The Great Beyond

Any day now, the non-profit Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association (ARCA) will launch a high-altitude balloon with a rocket tied to the bottom from a ship in the Black Sea.

Actually its three rockets tied in what one reader creatively describes as "nunchuck staging". When the balloon reaches altitude, the first of the string of rockets will fire, carrying a small probe on a short suborbital trip. If all goes well, this proof-of-concept mission will pave the way for a launch balloon-based moon launch.

It's an unusual, some might argue slightly crazy, approach to rocketeering. But Bogdan Sburlea, ARCA's Project Manager, thinks it will work. He graciously agreed to answer some questions about this unorthodox proof-of-concept rocket, known as Helen.

How are you planning on attaching the Helen’s stages together? Will you use cable? Rope?

We will use cables of different diameters, the cable from the balloon to the first stage being the thickest.

How will you separate each stage when it has finished firing?

Actually, the separation will not take place after the previous stage finished firing. We will have about two seconds of simultaneous firing for stage one and two and later on for stage two and three. There are two reasons. The first is to avoid chaotic tensions in the cables. Firing the next stage before the previous stage shuts down means that there will be no moment in time when the tension in the cable becomes zero. The second reason is to avoid a collision between the stages.

Yes, the previous stage will become unstable during these few moments and will alter its trajectory. It will be enough to avoid a collision with the next stage. For separation, we use a pneumatic system for stages two and 3.

Are you worried that pendulum motion (swinging from side-to-side) might cause the rocket to become unstable?

This is not a concern for us, we modelled it and it works. If we are talking about the risks, that's a different story. There are associated risks with many critical activities, but we hope that we covered everything.

How high do you hope the rocket will carry the test vehicle? Will it go into orbit?

No, it will not. This is just a test. We need to check the launch from the water, the usage of world's largest solar balloon, not to mention the stabilization method and the strange position of the stages. We've got enough things to test; reaching orbit is not an objective for this launch.

How much have you spent developing the Helen? Who is paying?

We decided not to disclose the budget for the moment. There are many sources for the current budget, sponsorships and donations.

Do you have popular support in Romania?

Yes, we do. Many people are interested in what we do.

What will you do if the launch fails?

We will continue. Did SpaceX quit after the first failure? Or after the second failure?

Do you really think it will work?

Yes, we do. We have a huge advantage by being a small, private company: we can afford to test this.

When do you hope to get to the moon?

Before Google Lunar X Prize ends. We will do our best.

If you haven't seen it already (and chances are if you're a regular reader, you have), here's a video showing the Helen's flight plan:

Continue reading "EXCLUSIVE: Romania's lunar ballooners speak!" »

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on November 04, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies, Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

A new understanding of one of nature’s most complicated eyes could lead improvements in a huge range of modern electronic devices, according to a paper published in Nature Photonics.

Nicholas Roberts, of the University of Bristol, and colleagues have worked out how the ‘quarter-wave plates’ in the eyes of mantis shrimp work.

As you may have guessed, a quarter-wave plate rotates the plane of polarization of a light wave by a quarter. Crucially, they can convert between linearly polarized light and circularly polarized light, something that makes them useful for DVD players, CD players, and camera filters.

“Our work reveals for the first time the unique design and mechanism of the quarter-wave plate in the mantis shrimp’s eye,” says Roberts (press release). “It really is exceptional, outperforming anything we humans have so far been able to create.”

Shrimp eyes use cleverly designed cell membranes rolled into collections of tubes to make their quarter wave plates and to help them see polarized light (as well as twelve colours as opposed to human eyes, which have a rather paltry three colour palette), the authors report.

Study author Justin Marshall of the University of Queensland says shrimp also reflect circular polarized light off their bodies.

“They have a cuticle on their skin that reflects it,” he told ABC. “They’re talking to each other with a secret light channel.”

Now we’re closer to understanding how shrimp eyes work, we may be able to use their advanced optics to make better electronics, using liquid crystals to mimic them, say the authors.

This is undoubtedly very cool science, but won’t we just be downloading our movies and games by the time they get this working for DVDs?

Image mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus) / Roy Caldwell.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 26, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Kerri Smith

The first findings from an ancient Greek town that was swallowed by the sea around 3,000 years ago have come to light.

A joint Greek and British team of archaeologists and divers have been surveying the submerged town of Pavlopetri, just off the coast of southern Greece, and have turned up shards of pottery and other remains dating from as long ago as 3500 BC – which dates the town to the Bronze Age, and makes it over 1000 years older than the team previously thought.

“We got late Neolithic pottery, which dates to about 3500 BC, which is earlier than anything else that was found on the site before,” says Jon Henderson of the University of Nottingham, one of the underwater archaeologists working on the project. “And we’ve got a full sequence [of remains] up until about 1000BC. So it looks like it was occupied for a very long period of time.”

The submerged site was also bigger than it was when originally discovered and mapped by hand in the 1960s. “The sand has moved since the 60s,” says Henderson. “There’s 9000 m2 of new buildings.” The site is now thought to cover an area of around 30,000 m2.

Nature reported on the expedition when it began in May this year.

Since then the team, led by Henderson and his team at Nottingham and a Greek team under the direction of Elias Spondylis from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, have digitally mapped much of the site and lifted some remains from the surface. As the project continues they hope to map the site in more detail and start to excavate some of the buildings.

Image: Jon Henderson

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 19, 2009
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NASA’s Operation Ice Bridge got underway in the Southern Hemisphere on Friday last week, with a DC-8 plane flying the first of a series of missions to measure Antarctic ice.

Although ice can and is measured from satellites there will be a gap in NASA’s measurements after ICESat-I comes to the end of its life this year and before the start of ICESat-II in 2014. To plug this gap the space agency is stepping up with a six-year programme of ice-measuring plane flights.

“The DC-8 flew two parallel tracks along the coast, one just offshore over the floating ice shelf, and one just inland. By measuring on either side of the “grounding line” between the floating ice and the ice on land, scientists can determine the rate at which this near-shore part of the ice shelf is melting,” says NASA.

The plane is too large for Antarctic runways so it launched from Chile at 9:11 local time and flew south to the Getz Ice Shelf.

Although Friday’s flight is being reported as the start of Operation Ice Bridge, the very first OIB flights were actually made in April in the Northern Hemisphere.

Image top: OIB logo.
Image lower: view from the plane.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 19, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Nikon-sponsored ‘Small World’ photography competition has unvield another set of truly stunning images of the world.

In first place is this shot, by Heiti Paves of Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia. It shows the male sex organ of the thale cress.

Continue reading "Small World: Big pictures" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 09, 2009
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Ok so normally we'd just defer to Danger Room on all things defensive, but this was so cool we had to put it up.

For a couple of years now Boeing has been working on its Advance Tactical Laser. In a nutshell this thing is supposed to fit on a C-130 aircraft and be able to burn a 10cm hole in a target up to ten kilometres away.

What kind of laser could do that? It's called a Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser (COIL), and according to this nifty US Patent by Boeing, it basically works by combining excited oxygen molecules with iodine. When the oxygen collides with the iodine, it excites the atom's outer electrons, causing them to emit light at 1.315 mu.m (infrared).

The COIL laser is designed to deliver hundreds of kilowatts of power—enough juice apparently to burn a hole in (or at least singe) the top of this truck (see right). This video isn't so hot, but if you watch the longer version on DR, you can see that the laser was fired from the air. So basically this thing is close to being operational.

By the way, a larger version of a the same kind of laser is being put into Boeing's Airborne Laser, which, sooner or later, is going to be used to shoot down ballistic missiles as they launch.

Danger Room has pointed out just how incredible (and creepy) this sort of weapon is. As you can see, the infrared laser light is invisible to the human eye. Special operations is envisioning all sorts of clever ways to use it to secretly knock out distant targets, or even immolate individual insurgents. It's the ultimate in stealthy, surgical strike capability.

But don't hold out hope for a hand held version. The COIL takes up a lot of room. And because it's chemical, it can only used about a hundred times before it has to be reloaded. Finally, the laser releases a toxic mix of gases like iodine, chlorine, fluorine, and hydrogen. All-in-all, it's not something you'd probably want to carry in your pocket, even if it would fit.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on October 05, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink

We’ve previously brought to your notice the work of Jonathan Chase, aka Oort Kuiper, in the form of his ‘Astrobiology Rap’.

Now he’s back with a new song about genes…

[Hat tip: pharyngula]

Below the fold: Previously on Songs about Science.

Continue reading "Songs about Science XXVI: ‘I don’t mean trousers’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 24, 2009
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Nature’s announcement of a new journal has been exciting comment this week, mainly because the new publication will feature an open access route.

Nature Communications will be the first online-only Nature-branded journal, but it is the ability of scientists to pay an ‘article processing charge’ to make their papers open access that has generated most interest.

As Steven Inchcoombe, Nature Publishing Group’s managing director, explained to The Scientist:

Few could have anticipated the scale of upheaval in the global economy over the past twelve months. At the same time, scholarly publishing is on the cusp of yet more radical change with increasing commitment by research funders to cover the costs of open access making experimentation with new business models more viable.

The new journal aims to publish papers in biological, chemical and physical sciences that “represent advances of significant interest to specialists within each field”.

Not everyone is impressed by the NPG announcement though.

On the Science Insider blog, Patrick Brown comments thus:

After brilliant and courageous editors and staff at PLoS had the cojones and vision to make high-quality, truly open-access scientific publication affordable and accessible to any scientist with a constructive contribution to communicate, and in doing so, prove the cynics at Science and Nature wrong, it’s deliciously ironic to see the craven NPG, years later, skulking around the open-access world looking for a way to pick up a few bucks.

Nature Communications starts accepting submissions in October 2009, with a first issue scheduled to go online in April 2010.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 24, 2009
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A blind listening test at a forestry conference suggests that foresters, at least, prefer a modern violin made from fungus-treated wood to an original Stradivarius.

Last year Francis Schwarze of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research in St Gallen published results suggesting that treating wood with fungus might help recreate the unusually low density that prevailed when Antonio Stradivari carved his legendary instruments.
(Nature News, 16 June 2008)

Schwarze teamed up with luthiers (violin-makers) to build violins with the treated wood, along with some control copies made from untreated wood. At a blind competition in the German city of Osnabrück on 1 September this year, 180 attendees of a German forestry conference (Osnabrücker Baumpflegetagen) rated the test violins and an original Stradivarius played by British violinist Matthew Trusler (World Radio Switzerland, 1 September 2009). One of the fungus-treated violins, called "Opus 58" garnered 90 votes for the best sound, with the Strad second at 39, according to a press release.

Blind violin identification is notoriously difficult: In a BBC test in 1974, experts were only able to correctly identify 2 of 4 instruments, and confused a modern instrument with a Stradivarius. Schwarze noted that the fungus treatment might make violins which sound like Strads, at least to foresters, for as little as 25,000 Swiss francs (World Radio Service, 10 September 2009).

Photo: The 5 violins in the competition. By Egmont Seiler.

Posted by Lucas Laursen on September 15, 2009
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Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is the keystone text for evolutionary theory; now you can see how the book itself evolved, thanks to Ben Fry.

Fry is the director of information design company Seed Visualization and he has constructed a rather wonderful graphic that shows the changes in the book over its six editions.

“We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin's theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished,” writes Fry. “In fact, Darwin's On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime.”

