The Great Beyond

Northern and Southern California have finally gotten their acts together and decided to quantify earthquake magnitudes in the state the same way.

For the past six years, the groups of scientists that collect seismic data for northern and southern California have been using slightly different ways to calculate a parameter called ML, or local magnitude. This is a minor problem because, um, the state is supposed to be working as one under the rubric of the California Integrated Seismic Network.

ML is actually the original magnitude scale as defined by Charles Richter and Beno Gutenberg in 1935. It quantifies magnitude as how much a tremor makes the needle on a seismograph jitter; a 1-centimeter jolt measured 100 kilometers away, for instance, means the quake must be magnitude 3. ML remains useful as one among many of the magnitude scales that have sprung up over the years.

Yet researchers in both halves of California have used slightly different ways to determine ML. It all adds up to a roughly 0.15-magnitude difference when looking at 100 earthquakes – so don't worry that some big quake will rip through San Francisco and get drastically underreported. Fixing the reporting difference is "more to unify the magnitude reporting in the state than anything else,” says Peggy Hellweg, operations manager for the seismology laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Southern California has finally gotten the new reporting system up and running in the past few weeks; Northern California is still working on implementing it.

Posted by Alex Witze
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What’s been on The Great Beyond this week...

Continue reading "Weekly round up" »

Posted by Nicola Jones
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The press seems to be finally picking up on news that NASA’s Mars Space Laboratory (MSL), designed to look at mineralogy on the red planet and hunt for signs of life, is in trouble.

AP reports that Mike Griffin, NASA Administrator, told a congressional hearing on 13 Feb that the heat shield on the craft’s rover will have to be redesigned, pushing costs up and possibly delaying the craft’s proposed 2009 launch. Interested parties picked up the copy (Mars Society; Space.com).

It seems surprising that NASA, of all organisations, can’t get a heat shield right (this one was originally modeled on the space shuttle, apparently).

Aviation Week were on the case at the time of the hearing, although they don’t put a price on the extra work, which AP says will be between $20 and $30 million.

Aviation Week also followed up with a bleak prediction about the spiralling cost of the mission, now expected to hit $2 billion.

Apart from that, there wasn’t much coverage between the hearing itself and the AP copy – perhaps because the news was overshadowed by the United States deciding to shoot down a spy satellite (Nature News).

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Reports this week announced that researchers have ‘solved the mystery’ of how Maya Blue was made (National Geographic News, New York Times), off the back of a paper published in the journal Antiquity. The vivid pigment, which was painted on human and other sacrifices, has been a focus of interest for decades. Although the main ingredients of the pigment – indigo and clay – have long been known (see this 1966 paper in Science), archaeologists have wondered about the details of how, when and where it was made.

The paper describes the study of a particular pot of incense in which researchers discovered flecks of clay and indigo. The slow-burning incense resin provided the heat needed to create the paint, and, according to LiveScience, might have been a key ingredient in binding the other ingredients together. The bowl was then chucked into a sinkhole thought to be a portal to the spirit world. The location and the incense suggest that “the production of the ancient Maya blue was based on the performance of the religious rituals” (The Chicago Tribune). Although the find may not be too surprising, the bowl appears to be the first artefact to show evidence of the pigment production process.

The recipe behind Maya Blue also made news in 2002 (National Geographic). That team patented a number of ‘Maya Blue’ recipes in 2006, including one that involved a combination of indigo, clay, and resin.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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China is considering scrapping its one-child policy (Reuters; Guardian report from their Beijing correspondent)

The policy, implemented in 1979 to combat overpopulation and accompanying environmental problems, has been variably enforced over the years, and extremely controversial, leading to discrimination against some sub-populations (including females).

There have been calls to scrap it before: in March 2007 some 30 delegates at the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference called on the government to abolish the one-child rule because "it creates social problems and personality disorders in young people." (AsiaNews) An aging population, increasing gender bias, and changing attitudes to family size (apparently most couples now want fewer than 2 children anyway, Reuters) have been posited as reasons for change.

The latest reports originate with comments by family planning chief Zhao Baige, who told reporters she wanted an "incremental" change in the policy (BBC). CNSNews suggests the conversation has been spurred by increased attention on Chinese human rights in the run-up to the Olympics there.

