between two worlds
Standing at the centre of time as it uncurls
Cutting through a veil of illusion
Moving beyond past conclusions
Wondering if all my doubt and confusion will clear

If I could be anywhere,
If I could be anywhere
If I could be anywhere right now, I would want to be here

Searching for the future among the things we’re throwing away
Trying to see the world through the junk we produce every day
They say nothing lasts forever,
But all the plastic ever made is still here
No amount of closing our eyes will make it disappear

If I could be anywhere,
If I could be anywhere
If I could be anywhere in history, I would want to be here

The Romans, the Spanish, the British, the Dutch
American exceptionalism, so out of touch
The folly of empire, repeating its course
Imposing its will and ruling by force
On and on through time

But the world can’t take it, very much longer
We’re not gonna make it, unless we’re smarter and stronger
The world is gonna shake itself free of our greed somehow

If I could be anywhere,
If I could be anywhere in time
If I could be anywhere and change things, it would have to be now.

They say nothing lasts forever,
but all the plastic ever made is still here
No amount of closing our eyes will make it disappear

And the world can’t take it, very much longer
It’s not gonna make it, ‘less we’re smarter and stronger
The world is gonna shake itself free of our greed somehow

And the world can’t take it, that you can see
If the oceans don’t make it, neither will we
The world is gonna shake itself all the way free somehow

If I could be anywhere, If I could be anywhere in time
If I could be anywhere and change the outcome, it would have to be now.

Today famed groundhog Punxsutawney Phil poked his head out of his burrow and saw his shadow, meaning (according to the old German superstition) that we can expect six more weeks of winter. But the crowd gathered in Pennsylvania to see the rodent’s prediction stood in pre-dawn temps hovering just above freezing, almost twice the average for Groundhog Day there.

But many people around the country are wondering if Phil is a little off since they’ve hardly seen any winter and can’t really imagine six more weeks. Across the Midwest where temps hovered in the 60s people are thinking spring. Plants are poking through the dirt and trees are beginning to bud.

Chicago Feb. 02, 2011 and Feb. 02, 2012, courtesy of AP, photo by Kiichiro Sato

According to the National Weather Service Midland, Texas has seen more snow this year than Chicago or Minneapolis. Outside of Alaska the U.S. has been spared much of the harsh cold and snows of winter. On the last day of January Washington D.C. almost reached 70 degrees and the cherry trees were beginning to bud.

That’s quite a contrast to last Groundhog Day when a big blizzard crippled much of the country, killing 36 people, cutting power to millions and causing $1.8 billion in damage. For the season, it appears that just about every place is low on snow. Except Valdez, Alaska where 328 inches have fallen — 10 feet above normal, stranding residents and forcing emergency oil deliveries to keep the heat on.

Some are left wondering if this weird winter weather is a sign of global warming? The short answer is probably not. No one weather occurrence can be linked to climate change but trends over time paint picture that shows the planet is warming. There is a clear long term trend that is melting ice at each pole and on glaciers around the world.

Tom Wagner, the cryosphere progam manager at NASA says this winter weather pattern is likely within the zone of natural variability. While snow seems to be a no-show this year for most parts of the country, Wagner says that we actually had less snow at this time in 2006.

NASA attributes our mild winter to two atmospheric factors. The first is a strong positive Arctic Oscillation. That means that all the cold air that generally pushes south in winter is staying closer to the North Pole. On top of that we also have a La Nina year occurring in the Pacific Ocean where waters are cooler than average. That sends dry air over North America.

Wagner says, “The upshot of all this is that we wind up with all the snowstorms going to places like Alaska whereas here in the lower 48 we will wind up without a lot of snow.”

When you put those two pieces together most of us get the winter that wasn’t.

Here’s how it works.

Positive Arctic Oscillation Caused by Colder Stratosphere and Keeps Arctic Air in the Arctic, courtesy of NOAA

The cold jet stream dipped in Europe and Asia but remains bottled up over North America. That’s because another meteorological phenomenon called the North Atlantic Oscillation is a little out of whack. Normally the AO and NAO are in lockstep but right now the National Weather Service satellites show the NAO is staying positive while the AO has gone negative. In a nutshell, that inverse in phase is a bit unusual and is preventing the cold air from descending over much of North America.

Halpert says 90 percent of the time the North Atlantic and Arctic oscillations are in synch.

If the groundhog is right and winter isn’t over yet then Jake Weltzin’s concern may have some merit. The U.S. Geological Survey ecologist is worried that trees and plants that are budding early may not bloom when the “inevitable deep freeze returns.”

Weltzin tells the Associated Press, “If you think about plants and animals being kind of biologic thermometers, they are indicating a very early spring.” He adds, “And, that’s a problem.”

Even though the U.S. has one-fifth of its usual winter snow cover and temperatures are unseasonably warm in many areas, the northern hemisphere is experiencing average winter snowfall as a whole. The Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University found January to be the third-least snow month on record in the contiguous U.S. since record keeping began in 1967. But Europe and parts of Asia are stuck in the deep freeze. Europe and Asia experienced the ninth snowiest January since 1966.

Snow fell in islands on the Adriatic Sea. Parts of the Black Sea froze near the coastline of Romania. And 112 people died from a vicious cold snap that left England coated in ice and the Ukraine shivering from frostbite.

Tourists Climb Snow Drift in Front of Kiev-Pecherskaya Lavra cathedral in the Ukraine, photo by Sergei Supinsky, AFP

Back in the U.S. New Jersey state climatologist David Robinson says he’s disgusted that duffers are golfing on his winter cross-country ski course. For the northeast U.S. the last few months have been among the warmest and least snowy on record. The Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University shows the region’s temperatures are five degrees warmer than average.

They are also golfing in Dayton, Ohio where Tuesday’s high was a balmy 60 degrees.

Ecologist Weltzin thinks if there is a big freeze after the plants begin to bud that will affect wine grapes and other fruit this year.

Jeff Masters, the director of meteorology at Weather Underground tells the Associated Press, “We’ve just had a remarkable run of unusual winters in the past six years globally.” He’s in the middle of the winter snowbelt in Ann Arbor, Michigan where he says winter hasn’t yet arrived.

Along Lake Erie which is usually frozen in the winter, a ferry service that shuttles passengers to islands began winter routes for the first time in six years.

Wagner says it’s hard to predict what the next two months will bring. When there is a positive Arctic Oscillation you get real variation in the position of the jet stream. So he says the weather in February and March “is anyone’s guess at this point.”

Punxsutaney Phil doesn’t rely on sophisticated computer models or satellite imagery to understand the complex nature of the atmosphere, weather and climate. He just looks up and if he sees his shadow he returns to the comfort of his hollow for another six weeks. Since he began forecasting the seasons in 1886 he has seen his shadow 100 times.

But he’s never wrong about winter’s end because according to Mike Johnston, the vice president of the inner circle (the top-hat toting group of men that run the Groundhog Day event) says Phil is “incapable of error” because he doesn’t factor geography into his predictions. Johnson says since the groundhog predicts six more weeks of winter this year, “I guarantee you someone’s going to have six more weeks of winter.”

It may have been too much space talk on the Space Coast in Florida during the Republican primary that cost Newt Gingrich his presidential primary momentum. After all the dramatic yet conservative candidate has a penchant for making reasonable, scientifically plausible policy sound like science fiction.

In the run up to the Florida primary the former Speaker of the House called for colonies on the moon by 2020. In a field of mostly anti-science candidates his pro-science stance stood out from the pack. Making several references to John F. Kennedy’s big thinking to put a man on the moon probably didn’t help his case either.

After calling for the moon to become a possible 51st state in the union most people started to dismiss his space ambitions as little more than pipe dreams.

Newt "New Moonie" Gingrich Cartoon

Romney quickly retorted saying he would fire anyone at a company of his who wanted to spend billions of dollars that way.

And it appears that Florida Republicans agreed that space is outside the realm of their earthly politics. Romney trounced Gingrich after many thought it would be a close race.

But scientists and science policy experts say that Gingrich’s space base isn’t so off base after all.

Until three years ago that was U.S. policy. Both Republican presidents with the last name Bush endorsed lunar colonies and spent billions on the idea. President Obama canceled the moon program three years ago after the economy plunged into recession and projected costs of returning to the moon rose well beyond $700 billion.

George Washington University space policy director Scott Pace, who was a NASA associate administrator under George W. Bush says that Gingrich’s moon mission was feasible in 2005. But it is no longer. Pace, who is a Romney space policy advisor, says that going to the moon is definitely doable but figuring out when is the trick.

While campaigning in Florida before the primary Gingrich said, “Some of you may like it and you may dislike it, but I gave the boldest explanation of going into space since John F. Kennedy in 1961.” He added, “I believe in an America of big ideas and big solutions.”

Gingrich’s science-based ideas may have been too big for the Florida electorate to swallow.

It’s not to say that the other Republican candidates are against going to space. On the contrary, all the candidates support a robust private space industry. Here the candidates sound eerily similar to their political foe, President Obama. Since NASA scrapped its shuttle program which left thousands of Florida space workers unemployed all eyes have turned to private companies to fulfill that mission.

After all getting commercial space companies to take over the job of getting Americans to low-Earth orbit is a key part of the Obama space plan. But money is still the issue. In the current budget NASA received $406 million for private space programs though the Administration asked for $805 million.

Still, Gingrich stands further afield than the other candidates who remain quiet on science issues.

Former Clinton science adviser Neal Lane says Gingrich is pro-science. He credits Gingrich with preserving federal science research from big budget cuts in the 1990s.

Lane doesn’t agree with all of Gingrich’s ideas but he says they aren’t crazy.

Syracuse University science policy professor Henry Lambright tells the Associate Press, “[Gingrich] is on the edge of mainstream thinking about big science.”

While campaigning in Iowa in December, Gingrich made a plea to map the brain to better understand neuro-degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. There, he made it personal, wiping a tear off his cheek as he described watching his mother go from being a vibrant woman to one wracked with physical and mental problems in a nursing home.

Then he said his “whole emphasis on brain science” was based on his mother’s depression and mental illness. He said, “It’s not a theory. It’s in fact, my mother.”

In Seattle, the Allen Institute for Brain Science is hard at work mapping the brains of mice to help better understand the human brain. Large undertakings like brain mapping is a common scientific method to evaluate a large problem. Scientists have done similar projects mapping the human genome and trying to understand the basic biology of cancer.

But Arizona State University science policy professor Dan Sarewitz tells the Associated Press, “The trouble is that, in the past, it hasn’t paid off as promised.”

Those big important ideas with little short term pay off seem to sour voters.

Gingrich also raised a few eyebrows about his paranoid preoccupation with electromagnetic pulses wiping out electricity in the U.S. In 2009 he said that “may be the greatest threat we face…we could in fact lose our civilization in a matter of seconds.”

Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich Team up in 2008 Climate Ad

He also stunned many political allies when he appeared seated next to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi in an ad about climate change. Gingrich also wrote a book about the subject, called A Contract with the Earth.

But it seems that his dreams of space are the ones getting him in trouble this primary season.

Alan Stern, a vice president for research and development at the Southwest Research Institute and NASA’s chief of space sciences under George W. Bush says the media criticism of Gingrich’s space plans is unfair. He calls Gingrich a big thinker and a pioneer. Stern says, “When a government guy or politician talks that way, they just get clobbered about being unrealistic and that’s unfortunate.”

And, that’s exactly what happened in Florida.

Exerpts from the Florida Republican debate about Space.

NASA is spending $63 million per astronaut to send them to space on Russian rockets. But a pair of Toronto teens did it for $400. Okay, their astronaut was made of plastic and stood just a couple of inches tall. And he only made it about a quarter of the way to the internationally accepted boundary of outer space which is 62 miles or more than 328,000 feet in altitude.

So let’s say he went to nearer space like so many iPhones and other (ahem) electronics before him. Nevertheless this near space adventure captured the hearts and minds of thousands as well as some amazing images of the edge of space.

Gripping tightly to a Canadian flag, the first Lego man flew almost 16 miles straight up. The two teens who piloted the plastic man’s ride documented the hour-and-a-half-long journey, which has turned into a YouTube hit. And in just a few days Lego man’s Facebook page has gained thousands of fans.

Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad Show Lego Man at Press Conference in Toronto

Muhammad was inspired by something similar at MIT and other YouTube videos. But he also gives credit to his Earth and Space science teacher, Steven Tors.

The Lego man made it to 85,000 feet — in the middle stratosphere – before the weather balloon popped and a homemade parachute returned him and his precious video cargo to Earth.

Four cameras — two still and two video — captured all the images of Lego man’s trip to the edge of space, which took 97 minutes. In addition to 97 minutes of video capturing the entire experience, Ho and Muhammad snapped over 1,500 digital images. They also included a cellphone with a GPS tracker app in the styrofoam cargo container housing the electronics.

Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad Retrieve Lego Man after Trip to Edge of Space

Muhammad says, “It sent us the coordinates of its position and that’s basically how we tracked it down.” But for an hour of the decent the GPS tracker didn’t transmit any data. But then at about 6,000 feet the tracker started recording again, allowing the teens to find the Lego Man 97 miles from their Toronto area launch site.

In preparing for the flight the Agincourt Collegiate Institute seniors say that after filling a 12-foot weather balloon with helium, doing some final instrument checks, they launched the Lego man who rose at a rapid 27-feet per second.

But they had to wait a week to see if their experiment was a success. When they retrieved the Lego man the following weekend (it was too dark when they initially tried to find him and school prevented them from reacquiring their citizen science project right away) they say they jumped for joy. But they were scared and excited at the same time, wondering if the cameras captured good images.

They did.

Lego Man Flies to Space (almost), Curvature of the Earth in the Background

Muhammad says, “When we first saw those photos it really makes us think what we are really doing to our Earth and what it is when you look at it from the outside. And, it was really inspiring and emotional too.”

They say they both got goosebumps and were grateful to be able to look at the Earth from a different vantage point.

But these two budding space engineers are not the first to send a weather balloon to the edge of space just to see what it looks like.

Boy Scout troops and pioneering pranksters have been equipping weather balloons with payload containers housing inexpensive video cameras and GPS units and floating them to the edge of space for a few years — since the equipment has become inexpensive enough to be considered disposable if something goes awry.

The next goal for the two Toronto 17-year-olds is to complete 12th Grade.

Florida has been wrestling with its python problem for years. Thanks to the tropical temps in south Florida the Everglades National Park has become a dumping ground for unwanted reptiles, particularly the non-native Burmese python. Wildlife officials have been battling the snakes for about twenty years.

They presume that parents of kids who outgrew their pets and the pets who outgrew their owners freed the snakes in the swamp. Some also believe that the wild python population began to grow after Hurricane Andrew destroyed pet stores selling the exotic snakes in 1992.

Park Service's Al Mercado, Rep. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., Florida Wildlife Commission's Ron Bergeron and U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar Hold a Burmese Python

On a regular basis, giant snakes are turn up in backyard swimming pools, terrorizing neighborhoods. And in November game officials found a 16-foot python that had swallowed a 76-pound deer. Burmese pythons can grow to 26 feet and weigh well over 200 pounds. And unlike in its home in southeast Asia, there are no known predators in Florida that keep the snake population in check.

A study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found that sightings of medium-sized animals like racoons, oppossums, rabbits, foxes, deer and bobcats are down dramatically — as much as 99 percent — in some parts of the Everglades where these snakes are most commonly found.

There is no way to tell for sure that the Burmese python is solely responsible for the drastic decline in medium-sized mammals. But scientists suspect it is. They are concerned that the invasive species will disrupt the food chain in the Everglades and upset the delicate ecosystem balance.

J.D. Wilson, a Virginia Tech research biologist and co-author on the study says, “The effects of declining mammal populations on the overall Everglades ecosystem, which extends well beyond the National Park boundaries, are likely profound.”

Between 2003 and 2011 researchers drove 39,000 miles of Everglades area roads, counting wildlife. Since 2000 the National Park Service has counted 1,825 Burmese pythons in and around the national park. The largest, 16.4-foot snake weighed 156 pounds and was captured earlier this month.

Burmese Python Swallows Adult Deer Whole in Florida, November 2011

Michael Dorcas, a biologist from Davidson College in North Carolina and the lead author of the study says, “The magnitude of these declines underscores the apparent incredible density of pythons in Everglades National Park.”

Here are the significant declines in medium-sized mammal sightings in the Florida Everglades.

Raccoons — down 99.3 percent
Oppossums — down 98.9 percent
White-tail deer — down 94.1 percent
Bobcats — down 87.5 percent
Rabbits — down 100 percent (no sightings)
Foxes — down 100 percent (no sightings)

The research also found slight increases in coyotes, Florida panthers, rodents and other mammals. But because those sightings were so rare they discounted them altogether.

Secretary Salazar says, “This study paints a stark picture of the real damage that Burmese pythons are causing to native wildlife and the Florida economy.”

The state of Florida banned the private ownership of Burmese pythons in 2010. Now the federal government announced new rules on January 17 that will ban the importation and interstate transport of Burmese pythons, yellow anacondas and three other invasive constrictors sold in the pet trade. All have been found roaming Everglades National Park.

Some believe the federal mandate goes a little too far. Practically, the snakes can only survive outside in a few parts of the country, including south Florida and Louisiana. The rest of the nation is just to cold for the snakes to take hold. Snake breeders and experts who use the mighty constrictors to educate people about reptiles say the overall ban could lead to a burgeoning black market for Burmese pythons and could hurt legitimate businesses in the process.

With some estimates of the Everglades invasive snake population approaching 30,000 research turns to understanding and limiting the spread of the invasive snake species.

Burmese pythons need freshwater to survive. But a team of biologists with the U.S. Geological Survey led by Kristen Hart in its Davie, Florida lab showed that the snakes can drink in their much-needed moisture through the tissue of animals they swallow. The team also ran experiments trying to understand the snakes relationship to water.

The team’s experiments suggest that newborn pythons can’t survive more than two months with only access to saltwater. But a pair of hatchlings survived over 200 days with access to only brackish (mix of fresh and saltwater) water. And a yearling snake with access to only saltwater survived 7 months. New research in the upcoming Journal of the Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology suggests that these super-swimming snakes could head for the sea and migrate long distances.

Scientists Haul a Big Burmese Python out of the Everglades

Already, Burmese pythons have already been found eating endangered wood rats on Key Largo, off the mainland Florida coast. The first snake was discovered alive in 2007 when two researchers studying federally endangered Key Largo woodrats were checking on the status of a male woodrat wearing a radio transmitter that had suddenly moved more than a mile from its original documented habitat.

The signal led the researchers — a University of St. Andrews graduate student Joanne Potts and a volunteer assistant — to a eight-foot Burmese python sunning itself.

The contents of the captured snake’s stomach included not only the collared woodrat but a second woodrat as well.

Jack Hanna, the director emeritus at the Columbus Zoo believes the Florida python problem is a state issue not a federal one. He is concerned that the far-reaching ban on exotic constrictors will choke commerce. He tells CBS This Morning the new ban might effect the 220 breeding programs at the nation’s zoos as well as hurt snake breeders.

He says, “There are reputable breeders in Florida and we can’t put these guys out of business because they help and there is a logical role with a lot of our breeding programs [at zoos].

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

Golden orbweaver spiders from Madagascar secrete the only spider silk that is gold in color, not white. And now a five-year project to create a cape is finished and on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. This is the first spider silk textile made since the late 19th Century.

Nicholas Godley and Simon Peers with Their Spider Silk Cape

Clothing designer Nicholas Godley designed the garment. He says, “The color is just incredible. It’s incredibly strong, incredibly soft, incredibly sticky.” But his creation goes beyond being just a fashion experiment. He adds, “In the scientific and medical world at least spider silk is many ways the Holy Grail — in many ways it’s one of the most incredible materials.”

1.2 million spiders made the golden silk thread that built the gold brocaded cape.

Textile expert Simon Peers explains the process, starting with the spiders. He says, “You can’t keep spiders together because they are cannibals — they eat each other.”

Golden Orbweaver Spiders from Madagascar

Once the spiders have finished their work, four strands of silk are twisted together to make an ultra-strong and extremely flexible golden thread for a team of humans to sew into fabric. This particular spider silk stretches another forty percent of its resting length, which makes it very difficult to work with as a textile.

Peers is a British expatriate who moved to Madagascar over 20 years ago where he established a business to promote and explore the island nation’s heritage of weaving.

According to Wired.com in 2009,

Peers conceived the idea of weaving spider silk after learning about the French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them.

Science News tells a slightly different tale.

At some point, Peers shared what he had learned with a friend who was doing academic research on Madagascar’s textiles. “And she enthused about this whole idea of spider silk,” Peers recalls. “In fact, she pursued it a little further than I did,” turning up details of the original machine that was used to “silk” spiders for that World’s Fair fabric. While in France, she had one small element of the silker reproduced and made Peers a present of the mechanical piece.

It then sat on a shelf in his office for years. Many, many years.

At the time the Godley and Peers project had made a large piece of fabric but had not cut the garment yet into a cape yet.

Textile expert Simon Peers and Fashion Designer Nicholas Godley Flank Model Bianca Gavrilas Wearing a Hand-Embroidered Spider Silk Cape

Molecular biologist Randy Lewis is also stuck on spider silk and is always looking for new practical applications for the material in the real world. With a tensile strength greater than steel and even kevlar (used in bullet-proof vests) spider silk is an ultralight weight material that could stop a speeding bullet.

Lewis lives in Wyoming and decided to combine his knowledge of animal husbandry with cutting-edge genetics. In the process he made transgenic goats that produced spider silk in their milk. That’s one way to overcome the spider labor problem faced by Godley and Peers.

Peers estimates that the spider silk project took hundreds of thousands of hours when you factor in the work of the spiders.

Excerpt from NOVA’s Making Stuff show about spider silk, featuring Simon Peers and Randy Lewis.

For those expecting President Barack Obama to expound on the accomplishments of his laundry list of science and innovation policy he outlined in last year’s State of the Union, there were a few nods to but no specifics in this third State of the Union address on Tuesday evening.

As Forbes reported this morning for those interested in science and science policy the President’s address “offered some pretty thin gruel.”

The President stayed loyal to his pet issues of investment in basic research, jobs creation, education, clean energy and innovation.

With an expected mention of Steve Jobs he tied basic research to innovation. He said…

“Innovation also demands basic research. Today, the discoveries taking place in our federally financed labs and universities could lead to new treatments that kill cancer cells but leave healthy ones untouched. New lightweight vests for cops and soldiers that can stop any bullet. Don’t gut these investments in our budget. Don’t let other countries win the race for the future. Support the same kind of research and innovation that led to the computer chip and the Internet; to new American jobs and new American industries.”

As in previous years President Obama focused his remarks around preparing and educating the country to create new jobs, new industries, innovate new energy sources, safeguard our security and find national prosperity. But in this speech, the President bookended his address with salutes to military achievements — first of getting U.S. troops out of an autonomous Iraq and then in ridding the world of Osama Bin Laden. And in the end he proclaimed…

This nation is great because we get each other’s backs. And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard. As long as we are joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, and our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong.

But where is the meat of science policy that dotted previous addresses?

Last year the President kept the commitment he made in his State of the Union by submitting to Congress a budget with increases to National Science Foundation as a way to bolster basic research.

This year, he said…

Don’t gut these investments in our budget.

Last year President Obama set an ambitious goal: By 2035, he wants 80 percent of U.S. electricity to come from clean energy sources.

This year he focused on natural gas being extracted from shale in the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing. He said…

We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years. And my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy. Experts believe this will support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade. And I’m requiring all companies that drill for gas on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use. Because America will develop this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk.

The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy. And by the way, it was public research dollars, over the course of 30 years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock –- reminding us that government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.

Now, what’s true for natural gas is just as true for clean energy. In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries. Because of federal investments, renewable energy use has nearly doubled, and thousands of Americans have jobs because of it.

Like last year the President found a 55-year-old furniture maker in need of job retraining. Last year it was North Carolinia’s Kathy Proctor who moved into the biotechnology field. This year he featured Bryan Ritterby from Michigan to tell the story of how a luxury yacht factory was converted to make wind turbines, which enabled Bryan to get a new job.

He also featured Jackie Bray, a single mom from North Carolina who went from being a mechanic to community college where she was retrained in lasers and robotics and now works for a gas turbine factory owned by Siemen’s in Charolotte.

President Obama made a clear point. The economy is changing and so must the way we educate people and prepare them for a new kind of workforce. He said…

Growing industries in science and technology have twice as many openings as we have workers who can do the job. Think about that –- openings at a time when millions of Americans are looking for work. It’s inexcusable. And we know how to fix it.

One way he proposes fixing it is by allowing students who come to the U.S. to study or those born here but to undocumented worker parents to become full citizens. He said…

Let’s also remember that hundreds of thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another challenge: the fact that they aren’t yet American citizens. Many were brought here as small children, are American through and through, yet they live every day with the threat of deportation. Others came more recently, to study business and science and engineering, but as soon as they get their degree, we send them home to invent new products and create new jobs somewhere else.

That doesn’t make sense.

If those words sound familiar, you’re right. President Obama said almost the same thing last year. Then he said, “Today, there are hundreds of thousands of students excelling in our schools who are not American citizens. Some are the children of undocumented workers, who had nothing to do with the actions of their parents. They grew up as Americans and pledge allegiance to our flag, and yet they live every day with the threat of deportation. Others come here from abroad to study in our colleges and universities. But as soon as they obtain advanced degrees, we send them back home to compete against us. It makes no sense.”