Fry’s other scientific information design projects include a redesign of genetic code diagrams and illustrations of the relationships between different genomes. He was also behind the rather cool Nature HapMap cover.

His Traces graphic allows to you not just to watch the changes accumulate as time passes – and editions are published – but also to see where words and passages have been added into the text (image left).

“The idea that we can actually see change over time in a person’s thinking is fascinating,” says Fry. “Darwin scholars are of course familiar with this story, but here we can view it directly, both on a macro-level as it animates, or word-by-word as we examine pieces of the text more closely.”

Traces uses text from The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, run by John van Wyhe.

Hat tip: Flowing data

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 07, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific body, delivered its official view on geoengineering. Scientists analyzed a dozen different approaches and weighed their pros and cons. Then, being scientists, they plotted their results in a bizarre phase space that nobody could understand. Many a reporter, myself included, were scratching our heads when co-author Ken Caldeira popped this little gem up onto the screen:

(Note: error bars are purely symbolic. Huh?)

Now I want to be fair, the Royal Society report is actually very well written and it contains a lot of good information about the geoengineering proposals out there. But it's a nuanced take on a complex issue. So it's not surprising that you saw a range of headlines. The most inaccurate enthusiastic one by far, came from those lovely folks at the Register:

Boffins: Give up on CO₂ cuts, only geoengineering can work

The Financial Times landed on the other end of the spectrum:

Hopes dashed for geo-engineering solutions

And in between came everybody else:

Study says 'geoengineering' to flight climate likely, but risky (USA Today)

Royal Society warns climate engineering 'could cause disaster' (the Times)

World must plan for climate emergency-report (Reuters)

Investment in geo-engineering needed immediately, says Royal Society (the Guardian)

These headlines make the report look like a Kurosawa film, but most of the actual stories are pretty accurate in my opinion. The bottom line is that the Royal Society felt that the only sure way to save the planet is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But in the event of a global climate emergency, we should at least know the consequences of geoengineering.

You can read our coverage here.

Update: I've included the updated diagram off the Royal Society website.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 02, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies, Policy | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Robotic fish – probably the best small robotic fish you’ve ever seen – have been made by clever engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You can even see a video of them doing their thing.

The fish, about 30 cm long, are ancestors descendents of robotuna – a giant autonomous robotic fish also made at MIT in the 1990s.

The difference is that these fish are much simpler – they are small and powered by a single motor, unlike robotuna’s six motors, and made from just 10 parts. All these parts are encapsulated in a flexible rubber casing that is moved by a motor sending a wave along the body. They're small size will apparently make them more able to swim into small crevices.

And they can certainly swim well. I’m just a bit concerned about how useful they are. They're being developed apparently to go places where other autonomous robotic fish can’t go. Maybe I’m way out of touch, but I wasn’t aware that this was a major problem.

"The fish were a proof of concept application, but we are hoping to apply this idea to other forms of locomotion, so the methodology will be useful for mobile robotics research - land, air and underwater - as well," said Valdivia Y Alvarado, whose PhD thesis was devoted to the little robotic critters (press release).

But wait a minute, my scepticism may be short lived. I am behind the times after all. Only in March this year, a robotic carp was unveiled by researchers at Essex University, UK. Five of the monstrous 1.5 metre-long robotic carp are scheduled to be released into Spanish waters, equipped with chemical sensors to sniff out pollution.

The MIT group claims that fleets of their robofish could be deployed to inspect pipelines, lakes, rivers and boats. Whatever they’re used for, you can’t escape the fact that robo fish are actually quite cool. Maybe they’ll become the next rubber duckie.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on August 25, 2009
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Posted for Mico Tatalovic

The prospect of gigantic, flexible LEDs screens has been raised by a new paper, published this week in Science. The paper describes a process for making ultra-thin LEDs that can simply be stamped onto other materials such as glass, plastics and rubber.

Currently, organic LEDs, so named as they are made out of thin carbon-based materials, are used in cheap portable systems such as mobile phones. Much brighter and more robust inorganic LEDs, made out of made out of gallium arsenide and gallium nitride, are commonly used for video billboards but they cannot flex and are difficult to assemble.

“So what we were trying to do really is combine some of the advantages of the processing of the organic devices, with the robustness and brightness of the inorganic,” says study author John Rogers, of the University of Illinois (press release).

The team has now developed a process that could lead to mass production of tiny inorganic LEDs in such a way to allow them to be embedded onto other, flexible materials – this will allow bright, durable inorganic LEDs to become as cheap and flexible as organic LEDs.

“By printing large arrays of ultrathin, ultrasmall inorganic LEDs and interconnecting them using thin-film processing, we can create general lighting and high-resolution display systems that otherwise could not be built with the conventional ways that inorganic LEDs are made, manipulated and assembled,” says Rogers (press release 2).

Some funding for the research came from Ford, who wanted to make flexible brake lights for their cars, notes Reuters.

Image: Photo by D. Stevenson and C. Conway, Beckman Institute, University of Illinois

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 21, 2009
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France’s national library has been forced to deny rumours that it has sold out to Google over digitization, and thus ended protracted resistance to perceived cultural imperialism.

“Following a news item published Tuesday 18 August in La Tribune, the [Bibliothèque Nationale de France] wishes to clarify that it has not signed an agreement with Google for the digitization of its collection,” says the library (pdf).

However, it adds that, “The Library has never ruled out a private partnership that would be consistent with the strategy of the Ministry of Culture regarding digital content.”

The BNF has been seen as “spearheading resistance” to Google’s digitisation of books and it championed an alternative European digital library that might be more suitable to non-English speaking countries.

The Tribune claimed yesterday that the BNF had capitulated to the American search engine. Other papers in France and abroad have followed up the story, with Le Figaro saying, the BNF had been “seduced by Google”.

French literary blogger Pierre Assouline declared, “It will thus have taken four years for the library to pass from resistance to collaboration.”

A library spokesperson told the Times the library has not abandoned its own digitization project, but would use Google to do the work faster and cheaper than it would be able to do itself.

Whether this approach will be acceptable to the French public after the sensationalist headlines die down remains to be seen...

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 19, 2009
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You can pretty much kiss civilisation goodbye in the event of a zombie outbreak, according to a new mathematical modelling study by Canadian researchers.

Led by Robert Smith?, of the University of Ottawa, the team modelled a variety of scenarios using techniques that would be familiar to those studying more plausible pandemics. (And yes, the question mark is part of his name.)

A basic model using three classes of person – zombies, susceptible to infection, and ‘removed’ – found coexistence with the undead was impossible and following a short outbreak, “zombies will likely kill everyone”.

The researchers went on to model for a cure and quarantine, as well as the potential for counterattacks to eradicate the zombie threat. Things still do not look good for humanity, they report in their paper When Zombies Attack!

“A zombie outbreak is likely to lead to the collapse of civilisation, unless it is dealt with quickly,” they write in the new book Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress.

“While aggressive quarantine may contain the epidemic, or a cure may lead to coexistence of humans and zombies, the most effective way to contain the rise of the undead is to hit hard and hit often. As seen in the movies, it is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble.”

This research paper is not a totally academic exercise; Smith et al note that their models may seem unlikely (as the dead can return to life), but they could have applications for those modelling allegiance to political parties or diseases that lie dormant for some time.

“If you look at it in a more realistic way, zombies are about the same as any other major infectious disease, they get out and we try to eliminate them,” study author Joe Imad told Canwest News. “Modelling zombies would be the same as modelling swine flu, with some differences for sure, but it is much more interesting to read.”

Given our worldwide success in acting quickly and in a unified manner to stop the spread of swine flu, I’m going to redouble work on that bunker under the Nature office.

Image: photo by rumikel via Flickr under creative commons

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 17, 2009
Categories: Health and medicine, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Humans harnessed fire to improve their tools much earlier than we’d thought, according to a new report in Science (doi:10.1126/science.1175028).

Though our forebears cooked with fire some 800,000 years ago, the consensus so far was that people hadn’t used fire to heat-treat materials until around 25,000 years ago. The new finding pushes that back at least 45,000 years.

“Our illumination of the heat treatment process shows that these early modern humans commanded fire in a nuanced and sophisticated manner," says the lead author Kyle Brown, from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. [Press release from Arizona State University, Brown's other affiliation]. “We’ve shown that, at least 72,000 years ago and perhaps much earlier, modern humans had an understanding of how fire and heat could transform the materials around them to suit their needs.” [Science News].

Researchers spent six years looking for the same type of silcrete rock that they found in tools at Pinnacle Point, a Middle Stone Age site on the South African coast. It wasn’t until they happened across such a piece of silcrete embedded in ash that they realised that they could get the deep red, glossy and brittle silcrete such as the one found in tools by putting regular silcrete in fire. They estimate that stones were heated to around 300 degrees Celsius, probably by cooking them under fire in a process that could last for up to 40 hours. This resulted in stones that were easier to shape into tools by using other rocks, and that could be used as knives, hunting weapons or for exchange for other goods.

"I think heating stones is the dawn of human engineering. One of the things that makes us uniquely human is that we can take the things in our landscape and adapt them. We can engineer them to fit our needs." Brown told the BBC.

Posted for Mico Tatalovic

Image: Kyle Brown/South African Coast Paleoclimate, Paleoenvironment, Paleoecology, Paleoanthropology Project

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on August 14, 2009
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With a combination of luck and fancy imaging techniques, geographers have snapped the first shots of an ancient Roman city.

The coastal city of Altinum was bustling in the early CE and possibly late BCE (Wikipedia). In the 5th to 7th centuries CE, historians believe the Barbarians raged through the city and the inhabitants fled to Venice, so Altinum is thus seen as a grandfather of sorts to Venice. But besides historical records and a handful of artifacts, little is known about the town’s structure, as it was dismantled to build Venice, repeatedly flooded, and is now blanketed by fields of soy and maize. (Despite the headlines on some reports (Spiegel, Times Online), the city was never actually “lost” — people knew it was there, they just didn’t know what it looked like.)

But in 2007, researchers at Padua University caught a break: a severe drought that stressed the overlying crops. That’s a blessing for them because it exaggerates differences in the crops’ health — vegetation doesn’t grow well over soil with stones, bricks or compacted soil, but does slightly better over depressed features like pits and canals. By photographing the area at both visible and near-infrared wavelengths, they were able to pick out these differences and compile a map of the city’s urban structure.

They discovered that Altinum was pretty much your standard ancient Roman city, with a basilica, theater, emporia, forum, encircling walls, and a decent network of streets and canals. The authors end their half-page (including references) Science article by concluding that Romans had "successfully exploited the amphibious environment several centuries before the city of Venice started to emerge.”

Other coverage:
Venice "Ancestor" City Mapped for First Time: National Geographic
Ancient Roman City Rises Again: ScienceNOW

Image: Realvista 2007, Telespazio S.p.A.

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on July 31, 2009
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Professional swimmers have been getting themselves in a right tizzy recently over what to wear.

A second generation of high-tech body suits has sent swimming times tumbling less than a year after records were smashed at the Olympics by those wearing similar garments. Some think science has created a monster in these new polyurethane suits and the world’s governing body has just banned them.

British Olympic-medal winning swimmer Rebecca Adlington called the new suits “technological doping”. “Why would I wear a suit just to improve my performance,” said Adlington, who wears previous generation suit the Speedo LZR, which claims to be “4% faster in starts, sprints and turns”.

So what is the science of the suit?