China’s media carries a related story about how the negative population growth seen in Shanghai since 1993 looks set to switch over to positive growth soon (Xinhua; Shanghai Daily). This is because the single-child generation is growing up, and now having children of their own: by the current rules, if a man and woman are both the single child in their families, they are allowed to have two babies.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Over on Nature Reports Stem Cells, there’s a blog posting about a company’s recent claim that they can reprogramme adult cells into embryonic-like stem cells, without the viral vectors normally used to do this. This should make the cells less likely to cause cancer: quite a big deal in terms of using such cells in future therapies. But the company hasn’t published their results (just a press release), so it’s unclear exactly what they’ve done or what to make of it. Yet.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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National Geographic has announced the winner of their planet-naming mnemonic competition. Ten year old Maryn Smith’s winning entry to remember the ‘newly designated planets’ (here listed as Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Eris) is: My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants.

This cutesy story got a smattering of pick up from the wire story by AP (CNN; FOX, etc).

But wait a minute – that’s 11 planets. I seem to recall that there are, in fact, just eight planets in our Solar System, following an enormous hoo-ha about the expulsion of Pluto from the planet list. According to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), Pluto is a ‘dwarf planet’, distinct from planets, as are Ceres and Eris. Although the debate still rages.

So this is a mnemonic of the 8 planets AND the 3 dwarves. Which is nice. But the IAU may award dwarf status to quite a few other bodies in the Solar System sometime soon. Last time we wrote about this at least one astronomer was pushing for 4 dwarves. And there are some 70 to 2,000 potential contenders for dwarf planet status. Are we going to see new mnemonics for those? They will be tongue twisters in the extreme.

Read further into the story and you’ll see that the competition was linked to a new National Geographic book. “Maryn's Aladdin-inspired phrase will appear in the National Geographic children's book 11 Planets: A New View of the Solar System, written by Harvard University physicist David Aguilar,” says The Great Falls Tribune. Their lengthy story covers into the ten-year-old’s classmates' entries in great depth, with nary a mention of the fierce debate about what constitutes a planet. It claims that “A new name-remembering aid was needed since Pluto was reduced to a dwarf planet and Ceres and Eris were upgraded to planet status.” Hmm.

Of course the IAU doesn’t necessarily get the final say on what kids and their teachers will call ‘the planets’. But have these ten year olds been mislead and confused by this competition?

Katharine Sanderson
Image: NASA

Posted by Nicola Jones
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The UK government has reached an agreement with the Gemini Observatory that will allow British astronomers to retain access to both of its 8-metre telescopes.

In November, the government shocked astronomers by announcing its intent to withdraw from the project. Subsequent negotiations to retain access to just one telescope, located atop Maneau Kea in Hawaii, failed. By early this year, British astronomers feared that their access to Gemini might be lost forever.

Those fears were premature, as neither side really wanted to break up the partnership. According to an agreement announced last night, the UK government will stay in the collaboration. But they'll sell some of their £3.5 million worth of annual observing time in order to save money.

That means that the UK's astronomers will have less time to peer through Gemini, but they won't have to give it up all together.

credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Sheffield University professor and media darling Noel Sharkey took the spotlight at a policy conference yesterday, warning that wars and terrorist attacks may soon be conducted by robots that can think for themselves. The conference, sponsored by British defence think-tank Royal United Services Institute, was organized specifically to discuss the ethical and legal implications of using unmanned vehicles for defence and security.

Most media reports led with Sharkey’s message that the world is on the verge of a robotic arms race (New Scientist). The Register took a derisive tone. Others have paid it more ‘serious’ attention (Xinhua; FOXnews) (Our favourite headline prize goes to the Inquirer for ‘Robots should be armless’) Alan Boyle (of Cosmic Log, MSNBC) sets up interesting tension between Sharkey and fellow panellist Ronald Arkin of Georgia Tech. While Sharkey is calling for an international ban on military use of autonomous robots until rules can be worked out, Arkin is actively working on creating robots with a ‘sense of right and wrong’.

Even if robots can be made with a ‘conscience’, the quesiton remains as to who will be held responsible for an autonomous robot’s actions in the field. We might avoid certain ethical implications if roboticized weaponry only targeted other weapons, but war, Sharkey has written, isn’t so simple:

In reality, a robot could not pinpoint a weapon without pinpointing the person using it or even discriminate between weapons and non-weapons. I can imagine a little girl being zapped because she points her ice cream at a robot to share. (Gaurdian)

Concerns may not be entirely unwarranted. Military use of unmanned vehicles is on the rise. The US army, for instance, is set to convert roughly one third of their ground vehicles to remote operation by 2015. Thousands of robots with varying levels of autonomy and unmanned aerial vehicles assist troops in Iraq.