Like last year, the President renewed his call for foreign students who are trying to obtain advanced degrees to be allowed to stay in the U.S. once they finish their studies.

Last year, he said, “But tonight, let’s agree to make that effort. And let’s stop expelling talented, responsible young people who could be staffing our research labs or starting a new business, who could be further enriching this nation.”

This year, he said…

But if election-year politics keeps Congress from acting on a comprehensive plan, let’s at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people who want to staff our labs, start new businesses, defend this country. Send me a law that gives them the chance to earn their citizenship. I will sign it right away.

On a final environmental note, President Obama recognized that comprehensive climate change legislation is not even on the political table this year. In a stern voice he threw down the gauntlet and challenged Congress to take a baby step. He said…

The differences in this chamber may be too deep right now to pass a comprehensive plan to fight climate change. But there’s no reason why Congress shouldn’t at least set a clean energy standard that creates a market for innovation. So far, you haven’t acted. Well, tonight, I will.”

The President announced that the Department of Defense is making a large clean energy commitment. He says the Navy is purchasing one gigawatt of wind energy electricity capacity, enough to power 250,000 homes each year. He also unveiled an executive plan to develop enough clean energy opportunities on public land to power three million homes.

But following a State of the Union last year that got many us all excited about the role in science in the Administration there were some conspicuous absences.

Like increasing access to taxpayer-funded research. Last year the President talked about openness and transparency in government that would allow taxpayers to see where research dollars go. But there was no mention of that commitment this year.

Alex Knapp, a reporter at Forbes adds to the list of missed State of the Union mentions. He asks the President, “Why not a program for building more makerspaces in public libraries? Why not build more on the contests the government has been running to solve certain scientific problems? How about broadening access to taxpayer-funded research and doing more to let the public and entrepreneurs out there know what discoveries are ripe for developing into economic opportunities? How about anything besides a banal platitude?”

SOTU Factoids:

Number of times Science mentioned 2
Number of times Technology mentioned 2
Number of times Engineering mentioned 1
Number of times Math mentioned 0
Number of times Climate mentioned 1
Number of times Innovation mentioned 6
Number of times Energy mentioned 23
Number of times Education mentioned 8

Republican Rebuttal Factoids:

Number of times Science mentioned 0
Number of times Technology mentioned 1
Number of times Engineering mentioned 0
Number of times Math mentioned 2
Number of times Climate mentioned 0
Number of times Innovation mentioned 0
Number of times Energy mentioned 2
Number of times Education mentioned 1

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

After several deaths of people in Cambodia, Vietnam and China recently, the bird flu is making a comeback in public discourse. Concerns are growing about the H5N1 strain of the influenza virus. A few years ago the world-sweeping swine flu stole headlines but the bird flu, which is much more virulent than it’s porcine cousin, has been spreading from poultry to people.

An 18-year-old duck farmer in Vietnam died last week, becoming the first bird flu fatality in that country in two years. The World Health Organization also reports that a two-year-old boy in Cambodia died from bird flu after being exposed to sick poultry in his village. Those deaths follow quickly on the heals of a 39-year-old Chinese bus driver dying on December 31 just outside of Hong Kong. And a 24-year-old man and five-year-old toddler in Indonesia also reportedly died from the bird flu this year.

The WHO says that makes 343 deaths from 582 cases of bird flu since 2003 when the virus first began hopping from birds to people.

But now growing fear over the necessary research to better understand this pathogen, which has a 60 percent mortality rate, is forcing bird flu scientists to take a 60-day break.

Researchers studying a more deadly version of the H5N1 virus that can be spread through the air voluntarily suspended their research for two months after bioethicists raised concerns of the virus being turned into a bioweapon.

Electron Micrograph of the H5N1 Influenza Virus

This deep concern began in late December when a U.S. federal government scientific advisory board asked two peer-review journals not to publish the papers if they explained how they were able to genetically modify the current, naturally-occurring strain of bird flu. The government scientists made the virus even more deadly by making it airborne.

Just days after that announcement and before the papers could be published, government advisers demanded the details be kept secret and not published in scientific journals to keep the information from falling into the wrong hands.

The scientists who created the deadlier H5N1 in the lab say they needed to know if the current strain has the potential to mutate into an airborne one. It does. They just sped up the process. Knowing that key piece of information will allow countries to take more severe measures to eradicate the newly emerging illness.

Now the story about bird flu has mutated as well, raising concerns that the manmade strain of the virus is now a bigger threat than the naturally-occurring one, which seldom hops from poultry to people.

In a letter that appeared in both journalsScience and Nature, several key bird flu researchers explain why they are temporarily halting their research.

The principal investigators at the labs where the bird flu research is being conducted say that perceived fear of the new manmade strain of the flu virus escaping the lab is making them push the pause button for 60 days.

Drs. Ron Fouchier, Adolfo García-Sastre, Yoshihiro Kawaoka and 36 others recognize that they and the rest of the scientific community need to more clearly explain the benefits of bird flu research and reassure the public that the biosafety measures taken minimize its possible risks.

They say, “We have agreed on a voluntary pause of 60 days on any research involving highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 viruses leading to the generation of viruses that are more transmissible in mammals.”

The controversial research that prompted government warnings and the voluntary research suspension centered around ferrets. The researchers proved that viruses possessing a haemagglutinin (HA) protein from highly pathogenic avian H5N1 influenza viruses can become transmissible in ferrets.

Scanning Electron Microscope Image of H5N1 Avian Flu Virus

But now the perceived fear of the ferret-infected virus escaping from the secure labs is creating a fear pandemic instead.

They continue, “We would like to assure the public that these experiments have been conducted with appropriate regulatory oversight in secure containment facilities by highly trained and responsible personnel to minimize any risk of accidental release.”

The scientists agree their research is absolutely necessary to help to public health efforts detect when the H5N1 influenza virus might change in the wild, sparking a human pandemic. But Fouchier of Erasmus Medical College in the Netherlands, Garcia-Sastre of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the lead authors on the letter in Science and Nature nevertheless are voluntarily suspending it so public perception can catch up.

Censorship in Science

When a U.S. government advisory panel told the editors of Science and Nature to censor a submitted bird flu paper, the complex issue also enjoined the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The reason for asking for censorship was noble. Biosecurity experts fear an airborne version of the H5N1 flu virus that becomes transmissible between humans could create a pandemic worse than the 1918-19 outbreak of Spanish flu that killed between 20 million and 40 million people.

The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) made the following recommendations about the publication of two papers submitted on the highly pathogenic avian influenza, H5N1:

1. Neither manuscript should be published with complete data and experimental details.

2. Conclusions of the manuscripts be published but without experimental details and
mutation data that would enable replication of the experiments.

a) Text should be added describing: 1) the goals of the research, 2) the potential
benefits to public health (including informing surveillance efforts, pandemic
preparedness activities, and countermeasure development and stockpiling efforts), 3)
the risk assessments performed prior to research initiation, 4) the ongoing biosafety
oversight, containment, and occupational health measures, 5) biosecurity practices
and adherence to select agent regulation, and 6) that addressing biosafety, biosecurity,
and occupational health is part of the responsible conduct of all life sciences research.

b) The NSABB should develop a statement that explains their review process and
rationale for the recommendations. This statement will be provided to the journals to
consider for publication.

c) The USG should encourage the authors to submit a special
communication/commentary letter to the journals regarding the dual use research
issue.

In other words, don’t publish the whole genome and don’t explain exactly how this mutation occurred.

Both journals responded by agreeing to the recommendations in part.

Science writer Carl Zimmer sums it up best. He describes the journals’ response, “In essence, “We haven’t decided yet. It would be nice if you let us know how responsible scientists could get hold of the data.”

Since science is rooted in reproducibility this type of censorship flies in the face of the method.

But the U.S. government does have a history of censoring sensitive science, including the recipe for nuclear fission and fusion. And now the formula for ferret to ferret transmission of bird flu.

Columbia University virologists Vincent Racaniello tells Zimmer the censorship move doesn’t make any sense. He says, “The point of a science paper is to enable others to duplicate the findings. Are we going to set a new precedent, where security matters override the reason for publication? This is setting a very dangerous precedent for virology and biological sciences in general.”

But in the end, the scientists themselves agreed to grudgingly redact contested parts of the papers.

Albert Osterhaus of Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands says this type of activity is unprecedented. He believes that public health is best served by making the information widely available. A spokesman for Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin, Madison also says the lead author will modify the paper and resubmit it.

Meanwhile the editors of Nature and Science are working with government officials to iron out a “written, transparent plan” for relevant scientists to have access to the critical details of this research, which will likely not make the published version of the papers. Science editor-in-chief Bruce Albersis confident that this all can be resolved in a couple of weeks.

The official hydraulic fracturing song and video is so catchy and fun because it sounds like swearing. At least that’s why Time magazine deigned it number 2 in the Top 10 Creative Videos of 2011. Based on the three-year investigation by ProPublica into concerns about chemical pollution in the water supply near fracking drill sites, the song focuses on methane being released into the groundwater where drilling is happening.

But what’s the real science behind the accusatory lyrics, which leave the listener wondering if this new, cheap way of extracting natural gas is actually contributing to the global warming problem?

Oil and gas companies see it as a cleaner, more environmentally responsible energy alternative.

Hydraulic Fracturing in Shale

But a Cornell study last year found something different. It says that the methane in natural gas extracted by hydrofracking in shale makes it a potent climate changer. The study and others since then argue that methane leaks unburned into the air during extraction and processing prior to burning. And methane is considerably far more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2.

Methane has an atmospheric life of 20 years compared to carbon dioxide’s 100. But methane can cause other problems.

Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler from NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies says, “There are indirect effects from methane emissions because it is chemically reactive in the atmosphere. It contributes to increases in tropospheric ozone and stratospheric water vapor (increasing the warming impact), and by changing the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere, affects it’s own lifetime, and that of sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrous oxide (NOx) – which in turn affects aerosol formation, and indeed aerosol-cloud interactions.”

After a Duke University study found hydrofracking was polluting water to the extent that some kitchen taps could be set on fire, the water contamination issue began to boil.

Just recently, the Environmental Protection Agency has begun trucking water to homes in a town in Pennsylvania as a precaution.

Robert Jackson, who was part of the Duke Study says, “We certainly didn’t expect to see such a strong relationship between the concentration of methane in water and the nearest gas wells. That was a real surprise.”

The research found that water supplies within six-tenths of a mile of a hydraulic fracturing operation had on average 17 times more methane in the drinking water than wells further away from drilling sites.

Homeowner Lights Methane Contaminated Tap Water on Fire

In mid-January the U.S. EPA informed New York officials that the state needed better safeguards to protect water supplies near hyrdofracking sites.

To free the gas trapped in the underground shale formations, drillers pump millions of gallons of water mixed with sand and chemicals deep underground under enough pressure to fracture rock. The wastewater left over from the process has a way of getting into drinking water by being disposed of at sewage treatment plants.

In 2004, the EPA found that hydrofracking posed no risk to drinking water. Then Congress exempted the process, created by Halliburton in the 1990s, from the Safe Drinking Water Act. As a result of those moves, hydrofracking is now the common gas extraction method in nine out of every ten natural gas wells in the U.S. And there are almost 500,000 shale gas wells in the U.S., twice as many as there were in 1990.

In 2010 the EPA and other federal health officials, cautioned some Wyoming residents not to drink their water and to ventilate their homes when they bathed because the methane in the water could cause an explosion. In December, the EPA made the link between fracking and water contamination for the first time.

My Water’s on Fire Tonight

by David Holmes

Fracking is a form of natural gas drilling
An alternative to oil cause the oil kept spilling
Bringing jobs to small towns so everybody’s willing
People turn on their lights and the drillers make a killing

Water goes into the pipe, the pipe into the ground
The pressure creates fissures 7,000 feet down
The cracks release the gas that powers your town
That well is fracked….. Yeah totally fracked

But there’s more in the water than just H2O
Toxic chemicals help to make the fluid flow
With names like benzene and formaldehyde
You better keep ‘em far away from the water supply

The drillers say the fissures are a mile below
The groundwater pumped into American homes
But don’t tell it to the residents of Sublette Wy-O
That water’s fracked…. We’re talking Benzene…

What the frack is going on with all this fracking going on
I think we need some facts to come to light
I know we want our energy but nothing ever comes for free
I think my water’s on fire tonight

So it all goes back to 2005
Bush said gas drillers didn’t have to comply
with the Safe Drinking Water Act, before too long
It was “frack, baby, frack” until the break of dawn.