Continue reading "Swimsuit science shenanigans" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 30, 2009
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New reports, but same old message from the carbon capture and storage (CCS) crowd: high costs and regulatory uncertainty still hamper the technology reaching commercial scale.

A study by the Alberta Carbon Capture and Storage Development Council says that between $1 billion and $3 billion of local and national government support for the technology will be required every year after 2015, when full-scale projects are supposed to take over from the first wave of demonstration plants. The province is among the world’s keenest: it has already announced a $2 billion investment towards three CCS pilot projects to be built by 2015.

Last week, researchers from Harvard’s Belfer Center released a paper on the ‘realistic’ costs of carbon capture, which reckons that first (most expensive) plants will add 10 cents per kWh to electricity prices, and that each ton of captured CO2 will cost between $120 and $180. That figure is higher than widely-cited estimates[pdf] from consultancy McKinsey, which put initial costs at €60-90/tCO2 avoided. And both of these are way higher than the cost of a ton of carbon dioxide on the European Trading Scheme, currently around €14.

Meanwhile in the UK, the winners of a 400MW demonstration plant competition were supposed to be announced in the summer this year, but the timetable has slipped back. The UK’s carbon capture and storage association, an industrial lobby group, has repeated its message that the country is slipping behind others. [Bloomberg]

At least one more small demonstration project opened this week, as Doosan Babcock started up a pilot oxyfuel combustion burner in Renfrewshire, Scotland. It burns coal in pure oxygen, rather than air, producing a waste stream of almost pure carbon dioxide gas and water, from which it's easier to trap carbon dioxide.

But the Financial Times points out that Vattenfall’s Schwarze Pumpe 30 MW pilot plant, which began operation last September, has yet to bury underground any of the 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide its plant has captured. That is because in June Germany put off a legal framework to govern CCS storage “due to concerns from local officials,” the FT says. As its reporter Joshua Chaffin sums up: “Even if CCS backers can solve the technical and financial puzzles, they may still face a more daunting challenge: winning public acceptance.”

Image: Vattenfall

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on July 28, 2009
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When you’re stuck at a field station in the Arctic you clearly can’t do science all the time. So researchers from the Toolik Field Station in Alaska have constructed what they claim is the “Northernmost Tribute to Michael Jackson”, by recreating his ‘Thriller’ video.

The NJ Star-Ledger proclaims itself impressed given “they only had three rehearsals” and that “Arctic researchers are not generally known for their rhythm”.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 08, 2009
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New images of the Great Beyond’s volcano of the year (to date): Sarychev Peak in the Russian Kuril Islands.

Although not quite on a par with the awesome shot from last week (see: Picture post: BOOM!) this double act show the impact of an eruption like the one that Sarychev experienced beginning 12 June. The ‘before’, top, was taken 26 May while the ‘after’, below, is from 30 June.

Acquired by the ASTER instrument that graced this blog yesterday, these false-colour images show vegetation as red, water as dark blue, and bare rock as brown / gray. The white patches are either ice or clouds.

NASA notes:

The most striking difference between these two images is the cap of new volcanic rock coating the northwestern half of the island in June 2009. While vegetation on the rest of the island appears lush, little or no vegetation remains on the northwestern end. A close look at the top image also reveals that the recent volcanic activity appears to have expanded the island’s coastline on the northwestern end.

Hat tip: Eruptions blog

Image: created by Jesse Allen, using data from NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS/ASTER Science Team

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 01, 2009
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The most hotly awaited science song of they year, nay, the decade, has arrived. Buzz Aldrin has released his rap!

Recently the New York Times reported that Aldrin had been in a rap session with Snoop Dogg. It transpires that Aldrin and Mr Dogg do not actually rap together, rather the latter has produced the former’s song.

You can see the full video on the Funny or Die website.

While this is unlikely to go down as a classic, the making of video that accompanies it has some choice moments. “I have only two passions, space exploration and hip hop,” declares Buzz ‘Doc Rendezvous’ Aldrin.

Perhaps the best part though is where Aldrin discusses Gill Scott-Heron’s seminal ‘Whitey On the Moon’, a tirade against spending money on spaceflight when there is so much poverty on Earth.

“Me and Gill are cool now,” says Doc Rendezvous. “I explained to him we came in peace for all mankind and he backed off.”

Below the fold: Previously on Songs about Science

Continue reading "Songs about science XXII: Aldrin raps his Rocket Experience " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 25, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The new Top 500 supercomputer list is out, and it looks remarkably like the previous one, in that it charts a continuing exponential growth in the aggregate power of the worlds top computers. Awesome technological achievement – but no great surprise. As The Register puts it in a headline “World Yawns at Petaflops”.

The yawning is helped by the fact that the number one and number two computers this time round are the same as they were last time round: the US Department of Energy’s Roadrunner, at Los Alamos, and its Jaguar, at Oak Ridge.

But if you want to get geeky on the topic there are some possibly interesting details and trends to see in the data that the Top 500 lists creators make available in a variety of helpful formats.

Continue reading "Getting geeky with supercomputers" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 24, 2009
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UPDATE: Some are now questioning the maths behind this analysis. See: John Graham-Cumming, Times.

It is widely acknowledged that humans are very bad at making up random numbers. If we weren’t we wouldn’t have invested so much time in developing random number generators.

Now some work by political scientists Bernd Berber and Alexandra Scacco, of Columbia University, suggests that fact hasn’t reached certain key individuals in Iran. As the country struggles with the violent aftermath of its recent hotly contested election, Berber and Scacco say the results of that election seem highly suspicious.

They used the results published by the Ministry of the Interior and examined the last two digits of the votes reported for the four main candidates.

“The numbers look suspicious,” they report in the Washington Post.

Continue reading "‘Iran’s election was fixed,’ say number crunchers" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 22, 2009
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Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist behind the first widely-used taxonomy of plants and animals, faced a problem modern biologists confront all the time: too much data. His solution was simple, says science historian Staffan Mueller-Wille: Linnaeus invented index cards.

“Although a seemingly mundane and simple innovation, Linnaeus’ use of index cards marks a major shift in how eighteenth-century naturalists thought about the order of nature,” says Mueller-Wille (press release).

He says Linnaeus first sorted his ideas onto individual sheets of paper so they could be shuffled, and years later shrank the size of his notepaper to make them easier to handle.

Mueller-Wille, of the University of Exeter, will be chatting about his ongoing research into how Linnaeus invented his famous taxonomy on 4 July at an outreach event organized by the British Society for the History of Science in Leicester, UK.

More
Mueller-Wille and colleague Sara Scharf published a working paper [pdf]on the topic with the London School of Economics in 2007.

Image: wikipedia

Posted by Lucas Laursen on June 18, 2009
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It is hard to avoid using the phrase “scientists have discovered ….” But here we go again: Scientists have discovered a way to make concrete last for 16,000 years.

This is not, as on first inspection it might seem, the environmental nightmare it sounds like. What Matthieu Vandamme from the Université Paris-Est and Franz-Josef Ulm from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have done is work out why concrete creeps, or gradually deforms over time.

The answer is published in PNAS this week and appears to be the way that calcium-silicate-hydrate crystals rearrange themselves at the nanoscale.

This process can’t be stopped, the researchers say, but can be slowed. Slowed so that concrete will last 16,000 years, says GreentechMedia.

So what is creep? Well, according to Ulm, it’s like chewing gum. Gum will stretch and compress if a constant force is applied, Science News tells us, and this, says Ulm is what concrete does, but at a much larger scale.

The hope for creep-free concrete in future is now in the hands of nanoengineers who with the help of this latest research might be able to come up with an additive that slows the creep right down.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 16, 2009
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News of 'the world's first scientific experiment on Twitter' has received some media pickup today. The trial starts tomorrow, conducted by psychologist Richard Wiseman together with New Scientist.

Wiseman, who works at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, says the study will examine the psychic ability of 'remote viewing' - the idea that one can see an object without being shown or told what it is. He'll tweet from a location, then offer five photo options; tweeters have to guess which of the five he is actually in. The trial will be repeated four times using different locations (3pm, Tuesday to Friday this week).

Although rigorous scientific experiments have been conducted into remote viewing before (with no evidence found for the ability), this isn't one of them. The choice of Twitter pretty much guarantees that, as Wiseman readily concedes in conversation, though not in his quoted press comments.

Continue reading "Twitter science" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on June 01, 2009
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Here’s a story to bring music to your ears. Computer scientists in the UK have allowed instrument makers to build a horn specified by Bach to be played in a particular ditty of his, but an instrument that has since never been heard of.

The work, supported by the UK’s engineering and physical sciences research council (EPSRC) has allowed the lituus to be made. This is a long, thin horn that Bach specified for one particular cantata, ‘O Jesu Christ, meins lebens licht’ (BWV 118)’ written in 1736-37. Swiss conservatoire, Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, contacted Murray Campbell from the acoustics & fluids group, in the University of Edinburgh’s school of physics and astronomy with the hope that he could remodel the lost instrument

“It’s called ‘Bach’s forgotten horn’ because Bach specified this in this particular cantata but nobody knows what he meant. There were no instruments known to have been around in Leipzig in Bach’s time which were called lituuses, no lituus player appear on any rolls of musicians, no one knows what exactly he meant,” says Campbell.

Campbell’s PhD student Alistair Braden did the modelling based on fragments of information from the Swiss musicians about what the lituus might have sounded like, or looked like. Braden used optimisation software that he developed to get to the final design, a blueprint to give to the instrument makers.

The result was a long, wooden horn that is apparently difficult to play.

The BBC has a story with an audio clip of the whole piece, lituus and all.

Image: EPSRC

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 01, 2009
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The Google search engine offers a predictive function, where it will suggest things you might be looking for in advance of you completing your query. As these are at least partially based on what other people have been searching for, can they provide some insights into the way science is perceived on the interwebs? The Great Beyond investigates.

Initial results are not promising. There seems to be widespread skepticism of evolution for a start. This page is from the US version of Google:

Continue reading "Predictive search and science" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 07, 2009
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Via Wired, The Great Beyond has learned of a baffling cultural crosswire.

Car insurance fan and rock star Iggy Pop is apparently making a new jazz-influenced album called Preliminaires, based on the work of a science-obsessed agent provocateur of French literature.

Continue reading "Iggy Pop’s cloning project" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 06, 2009
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Last week Nature’s Lucas Laursen exposed a Facebook network of stem cell scientists that was not all it seemed. Over 100 scientists, policy-makers and journalists have had their identities purloined to create a fake network of people linked to stem cell science.

One of the few real people in the network was Forbes science editor Matthew Herper, who accepted a seemingly authentic friend request from a fake version of Washington Post reporter Rick Weiss. Now Herper has written a piece for Forbes entitled, ‘I Was Impersonated On Facebook’.

“My trip from Facebook to fakebook began in February when I got a friend request from Rick Weiss, the former Washington Post science writer. I'd admired Weiss' work for years and was thrilled to speak on a panel with him in Madison, Wis.; I accepted the request immediately,” he says.

Read the full article here.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 27, 2009
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Following hot on the heels of the theft of computer data on America’s most advanced fighter plane, President Obama’s cybersecurity advisor has called for more to be done in safeguarding information.

Melissa Hathaway, acting senior director for cyberspace, is leading a review into the issue of cybersecurity which the New York Times says “is simply the opening round in what may become a bruising political battle over how much control should be exercised and over which agencies of the government will take command of computer security”.