Sharkey is not alone in his concern. The legal framework for dealing with war crimes has many potential loopholes when it comes to advanced robots, consultant Chris Elliot told the crowd. Instead, “the real court in which you are judged is the court of public opinion, trial by CNN,” Elliot said. With prices of electronic equipment so low, Elliot added, chances are likely that long before nation-states join the fray, robots that test our ethical limits will be put into use “by people who don’t feel constrained by the law or by public opinion.”

Posted by Nicola Jones
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The Official Richard Dawkins website tells us that the (in)famous evolutionary biologist / aetheist and campaigner for ‘reason in science’ will be retiring from his post at Oxford in September (having reached the Chair's mandatory retirement age).

I’m really not sure who could possibly replace him as the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science (especially since that post was invented for him).

In the blogosphere rumours are hot for American evo-devo biologist / atheist PZ Meyers. Myers himself confirms on Pharyngula (his own blog) that he has been invited by Dawkins to apply, “but he [Dawkins] also invited Lawrence Krauss and Carolyn Porco. The competition is a bit intimidating,” he writes. Krauss is a physicist and prolific writer; Porco is a planetary scientist, more famous for spreading the word of science through pictures than words (she is leader of the imaging science team for the Cassini space mission to Saturn). Krauss is currently a columnist for New Scientist.

One other blogosphere nomination goes to Armand Leroi (biologist, author, and presenter of the UK television documentary series "Alien Worlds" and "What makes us Human"). Any other suggestions?

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Posted on behalf of Jeff Tollefson:

Judging by the press coverage, it would appear that the Bush administration just turned green. A flurry of stories has hit the press after James Connaughton, a senior environmental advisor, suggested the White House would be willing to “enter into an international agreement” on climate change, “if other countries do, too.” That’s according to the New York Times. The BBC focused on three words - “binding international obligations” - uttered by Daniel Price, a national security advisor to President George W. Bush.

Although it remains unclear what, exactly, this means, it is perhaps telling that such statements could grab headlines around the world. The administration seems eager to clarify what it considers misunderstandings about its position on global warming (namely the general perception that it will stop at nothing to quash or at least cripple any international treaty to protect its industry friends). Bush’s critics aren’t going to buy it, of course, but they appear to be more than happy to watch the president try to wiggle out of what has become an increasingly lonesome political corner.

The problem here is that there isn’t much new. In trying to explain the president’s call for “aspirational” climate goals last year, Connaughton used similarly vague language. Under Bush’s plan, countries could institute various voluntary and regulatory measures at the national level. Those commitments would become binding under an international treaty, he said.

So are those the same “binding international obligations” that Connaughton discussed this week? The answer would appear to be no: Most stories suggest that “binding obligations” refers to various proposals to reduce emissions by some percentage by a specific date.

If that were the case, this might be newsworthy. But Connaughton’s suggestion that major developing nations (think China and India) would have to do the same is, if interpreted literally, a tad unrealistic. It also goes against the administration’s entire strategy for global warming, which has up until this point emphasized a decentralized approach based on various national strategies that could be developed by countries according to their specific needs and resources.

Oddly enough, this is one area where the Bush administration’s arguments seemed to (quietly) resonate. Following the principle of “common but differentiated” responsibilities for poor and wealthy nations, many in the climate community had already come to accept the idea that a one-size-fits-all approach simply would not work. If, on the other hand, Connaughton meant to say that major developing nations could sign up for various national policies as opposed to strict emissions targets, the question is then whether the United States would be able to do the same thing. If that were the case, nothing would have changed.

Where does all this leave us? I’m not sure. Connaughton says he is trying to reframe the administration’s position on climate change by emphasizing what it is willing to do, rather than what it is not willing to do. If would be easier to evaluate if the administration would offer some numbers.

Posted by Alex Witze
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South Africa, which has for years struggled to fit its elephants in amongst all its people, has announced that it will resume culling the animals when their hungry numbers threaten to destroy the enclosed reserves in which they live. Since 1995, when the ban went into effect, numbers of elephants have risen from less than 10,000 to more than 20,000 in that country (The Independent; Washington Post)

South Africa is very much a special case when it comes to elephants. In most of the continent, elephants are still in danger from poachers (and it may even be getting worse: The tusk detective) South Africa's elephants are just a small fragment of the total number of African elephants, which is very likely more than 500,000 (IUCN data, with cool distribution map).