With the EPA out it was up to the states
But they didn’t have the money to investigate
Sick people couldn’t prove fracking was to blame
All the while water wells were going up in flames

Cause it’s hard to contain all the methane released
It can get into the air, it can get into the streams.
It’s a greenhouse gas, worse than CO2
Fracking done wrong could lead to climate change too

Now it’s not that drillers should never be fracking
But the current regulation is severely lacking
Reduce the toxins, contain the gas and wastewater
And the people won’t get sick and the planet won’t get hotter

What the frack is going on with all this fracking going on
I think we need some facts to come to light
I know we want our energy but nothing ever comes for free
I think my water’s on fire tonight

Music by David Holmes and Andrew Bean
Vocals by David Holmes and Niel Bekker
Animation by Adam Sakellarides and Lisa Rucker
Created by the Studio 20 journalism project at NYU.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave an important math prize to two U.S. mathematicians for their pioneering work in harmonic analysis.

Professor Anders Bjorner from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm says, “These are two of the best problem-solvers alive and even on an historic scale this is totally unique that so many important problems have been solved by individuals as is the case for each one of these.”

Jean Bourgain from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and Terence Tao from UCLA claim the 2012 Crafoord Mathematics Prize for, “their brilliant and groundbreaking work in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, ergodic theory, number theory, combinatories, functional analysis and theoretical computer science.”

What is unique with these two laureates is they worked in so many areas and they very quickly moved from one part of mathematics to another and see connections and solve big problems in many areas.

Dr. Bjorner says, “It is like coming back from the Olympics with 20 gold medals in different sports.”

But the common mathematical thread the Drs. Bourgain and Tao share is an area of math called harmonic analysis. In a nutshell that sub-discipline is the ability to find patterns in seemingly random masses of information.

By studying overlapping integer multiples, mathematicians can better sense the world. For example if f stands for a frequency in music (a note), then multiples of that frequency 2f, 3f, 4f and so on would be considered the corresponding harmonics.

Terence Tao

Tao initially said it was an impossible task. Then within a few minutes he told applied mathematician Emmanuel Candes that he was on to something. The next day, Tao had solved the problem himself, creating compressive sampling in the process.

As a result of the Candes-Tao quick collaboration engineers are busy building faster MRI scanners and one-pixel cameras. Tao is not an engineer but he saw a connection that no engineer noticed.

Candes says, “Whenever he touches a subject, it becomes gold very quickly.”

Ben Green, who collaborated on him with the prime number problem says, “Terry is unusual in how open-minded he is.”

That ability to follow an idea wherever it may roam has allowed him to be named the youngest full professor in UCLA history, to collect every notable math prize, including the coveted Field’s Medal, known as the Nobel Prize of math.

Jean Bourgain won the Shaw Mathematical Prize in 2010 for his work on psuedorandomness, the kind of math that generates random numbers used in advanced cryptography, slot machines and videogames.

Alex Kontorovich, one of Bourgain’s post doc research fellows says, “He is one of the 21st Century’s absolute giants of mathematics.”

Jean Bourgain, Institute for Advanced Studies Mathematician

Bourgain describes himself as a pure mathematician who says his greatest contribution to the field of mathematics is psuedorandomness.

He says, “The question is how to produce something that has many features of the truly random coin flipping. This is where the mathematics comes in.”

While conventional math theory holds that having a larger period between repeating sets of numbers, the greater the appearence of randomness. Take a slot machine for example. A computerized one-armed bandit has software that spits out billions of binary digits, ones and zeroes. That determines who wins and who loses. But those random number generators appear less predictable if there is a greater period between repeating sequences of numbers. At least that’s what most mathematicians thought.

But Bourgain shows that random number generators can be equally strong using shorter periods. Selecting jurors, compiling statistics or generating a quote of the day on a website are just a few applications that random number generators have found in the digital age. They can also be used to encrypt secrets or simulate weather patterns. The numbers are considered pseudorandom because they aren’t quite as random as flipping a coin.

He has found that he can create short sequences that seem just as random as long sequences.

He says, “My contribution is to show mathematically that you still have a lot of randomness when this period becomes much smaller.”

In awarding the Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences says that Bourgain and Tao “have solved an impressive number of important problems in mathematics. Their deep mathematical erudition and exceptional problem-solving ability have enabled them to discover many new and fruitful connections and to make fundamental contributions to current research in several branches of mathematics.”

Beaches along the coasts of Washington and Oregon are treasure troves of flotsam for avid beachcombers. But one scientist says that what’s on its way to the west coast is unprecedented and those areas are totally unprepared.

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer is a self-proclaimed expert on manmade stuff that floats the ocean blue. He even wrote the book on it, called Flotsametrics and the Floating World.

Now he says the first evidence of what could be 20 million tons of debris from coastal Japan is beginning to arrive. After the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami devastated the eastern coast of Japan last March, cars, houses, people and their belongings were swept out to sea. Still over 20,000 people are dead or reported missing.

Ebbesmeyer says, “We are not prepared for this. Nobody is prepared. Nobody has even thought through the dimensions.”

And prepared or not, the floating field of debris is on its way. A buoy that landed on a beach in northwest Washington may be the first evidence of the flotsam storm that’s brewing at sea.

3 Japanese Buoy Types Washing Ashore from Oregon to Alaska, Photo by John Ingraham

He estimates that 25 percent will sink as it floats along ocean currents. Another 25 percent could reach the west coast of the U.S. and Canada. Probably another 25 percent will enter into the Pacific Gyre and return to Japan but not for about six years. The rest will likely pass by Hawaii on the way to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch where it will join plastic refuse from all over the world.

The Path of Japan's Earthquake and Tsunami Debris As It Moves from Japan towards the U.S. West Coast. Click on the image to see the animation.

He says, “There’s never been a devastation on one continent that has moved off to the other continent and actually recorded.”

Because of the nuclear accident that followed the earthquake and tsunami, Ebbesmeyer is concerned that some of the Japanese flotsam could carry radioactive material.

Nir Barnea from NOAA says there is little cause for alarm. He expects most of what washes up on Washington and Oregon beaches to be lumber and some household items. He says, “We don’t expect any debris items that are exotic or unusual.”

But beachcombers are always looking for those unusual items. Frequently Japanese fishing floats wash ashore in Washington after a big storm. If and when beachcombers find any Japanese items they can report the finds to Ebbesmeyer who is tracking the arrivals online.

The big west coast arrival wasn’t expected for about two years. In October a Russian cargo ship spotted boats, refrigerators and large pieces of homes near the Midway Islands about 1,700 miles from Hawaii and about 300 miles further east than expected.

NASA Projects Debris Field Track

That sighting forced scientists to revise their estimates down from five years to two. The Japanese flotsam patch is roughly twice the size of Texas and heading on a direct course with the Washington and Oregon coast traveling at about 7 miles per hour.

Ebbesmeyer says get ready because lighter weight items like the black buoy that washed ashore near Neah Bay, WA will get to the U.S. faster. He says that if the items ride high in the water, are lightweight and have a lot of area exposed to wind, they can travel up to 20 miles per hour. That means some items from Japan could begin landing on beaches as early as next year.

Ebbesmeyer believes the debris landing area will be more spread out than predicted. He thinks beaches from southern Alaska to California will see personal items from broken Japanese lives.

And at a December 13 meeting he said, “All debris should be treated with a great reverence and respect.”

He adds, “As of December 30, 2011, beachcombers reported more than 23 buoys from 17 locations scattered between central Oregon to Kodiak Alaska. He even says that a woman named Jody Godoy traced the writing on one buoy to an oyster farm along the tsunami-ravaged coast.

Ebbesmeyer is a retired oceanographer who has tracked ice bergs, oil from the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and sewage outflow into Washington state’s Puget Sound. But he is known as the founder of Beachcombers Alert where he and his team track things that float, including tennis shoes, rubber duckies and messages in bottles.

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

Samantha Garvey wants to be a marine biologist and the science-focused 17 year old is now one of 61 finalists from Long Island in the Intel Science & Engineering Fair for her pioneering work with mussels.

But the real story of this scientist-in-training is that she is able to excel in the classroom as an honor’s student without all the creature comforts of home. In fact, the teen and her family are homeless and living in a shelter on Long Island, New York.

Both of her parents were unable to work following a car accident. As a result of falling behind on their rent, the family was evicted from their apartment on December 31. After advancing to the Intel finals, this science rags to riches story garnered national attention and a community banded together to get the family a house.

Samantha Garvey, Intel Science Fair Finalist

Now the science. The enterprising Samantha has been studying inedible marsh mussels for the last two years. But a nagging question kept eating at her and prompted her investigation, which she entered into the Intel science competition. She was studying how mussels settle in salt marshes and noticed mussel concentrations appeared to be higher in areas where there were more crabs, one of the mussels’ primary predators.

She tells Good Day New York, “I thought this was weird. How are they surviving in areas where they are being preyed upon?”

Thinking that observation runs counter to what she would expect she did a little experiment, studying mussels in areas of low and high crab predation. She discovered that that mussel shells were actually thicker in super crabby areas and a bit thinner in less crabby waters.

So she tested her theory by putting crabs and mussels together to see what would happen. She discovered that the mussels adapted to the threat by increasing the thickness of their shells.

Garvey says, “I discovered when you expose a crab to a mussel, they grew thicker, heavier shells to defend themselves.”

Hoping to be selected from 1,500 finalists from 65 countries as a $100,000 scholarship winner of the Intel science competition, Garvey intends to study marine biology at either Brown or Yale, her top two picks for her undergraduate studies. From there she would like to continue studying invasive species.

Full interview (6:54) with Samantha Garvey on Good Day New York. Greg finds out why there are holes in mussels at restaurants.

Every few years biologists struggling to understand the evolutionary constraints placed on the largest and smallest of animals happen upon — usually by accident– a new contender. But that little creature then gets replaced by the next littlest critter. The competition goes on and biologists now find themselves measuring the smallest spined animals in tenths of millimeters.

The latest find is a miniature frog that can rest on a dime with plenty of room to spare. He (the males holds the tiny title right now) breaks a long-held theory that the biggest animals (blue whales) and the smallest (this frog or a tiny fish) all are linked to life in the water.

The idea is that the buoyancy of water offers support and helps the largest and smallest animals develop.

The new frogs to the phylogenetic fete reside in leaf litter on the floor of the tropical rainforest in Papua New Guinea. And instead of hatching into tadpoles in water they hop out of their eggs as fully formed frogs.

Tiniest animal, Paedophryne amauensis, Sits on a US Dime

So with discovery of tiny terrestrial frogs, the aquatic extreme theory apparently doesn’t hold water after all.

Chris Austin, the Louisiana State University biolgist who found the frog says, “The size limit of vertebrates, or creatures with backbones, is of considerable interest to biologists because little is understood about the functional constraints that come with extreme body size, whether large or small.”

But he wouldn’t have found the frog if it weren’t for its infernal high-pitched mating call.

In August 2009 Austin and graduate student Eric Rittmeyer were collecting and recording frog mating calls at night. They kept hearing a high-pitched “tink, tink” sound they assumed belonged to an insect.

Austin says the sound was all around them and it took a little while to determine where it was coming from. Once they narrowed the search to a pile of leafs on the forest floor, they grabbed big handfuls of habitat and stuck them into a plastic bag. Then they had the tedious task of slowly and methodically removing all the leaves to find the loud caller.

When he saw a tiny frog hop onto a leaf he knew he’d found the source of the sound. Weighing in at barely nothing and measuring 7.7 millimeters Austin had discovered the world’s tiniest vertebrate, named Paedophryne amauensis.

But that’s not the end of the frog tale.

Indonesian Carp, Paedocypris progenetica, World's Tiniest Fish

Male Anglerfish, Photocorynus spiniceps, Vies for World's Smallest Distinction

During the New Guinea expedition, Austin believes the researchers found about 20 new species species on that trip, including another related frog species that is just a millimeter or two larger and has a different call. The paper announcing the discovery of the tiniest frog appears in the online journal PLoS ONE.

Steven Beaupre, a University of Arkansas scientist and president-elect of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists says he doesn’t put too much stock in this type of record-setting announcement. He says it is far more interesting to view this and similar discoveries as a way to “better understand the advantages and disadvantages of extreme small size and how such extremes evolve. Fundamentally, these tiny vertebrates provide a window on the principles that constrain animal design.”

Whether the tiniest creature with a spine is a frog or a fish is rather inconsequential to biology. But Beaupre says what is remarkable is that “the discovery of two new frog species comes as great news against the background of more prevalent accounts of tropical amphibian extinction.”

Maurice Kottelat, the Swiss scientist who found the tiniest Indoesian carp says, “It is not so interesting to know which is really the smallest. Tomorrow will bring another smallest anyway.”

And his concern is not over who is known as the biologist who found the tiniest animal.

Since the discovery of his tiny fish Paedocypris progenetica in 2006, he says most of the habitat in the peat swamps of Indonesia where the fish live has been destroyed. He adds, “I have a great concern. It is not when will we discover the next smallest, but whether habitats where to discover them will still be there. Or how long will the habitats survive.”