The review will likely be made public at the end of the month but Hathaway, speaking at the RSA 2009 conference in San Francisco, said cybersecurity was “one of the most serious challenges of the 21st Century”. She called for public and private organisations to come together with individuals to secure the internet (BBC).

“A few hours south of here, there are creative Hollywood writers and actors who have imagined and produced stories that capture the essence of the problem, including: Matthew Broderick in War Games, Robert Redford in Sneakers, Sandra Bullock in The Net, and Bruce Willis in Live Free and Die Hard. These and other movies present the types of issues that we should care about and solve together,” Hathaway told the conference (remarks from The Atlantic).

Continue reading "Cybersecurity: Matthew Broderick, Robert Redford, Sandra Bullock, Bruce Willis and now … Barack Obama" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 23, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies, Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in the day, Chinese scientists like Wen Ho Lee had to come to the US to be accused of stealing secrets. More recently, a US researcher is awaiting sentencing in America for sharing technology with his Chinese student. But the world is changing fast, and today's Wall Street Journal has an incredible story of how the Chinese are now being accused of stealing US technology from the comfort of home.

The Journal article details how hackers have stolen terabytes (that's TERABYTES) of data on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a US$300 billion project that is the Pentagon's costliest development programme ever. The attackers infiltrated contractor computers during 2007 and 2008 and siphoned off sensitive details about the design and electronics systems of the aircraft. The most sensitive data were kept on a secure Pentagon server and appear to be safe, but the hackers made off with mounds other stuff. It's not even clear what they managed to steal: the infiltrators encrypted the data that they siphoned off, leaving Air Force forensic teams stumped.

Like many cyber attacks, the espionage appeared to originate in China. Of course nobody knows for sure that Chinese nationals were behind the attacks, but that hasn't stopped speculation that, once again, the Chinese have gotten hold of the US's most sensitive secrets. The Chinese Embassy in Washington called those allegations "a product of the Cold War mentality" and said that they were meant to "fan up China threat sensations."

Lockheed Martin Chief Financial Officer Bruce Tanner says, via the Washington Post, "To our knowledge there's never been any classified information breach." He went on to say, "Like the government, these attacks on our systems are continuous, and we do have stringent measures in place to both detect and stop these attacks."

Image: USAF/Lockheed Martin

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on April 21, 2009
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If you haven’t yet voted, there’s still time to pick your favourite NASA Image of the Day from the 50 finalists.

Will you pick Antarctic warming trends or Fall Colours in Pennsylvania? Maybe you lean more towards the giant designs carved by Nazca in the Peruvian desert? Or a view of Earth from Saturn?

My vote is going to this 2002 image. Can you guess what it is? Answer below the fold. Voting ends April 27.

Continue reading "NASA’s 50 greatest photos " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 20, 2009
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The song that originally inspired the start of this Songs About Science Series now has a sequel.

Back in the depths of time, the Bio-Rad company decided to promote one of its products with the inspired PCR Song. Now, via chemistry-blog.com, we’ve been made aware of the follow up: the GTCA song.

If you want more head over to Bio-Rad for different versions, outtakes and more.

Below the fold: songs about metrics and charts.

Continue reading "Songs about science XIX: back to our roots" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 17, 2009
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Today’s science song is what the office’s young person tells me is a ‘rap’ that has been ‘dropped’ by Chicago- based BinoWhite, where the rapper and his ‘crew’ threaten to “kick your arse with science”.

Mr White describes his ditty as, “An educational song, with violence.”

(Warning: video contains swearing some may find offensive.)

[Hat tip: Pharyngula]

As ever – below the fold is Previously on Songs about Science.

Continue reading "Songs about science XVIII: ‘What up Einstein, you as smart as people think you are.’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 15, 2009
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UPDATE – Current Nature editor Philip Campbell’s tribute, John Maddox 1925–2009, is now on our website:

It was with great sadness that I and my colleagues at Nature learned of the death on Sunday of Sir John Maddox — or 'JM', as his colleagues always referred to him.

There was puzzlement, too. Yes, John had been looking frail recently, but, well, this was JM — the perpetually restless, irresistible, unstoppable force. The editor who conducted some gatherings with 'shock and awe' as some recall. The 'man with a whim of iron' as others used to call him. And the man who survived countless cigarettes and glasses of red wine, many consumed late into the night as he wrote the week's Editorials at the last possible moment.

As Walter Gratzer, of King’s College, London, wrote recently, “John Maddox brought an old-fashioned Nature into the modern age from the mid-1960s.” (History of Nature feature.)

A full appreciation from Nature will follow shortly. Meanwhile, here is what the world is saying.

Without too much trouble I could probably fill blogs for a month with tales of John: of waiting at the typesetter while he finished an editorial way beyond deadline; of a plan to visit Mexico together when we wined and dined the very attractive press attache at the Mexican Consulate; of how he regularly set fire to his waste-paper basket. Of being sent to the wine bar with a fiver for a bottle of Chateau Thames. Of him disappearing on a Friday night and saying, as the door closed, that he wanted a thousand words from me by Monday for the following week’s issue – on anything I pleased. Of many cases of exasperation and irritation, and many more acts of kindness.

- Henry Gee, Nature editor

He was one of those fellows who shaped the direction of science for quite a long period of time with the power of one of the most influential science journals in the world. I suspect every scientist of my generation read his editorials in our weekly perusal of the journal.

- PZ Myers, Pharyngula

One of the toughest adversaries I’ve ever wrangled with is Sir John Maddox. He was hard-headed, scarily knowledgeable, hyper-articulate, unfailingly gracious even as he ripped you a new one.

- John Horgan, Director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology

As Editor of Nature, he restored the journal to an unchallenged position as the place to publish interesting research quickly, and did so at a time when Britain’s influence in world science was otherwise declining. His judgments, sometimes quirky but never dull, were always backed by persuasive argument and a sense of humour.

- The Times

It was a mark of his skilled editorship that Nature could publish a paper on, say, the Loch Ness monster without sacrificing its authority.

“He took command of Nature in a big way,” the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins said. “He had a tremendous grasp of science in the full range, from physics to biology to public affairs as they affected the world of science.”

Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society and Britain’s astronomer royal, called Mr. Maddox “a dominant figure,” adding that “he helped establish Nature’s status internationally and built it up by developing supplements to increase its coverage.” After retiring as editor in 1995, he assumed an influential elder statesman role, acting, Mr. Rees said, “as a general guru of science and scientific policy.”

- NY Times

"He adored science and talked about it all the time," she [his daughter, Bronwen Maddox] says. "He was enormously enthused by it. He was a physicist, and took to the biological sciences with enthusiasm, but I think his heart stayed in physics."

- Scientific American

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 14, 2009
Categories: Chemistry, Earth, environment & ecology, Energy, Financial Crisis, Health and medicine, Neat technologies, On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Would you Adam and Eve it? Robot scientists - named Adam and Eve - could soon be after your research jobs.

According to a new paper in Science, an autonomous robot can conduct its own experiments and has now come up with its first results. Ross King, of Aberystwyth University, and his colleagues report that their robo-researcher ‘Adam’ has “generated functional genomics hypotheses about the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypotheses by using laboratory automation”.

The team set Adam to work finding genes for “orphan enzymes”. These are as-yet undiscovered genes for enzymes thought to catalyze reactions that occur in yeast. King told the Times:

Because biological organisms are so complex it is important that the details of biological experiments are recorded in great detail. This is difficult for human scientists, but easy for robot scientists. Yeast is well understood. It’s been studied for over 100 years. We knew this enzyme must be there, but we didn’t know where.

Continue reading "Rise of the machines" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 03, 2009
Categories: Chemistry, Neat technologies, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Video games might improve your eyesight, according to a paper published by Nature Neuroscience.

Daphne Bavelier, of the University of Rochester in New York, and colleagues found that study subjects who played action video games (either Unreal Tournament 2004 or Call of Duty 2) had improved ability to detect small changes in shades of gray on a uniform background, so-called ‘contrast sensitivity’. Those who played a more sedate game (The Sims 2) showed no improvement.

“Unfortunately, contrast sensitivity is one of the aspects of vision that is most easily compromised,” says Bavelier (Independent). “This problem affects thousands of people worldwide, including those with professional activities requiring excellent eyesight, and ageing populations, along with individuals who are clinically evaluated for vision problems such as amblyopia.”

The new study suggests playing certain video games might help with contrast problems. After 50 hours of playing the action-game group had improved their ability to see shades of gray by 43%.

“[Contrast sensitivity function] improvements are typically brought about by correction of the optics of the eye with eyeglasses, contact lenses or surgery,” the researchers write. “We found that the very act of action video game playing also enhanced contrast sensitivity, providing a complementary route to eyesight improvement.”

Gary Rubin, of the University College London Institute of Ophthalmology, told the BBC, “Contrast sensitivity is a very basic visual function, and usually they are more difficult to alter in adulthood. This is a small study, showing a small effect, but it was carefully done, and merits further investigation.”

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 30, 2009
Categories: Health and medicine, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A BBC documentary is claiming that the famous Egyptian queen Cleopatra may have been at least part-African, rather than Greek.

The claim hinges on a skeleton that maybe Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoe, who some suspect was murdered on the orders of her sister. The remains were found at a tomb called ‘The Octagon’ in Ephesus, Turkey.

Continue reading "Cleopatra: maybe African, maybe not" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 16, 2009
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The recent rash of songs about science continues, with this example reaching us via Deep Sea News. At this rate I’m going to have to expand my knowledge of Roman numerals.

The New York Times informs us that, “The rapper on the left is Derrick Davis, a junior at Stanford. The rapper on the right is Tom McFadden, an instructor in the human biology program there.”

This is not the only example from these rapping researchers. Check out the awesome song about cane toads, I Just Want a Function.

Equally good are I'm going going back back to plasma membrane, Wanna be a... Scholar?, and Hi, Meiosis.

Continue reading "Songs about science XVII: gene regulators mount up" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 11, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Journals should be routinely checking papers they publish for signs of plagiarism, a team of American researchers is demanding.

In a commentary paper published in Science the team headed by Harold Garner, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, report their checking of similar citations in the Medline database. They found 212 pairs of articles with “signs of potential plagiarism” using a computer programme called eTBLAST.

“We have just started to scratch the surface, we anticipate finding hundreds to thousands more cases. It is definitely the tip of the iceberg,” says Garner (Globe and Mail).

Garner previously used the same programme on Medline to find duplicate citations and found thousands of cases of potential plagiarism. Writing in Nature in January 2008 Garner and fellow researcher Mounir Errami wrote:

We find it odd that automated text-matching systems are used regularly by high schools and universities, thereby enabling us to hold our children up to a higher standard than we do our scientists. In our view, it would be fairly simple to fold these tools into electronic-manuscript submission systems, making it a ubiquitous aspect of the publication process.

Now they are again pushing the issue in their new piece, and reporting the responses of editors and authors of both the original paper and the suspected plagiarism.

Continue reading "Putting plagiarists on the back foot" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 06, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies, Policy | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The clever people at MIT have come up with rather excellent video of DNA transcription utilising one of the greatest inventions of the last 100 years: the humble Lego brick.

Another video along similar lines has been made for translation.

Of course, one Lego-based science video is never enough. Below the fold are some more internet Lego-science hits.

[Thanks to Mike for pointing us to this.]

Continue reading "Video: Lego DNA" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 03, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A German group named after a famous heretic has decided to celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday by campaigning to have the Ascension Day public holiday renamed ‘Evolutionstag’ (Evolution Day).