When I went to South Africa last year, I heard representatives of the parks department express a lot of frustration at the condemnation of elephant culling that rains in from around the world. After all, these parks officials said, who are these people to tell us how to deal with our own domestic problems? Alternative management strategies all have their problems: contraception takes a long time to take effect, while forests are being ripped up now; "letting nature take its course" isn't particularly natural, since all the elephants are trapped inside small parks, and would be quite bleak, as elephant herds starved to death; knocking down fences to let elephants expand makes them the problem of poor rural people whose fields would bear the brunt of elephantine appetites. It is a knotty problem, to be sure, and a highly emotional one.

A deer cull in New Jersey pushed many of the same emotional buttons earlier this month (New York Times) but got much less press. I guess deer are just not as compelling as elephants. And that is South Africa's tourism blessing and public relations curse.

Read our feature on managing elephants in South Africa, "Africa conservation: Making room".

Emma Marris. Image credit Emma Marris

Posted by Nicola Jones
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After the launch of the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Life, media attention (see the Nature story with comments attached) drove so much traffic to the site that it crashed (AP, whose headline I have stolen; Techshout).

The encyclopedia's website logged 11.5 million hits over 5.5 hours, including two hours of down time, according to the site organisers.

This amusing point has generated even more press… will that too take down the site? It was live and well, if slow, when I checked today. Let’s all check and see what happens.

I still find it amazing when over-popularity ‘breaks’ a site. We experienced this ourselves with our eye-catching story on ‘How to make a zombie cockroach’, which apparently many, many people could not resist clicking. Who can blame them. (We’ve made it free again for 4 days so you can try to crash us again).

Meanwhile, some knowledgeable bloggers are putting together detailed critiques about the 'encyclopedia' (iPhylo; bbgm)

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Talk about being a picky eater. It turns out that one species of butterflyfish – the yellow and black striped snorklers’ favourite – would rather starve to death than switch to eating a different sort of coral. This is a problem, since the coral they currently prefer is quite likely to go extinct with climate change.

The more technical way of describing this is to say that Chaetodon trifascialis has a highly specialized feeding habit: it is an obligate specialist for Acropora hyacinthus (press release). Remember those technical terms next time a toddler spits her mashed broccoli back at you. The researchers confirmed the butterfly fish’s fussiness by keeping some in a tank without their preferred food. The fish died.

Apparently this butterfly fish is also in danger by aquarium collectors, who frequently don’t cater to the fish’s tastes. These fish also die.

The paper itself (Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology) seems to carry a more subtle message than the press release or any of the media coverage: they additionally tested whether this obligate specialist did better than a generalist butterflyfish when given its ideally preferred diet. It didn’t. “Increased dietary specialization, therefore, appears to be a questionable strategy,” they unsurprisingly conclude, “as there was no evidence of any increased benefits to offset increases in susceptibility to disturbance.”

I have an inherrent belief that diversity is a good thing and species should be preserved, but even I have my limits. Come on butterfly fish… learn to like your sprouts.

The Australian covers the issue of fish and climate change more broadly (Fishy signs we fail to fathom). Wired has a video (Of fish. In a tank. Eating coral). International Animal Rescue is perhaps contemplating going to the rescue.

Image courtesy of ARC Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef Studies

Posted by Nicola Jones
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An intriguing paper in Physical Review Letters this week reports on an international team’s efforts to dig deep into the Standard Model of physics. The paper itself (PRL) is very technical (not to be attempted by the faint-hearted). But the Edinburgh University press release on the work (not available online, sorry) gets the quote-of-the-day prize for this succinct summary:

Professor Richard Kenway of the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics said: “Although the Standard Model has been a fantastic success, there were one or two dark corners where experimental tests had been inconclusive, because vital calculations were not accurate enough. We shone a light on one of these, but to our enormous frustration, nothing was lurking there.”

According to the press release, the team used a supercomputer to compare recent experiments studying the decays of bottom quarks to be compared with earlier, strange quark experiments (that’s experiments on strange quarks, not strange experiments on quarks). The comparison result agrees with the predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics and implies that the particle-anti-particle asymmetry (technically known as "CP-symmetry violation") seen in these two different decay processes have a common origin.

In other words they confirmed the six-quark theory of particle-anti-particle asymmetry.