For years, scientists have been talking about the era of personalized medicine. While many preparations are underway, the biggest hurdle to widespread adoption has been the prohibitive cost to read a person’s entire DNA. Our genetic code provides a full road map to preventing and treating disease. We just don’t know how to read it yet.

Since the first entire human genome was sequenced in 2000, the price and time it takes has tumbled into affordability.

But the entire biotechnology industry has rested on the belief that personalized medicine won’t work until it takes a day or less to map a whole human genome and the cost reaches the $1,000 price point.

Well, 2012 is the year. At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Life Technologies unveiled its latest gadget, a $150,000 high-speed gene sequencer, which allows entire human genome sequencing for $1,000 per genome.

Outfitted with a semiconductor chip instead of tiny microscopes, the Benchtop Ion Proton sequencer is ready to read our DNA fast and cheap. That means this technology will quickly move from the research lab to the doctor’s office where patients will pay a little more than the $1,000 it costs to sequence a full genome.

There are companies already doing some high-speed, fast-turnaround gene sequencing. But they rely on just pieces of a genome, looking for particular markers to identify risk for specific diseases. No company until now has been able to run a full genome for $1,000 in less than a day.

Life Technologies’ Dr. Robert Bennett says, “For the first time, you’ll be able to sequence an entire human genome in a matter of a few hours.”

Immediately following the announcement, the company said that Baylor College of Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, and The Broad Institute have signed on as the first three customers of the new semiconducting gene sequencer.

Dr. Richard Gibbs, Director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor says, “A genome sequence for $1,000 was a pipe-dream, just a few years ago.”

Not to be outdone, another company that builds gene sequencers also just announced that its new generation of machine will read an entire genome in less than 24 hours. Illumina hasn’t announced how much it will cost on a per genome basis.

It’ll be a year or so before these lightweight machines will begin showing up in doctor’s offices. But when they do it is still unclear what running a person’s genome will show.

Doctors must first be trained to use the new technology. The power of personalized medicine and the promise of rapid, inexpensive gene sequencing lies in being able to identify genetic mutations to make medicine more effective, reduce drug interactions, improve preventive health and give the patient more information about his or her health.

But this kind of broad ability could also open up a pandora’s box of privacy concerns. Namely, how much of a person’s genetic information should be accessible to insurance companies, which conceivably could discriminate against people with predisposed genetic risks for certain diseases.

Regardless of any controversy, reaching the genome milestone of $1,000 per genome is changing the face of medicine forever.

Richard Lifton, Chair of the Department of Genetics at Yale School of Medicine says, “The technological advances in the new instrument promise to be game-changing for both research and clinical applications.”

Leann Lloyd had the dubious honor of lugging a metallic rock through airport security in Missouri. She was on her way back to Albuquerque and the Meteorite Museum at University of New Mexico after retrieving the missing meteorite.

She says, “It stopped the line and caused a big hub-bub and three or four agents came over and pulled it out.”

The meteorite isn’t that big but because of its density weighs about 50 pounds. And apparently a suspect just walked out of the museum through the front door carrying the space rock before winter break.

Sikhote Alin Meteorite, Stolen from UNM Museum

The museum director noticed the empty case when he was giving a private tour during the holiday closure. He immediately put out an all-points meteorite bulletin through an international collector’s group and within a day had tracked the rock to Missouri, where Lloyd was sent to bring it home.

After orbiting in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter for eons, the rock hit Russia about 60 years ago and landed in New Mexico when a Russian scientist gave the remarkable specimen to the first director of the musuem. Since then the rock sat still until straying off course just before Christmas.

Kent agee says the rock, which sold for $1,700 is not just a great scientific specimen but also one of historical significance. He places the value of the meteorite at about $40,000. The suspect who sold the stolen space rock used his real name in the transaction so the International Meteorite Collectors Association was able to track him easily.

Though he has not been arrested yet the thief stole the Sikhote-Alin, a 9,000 gram iron-nickel meteorite for the money. The UNM meteorite museum is closed while a full security review is conducted.

John Schooler, a meteorite collector and dealer in Missouri sees occasional alerts on the IMCA site. He says, “It’s not good. But like anyhting of value it has the potential of being stolen. They’ve done this for generations. The size here is unusual. He had to show some physical exertion to do it not just stick it in his pocket.”

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.

In 2006 bees began disappearing. Entomologists have never been exactly able to pinpoint the cause of syndrome, which they now call colony collapse disorder. It occurs when the worker bees abandon the hive and the whole system falls apart. No one knows why the bees leave. Some have suggested they get disoriented and can’t find their way back home. After studying fungus, chemicals, environmental toxins, a new possibility is on the rise.

Honeybee Hive, Abuzz with Activity

Call them zom-bees.

John Hafernik, an insect biologist at San Francisco State University made an accidental but significant discovery, which could explain colony collapse disorder.

He found that a parasitic fly had deposited eggs into the honey bee’s abdomen and the maggots were incubating there, feeding on the bee’s internal organs. It sounds like something out of a horror movie but Dr. Hafernik says that the flies were turning the worker bees into zombies. And that could explain why they were abandoning their hives.

It all started on a cold morning a few years ago when he noticed a bunch of dead and dying bees on the sidewalk near his office. Among the dozens of dead bees he noticed some still living bees appeared disoriented, walking off kilter and in circles. He knew the bees came from a nearby hive but thought they would have had the sense to stay inside when it was so cold. As a curious scientist he scooped a bunch of bees into a test tube and took them upstairs to his lab where he filed them on his desk top.

After about a week in his lab, Hafernik looked at the vial again and saw little brown pupae. He immediately knew they were fledgling flies. He set his students to work studying this serendipitous scientific moment.

Forage Fly Lays Eggs Inside Unsuspecting Honey Bee, Photo by Chris Quock

Hafernik says, “There was nothing left inside the bee.”

Hafernik and his research team has figured out the scary cycle. Apparently, a fertile fly uses the bee’s appendage called an ovipositer to lay fly eggs inside the bee, where they hatch into lots and lots of maggots.

Graduate student Christopher Quock says the team found 25 maggots in one of the bees.

Hafernik says, “They eat them; eat them from the inside out.”

He says the maggots start their meal in the abdomen then the baby flies eat their way into the wing muscle and eventually the brain. They pop out between the head and thorax.

Hafernik says, “It’s kind of a bee’s worst nightmare.”

Figuring out what happened to the bees a few years ago is not just a bee problem. Bees are primary pollinators and are a critical piece of the U.S. agricultural process. Without honeybees many crops can’t produce food for us to eat.

While Hafernik won’t confirm that flies taking over bees and eating them from the inside out is the cause of colony collapse disorder he does see it as yet another viable reason for it. And, the symptoms do fit the situation.

Dennis vanEngelsdorp of the University of Maryland, College Park says casting a wary eye on the fly is “certainly worth a lot more attention.”

Maggot Emerges from Honey Bee's Head, Photo courtesy of John Hafernik

But according to their research which appears in PLoS ONE they discovered that just 5-15 percent of the bees in a SFSU campus hive near the bug building had been turned into zom-bees. That’s not enough to cause complete colony collapse disorder. But it does raise a whole host of new questions.

Namely, where did the parasitizing of honey bees begin? DNA analysis of commercial hive samples suggests that the type of fly found inside the honey bees comes from South Dakota and the Central Valley of California.

Bee pathologist Elke Genersch of the Institute for Bee Research in Hohen Neuendorf, Germany says, “Extensive surveys are now needed on the distribution of the flies in the global honey bee population.”

Since honey bees are trucked between those two locations to assist in pollination for the U.S. agricultural industry, it is conceivable that isolated cases of zom-bees hopped on the road and spread quickly, aided by modern transport.

Colony collapse disorder is blamed on the loss of seven percent of all honey bee hives in North America each year. And this was a disorder that has only been around for six years.

Eric Mussen at the University of California, Davis says that based on the infection rate at the SFSU campus hive, the parasite “does not appear to be a dominate factor.” But Genersch is concerned that the fly population could explode if the parasitizing flies get into entire hives and turn all the drones into zom-bees.

Dennis vanEngelsdorp talks honey bee disappearance at the 2008 Taste3 conference.

Recently scientists in Australia discovered that two species of sharks are interbreeding. The common black-tip shark and the Australian black-tip shark have started producing hybrid sharks. Marine biologists in Queensland say they’ve found 57 sharks so far.

The common black-tip shark is found around the world in subtropical and temperate ocean waters while the smaller Australian black-tip shark is more suited to warmer, tropical waters. The combination of the two species — which is extremely unusual — could be a response to climate change.

Lead researcher Jess Morgan of the University of Queensland says, “If it [the Australian black-tip species] hybridizes with the common species it can effectively shift its range further south into cooler waters, so the effect of this hybridizing is a range expansion. It’s enabled a species restricted to the tropics to move into temperate waters.”

The team confirmed the cross-breeding through DNA analysis. The team found the 57 hybrid sharks along 1,250 miles of coastline on the east coast of Australia.

Jennifer Ovenden, one of the co-authors on the paper, which appears in the journal Conservation Genetics says, Hybridization could enable the sharks to adapt to environmental change as the smaller Australian black tip currently favors tropical waters in the north while the larger common black tip is more abundant in sub-tropical and temperate waters along the south-eastern Australian coastline.”

Morgan says, “You’re seeing evolution in action.” Mixing two species of animals like this increases its chance of survival. Animals start interbreeding when their existence is threatened. By combining genetics, these sharks become stronger, making them more able to withstand changes to their environment.

Hydraulic fracturing or hydrofracking to reach deep pockets of natural gas seems to be the culprit behind a small earthquake that shook Youngstown, Ohio on Saturday. By Monday, state lawmakers had imposed a two-week ban on drilling while the latest quake is investigated.

Since the epicenter of the 4.0 quake is less than one-tenth of a mile from an injection drilling site, many feel confident that the drilling practice is to blame.

Breaking rock with chemicals, sand and water pressure is a common practice used to access big pockets of natural gas trapped inside large underground geological formations. But that practice comes with a slew of environmental concerns.

Secondary wells drilled to dispose of the water/chemical mix called injection wells could be triggering the earthquakes, which have grown from rare in the area to monthly events.

A spokesman for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources says that the frack water being sunk in the Youngstown area isn’t just from Ohio. Over half of the waste water comes from nearby Pennsylvania, where the majority of the Marcellus Shale is located.

Deputy Director Andy Ware of ODNR says, “While we couldn’t say for sure that there’s a direct causation between the injection well and the earthquakes, we thought it better to be overly cautious.”

After a small earthquake in Youngstown on Christmas Eve, regulators asked drilling companies to stop injecting frack water into the ground. And after the New Year’s Eve quake, they decided to stop all drilling within a five-mile radius until the quake can be investigated.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Pennsylvania started shipping its frack water over the Ohio state lines, increasing the Ohio frack water burden by 400 percent since March 2011. Pennsylvania has permitted 7 injection drill sites while Ohio has 194.

Until April of last year Pennsylvania had been disposing of its drill waste “water” at treatment plants. But the treatment process didn’t remove all the chemicals and they escape into the groundwater. Now, much of that frack water is trucked over the Ohio state line and injected into the ground.

A city official of Hubbard Township, a mile from the Ohio-Pennsylvania border says, “It’s too toxic to discharge into the ground in Pennsylvania, but it’s OK to discharge into the ground in Ohio.”

And now it seems that practice may be causing earthquakes in an area that was seismically stable.

Michael C. Hansen, state geologist and coordinator of the Ohio Seismic Network says there is “little doubt” the quakes are related to injection well operations.

Geologists have long suspected that injecting liquids into underground rock formations can trigger earthquakes along fault lines because the liquids allow rock to flow more easily past each other. When rocks slide, the earth quakes.

For many, 2011 was the year of Steve Jobs. His bright, creative light went dark. His legacy of innovation and creativity lives on in the products of Apple and the people who work there. But his reach extends much further. Political scientists, business gurus and pop culture junkies are still calculating exactly how big of an impact Jobs had on shaping modern society. And despite his death, I don’t think he’s quite done yet.

Certainly, no one would argue that Steve Jobs made personal computing much more personal. The cold, hard, immutable technology became warm, brightly colored and comforting under the watchful eye of Jobs and his creative team.

Perhaps the greatest gift Steve Jobs left us all was the ability to recognize how important art and creativity is to fostering innovation and solving technological challenges.

No one agrees with that more than Harvey White, the cofounder of QUALCOMM and former CEO of Leap Wireless International, a cellphone company on the cutting edge of technology development. Familiar with the education jargon Science, Technology, Engineering, Math or STEM he felt compelled to add an A for Arts.

At a San Diego economic development meeting last year, White said, “We simply cannot compete in the new economy unless we do something now about creativity and innovation.”

He and many others view an infusion of art as a means to preserve America’s advantage in the future.

"It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning unexpected findings of science." - Carl Sagan. Painting by Pat Linse

After all, Steve Jobs and Apple demonstrated that infusing sleek art and design elements into technology is the formula for great success and untold riches.