Ascension Day is when many Christians celebrate supposed return of Jesus to heaven, it normally falls in May. As Spiegel notes in its coverage of the campaign, most holidays in Germany have Christian roots, although a third of the population is atheist.

The Giordano Bruno Foundation, which is behind Evolutionstag, says it is time for a secular holiday. (Bruno advocated heliocentrism and was burned as the stake in 1600, although many believe this was more to do with his unorthodox views of god than his astronomy musing.)

To spread their message they’ve made this song.

[Hat tip: Pharyngula]

Below the fold: Previously on Songs about Science

Continue reading "Songs about Science XV: You can’t fool the children of evolution" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 27, 2009
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It’s a double bill on today’s edition of songs about science. First up, the Nano Song.

This is the UC Berkeley entry in the American Chemical Society’s ‘What is Nano?’ contest. "We put a lot of work into making something we hoped would be accessible and enjoyable for everyone we know who doesn't spend their life studying nanoscience," says Patrick Bennett, the scientist who directed the video, told Wired.

The next item for your delectation is the welcome return of Richard Alley, who some of you may remember for his “musical review about the problem of scarce resources” set to the tune of Proud Mary and others may remember for his glacial calving work. Via the Highly Allochthonous blog comes this geological reworking of ‘Ring of Fire’.

Below the fold: Previously on Songs about Science

Continue reading "Songs about Science XIV – Nano vs Fire" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 26, 2009
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As it gears up to build another generation of nuclear plants, Britain is expecting to close down its £470 million facility at Sellafield which converts plutonium waste into new nuclear fuel, The Guardian reckons. The plant, which was launched 10 years ago and is the only one in the country, was supposed to help use up plutonium recovered from nuclear waste by turning it into MOx fuel (mixed oxides of uranium and plutonium). It’s never been a success, reprocessing less than 3 tonnes of fuel a year since it started, and being dogged by embarrassing technical problems.

According to a strategy document recently published by Britain’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which is wondering what to do with plutonium:

NDA have reviewed SMP [the Sellafield MOx plant] and do not believe that it provides either the capacity or longevity to be used for the UK civil stockpile and the recycle options that NDA has considered assumed that plutonium is either sold direct or that MOx is fabricated in a new plant.

Industry sources say that means curtains for the old MOx plant, The Guardian says, though the NDA says it hasn’t made a formal recommendation yet.

Continue reading "Britain's pox on MOx" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on February 17, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A group of UCLA scientist think they may have answered a question that has baffled the most powerful military machine on Earth: where is Osama bin Laden?

“In informal conversations in the Geography Department at UCLA, we began to ask ourselves if the biogeographic theories we use every day – theories that predict how plants and animals distribute themselves over space and over time – employed in conjunction with publicly available satellite imagery, could shed some light on this question,” write Thomas Gillespie and colleagues in the MIT International Review.

“… By bringing these methodologies to bear, it is our hope that a long overdue debate might bring bin Laden back to the fore of the public consciousness – and possibly to justice.”

Combining facts about his behaviour and last known whereabouts with satellite images, the researchers narrow down his possible location to three building in the northwest Pakistan town of Parachinar. "If he's still alive, he honestly could be sitting there right now," says Gillespie (press release).

Kim Rossmo, of Texas State University in San Marcos, told USA Today he was not entirely convinced.
“It’s important to think outside the box, and this is an innovative idea worth more pursuit,” says Rossmo. “However, the authors are much too certain of their conclusions. The idea of identifying three buildings in a city of half a million — especially one in a country the authors have likely never visited — is somewhat overconfident.”

Continue reading "UCLA researchers ‘locate bin Laden’ " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 17, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Now that they can do no science till their giant particle smasher is fixed, the Large Hadron Collider scientists are finding other ways to keep people interested.

Sergio Cittolin, who works on the Compact Muon Solenoid detector, has been sketching the different elements of his equipment “in the style of Leonardo da Vinci”.

Although they seem to have only appeared on the CERN website at the end of January, some of these drawings were originally featured in Physics World last year. They also grace the CMS website and are too cool not to share here.

Dan Brown fans will surely be thrilled to find two of their author’s interests combined.

[Hat tip: Alexis Madrigal]

More below the fold.

Continue reading "The LHC, Da Vinci style " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 10, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As part of the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast George Hrab has recorded this ditty about how big numbers get for those working in space science.

You ponder the universe and a look comes 'cross your face You try to fathom distances of all the stuff in space But you can't wrap the bacon of your mind around the fig Of all the terms required to describe how big is big

“Far” (mp3).

UPDATE - Video now on YouTube

[Hat tip: Bad Astronomy.]

Previously on Songs about Science
Songs about science
Songs of science part II
Songs about science part III: geology
Songs about science part IV: GeekPop08
Songs about science part V: singing scientists
Songs about science part VI: ‘Don’t go messing with our telescope’
Songs about science VII: ‘It’s a long way from Amphioxus’
Songs about pseudo-science
Songs about science part VIII: the astrobiology rap
Songs about science IX: Rollin’ to the Future
Songs about science X: drilling’s killer songs
Songs about science XI: Charlie Darwin
Songs about science XII: Shubin’s song

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 06, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Iran’s announcement that it has successfully put a satellite in orbit has successfully triggered the fear in many.

The satellite is named Omid (Hope), and according to Reuters is for research and telecoms. Manouchehr Mottaki, the Iranian Foreign Minister, commented, “Iran’s satellite technology is for purely peaceful purposes and to meet the needs of the country.”

However France, American and UK are already expressing concerns about Iran’s apparent space-ability, mainly because the technology used could also be used to make ballistic missiles (BBC).

Continue reading "Iran’s Sputnik" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 03, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies, Policy, Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Thanks Google, now I’ve got that annoying song Under the sea from The Little Mermaid stuck in my head.

You can do the same, just by taking a look at Google Earth’s latest addition. (Check out Climate Feedback last year on Google Earth's climate-related updates). It’s a very cool update that allows you to scoot around under the sea, and take a look at the sea floor, or at least a representation of it based on seismic data. Can you guess what it’s called? Google marketing people have done themselves proud this time, yes, it’s called Google Ocean!

This Very. Exciting. News. has set the internet alight with stories about the project.

Sylvia Earle, oceaneer extraordinaire introduces the project in a video neatly slotted in at the Guardian, and a great quote of hers is highlighted by Deep Sea News: “Anyone can discover in a few minutes what took me 50 years to understand.” DSN are in turn highlighting the Google Ocean live blogging epic by Danny Sullivan.

The application allows you to spin the globe round, take your pick of underwater treasure you want to find, and zoom in (or dive down) to check out how the land lies. It’s neat, and the Googlers have added tidbits of information about some of the features you might see.

The data has come from a load of research institutes, and the EU is also claiming a stake in the project.

Take a peek, but look out for the vampire squid, apparently lurking there somewhere…

Image: screenshot from Google Earth/Ocean/Mars/Sky/Etc

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on February 03, 2009
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America is getting a new university. A rather strange sounding university.

Based at NASA’s Ames facility in California, the Singularity University has been inspired by the writing of ‘futurist’ Ray Kurzweil. This summer students – who may number 30 or 120 – will start work at the university, which is backed by Google (who else) to the tune of $1 million.

“Singularity University aims to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges,” says the institution’s website.

Continue reading "A singular university" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 03, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Emma Marris

You might recall a neat site we profiled last July that ranked journals not by citations but by value for money—the eigenfactor.

Well the team behind the eigenfactor have not rested on their laurels. Instead, they have teamed up with data visualization whiz Moritz Stefaner of Well-formed data to make super-sexy looking visualizations of how and how much journals and fields cite one another, which journals are the best value, and how a given journal's importance has risen and fallen over time.

See them in all their glory at well-formed.eigenfactor.org and read Stefaner's notes on how he approached the project at his blog.

Carl Bergstrom, the lead player in the eigenfactor team, says the intended audience is curious scientists as well as data-visualization enthusiasts. "What we are experimenting with here is how good algorithms and good data can combine with intelligently designed and aesthetically beautiful ways of displaying that data."

Bergstrom left all the aesthetic decisions, such as which colours to use, strictly to Stefaner. "Moritz is the designer," he says. "I shouldn't be allowed to do these things. My wife could tell you that."

Meanwhile, in other impact-factor news, Public Library of Science ONE has recently announced (registration required) that it will add a grab-bag of "alternative impact data" from Scopus, user ratings, press coverage and the like to each article. The Scientist quotes Peter Binfield, the journal's managing editor, as saying "Our idea is to throw up a bunch of metrics and see what people use."

Update: Carl Bergstrom has asked us to make the following clear: "We also rank by citations. We just have additional features that let you take price into account. But the basic Eigenfactor scores as visualized at the new site are purely citation-based, and independent of price." Apologies for any confusion. Ed.

Image: citation patterns for Nature (click for larger version).

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 29, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A new world record has been set for solar cell efficiency, or so we are told by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, Germany. They have revealed a triple-junction cell that has a conversion efficiency of 41.1% (press release).

Solar cell efficiencies are notoriously hard to pin down. Claims are often made, but not considered ‘official’ until they are independently verified by a recognised body. A quick search online, for example led me to a claim from a consortium that includes the University of Delaware of a cell with 42.8 % efficiency.

So what’s the real answer? And do these incremental advances mean anything?

Continue reading "Baffling solar cell efficiencies are broken" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on January 19, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The ever-vocal Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, based in Washington, DC, is the latest organisation to produce a report bemoaning the lack of regulation of engineered nanoparticles in commercial products (press release).

This time, the US Food and Drug Administration are under fire for not being up to the task. The report “A hard Pill to Swallow: Barriers to Effective FDA Regulation of Nanotechnology-Based Dietary Supplements” pulls no punches, kicking off in the summary with the following: “This paper addresses the issue of whether FDA is equipped to meet the emerging regulatory challenge of dietary supplements that use engineered nanomaterials. The short answer is no.”

The three main problems the report authors, William Schultz from legal practice Zuckerman Spaeder and his colleague Lisa Barclay, identify include:

1. FDA does not have the capacity to identify nano-based dietary supplements that are being developed and marketed, unless manufacturers submit to the pre-market notification process for new dietary ingredients.
2. To the extent that FDA is aware of nano-based dietary supplements, it has little regulatory authority over them.
3. Even if it were granted increased regulatory authority, FDA lacks the scientific expertise and resources to effectively regulate nanomaterials in supplements.

Continue reading "Nanotech regulatory woes continue" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on January 14, 2009
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The proportion of videos on YouTube concerned with performing animals and feats of dance has declined very slightly this month. The reason for this is that Nature has launched its very own channel, bringing you all that is best in science.

Where else can you watch items on genome analysis of the duck-billed platypus and new interpretations of the mysterious Antikythera Mechanism alongside whale evolution and mega-impacts on Mars? Nowhere, that’s where.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 17, 2008
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Researchers have released a map showing where in the US you are most likely to die in a natural disaster. Such acts of God do not, of course, smite the country evenly.

The survey, published in the International Journal of Health Geographics yesterday, puts the worst mortality statistics in the South, thanks to tornadoes and other deadly weather. Heat waves and droughts made the northern Great Plains another danger zone.

Heat and drought were, in fact, the country's biggest killers, accounting for 19.6% of all hazard deaths in 1970-2004. Close behind were other forms of severe weather - thunderstorms, blizzards, and such like.