In other, other words they confirmed what they thought they knew about quarks, and didn’t find anything new. That may be disappointing to people looking to push the boundaries of physics, but I must admit to being a bit relieved: surely we have enough mysteries in the world of particle physics, thanks very much, without turning up new ones.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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In all but the most severely depressed patients, there is no evidence that new-generation antidepressants work any better than placebos. So says a large metanalysis that combed through 47 published and unpublished studies on several Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), published in PLoS Medicine yesterday. This class of drugs includes Prozac.

The bold headline ‘Antidepressants don’t work’ obviously caught the attention of the press (Google news search yields at least 250 hits today; almost all from the UK) and the public, and for good reason. It’s important to keep in mind that professionals already knew these drugs don’t have a huge effect for many (more below). But the extent to which the drugs were found to be effective as a placebo is striking. They did seem to work in extreme cases, but not for the reason one would expect: “The main finding among severely depressed people was that they ceased to respond to a dummy placebo pill, not that they showed a particularly heightened response to anti-depressants." (BBC)

Current UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines already advise non-medicinal treatments for mild depression, including exercise and sleep management or psychological interventions. “Antidepressants are not recommended for the initial treatment of mild depression, because the risk–benefit ratio is poor,” they state. “Where mild depression persists after other interventions, or is associated with psychosocial and medical problems, consider use of an antidepressant.”

As Anne Robinson tells us in a Guardian post, there is “no need to panic”. “People who are already on antidepressants and getting better should stay on them and then tail them off gradually when they feel ready. Those who are considering taking them will want to think twice. But none of that's new and none of it is reason to panic.” This ‘not new’ statement sits rather ironically aside the Guardian’s choice for front page.

It’s with moderate depression that the case gets interesting. NICE guidelines say: “In moderate depression, offer antidepressant medication to all patients routinely, before psychological interventions.” It is unclear whether that should now be changed. Lead study author Irving Kirsch from the department of psychology at Hull University, who was one of the consultants for these guidelines, says the new analysis suggests prescriptions “might be restricted even more” (Guardian).

(see UPDATE below the fold)

Continue reading "Antidepressants 'no better than placebo'" »

Posted by Nicola Jones
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After 17 year’s of service, solar mission Ulysses is at its end. The craft, which has been circling the Sun since 1992 tracing solar wind and studying the Sun’s poles, is about to run out of power and fall below a critical temperature of 2 degrees Celsius, at which point its hydrazine fuel will freeze.

Sadly a cleverly hatched plan to try and save power in the aging craft hasn’t worked out for NASA.

Mission scientists decided to temporarily turn off the craft’s transmitter, hoping to shunt this power over to the scientific instruments and the heater. They planned to turn the transmitter back on only when data was ready to be sent back to Earth. This would have made it possible to run Ulysses for up to another two years.

Unfortunately, this cunning plan proved to be a dud. A test revealed that the transmitter couldn’t be turned back on. And, to make matters worse, the fault seemed to lie with the power source of the transmitter, meaning there was no extra power to shunt over to the heater after all. "The decision to switch the transmitter off was not taken lightly. It was the only way to continue the science mission," said Richard Marsden, ESA project scientist and mission manager (press release). Its life expectancy is now down to only a few months.

New Scientist points out the irony of a spacecraft orbiting the Sun freezing to death. Discovery News rings the death bell for the craft. Elsewhere the annoying habit of humanizing inanimate objects continues, as the lump of metal is tagged as ‘brave’ (AFP).

Last time we heard from the Ulysses team the craft was bagging some good data from the solar cycle switch by flying over the pole at an opportune time.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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The US Defense Department (DoD) says they've completely destroyed an errant spy satellite, which they shot down last week.

President Bush ordered the shoot down amid fears that the satellite's unused hydrazine fuel posed a potential health risk to anyone who happened to be in the area where it came down. Nobody would dispute that hydrazine is dangerous, but a lot of experts doubted that the stuff would land anywhere near populated areas.One independent analysis puts the chances at one in several thousand.

It now appears that the hydrazine menace has been safely contained. The same cannot be said for the political debris created by the satellite. A few stories are talking about the diplomatic fallout from the hit. Interestingly, it appears that the US is going to try and smooth some ruffled feathers by sharing its data with China.
credit: DoD

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Okay, it isn’t really ‘stop-the-presses’ news that global warming, pollution and over-harvesting are threatening the worlds’ fish stocks. But a UN report out last Friday (In Dead Water, pdf) hammers home some statistics on the dangers, and has some good graphics highlighting some of our oceans’ bigger problems.