Former U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley predicts that the jobs in greatest demand in the future don’t yet exist. In fact, he says they will require workers to use technologies that have not yet been invented to solve problems that we don’t yet even know are problems.

After all, Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

In addition to technical know-how, many of these challenges will require fresh, creative and artistic solutions.

Both former President George W. Bush and President Obama have called for strong investment in our nation’s education system, especially when it comes to STEM fields. But art is conspicuously absent from the discussion.

President Bush authorized the STEM initiative for Science Technology Engineering and Math. And with it came a $151 million infusion of federal dollars to help students earn a bachelor’s degree, math and science teachers to get teaching credentials. It also provides additional money to help push Kindergarten through 12th Grade math and science curricula to better prepare students for college.

President Obama reauthorized the America COMPETES Act in 2010 and added his own initiatives including Educate to Innovate and Race to the Top, calling for a renewed focus on STEM education. As a result, STEM centers are popping up all over the country. STEM seems to be on everyone’s lips and a future without proper STEM preparation is viewed as a dark time, perhaps even the death knell of the U.S. leadership.

However, many global economists recognize that a more well-rounded education that includes STEM plus art and music is the direction the U.S. should head. Most analysts agree that growing a “creative and innovative” economy represents America’s best chance to stay competitive in the global knowledge economy.

Journalist Jonah Lehrer says that science needs to find a place for the arts. A STEAM advocate himself, he believes that the best science begins with a scientist imagining something — an idea, a universal truth — long before it can be experimentally proven. He says science often relies on metaphor.

STEM to STEAM

In the 1920s physicist Niels Bohr was studying the radiation given off by electrons. At this point in history, the classical model held that atoms were like miniature solar systems with the nucleus acting as the sun while electron planets whirred around it in orbit.

While analyzing the radiation emitted by electrons, Bohr realized that the mini solar system idea didn’t hold up. In fact, what he learned about electron behavior seemed to defy every conventional explanation. At the time he said, “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.” In this case as in many others ordinary words couldn’t accurately capture the data.

Lehrer says, “Science needed a new metaphor.” Bohr was an avid fan of Picasso and loved the the deconstructed cubist art of the time. He was quickly learning that the atomic world was much more abstract than science would admit at the time. Lehrer says, “For Bohr, the allure of cubism was that it shattered the certainty of the object.”

Within the same time period, Louis de Broglie discovered that electrons could be either particles or waves. Thinking like a subjective artist, Bohr thought that which form they took depended how you looked at them.

Lehrer says, “This meant that electrons weren’t like little planets at all. Instead, they were like one of Picasso’s deconstructed guitars, a blur of brushstrokes that only made sense once you stared at it. The art that looked so strange was actually telling the truth.”

The students and instructors at the Rhode Island School of Design understand this principle all too well. In January the National Science Foundation and the renowned art school brought together over 60 leaders in science, creative information technology, engineering, art & design, math and education research to examine and develop strategies for enhancing STEM education through the integration of art and design.

With creative energy and structure, this collaboration is turning STEM to STEAM.

John Maeda, the president of RISD says, “When policymakers today talk about education and reform, it’s all about the STEM subjects. It’s about convergent thinking – problem solving by breaking it down. Instead, a divergent thinker takes an idea and looks to expand it, and to find new diverse ways to connect it.”

In June, Representative James Langevin (D-RI) heard those words as he submitted a House Resolution to add Art to existing STEM initiatives in federal agencies. In part the bill says, “Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that adding art and design into Federal programs that target the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields encourages innovation and economic growth in the United States.”

Stephen Lane is the CEO of Ximedica, a company that develops medical products and services. But the company began at RISD with a base in fine arts and industrial design. Lane says many major companies started as art companies but became design-driven enterprises.

Lane believes that STEM enables but that design is what really drives innovation. He says, “My kids didn’t grow up in grade school saying I want to become a technical sound engineer. They grew up saying, I want to be a rock star.” He believes art and design are the capture points and where students must be engaged.

Invoking the memory of Steve Jobs, Lane says, “Those are the people who are truly changing the dynamic, meaningfully, impatiently and consistently over time.”

Steve Jobs Shows Apple's Sweet Spot at iPad Launch, 2010.

Steve Jobs told Walter Isaacson in his biography Steve Jobs, “Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place.”

Lehrer says at first glimpse science, in particular, physics may seem far removed from the subjective nature of the arts. But he says, “This science continually insists that our most basic intuitions about reality are actually illusions, a sad myth of the senses.”

It’s true that physics theories are extracted from rather arcane equations and the subatomic debris of supercolliders. But Lehrer suggests that just as artists rely on the imagination physics actually exceeds the imagination. He paraphrases Shakespear’s Hamlet, “there are more things in heaven and earth—dark matter, quarks, black holes—than could ever be dreamt up. A universe this strange could only be discovered.”

Richard Feynman, the father of nanotechnology famously said, “Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.”

To find the ingenious within us all as Jobs did, we must focus our strength and energy on the critical intersection point of the arts and sciences. Science is art. Art is science. And both are interdependently woven into the fabric of human existence. They are inextricably linked and for that reason, Steve Jobs’ legacy will likely be that of one of the most visible visionaries to embrace the STEM to STEAM movement and without ever realizing it.

If it’s December it’s time to count the birds. For 112 years the National Audubon Society has been documenting the avian world with its annual Christmas Bird Count. The oldest citizen science (and longest running) project now utilizes the bird-spotting expertise of over 60,000 volunteers from around the country.

The task is simple. Go outside and count birds. Then add your observations the massive bird database, doing your part for science.

In Vermont, the annual Christmas bird count is a time to spot snowy owls and other winter rarities. But for biologist Kent McFarland from the Vermont Center for Ecostudies it’s more about familiar favorites like the tufted titmouse.

He says, “I’m really into whats going on over time with the common birds.”

Tufted Titmouse Forages in the Snow

He says, “The tufted titmouse is giving us an indicator here that yeah there is stuff going on across the landscape.”

The Audubon Society has been tracking the species of bird off and on since 1927 so there is a reliable dataset over a long period of time.

McFarland says, “I knew it was going to be an interesting bird to talk about.”

The annual Christmas count continues through January 5. So if you like birds or are looking for a fun family activity, head outside and start counting birds. Taking time to stop and watch the birds is a great way to appreciate nature this Holiday season.

NOTE: There is a $5 fee to participate in the Christmas Bird Count for all field participants aged 19 or older.

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.

It’s almost Christmas and the value of the gifts of the Three Wise Men is on the rise. For those not remembering the Nativity story the Three Wise Men brought three items, gold, frankincense and myrrh to the birth of baby Jesus. Quite valuable way back when, the three items are still quite rare today.

Boswellia Tree Hangs in the Balance

Dutch forest ecologist Frank Bongers is trying to preserve the fast-disappearing tree that produces frankincense, a tree highly adapted to survive the harsh conditions in Ethiopia. But he says that fires, human encroachment and species are overpowering the dry-land ecosystems.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources includes 10 Boswellia tree species on its Red List of Threatened Species. Eight are listed as vulnerable to extinction.

And Dr. Bongers thinks that the frankincense tree could be 90 percent wiped out in the next 50 years.

He says, “This is a rather alarming message for the incense industry and conservation organizations.”

While frankincense isn’t a major commodity, about 2,500 tons of the Christmas ingredient are purchased in the U.S., Europe, North Africa and China every year.

Bongers is studying the tree’s genetics to better understand its diversity as a means to save it from extinction. One suggestion he has is to stop tapping the tree for its sap after five years.

In another frankincense tree study five years ago, scientists discovered that taking resin from Boswellia trees for frankincense caused them to produce one-third the number of seeds as trees that had never been tapped.

He says, “There’s not a shortage of frankincense, but there’s no regeneration of the forests. There are no young trees anymore.” He also suggests growing saplings in nurseries and planting them where they are safe from fire and animal grazing.

While it would be sad to lose an entire tree species to extinction, Christmas will still have gold and myrrh.

Just a couple of weeks after announcing the discovery of a planet within a distant solar system that is orbiting in what astronomers called the habitable zone for life, another exciting announcement adds two more confirmed planets to the list.

Since its launch in 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope has been scanning hundreds of thousands of distant stars, looking for the slightest wobble, which would indicate the gravitational pull of planets as they orbit their sun. The Kepler team has been studying and investigating dozens of Earth-like candidates, including two around Kepler 20 in the constellation Lyra.

The star Kepler 20 houses two planets nearby that are Earth-like in size. One is just three percent larger in diameter than Earth and the other is nine-tenths the size of Earth. But unlike the previous discovery of Kepler 22b — a watery world with a temperature of about 72 degrees — these are rocky planets with scorching temperatures too hot for any life we can imagine.

They are situated in a tightly packed planet pile with three other known planets, all very near the host star. Kepler-20e has an orbit of six days, while Kepler-20f has an orbit of 19.6 days.

Kepler 20e and Kepler 20f are the closest sized planets to Earth discovered to date. The confirmation of these two planets is significant because planets the size of Earth are just hard to find and this shows that Kepler is up to the task. This gives scientists hope that they will find life outside of our solar system.

Kepler 20e and Kepler 20f Compared to Earth and Venus

It may be a bacteria, mold or single-celled life form but astrobiologists are encouraged by this news.

Linda Elkins-Tanton, who studies planetary formation at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington says the larger of the two planets, Kepler-20f, is especially intriguing. She says, “If it was formed with water, which I think is possible, it could have been habitable in the past.”

Alan Boss, also an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution says science would be remiss not to look for life-inhabiting planets outside of our solar system. He says, “That does not mean that we necessarily think that only exact Earth twins could be inhabited, just that we at least had better be able to find Earth twins, and then along the way we will be certain to uncover all sorts of other types of exoplanets that should be habitable, and perhaps even inhabited.”

Francois Fressin is the lead author of the paper announcing the discovery which appears in the journal Nature. He says though the planets are about the right size they are definitely not right for life. Kepler 20e is about 1,400 degrees F while Kepler 20f is 800 degrees.

In his paper, he writes, “Theoretical considerations imply that these planets are rocky, with a composition of iron and silicate.” And he notes, “The outer planet could have developed a thick water vapour atmosphere.”

Boss puts this discovery and the Kepler 22b discovery a couple of weeks ago in perspective as he tells ABC News, “In less than 20 years, we have gone from not knowing if any other planets exist in the universe, to being able to look out at the night sky and realize that essentially any star we can see has at least one planet, and a good number of those are likely to be habitable.”

He adds, “That is a revelation that has not yet dawned on the general public, and even astronomers are having their minds blown when they think about it.”

Just ten years ago University of Washington astronomers Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee created the Rare Earth hypothesis, which suggested that the conditions for life are so particular that for us to find any sign of life elsewhere would be nearly impossible. In that time, astronomy as a whole has revised that theory.

But Ward and Brownlee’s also posited the idea of a habitable Goldilocks zone around a star which is neither too hot nor too cold and where the conditions for life are just right. That planet must orbit its star at a distance similar to that of Earth or Kepler 22b.

So far Kepler has found 54 planets that lie in the habitable zone around distant stars. But the team is backlogged with another 2,000 probable planets that await further study.

Comet Lovejoy has Close Encounter with the Sun

The comet was discovered earlier this month by an Australian amateur astronomer, named Terry Lovejoy. He spotted the comet, first called Kreutz sungrazing Comet C/2011, in broad daylight with his Celestron C8 telescope and a Canon camera.

This is the first time since the 1970s that a ground-based telescope has spotted a comet of this class. Thanks to Lovejoy’s observations space-based telescopes could be trained to watch what scientists thought was going to be the demise of the newly discovered comet.

It was set to be a routine comet suicide. Astronomers had watched this happen 2,000 times before and no comet had ever survived a brush with the broiling sun. They thought that the comet would melt away on December 15 when it entered a zone around the sun where temperatures reach several million degrees.

NASA had a front row seat, with telescopes pointed at Comet Lovejoy as it made its final solar approach. First astronomers reported they saw the sun’s corona “wiggle” as the comet got close to the sun.

Karl Battams tells the Associated Press, “I was delighted when I saw it go into the sun.” It’s quite a treat to witness a relatively infrequent event like this live. But he says, “I was astounded when I saw something re-emerge.”

Comet Lovejoy was a shadow of its former millions of tons self. Dean Pesnell, a NASA scientists who tracked the comet’s hair-raising journey says, “It looks like the tail broke off and is stuck” in the sun’s magnetic field. The comet spent more than an hour in the sun’s grip.

The comet came within 90,000 miles of the sun and didn’t disappear, leaving astronomers scratching their heads and scientists at NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory excited to study the phenomenon.

Some say to survive the dirty snowball was much bigger than originally thought and others say the comet may have a rocky core.