Continue reading "The most hazardous states in the union" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on December 17, 2008
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Brits and Kiwis got curious about the Large Hadron Collider this year, according to newly released search stats from Google. But nobody else did.

After a press-sweeping September debut - and an almost immediate breakdown from which rumours are still rippling - "large hadron collider" was the 6th-fastest-rising search term of 2008 in the UK, and came in 10th in New Zealand (fastest rising = largest increase in searches since 2007). It didn't make the top 10 list in any other country.

The LHC-equivalent 6th fastest riser for the US was "fox news"; for Canada it was "free movies".

No other science term made it onto the lists - unless you count "earth day", which was 4th for Hong Kong googlers (followed, for reasons opaque to me, by "alexander graham bell", "marc chagall", and "diego velasquez"). In Australia "underbelly" was 10th, but disappointingly, it's a popular TV show, not an epidemic of seedy corruption.

Posted by Anna Barnett on December 10, 2008
Categories: Neat technologies, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you believed some of the more sensationalist headlines, you might think that a commentary paper published in Nature yesterday was urging everyone to go out and source illegal drugs to boost their brain function.

Sample headlines include ‘Let all pop pills for brain, experts urge’ and ‘Uppers for everyone, scientists say’. Admittedly, that is catchier than the title of the article in question: ‘Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy’.

“The article, while libertarian in spirit, is absolutely not saying: ‘use these drugs, everybody’,” says Philip Campbell, one of the paper’s authors and editor of Nature.

“My advice is to avoid taking such drugs unless you have been prescribed them. It is a serious felony to sell such drugs off-prescription in the US; in the UK, Ritalin, for example, is a class B drug, so that un-prescribed possession is punishable by prison and a fine. Furthermore, these drugs have undergone no clinical trials for use by healthy people. And they do have side-effects.”

Continue reading "The ethics of brain boosting" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 08, 2008
Categories: Health and medicine, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

French scientists today announced plans to clone black truffles and grow them in a lab (Financial Times).

Marking the start of truffle season, the French region of Corrèze launched a three-year plan that it hopes will revive supplies of the precious fungus - which fetches €1,000 ($1,265) per kilo at market but is harvested less and less. FT reports:

Their goal is to unlock the secrets of black truffle production - the soil, climate or the trees - and hopefully revive an endangered industry by producing a more consistent crop.

The project will involve culturing cloned truffles together with tree saplings in rows of sterile test tubes until they form their crucial symbiotic relationship, a process that can take up to a year. Once the pair is established they will be planted out to mature naturally.

The Times and the Telegraph pick up the story (the latter in a close paraphrase of the FT).

Says Jacques Pebeyre, an octogenarian author and truffier known as France's 'truffle king', "I am not against helping nature." But, he adds, "we need to know how good these [cloned] truffles will be. In the end it all depends on that" (FT).

Posted by Anna Barnett on December 04, 2008
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The University of Bath has unveiled the latest iteration of what may be the first robot that can both jump and roll.

PhD student Rhodri Armour’s ‘Jollbot’ could be useful for space exploration, says the university, as it is simpler than a legged design and can overcome larger obstacles than a similar sized wheeled vehicle could achieve (press release, 2005 meeting presentation).

“Others in the past have made robots that jump and robots that roll; but we’ve made the first robot that can do both,” says Armour. “Before jumping, the robot squashes its spherical shape. When it is ready, it releases the stored energy all at once to jump to heights of up to half a metre.”

Jollbot was previous announced in a 2007 paper, when Armour told PhysOrg, “For earth-bound uses, there are a variety of other possible applications that involve locomotion over random or rough terrain. Typically these would involve exploration and could occur in places such as volcanoes, caverns, mountainous regions, or more structured rough environments such as urban areas with stairs and other obstacles. Other applications could be for entertainment, such as tourist guides.”

Of course, if Jollbot does go into space it may meet some very similar things already out there...

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 04, 2008
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A clever camera setup in a Swedish neuroscience lab produces the sensation of swapping bodies with a mannequin or, perhaps even more uncannily, with a cognitive neuroscientist, according to a paper in PLOS One(press release).

This is not a major new finding, but rather – as Reuters notes - a high-tech extension of an old trick in which subjects are made to perceive a rubber hand is their own. The paper describes the technique:

Two CCTV cameras were positioned on a male mannequin such that each recorded events from the position corresponding to one of the mannequin’s eyes. A set of head mounted displays ... connected to the cameras was worn by the participants, and connected in such a way that the images from the left and right video cameras were presented on the left and right eye displays, respectively, providing a true stereoscopic image. Participants were asked to tilt their heads downwards as if looking down at their bodies. Thus, the participants saw the mannequin’s body where they expected to see their own.

We used a short rod to repetitively stroke the participant’s abdomen, which was out of view, in synchrony with identical strokes being applied to the mannequin’s abdomen in full view of the participant.

Continue reading "Swap my bod" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on December 03, 2008
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Posted for Declan Butler

How would nature do it? That's the premise of the field of biomimetics or biomimicry, which draws on designs and materials that lifeforms have evolved over the course of millions of years.

Now Autodesk, the industry leader in Computer Aided Design software and the maker of Autocad, has got together with Janine Benyus naturalist and founder of the Biomimicry Institute in Missoula Montana. Together they’ve created a free online database called Ask Nature, where they hope to compile nature's solutions to design and engineering challenges, for creators of all stripes to draw on for inspiration.

“This free database is the only public-domain online library of its kind in the world, where architects, designers and engineers can search for and study nature’s solutions to design challenges – learning, for example, how organisms filter air and water, gather solar energy, and create non-toxic dyes and glues,“ they say.

Continue reading "AutoNad? -- Nature Aided Design " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 03, 2008
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Via the Ocean Engineering blog, comes an amazing video.

The dangers of swimming too fast and not looking where you’re going are ably illustrated by this swordfish (or possibly marlin), found wedged into a blow out preventer on the Atwood Eagle oil rig. Not to worry though fish fans, a friendly underwater robot comes along to rescue it.

“This is an example of the things that make the offshore oil industry fun,” says the Peripatetic Engineer blog.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 25, 2008
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week Google put the photo archives of Life magazine online, and in the process put up some of the best science photos I’ve seen for some time.

As Life has retained the copyright we can’t put them up here, but have a look at some of the Nature team favourites and feel free to add any of your own favourites below.

Paracutin Volcano in San Juan, Mexico, 1945

Roald Amundsen on his South Pole expedition, 1911

Weather ballon experiment, Antarctica, 1951

Astronomers use the McDonald Observatory telescope, 1948

Einstein & Oppenheimer in Princeton, 1947

Julian Huxley looking confused in Canada, 1955

Soviet space animals in 1961

An American chemist at an unknown research lab in 1946

Warning: browsing the Life photo archive may become addictive.

UPDATE - More science Life photo favourites:
Gorgeous physics photos from the LIFE archives – Symmetry Breaking
Kicking it Old School - Cosmic Variance

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 24, 2008
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A skull from Frombork cathedral in Poland has been identified as that of revolutionary astronomer Copernicus.

Marie Allen, of Uppsala University, says DNA from the skull is a match for DNA from hairs found in books owned by Copernicus, whose book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium started the movement to viewing the sun – rather than the Earth – as the centre of the solar system.

“The two strands of hair found in the book have the same genome sequence as the tooth from the skull and a bone from Frombork,” she says (AFP).

Polish police have used the skull to create a reconstruction of how its owner might have looked. This, says AFP, “bore a striking resemblance to portraits of the young Copernicus”.

More coverage
Polish tests 'confirm Copernicus' – BBC
16th-century skeleton identified as Copernicus – Guardian

See also
No choppin' Chopin, says Poland

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 21, 2008
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Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager

Television might be about to get geekier.

The US National Academy of Sciences has created an initiative that will link TV and movie directors with scientists and engineers to incorporate more accurate science content into entertainment: the Science and Entertainment Exchange.

"By building strong connections between the entertainment and science communities, we're hoping to provide an important service to both Hollywood and the viewing public,” says NAS president Ralph Cicerone (press release). Cicerone says he thinks initiative should allow the public to get involved in the latest advances in science, technology and medicine through television and film.

More and more shows are incorporating science into their content, especially forensic investigation and medical shows like CSI and ER. Films like A Beautiful Mind and Mission Impossible are also heavy on science and technology while Star Trek and the like use the fundamental principles of science to push the frontiers into science fiction.

Continue reading "Getting better science on screen" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 20, 2008
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Recently, Dwayne Rooke, the chef at the Davis Station science base in Antarctica, was seriously injured in an all-terrain vehicle accident and had to be evacuated to Tasmania. This was no mean feat.

A ski-eqipped LC-130 Hercules transport plane was dispatched from McMurdo station, which is across the continent and now experiencing nasty spring weather. A temporary sea ice runway was prepared at Davis station for the rescue and penguins were kept off of it. The day after the plane arrived at Davis, it left again for Tasmania (NSF press release, Australian Antarctic Division press release, article from The Age).

When Werner Herzog went to Antarctica to make Encounters at the End of the World he was a bit disappointed at how mundane life at the bottom of the world seemed. Stations are often dirty and scruffy. But science at the end of the world has not yet become a tame affair.

Continue reading "Antarctic mishaps" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 07, 2008
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Posted for Heidi Ledford

A 16-year-old frozen mouse carcass made headlines yesterday when scientists announced the rodent was the first frozen animal to be cloned. In a paper published online by PNAS, Teruhiko Wakayama of RIKEN in Yokohama, Japan, and his colleagues report that they were able to produce healthy clones from the rodent’s frozen brain cells.

Frozen cells have been cloned before but those cells were specially treated with chemicals that helped protect them from the damaging effects of freezing. Wakayama’s paper is the first to successfully clone a frozen animal that was, from what I can tell, pretty much just placed in a paper box and plunked straight into a –20ºC freezer in the early 1990’s.

The authors are excited about the possibility of using the technology to resurrect the woolly mammoth from carcasses frozen in Arctic tundra, but acknowledge the possible technological leap between using a 16-year-old and a 40,000-year-old frozen body. (I won’t pretend to understand the obsession with the woolly mammoth, but have acknowledged that the obsession is very real ever since I learned there is a black market for woolly mammoth parts run, at least in part, by the Russian mafia.)

Continue reading "Clones of the dead: A mouse now, Ted Williams later?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 04, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A scientist has seen his research become an internet hit after a video of his work was set to the Benny Hill theme music.

David Scholnick, who works at Pacific University in America, was using a treadmill to assess the health of shrimps. Healthy shrimps should run fast, unhealthy shrimps should run slower.

“The healthy shrimp ran and swam at treadmill speeds of up to 20 metres per minute for hours with little indication of fatigue,” he says (Daily Mail). “[A] shrimp dealing with an infection is less active and limited in its ability to migrate, find food, and avoid being eaten. As far as I know this is the first time that shrimp have been exercised on a treadmill and it was amazing to see how well they performed.”

Then someone leaked a video of the running shrimp onto the internet. This was way back in 2006 so it’s not quite clear why a number of newspapers are covering this story now. Still, the video is amusing enough to be its own justification.

The video of the running shrimp has become a smash hit, with many versions being set to music. Embedded above is one of the most popular, with over half a million people watching it since November 2006.