The report’s key findings include:
• Over 90 % of the world’s temperate and tropical coasts will be heavily impacted by 2050.
• Currently there are an estimated 200 temporary or permanent ‘dead zones’ - areas of de-oxygenated water. That’s up from around 150 in 2003.
• Up to 80 % of the world’s primary fish catch species are exploited beyond or close to their harvesting capacity.
• Alien invasive species are increasingly associated with the polluted, overharvested and damaged fishing grounds. The concentration of ‘aliens’ unsurprisingly relates to the world’s major shipping routes (see pic).

This caught the attention of many (AP), including the Jamaican Gleaner, which is worried about hot times ahead. The Africa Science News Service flags an interesting shark tagging project in the wake of the report.

Continue reading "Dead in the water" »

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Amid a fair amount of hype, a Virgin Airlines 747 has flown from London to Amsterdam using biofuels (BBC
| AP in USA Today | Bloomberg in the NYT). Not, when it comes down to it, very much biofuel – 20% of the fuel for one of the four engines, which sounds like 5% overall to me. And given that as far as I know Virgin doesn’t normally fly empty jumbos from Heathrow to Schipol, this ends up sounding like quite a lot of old-fashioned jet fuel being burned for no particularly good reason.

Continue reading "Biofuel flight hype" »

Posted by Oliver Morton
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What’s been on The Great Beyond this week and a few extras...

Continue reading "Weekly round up" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Over on his blog Chad Orzel, a physicist at Union College in Schenectady, NY, asks how $3 billion could best be spent on science.

This is how much the Human Genome Project cost over its 13 years. Interestingly Orzel wouldn’t spend the money on physics, saying “if I had to choose from all areas of science, it's a no-brainer to throw all the money at public health-- eradication of malaria, cures for major diseases, etc”.

Even if the field is narrowed down to physics he wouldn’t go for particle accelerators, saying “is discovering the Higgs Boson going to materially improve the lives of anyone other than the heads of the collaboration that makes the first discovery and gets the Nobel? Not really.”

If I had three billion dollars to throw at a single area of physics, I'd probably go for high-temperature superconductivity. It's a phenomenon that's still not understood all that well, and the potential impact is huge. If somebody could find a way to make mass quantities of material that superconducts at or near room temperature, that would be one of the most revolutionary physics developments since the transistor.

Debate continues in the comments of his post.

Not that $3 billion is really much in the grand scheme of science. For example, the National Institutes of Health spends $28 billion a year on medical research.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Scientists have for the first time measured the force needed to move one individual atom.

In the latest issue of Science, researchers from IBM and the University of Regensburg in Germany detail how they used an atomic force microscope to measure the vertical and lateral forces exerted on individual atoms by the probe tip of the microscope probe (research paper, related perspective paper, IBM press release, Regensburg press release).

It seems to move a cobalt atom over a smooth platinum surface requires a force of 210 piconewtons. Moving a cobalt atom over a copper surface takes only 17 piconewtons. By contrast, IBM’s press release points out lifting a penny requires nearly 30 billion piconewtons.

Continue reading "Moving atoms is easy, measuring the moves less so" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A dead dolphin is drawing attention once again to controversial sonar trials off the California coast. The Navy and environmentalists have been battling over whether the tests should go ahead; tests have been legal, then not-legal, then legal again, then not-legal again as judges, the president and others all weigh in.

While this was going on a test took place at the end of January.

Now it has emerged that a dolphin washed up dead on the shore of San Nicolas Island as the Navy was wrapping up its tests (LA Times). The Times says it was a northern right whale dolphin Lissodelphis borealis (not to be confused with the northern right whale Eubalaena glacialis).

Continue reading "Have sonar tests claimed another cetacean victim?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Water disputes in the United States have taken a bizarre turn, with one state attempting to redraw its borders to capture access to the Tennessee River.

Georgia’s water supply is in trouble and it would really help if it could access the river, which currently lies a kilometer or so north of the state. So politicians have decided to claim that the people who originally drew up the border with Tennessee got it wrong, setting it south of the rightful boundary on the 35th parallel.

Helpfully, if these politicians are right, redrawing the border will give Georgia access to the river. “This is a serious effort to secure our border and begin a discussion of water sharing,” says state senator David Shafer (Chattanooga Times Free Press, Walker Country Messenger).

Behind this slightly comical development is a serious issue. The US is running out of water (see Nature story on the west running dry and recent post on Vegas running dry).

But this is Friday, so let us get on with the ‘you couldn’t make it up’ details…

Continue reading "Singing politicians fight for water" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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