Pesnell equates this event with an ice cube being placed on a hot barbeque grill. He says this comet is related to a comet that buzzed Earth back in 1106.

After surviving its perilous trip to the sun, it now continues to make its wide orbital swing through the solar system. Astronomers think it’ll be another 800 or 900 years before it gets close enough to the sun again. That’s plenty of time for it to build back up and regrow its missing tail.

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.’”

Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Or an adult human for that matter. New research from England shows that not only can we learn throughout our lives but that learning can change the structure of our brains as well.

Eleanor Maguire from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London took adults training for the toughest taxi job and watched how their brains changed as they learned the ins and outs of London over four years.

For those that don’t know, The Knowledge is the test given to all taxi drivers in London who are licensed to drive the famous black cabs. But this is no ordinary test. It is perhaps the biggest spatial memory test available.

To get a taxi license to drive in all of London, drivers must know all 25,000 streets within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross, the spot known as the center of London. They must also know the locations of 20,000 landmarks and know the shortest routes to get from point to point.

According to Dr. Maguire’s research all of this acquired knowledge increases the size of the hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with memory.

Professor Maguire and her colleague Dr. Katherine Woollett followed a group of 79 trainee taxi drivers and 31 controls (non-taxi drivers). Periodically they took snapshots of their brain structure over time using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and studying their performance on certain memory tasks.

Only 39 of the group passed the tests and went on to qualify as taxi drivers, which is about the norm for given the difficulty of The Knowledge.

By looking at the structure of the brain, the neuroscientists saw remarkable changes in the brain structure of the 39 who passed the taxi driver test. They saw an increase in grey matter — the nerve cells in the brain where processing takes place — in the posterior hippocampus.

Dr. Maguire says, “The human brain remains ‘plastic’, even in adult life, allowing it to adapt when we learn new tasks.”

But The Knowledge may come at a price. Besides the 3-4-year study period where prospective drivers say they lost touch with friends, ignored holidays and had no social life, this research which appears in the journal Current Biology found that though at the end of the training, those who pass The Knowledge have an imprinted map of London in their heads, they tend to have a weaker complex visual memory.

This study supports increasing evidence that learning can help our brains grow even into adulthood. This is encouraging news for lifelong learning and the potential for rehabilitation after brain damage.

2011 was a banner year for weather. It was cold, wet, dry and hot, depending what part of the country you inhabit. And according to new analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration there were 12 weather events that each cost over $1 billion, setting a new record.

Jack Hayes, head of the National Weather Service says in his 40-year weather career he’s never seen a year quite like 2011, where floods, wildfires, tornadoes and blizzards all set records.

Here are the disasters that we’ll be talking about for years.

Billion-dollar disasters of 2011 (as of Dec. 7, 2011), courtesy of NOAA

Groundhog Day blizzard » January 29-February 3, 2011

Midwest/Southeast tornadoes » April 4-5, 2011

Southeast/Midwest tornadoes » April 8-11, 2011

Midwest/Southeast tornadoes » April 14-16, 2011

Southeast/Ohio Valley/Midwest tornadoes » April 25-28, 2011

Midwest/Southeast tornadoes » May 22-27, 2011

Midwest/Southeast tornadoes and severe weather » June 18-22, 2011

Southern Plains/Southwest drought and heatwave » Spring-Fall, 2011

Mississippi River flooding » Spring-Summer, 2011

Upper Midwest flooding » Summer 2011

Hurricane Irene » August 20-29, 2011

Texas, New Mexico, Arizona wildfires » Spring-Fall 2011

Wallow Fire in Arizona, June 2011

Hurricane Irene blew up the eastern seaboard in late August, causing at least $7.3 billion in damage and killing 45 people.

Flooding in the upper Midwest along the Missouri and Souris rivers during the summer caused more than $2 billion in damaged and left at least five people died.

Gas Station Stays Dry during Record Flooding in Minot, ND

Flooding along the Mississippi River in spring and summer brought losses there between $3 billion and $4 billion and killed at least two people .

Drought and heat wave in the southern plains and Southwest from spring to fall cost the region $10 billion.

Buoy Sites High and Dry in Benbrook Lake, Texas

Tornadoes and severe storms in June tore through the Midwest and Southeast, causing at least $1.3 billion in damage and killing at least three people.

A tornado outbreak in the Southeast and Ohio Valley in late April left 321 people dead and caused $10.2 billion in damage.

Another string of tornadoes in the Midwest and Southeast in mid April killed 38 people and left a $2.1 billion path of destruction.

Tornado Leaves Joplin, MO in Ruin, May 2011

Just days later another set of twisters flattened parts of the Southeast and Midwest, causing over $2.2 billion in damage.

Another tornado outbreak in the Midwest and Southeast in May killed 177 people and caused more than $9.1 billion in damage.

The first big weather event of 2011 was the Groundshog Day blizzard, also known as Snopocalypse. It killed 36 people and caused more than $1.8 billion in damage.

Groundhog's Day Blizzard Ground Chicago to a Halt

Then there was the pre-Halloween blizzard that paralyzed cities, killed 27 people and caused $3 billion in damage.

And there are still a few weeks to go in the year before all the totals can be calculated.

NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco told scientists at the American Geophysical Union meeting this week that despite being a record-breaking year for weather disasters, 2011 was not an aberration.

She says, “What we are seeing this year is not just an anomalous year, but a harbinger of things to come for at least a subset of those extreme events that we are tallying.”

Dr. Lubchenco believes that some of the increase in frequency appears to be driven by climate change.

One of the largest reinsurance companies, Munich Re, agrees. In a 2010 report the company said, “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change.”

Hurricane Irene Huffed and Puffed up the East Coast in August

But 2011 was also a La Nina year, which meant that weather patterns were cooler and wetter than average (except where La Nina made it hotter and drier.) That could explain it right? Not quite.

And, as for the high cost of damage. More people are living in populated areas so when a weather disaster hits it affects more people.

But that doesn’t explain away the appearance of more extreme weather events. But is climate change responsible for this extreme weather?

Prevailing scientific wisdom says that you can’t attribute a single event to climate change.

Kevin Trenberth, the head of the climate analysis division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research says, “But there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago.

NOAA Tracks Billion Dollar Weather Disasters 1980-2011

In the last 30 years the amount of water in the atmosphere has increased by about four percent. Dr. Trenberth says that seemingly small increase “invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change.”

Last year, he told the New York Times, “It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both.”

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.”

Yves “Jetman” Rossy is a Swiss aviator and engineer who has created personalize jet flight. In 2008 he became the first person to fly independently without the aid of an airplane. He just had a fixed wing attached to his back.

Jetman, Yves Rossy Soars above The Alps

He’s been perfecting his airplane-less wing for 15 years and since 2010 has been a regular sight high above the Swiss Alps. Earlier this year he made news by flying himself across the Grand Canyon.

Jetman in Formation with Breitling Jet Team

Before attempting his latest stunt he returned from the Abu Dhabi Science Festival where he gave a talk and soared over the United Arab Emirates, inspiring a new generation of jet enthusiasts.

After his exhilarating run with the jet planes recently, Rossy told CNN, “Hey, I’m flying almost naked with nothing. But I am with jets and fast.” And he describes his experience as, “Like unreal.”

Jetman Races Two Fighter Jets

For his latest feat he dropped from a helicopter and then turned on his jets to zip into formation with the larger jets. But in the past he has begun his flights from other airplanes and even a hot air balloon.

Jetman Leads the Flight Formation

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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.
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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.

Two years ago the private e-mails of one of the top climate change research centers were stolen and published online. The timing was such that it occurred just before the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009. Now, just two weeks before the Durban, South Africa Climate Summit, the hackers have released a new batch of old e-mails.

But this time the culprits, who authorities have failed to catch, left a message.

It says, “Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day.”

“Every day nearly 16.000 children die from hunger and related causes.”

“One dollar can save a life” — the opposite must also be true.

“Poverty is a death sentence.”

“Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize
greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels.”

Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on
hiding the decline.

This archive contains some 5.000 emails picked from keyword searches. A few
remarks and redactions are marked with triple brackets.

The rest, some 220.000, are encrypted for various reasons. We are not planning
to publicly release the passphrase.

We could not read every one, but tried to cover the most relevant topics such
as…

And unlike last time, the climate scientists accused of scientific misconduct and facilitating a conspiracy surrounding manmade global warming are striking back.

University of East Anglia climatologist Phil Jones, left, and University of East Anglia vice-chancellor Edward Acton address the media during a news conference, London, Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2011. Photo: Raphael Satter / AP

Phil Jones, the man at the center of the 2009 investigation who was cleared of wrongdoing after being investigated for manipulating data and other scientific misconduct, held a news conference following the pre-Thanksgiving leak of 5,000 additional e-mails, dating between 2003 and 2009.

Dr. Jones, who runs the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in England, says his heart did sink a bit when he heard there was a new batch of e-mails released on November 22.

So far he says he hasn’t been embarrassed by any of the newly released e-mails but few new tidbits of his private discussions with colleagues have come out yet in what he says are “frank and honest discussions between scientists.” Although much larger than the last batch, Jones says these are still heavily cherry-picked e-mails.

UEA Vice-Chancellor Edward Acton who stood next to Jones at the press conference 24 hours after the latest release says, “Different phrases, same issues.” He predicted much less of a storm about an attempt to revive the furor over “Climategate” again, saysing, “There’s so much deja vu about it.”

In 2009, a hacker broke into the servers at the Climate Research Unit and downloaded untold thousands of e-mails between sent among climate researchers. Just before the Copenhagen Climate Summit, where the world’s nations were to draft a new global treaty to reduce carbon emissions, the e-mails appeared, casting a pall over the climate summit. Over 1,000 e-mails chronicled some nasty internal debates over minute aspects of climate science. It led to several investigations which independently concluded that scientists had committed no wrongdoing.

The University of East Anglia did get its knuckles rapped for its closed-door policy regarding data sharing and access to information. It has since changed its policies to be much more open.

Andrew Watson, a carbon-cycle scientist at UEA, said: “What comes across to me is that climate scientists are a diverse, complex and argumentative bunch, much like any other group of people.”

Now the hacker, who goes by the online handle FOIA 2011, has returned, claiming to still have 220,000 more e-mails that were stolen during the 2009 server breach. He or she has had two years to look them over and this latest batch appears to have a lot of repeats from the first release, including the infamous “hide the decline” phrase which taken out of context gave climate skeptics some fuel to fire the false debate a little longer.

Over at the Union of Concerned Scientists the director of the scientific integrity program says this latest attempt to disrupt U.N. climate talks and create doubt in the minds of the public about global warming merits a collective yawn.

Francesca Griffo says, “It’s time to condemn the real perpetrators in this story: the hackers who stole and released university property. The hackers and their allies are resorting to desperate measures to distract the public when our focus should be on how to respond to climate change.”

The Norfolk Police who have been handling this case view the hack as a criminal act too. A police spokesman tells BBC’s Richard Black that “the contents [of the new release] will be of interest to our investigation which is ongoing”. Black also got a hold of a document that shows just how much the police have spent on this investigation in the last 12 months.

He says, “they have spent precisely £5,649.09 on the investigation.” And, all but £80.05 was spent back in February. No work has been included on invoices in the last six months. Black adds, “Of all the figures surrounding the current story, that is perhaps the one that most merits further interrogation.”

But it’s not just scientists who are concerned over the slow progress of this investigation. U.S. Representative Ed Markey (D-MA) says in a statement released right after the new batch of CRU e-mails, “If this happened surrounding nuclear arms talks, we would have the full force of the Western world’s intelligence community pursuing the perpetrators. And yet, with the stability of our climate hanging in the balance with these international climate treaty negotiations, these hackers and their supporters are still on the loose. It is time to bring them to justice.”

But for the moment, Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa and the other scientists who were vilified for their role in “Climategate” have the upper hand. The science which has been thoroughly vetted since the first release of e-mails and has proven that there is no conspiracy to manipulate data in favor of global warming and though they disagree — and often hotly — the scientists do not disagree about the overall trend the planet is experiencing — the world is getting warmer over time and human activity is largely the cause.

On Saturday, a $2 billion science project will begin what NASA is calling a flagship mission to Mars to see if the red planet is capable of sustaining microbial life.

Equipped with 17 cameras, an on-board science lab, the six-wheeled rover named Curiosity will do what its predecessors Spirit and Opportunity failed to do — determine if there is liquid water on Mars that has the building blocks of life.

With the countdown at just over two days, team members are ready for launch. They say the robot-like rover will not be able to determine if there is life on Mars, unless something jumps out in front of the camera once the rover has safely landed in what scientists believe could be a dry lake or sea bed.

The Mars Science Laboratory has four mission goals, including determining if life ever arose on Mars, characterizing the climate, understanding the geology and preparing for human exploration in the future.

The Curiosity rover has 10 science instruments to search for evidence about whether Mars ever had environments favorable for microbial life, including the chemical ingredients for life like carbon. The rover will use a laser to look inside rocks and release their gases so its spectrometer can analyze and send the data back to Earth.