“'So many people have logged on to see it which I suppose is kind of funny - I guess people are fascinated,” Scholnick told the Mail. “I guess people find the prospect of watching a shrimp exercise on a treadmill amazing.”

More shrimp videos
Shrimp vs The Final Countdown
Shrimp vs Curtis Mayfield
Dub shrimp
Shrimp vs Justin Timberlake
Shrimp vs Dragonforce
Animals on treadmills round up

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 04, 2008
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Posted for Declan Butler

The pair of 800 pound gorillas that are Microsoft and Google are shaking the cages of convention in traditional disease research. This week, the charity arms of both - the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its Sergey and Larry counterpart Google.org - announced millions of dollars for blue skies research, along the lines of the US military's DARPA whose motto has been to support “revolutionary, high-payoff research that bridges the gap between fundamental discoveries and their military use.” Likewise, Google and Microsoft are trying to attract new blood and ideas, for medical payoffs in the fields of detecting, preventing, treating, and controlling killer diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and pandemic flu.

Today, Microsoft announced the 104 winners, from 22 countries and six continents (see graphic below), of a competition in novel ideas for global health (list of winners). “Projects cover a wide range of innovation, including a “mosquito flashlight” to prevent malaria transmission by disrupting wavelengths, self-destructing TB cells, and studying anti-infective properties of the eye to help prevent HIV/AIDS and other infectious disease,” the company says in a press release.

Continue reading "Wacky races" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 22, 2008
Categories: Health and medicine, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The Large Hadron Collider has already been fired up and it has already broken. Yesterday the giant particle physics experiment was also formally inaugurated as Swiss president Pascal Couchepin, French prime minister François Fillon and science ministers from across the world met at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva.

In an obligatory nod to the world’s financial woes, Fillion said, “The financial crisis that is currently raging shows us the most destabilising face of globalisation. But the LHC is an example of its most promising aspect.” (AFP.)

Of course the machine is not working at the moment, after a massive amount of liquid helium leaked from its cooling system. This fact could hardly be glossed over and Raymond Orbach, US undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy, told AP, “Frankly it was a surprise that it worked the first time without a glitch.”

However Arden Bement, director of the National Science Foundation, added, “I have no doubts they'll get back into operation within three to four months.”

The Daily Telegraph is among papers to note that those attending the reception were treated to a banquet of ‘molecular cuisine’: “molecular egg curdle and ice-cream mixed with liquid nitrogen, created by two of the world’s best chefs Ettore Bocchia of Italy and Ferran Adria, who runs El Bulli restaurant in Spain”.

Liquid nitrogen? Let’s hope that none of that leaked...

Image: CERN control room / CERN

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 22, 2008
Categories: Financial Crisis, Neat technologies, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Ingredients

Malaria parasite (or other organism of your choice)
Butter
Flour
Sugar
Eggs

Method

Sequence your chosen organism’s genetic code.
Submit your genome sequence to Nature.
Ensure your paper is given pride of place on the cover of that journal.
Make your cake.
Put said cover of Nature onto your cake.

Et voila. Your Nature cake should now look something like this...

Thanks to the authors behind the recent Plasmodium vivax paper for sending us these photos of their brilliant cake. Below the fold: the team with their tasty, tasty cover.

Continue reading "How to bake a Nature cake" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 20, 2008
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This strange contraption is the result of a collaboration between Australian artist David Rogers and US Geological Survey scientist Andy Michael. The ‘seismic art installation’ displays Californian earth quakes in real time by shaking its three-metre high steel rods.

The Parkfield Interventional EarthQuake Fieldwork (PIEQF) exhibit receives data on all earthquakes above magnitude 0.1, of which there are around 40 in the Golden State every day.

Michael and Rogers say they hope the work will help people accept and understand the risks posed by earthquakes.

“The Parkfield installation embodies the extra dimension that art brings to science, helping to visualize what's going on below the surface in a way science can't on its own,” says Michael (press release). “David’s art brings earthquakes that happen under California every day to the surface and makes them real and visible for all to see. His work gives everyone a deeper appreciation for how the earth works, and why they need to prepare for the inevitable large and damaging earthquakes.”

If you can’t make it out to Parkfield you can watch on the webcam (note that PIEQF ‘sleeps’ from 9.30 in the evening to 6.30 in the morning).

More pictures below the fold.

Continue reading "Shake it! Earthquake art comes to California" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 16, 2008
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Warwick University expects more than 200 human body parts to arrive next week. You might think that wasn’t out of the ordinary, but this time there’s a twist.

The institution’s medical school has purchased “plastinated” teaching aids costing £400 000 from the controversial Gunther von Hagens. Von Hagens, who works out of Guben, Germany, is famous for carting exhibitions of preserved and carefully chopped up dead folks around the world, occasionally displaying them riding dissected horses or playing chess (press release).

Warwick’s anatomy students will be under strict orders on how to handle the expensive flesh, which should stay in one piece (or however many pieces are intended) for about a decade, according to the university press office. Head of department Peter Abrahams, apparently trotted around the workshops of various suppliers, testing their embalmed bits before agreeing to the deal with Dr Death (as von Hagens is weirdly proud to be known).

The Telegraph just published a profile of von Hagens and his German factory, with its blood-red floors and 150-odd workers, who boast jobs as peculiar as preparing Santa Claus’s lungs.

Intriguingly, the obsessive anatomist was once sold by East Germany to West Germany (West Germany purchased the release of about 30,000 political prisoners from East Germany - Times), and 8,000 people have volunteered to have their corpses dunked in a bath of acetone, injected with silicone rubber and then cured by him or his craftsmen.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article4613780.ece

More coverage
University buys £400k body parts – BBC
University buys body parts – PA

Image: Von Hagens with students and parts

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 15, 2008
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Something strange is happening with Google News. Those of you who are avid checkers of the science and technology home page may notice that an unexpected item has made its way into the listings.

Alongside the masses of IT news and the occasional science story the mysterious and top-secret Google algorithms seem to think horoscopes now count as science.

Yesterday UPI’s ‘Your Daily Horoscope’ was the second science story at a little after nine (image). Today the LA Times’ horoscope nestled neatly between news of Microsoft R&D spending and cheap DNA sequencing (image).

Is someone at Google having a laugh?

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 07, 2008
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Wow, here’s an invention I never realised we needed: The world’s fastest barcode reader.

But I'm just showing my ignorance – today I have learned that barcodes are used much more widely than just at the supermarket checkout.

Yes, barcodes are one of the underpinning infrastructure technologies of our society. Sorting things out everywhere from shops to post rooms to blood banks. Current readers use either a mechanically scanned laser – the reflected light bounces back and gives the reading – or an optical scanner that takes a picture of the barcode. The scan rates of these lasers is about 100 – 1000 scans per second, and require the use of mechanical scanners and lots of optical-to-electrical converters.

But if that’s not fast enough for you, check out this paper in Applied Physics Letters (paper, press release)by Keisuke Goda and colleagues at UCLA. They use a fancy laser technique, where a laser pulse has the barcode’s image mapped onto it, and this in turn is mapped onto another waveform that is read with great speed by a single, stationary, optical-to-electrical converter. The limiting step is the speed of the laser pulse.

They reckon they can get a bar code reader that scans at a rate of 25 MHz – 10,000 times faster than the old methods Goda says, and in future this speed could be even faster. They say that faster and faster readers are needed by industry. PI Bahram Jalali explains: " "Eliminating the CCD camera and the mechanically steered mirrors from bar code scanners can prove valuable in applications that demand high-throughput bar code reading, such as industrial monitoring and retail supply line management."

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on October 03, 2008
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Posted for Ashley Yeager

Hold on to those solar panels or they might show up on eBay. As energy prices soar and consumers turn to the Sun for their power, opportunistic thieves are cashing in on the new market by dismantling and reselling solar panels.

"I wouldn't say it's pervasive, but it's going on," California Solar Energy Industries Association executive director Sue Kateley told the Contra Costa Times in August. According to UK paper the Guardian a rash of thefts in California has led one wag to coin the term ‘grand theft solar’

California is the US leader for solar panel installations, with 33,000 across the state, the New York Times and the Guardian report. It’s no surprise, then, that California is also the US market leader for solar panel thefts. Note that figures are hard to come by and cases have been reported in Oregon, Minnesota and even in Africa.

On 22 September, in fact, the South African Sowetan reported that police caught an off-duty officer in Thohoyandou, Limpopo possessing solar panel band cutting equipment and suspected stolen property. Similar property thefts were reported by The New Vision Online, a Ugandan Web site.

Continue reading "‘Grand theft solar’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 26, 2008
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The catchily titled ‘2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge’ has rolled around again. The winning entries are published in this week’s issue of Science and can also be seen on the NSF website.

Pictured here are the suction cups of the Loligo pealei squid, captured by Jessica Schiffman and Caroline Schauer of Drexel University. That’s the image they captured, not the squid. This was given an Honorable Mention in the Photography category and probably would have won if it wasn’t the stuff of nightmares.

More below the fold.

Continue reading "Picture special: squid suckers, cancer close ups and more" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 26, 2008
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This year saw the 58th Meeting of Nobel Laureates descend on the island of Lindau, Germany. The meetings are supposed to allow young scientists to meet the giants of their field.

Nature sent a film crew to the island to make the first ever Nature documentary. Starting from October 3rd you can see five interviews in which students question Nobel Laureates David Gross, George Smoot, Gerardus t’Hooft, John Hall and William Phillips.

If you can’t wait there’s a teaser trailer already available here.

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 25, 2008
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Via Andrew Revkin’s DotEarth blog we meet Richard Alley of Penn State, aka The Singing Climatologists. This is ‘Rollin’ to the Future’, described by Alley as “a musical review about the problem of scarce resources”.

Revkin says:

Besides being a lead author on several reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr. Alley led one of the groups that first discerned in Greenland’s ice layers how the climate has seen extraordinary jogs in temperature, particularly shortly after the end of the last ice age. ... Now he’s moving into multimedia communication on climate, and earth sciences more generally, not just with video, but with a guitar.

For our younger readers, this is what he’s referencing although this version is clearly better.

Previously on Songs about Science
Songs about science
Songs of science part II
Songs about science part III: geology
Songs about science part IV: GeekPop08
Songs about science part V: singing scientists
Songs about science part VI: ‘Don’t go messing with our telescope’
Songs about science VII: ‘It’s a long way from Amphioxus’
Songs about pseudo-science
Songs about science part VIII: the astrobiology rap

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 15, 2008
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The media feeding frenzy that is the British Association Festival of Science has kicked off. Katrina Charles is there for Nature and has thus far enlightened us about fossilised forests in Illinois coal mines and why science in science fiction films is a bit silly.

There’s far more to cover than one person alone can manage. Here’s a round up of the rest...

Continue reading "BA Festival of Science round up" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 09, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Health and medicine, Neat technologies, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Via Steinn Sigurðsson’s Dynamics of Cats blog this rather excellent piece of Friday-fodder has surfaced. Philosopher of science Santiago Ginnobili and his colleague Christián Carlos Carman have constructed this awesome demonstration of the power of epicycles.

For those of you not au fait with ancient cosmology, epicycles are a way of explaining the motions of planets using only perfect circles. Assuming planets moved in perfect circles did not explain what was seen in the sky, so astronomers added secondary and tertiary circles, smaller and smaller, to try and create patterns which agreed with observation.

In theory any curve can be constructed using this method, if you’re prepared to add enough circles.