Gale Crater, Where Curiosity Will Land

While Curiosity begins where Spirit and Opportunity left off, a second Mars space orbiter nicknamed MAVEN will join the new roving science lab in 2014 to take upper atmosphere samples in an effort to understand what caused the Martian atmosphere -and water- to be lost to space, making the climate increasingly inhospitable for life.

Paul Mahaffy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center says, “The ultimate driver for these missions is the question, did Mars ever have life? Did microbial life ever originate on Mars, and what happened to it as the planet changed? Did it just go extinct, or did it go underground, where it would be protected from space radiation and temperatures might be warm enough for liquid water?”

Curiosity will answer those questions.

For seven million years at least 80 ancient whale skeletons have been preserved in the high desert of Chile. Now a road project threatens the ancient burial ground. But developers of the new highway project have given scientists another month to remove and study as much of the area as they can.

Whale Fossils Lie Exposed Next to Pan American Highway

3D modelers and paleontologists from the Smithsonian have been on site in Chile trying to gather as much data as they can before the highway expansion project resumes in Copiapo near the city of Caldera in the northern part of Chile.

Site manager John Vega says, “In 15 days, we have had almost 15 whales. It really was a surprise. We didn’t expect to find so many fossils in one place.”

Overlapping Whale Fossils

Palaeontologist Sol Squire says, “The whale discovery is a discovery of global importance. There has never been a find of this size or diversity anywhere in the world, which is one of the very special parts of Atacama region.”

Smithsonian Team Stands Over Whale Fossil

Other groups of prehistoric whales have been found together in Peru and Egypt, but the Chilean fossils stand out for their staggering number and beautifully preserved bones. Over 20 of the 80 skeletons are nearly intact, something that is crucial for new research and to determine how the animals all ended up in the same area.

That is the top question on the mind of Suarez, the director of the local Paleontological Museum in nearby Caldera. He is focused on how the this group of aquatic animals which died between two and seven million years ago wound up over 1,200 feet above sea level on top of a desert hill, about 40 miles from the nearest beach.

In addition to ancient whales, the team found an extinct aquatic sloth, an ancient seabird with a wingspan of over 17 feet, and the fossil remains of an unusual tusked dolphin that had previously been unearthed only in Peru.

First Whale Fossil Unearthed in August 2010

A vertebrate paleontologist at Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia told the Associate Press that the well-preserved and relatively complete fossil bed provides a “rare combination in paleontology and one that will likely shed light on many facets of the ecology and evolution of these extinct species.”

Materials scientists have been inspired by human architectural feats like the Golden Gate Bridge and the Eiffel Tower which demonstrate light-weight structures relative to their size. After applying similar architectural principles at the micro and nano scales, they have have created the lightest material on Earth.

Ultralight metallic micro-lattices are so light that a block of them can balance on the top of a dandelion without crushing the delicate seeds. Engineers at University of California, Irvine, Cal Tech and HRL Laboratories have created a material that is 99.99 percent air and 100 times lighter than styrofoam.

According to a spokesman for HRL Laboratories, a research venture owned by General Motors and Boeing, this new material redefines the limits of lightweight materials because of its unique micro-lattice cellular architecture, which uses an innovative fabrication process developed by HRL senior scientist Alan Jacobsen.

And it gets even stronger when it is compressed. Scientists discovered that it’s not the nickel that gives the material its strength but its shape. The lattice structure gets stronger as it is compressed to half of its size.

Lorenzo Valdevit says, “Materials actually get stronger as the dimensions are reduced to the nanoscale.”

And the ultralight metallic micro-lattice utilizes a tube within tube technique using lasers to coat plastics in metal and then remove the polymer, leaving a metal tube with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair. The tiny hollow tubes are made of nickel-phosphorous and are angled to connect at nodes, forming repeating, asterisklike unit cells in three dimensions.

This metal nano-mesh is also incredibly resilient. If you’ve ever tried to recover metal’s shape after bending it or squishing it, you know it is nearly impossible. Yet, this new material can recover 98 percent of its shape after being reduced to 50 percent compression. That’s remarkable.

The collaborators on the project are looking at all sorts of applications for this new nano-mesh. They include thermal insulation, battery electrodes, catalyst supports, and acoustic, vibration, or shock energy damping. However, since the grant money to do this project came from the Defense Advanced Research Agency it is more likely that the material — which will be very costly to make — will be directed toward military applications like lightweight combat vehicles, space travel and combat armor.

Until the metallic micro-lattice was invented, aerogels were the lightest solid material on Earth. But they had some engineering flaws because when gas was used to replace the liquid in the structure the chaotic architecture left the aerogel less sturdy than the original parent material.

The researchers are now looking at making micro-lattices from other materials including, diamond, polymers and ceramics. They say they should be able to make lattices from any thin-film material.

The paper appears in the current issue of the journal Science.

After a year of record precipitation in some parts of the country and blistering drought in others, everyone was hoping that this would be a neutral year. But weather forecasters show that a second La Nina began forming in August and could be at least as severe as last year.

Winter 2012 Precipitation Forecast

For those who floated to work on flooded Vermont streets or who dug their cars out of ten-foot snowdrifts, another record-breaking weather year is not necessarily better. And in drought-ravaged Texas where fires burned much of 2011, more is definitely bad news.

It is rare but not unheard of for their to be two La Ninas in a row. When La Ninas come in back-to-back years, the second has been weaker than the first in the three of the five cases since 1950. But the National Centers for Environmental Prediction says the current La Nina may become as strong as last year’s.

La Nina forms when cooler than normal temperatures are found in the sea surface of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. For the first two weeks of November, the mean temperature was almost one degree Celsius below normal, indicating a weak to moderate La Nina on the horizon.

La Nina tends to push the U.S. storm track further north, creating flooding in the northern plains and drought in the south.

In the month since the U.S. Climate Prediction Center issued its first report about this years El Nino Southern Ocscillation (ENSO) state, La Nina has already strengthened. the center says that the new La Nina will continue to strengthen into 2012. But other factors will determine what weather you experience at your house.

Winter 2012 Temperature Forecast

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is setting up with warm water in the central and northern Pacific with cool water pooling off the coast of Alaska and Canada. This is the same pattern as last fall. Based on that, forecasters are comfortable saying that there will be frequent cold and wet storms in the western half of the country.

But the Arctic Oscillation presents a weather wild card that scientists struggle to predict. The AO changes multiple times per winter fluctuating between positive and negative. A strong weak AO can overpower a warm El Nino and create a snowy winter in the Mid Atlantic. Last year the AO was predominately negative and the same is expected for this year.

The World Meteorological Organization says that expansion and contraction of cold air over the North Pole “could produce dramatic short-term swings in temperatures this winter.”

La Ninas occur every three to five years and last from nine to 12 months.

NASA wants You! Do you have what it takes to be an astronaut? That’s the question NASA is asking the American public this week.The space agency is seeking a new crop of astronauts and put out a splashy public call for the 9-15 available jobs. To qualify applicants must possess a bachelor’s degree in engineering, biology, physical science or math. And a master’s or doctorate is preferred.

All candidates must be English speakers who are fluent in Russian because right now the U.S. is without a manned space program. It is working with private industry to stay in the space race but works closely with Russia to send astronauts to the International Space Station.

The recruits that NASA acquires now may be in the running to be the first people ever to set foot on Mars sometime in the 2020s, according to the NASA astronaut recruitment video.

How much does an astronaut make? $64,724.00 to $141,715.00 according to the astronaut job posting at USAjobs.gov.

Here’s the full recruitment video for the 2013 astronaut candidate class. Applications will be accepted now through January 27, 2012.

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.

It turns out the Dead Sea isn’t so dead after all. Microscopic life is thriving in the super salty environment, according to new findings by a German and Israeli team of scientists. They found new species of life in freshwater fissures in the seafloor.

Fresh, bubbling water containing the ingredients to support life in harsh environments has revealed new types of microorganisms never before seen. Scientists aren’t sure if the organisms have adapted to the salty environment or to the freshwater. Their research in that area is just beginning.

Danny Lonescu from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Germany led a team of ten researchers who camped along the shores of the Dead Sea and did daily dives to locate the source of freshwater discharge.

They noticed ripples near shore indicating that something was bubbling up. When they dove to investigate they found a set of springs. After analyzing the water in a makeshift lab, they found micro bits of life, which was thought to be impossible in the Dead Sea. Even during the dives, the high salt content in the water burned the divers and forced them to take extra precautions. Prevailing scientific wisdom says that no life can thrive in this harsh, salty environment.

Since the 1930s scientists knew about freshwater springs and algae in the Dead Sea but the conditions made it almost impossible for scientific divers. So few have been able to see what lurks below the surface until now.

Christian Lott, a biologist and underwater photographer on the team says, “The interesting thing is normally the Dead Sea is thought to be dead… but here we have a huge variety of life forms that can exist in [these] adverse conditions.”

He marvels at hardiness of the extremophiles that inhabit the Dead Sea.

Dr. Lott says, “After a week of diving we get burns, we get bruises, our skin is getting bad and these bugs just live right there – they love it, it’s heaven for them.”

Just as the scientists have made this discovery, they are worried that evaporation of the land-locked sea will spoil their find. Every year the Dead Sea recedes by about 3.3 feet.

Dive with Christian Lott into the Dead Sea, the lowest point on Earth.

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.

The title of his latest book is War of the Worldviews: Science vs. Spirituality. But Dr. Deepak Chopra admits that science and spirituality connected and shouldn’t be pitted against one another. He believes that both are critical to solving the big problems facing the world.

He says, “The scientific method is very precise but scientific human beings who lack a connection to the spirit will continue to create atom bombs, nuclear weapons and mechanized death and biological warfare, destruction of ecosystems and global warming.”

The book is designed as a point-counter-point discussion of God in science. Co-written with physicist Leonard Mlodinow, who is most well known for co-writing A Brief History of Time with Dr. Stephen Hawking, Chopra says the book is a primer about the beginning of the universe, evolution and how biology functions, all geared toward an audience who believes God is a necessary part of science.

Dr. Chopra, who is a medical doctor and neuro endocrinologist in addition to being a highly revered motivational speaker and spiritual leader, says that there are many things around us that science cannot yet answer.

He says, “Science cannot answer why there are laws. Science doesn’t say that God is a delusion. Science does not even at the moment understand what the human spirit or consciousness is. We’re having a conversation and discussing certain things and of course we need a brain to do that. But where is insight? Where is imagination? Where is creativity? Where is intuition? Where is intention? Where is free will? Science at the moment doesn’t address these questions.”

It sounds like a plot line from a fictional page turner. Locked inside a coded message is the politics and rituals of a secret society. The message is 105 pages long and contains a combination of Greek, Latin and abstract symbols.

This is not the latest novel from Dan Brown. This is a real document that has stymied code crackers since the document was unearthed in East Germany after the Cold War ended. Even that part sounds contrived.

But USC computer scientist Kevin Knight and two colleagues from Sweden (I can’t make this stuff up, really) applied some complex computer algorithms to solve the 250-year-old mystery. He, Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer transcribed the yellowing tome into a machine-readable version and then began work cracking the centuries-old code.

Facing Pages from the Copiale Cipher, A 105-page Book by a Secret Society

Even though Knight is no cryptographer he was able to crack the 75,000-character Copiale Cipher (PDF) by applying a statistical translation technique he uses to better translate languages.

The hardest code for computers to crack is definitely human speech. Companies are striving to figure out how to translate casual conversation into computer code which will allow us to talk to our smart devices without having to type, push a button or even touch the screen.

And they work toward this goal by applying their complicated math formulas to less tricky puzzles. Knight approaches language translation as a cryptographic problem, which he hopes can be used not only to improve human language translation but it could also be useful in translating languages that are not currently spoken by humans, including ancient languages and even animal communication.

To crack the Copiale Cipher, the team ran the whole thing through 80 languages and came up empty. Then they started isolating categories, thinking that perhaps they were the true code.

After a lot of automated trial and error they soon realized that the Roman symbols and Greek letters were part of a ruse placed deliberately to mislead the reader.

When they focused on the abstract symbols they recognized groupings and patterns. Then they began putting this new alphabet together. When they ran the whole cryptogram through a German language translator, words began to emerge. Then it all began to make sense.

Except that the document showed that this secret society had an unhealthy fixation on eyes. The members apparently participated in eye surgery, rituals involving eyeballs, plucking eyebrows and even ophthalmology.

Knight is now targeting other coded messages, including ciphers sent by the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer who sent taunting letters to the the media and has never been caught. Knight is also applying his computer-assisted codebreaking software to other famous unsolved codes such as the last section of Kryptos, an encrypted message carved into a granite sculpture on the grounds of CIA headquarters, and the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval document that has baffled professional cryptographers for decades.

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.”