This exercise appears to be tied up with ideas of refutability and falsification in science, but to be honest my language skills aren’t up to translating philosophy of science papers in other tongues. Just enjoy the video for now.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 05, 2008
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Posted for Natasha Gilbert

Tests carried out on the two mummified foetuses found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun are beginning to yield results.

Research presented at the pharmacy and medicine in ancient Egypt conference at Manchester University, UK, earlier this week show the children could have been twins despite one being much larger than the other.

The results add weight to suggestions that the stillborn foetuses were the teenage Pharaoh’s children, and is due to be published in the journal Antiquity in January 2009.

Last month, Egyptian scientists announced they were to conduct DNA paternity testing on the foetuses. The results are due December. The foetuses were found by Howard Carter when he discovered the King Tut’s tomb in 1922, but very little has been found out about them since.

Continue reading "Tut’s tots could be twins" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 05, 2008
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A solar powered plane has set a new record over the desert of Arizona, staying aloft for 83 hours and 37 minutes. Importantly, this means it stayed up for three nights.

The Zephyr beat a previous official world record for unmanned flight of 30 hours set by the Global Hawk plane in 2001 and also beat its own previous unofficial record of 54 hours. As this Zephyr flight does not meet all the requirements of the Federation Aeronautique Internationale the record remains unofficial, notes the BBC.

Although it might eventually be used for research purposes such as earth observation, those most likely to see the Zephyr first used commercially are those unfortunate enough to be in war zones. Its manufacturer QinetQ is a mainly military engineering company that was spun out of the British military a few years ago.

“In addition to setting a new unofficial record, the trial is a step towards the delivery of Zephyr's capability for joint, real-time, battlefield persistent surveillance and communications to forces in the field at the earliest opportunity,” says Simon Bennett, managing director of QinetiQ’s Applied Technologies business (press release).

Previously on Nature
Solar power: A flight to remember
Solar powered flight at night

More news coverage
Wired
AP

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 26, 2008
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Posted on behalf of Tim Sands

News rampage, that is. The world’s press has gone into something of a frenzy over a report in New Scientist of a robot guided by “rat brains” – more accurately rat neurons in a dish.

This is just a small sample from around the globe: Wired, News.com.au, India Times, Telegraph.

This experiment is somewhat different from the monkey-brain controlled robotic arm described in Nature in May and the earlier robots controlled by whole monkey and lamprey brains. In these new experiments the response of disembodied rat neurons in a dish were used to control a free-roaming robot called Gordon.

Continue reading "Rodent-guided robot rampage" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 15, 2008
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Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow

Sat-Nav in a wristwatch, pretty high-tech? Apparently, not necessarily. Sat-Nav wristwatches have been around since 1920.

This nifty device, which provides scrolling directions for multiple locations*, is one of 50 weird and wonderful labour-saving devices that have gone on display at the British Library.

It is not clear if this device can also provide traffic updates.

Other gadgets, some of which the Daily Mail provides pictures for, on display include:

The two handled self-pouring teapot (1886)
Clockwork burglar alarm (1852)
Grenade to put out fires (1890)
Mechanical page-turner (1890)
The automatic nose hair cutter (1920)

And according to the Telegraph there are also "Go no further" honeymoon garters.

The collection is provided by Maurice Collins, “a retired businessman from Muswell Hill, London, who has cherry-picked 50 must-have items from his collection of 1,400 historic gadgets to show off at the British Library Business and Intellectual Property Centre”, says the Daily Mail.

For more retro-futurism check out yesterday's post: Welcome to the world of tomorrow!

*ok, you have to scroll it yourself and change the paper reel for different directions, it was the 20s!

Image: BL

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 15, 2008
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On the front page of wikipedia today you may have noticed a small item about WRNY, “an AM radio station ... started by Hugo Gernsbacks Experimenter Publishing Company to promote his radio and science magazines”.

These magazines started up over a hundred years ago in April 1908 with the first edition of Modern Electrics, which later became Modern Electrics and Mechanics. Gernsbacks continued with The Electrical Experimenter in 1913, which became Science and Invention in 1920.

“Not only did this fill America’s proto-geeks with dreams of wireless and electrical power machinery, it published Gernsback's hard-SF novel Ralph 124C 41 + and arguably foreshadowed the entire genre of technically oriented science fiction,” says the Magazine Art website.

Ok, we’ve missed the anniversary in April but this was too good not to bring to your attention: the Magazine Art website has a complete cover gallery of these magazines. If you have any time on your hands have a browse and see how the future looked back in the last century.

Cover gallery for Modern Electrics on MagazineArt.com
Cover gallery for Electrical Experimenter on MagazineArt.com

Image: January 1920 issue of Electrical Experimenter from MagazineArt.com

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 14, 2008
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Following on from Polish rejection of attempts to analyse the DNA of Chopin, a woman who says she is the daughter of Salvador Dali has started another testing debate.

A woman identified in the Daily Telegraph as Pilar A says the artist is her father but initial DNA testing on skin and hair from his iconic moustache has proven inconclusive. She has called in the lawyers and says she may even try to exhume Dali’s remains, having not been satisfied with the response of his estate to her attempts to establish paternity.

Pilar A says more DNA testing has been done by the estate, but she has not been told of the results by the estate, controlled by Dali’s friend Robert Descharnes. However Robert Descharnes’s son is quoted as saying that the doctor undertaking the paternity test told him verbally there was no Dali link to Pilar A (the Telegraph calls the son Richard; El Mundo calls him Nicolas).

And, proving beyond doubt that internet language translation cannot be trusted, ABC Spain (via Google language tools) provides us with this appropriately surrealist gem as the intro of their coverage:

Only ‘you lack the mustache’ (of the Salvador Dalí, which hedgehogs into the sky), confesses that he told Robert Descharnes-friend and collaborator of genius ampurdanés for forty years-nothing else see it.

Image: Dali, by Roger Higgins via Wikimedia and the Library of Congress

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 12, 2008
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Researchers from the University of Twente in the Netherlands have launched a test of ‘air-purifying’ concrete.

Titanium dioxide in the bricks helps sunlight convert nitrogen oxides into “harmless nitrate”. When the rains come this then washes the bricks clear (press release). It’s not clear if the amount of nitrate being produced would be a pollution problem, as is the case with nitrates in agriculture.

The bricks are based on Japanese technology (possibly this tech) which has been further developed by the Twente researchers, says the university. One road in the town of Hengelo will be paved with the eco-bricks and another with normal bricks. The researchers will monitor pollution on both roads.

This isn’t the first set of air-scrubbing concrete out there. The idea has popped up in Italy, where it featured at the Venice Biennale.

Want to know more? Check out this paper from Belgian researcher Anne Beeldens: An environmental friendly solution for air purification and self-cleaning effect: the application of TIO2 as photocatalyst in concrete (PDF).

Image: U Twente

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 07, 2008
Categories: Chemistry, Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Tim Sands

At the risk of turning The Great Beyond into a celebrity gossip sheet, which extravagantly-masked leader is currently having paternity tests conducted on two children suspected of being his offspring?

This is the widely reported news that Egyptian scientists are conducting DNA paternity tests on two foetuses found in King Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The stillborn foetuses were found by Howard Carter when he discovered the tomb in 1922 and have remained in storage ever since, having never been put on display or studied (AP).

It has always been assumed that the children were his, DNA testing should settle matter (and lay to rest questions over his fertility).

The testing is part of a larger program to test the relations between hundreds of Egyptian mummies. This is of immense interest to Egyptologists as the precise identity of Tutankhamun’s parentage is unclear.

Continue reading "Tut’s tots" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 07, 2008
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An unintended consequence of electric and hybrid cars was reported earlier this year: these environmentally-friendly cars are a danger because they don’t make enough noise. But now Lotus Engineering have come up with a way to add 'vroom' to a hybrid car.

The main concern with these quiet cars has been for the vision impaired, but children and distracted pedestrians, as well as cyclists, are also at risk. According to the Daily Mail “A study at the University of California found that a petrol or diesel car could be heard 36ft away but a Prius was not heard until it was 11ft from blindfolded volunteers.”

So to increase the noise Lotus have outfitted a Toyota Prius “with a waterproof speaker near the radiator that blares simulated yet realistic engine sounds to let pedestrians” (Wired).

Continue reading "Giving hybrids a voice" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 07, 2008
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Nature’s virtual island in Second Life will tomorrow play host to Jeff Marlow, of Imperial College London. Jeff is part of the European ExoMars team that is aiming to put a life-seeking rover on the Red Planet that will put sedentary solvent-sniffer Phoenix to shame.

Tomorrow he is delivering the next Nature Second Life lecture, anyone interested in Mars should check it out.

ExoMars: Europe’s Next Step in the Search for Life on Mars, kicks off tomorrow at 6pm BST (10am PDT).

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 04, 2008
Categories: Neat technologies, Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

England’s Neolithic artists had something of an abstract bent. While our continental artists were making human and animal representations 5,000-odd years ago British artists were carving convoluted lines and patterns into rocks, using other rocks as tools.

English Heritage, a government-funded body, has been cataloguing the carvings in the Northumberland region and has just released an online catalogue of them. It is also expanding this regional survey across the UK and hopes to add to the new carvings already discovered.

“There are many theories as to what rock art carvings mean,” says Kate Wilson, English Heritage’s inspector of ancient monuments (press release, Times news story). “They may have played a role in fire, feastings and offering activities, or been used as ‘signposts’, or to mark territory. They may have a spiritual significance.”

And according to Wilson, England’s rock-carvers may not be so different to their fellow artists after all. “The fact that these carved symbols developed in diverse and dispersed cultures across the world lend weight to arguments that these simple designs – and the urge to create them – are somehow hard-wired into the human psyche,” she says.

More pictures below the fold and on the England’s Rock Art website.

Continue reading "Picture post: England’s ancient rock art" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 04, 2008
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Any of you scuba divers? And any of you ever seen any insects down there? Nope, thought not. And why? Because of maths.

Insects manage to survive under water by forming a thin bubble around themselves to trap air and let them breathe. Mathematicians John Bush and Morris Flynn at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have looked closely at all the factors that control the stability of the bubble and have done the sums to work out the limits on the insects’ sub-aquabatics. (paper and press release)

There’s a maximum depth that insects can dive to before the bubble pops, around 30 metres. But there’s also a minimum depth above which the bubble becomes unstable.

Even though these insects, like the water boatman, could dive deep deep down, they typically don’t bother – it’s dark, cold and there’s not much to eat – but plenty of things to eat them.

Continue reading "Boating bugs breathe by building bubbles" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on August 01, 2008
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A famous 16th-century warship sank because its crew spoke a different language to its captain, says a researcher who has been looking at the crew’s skulls.

The Mary Rose was the flagship of Henry VIII’s navy before it sank, probably because water flooded in through open gun ports. The last words of its captain Admiral George Carew were of his crew: “I have the sort of knaves I cannot rule.”

Now Hugh Montgomery, a medical researcher at University College London, says he has found that many of the crew were Spanish, and may not have understood the order to close the gun ports. By looking at teeth from the shipwreck Montgomery and colleagues found their composition suggests they come from people who grew up in the Mediterranean.

“The analysis of the teeth suggests the men grew up in a warm climate, probably somewhere in southern Europe,” says Montgomery (Independent). “It’s also known that at this time Henry VIII was short of skilled soldiers and sailors and was trying to recruit mercenaries from the Continent.”

The claims will feature on a TV documentary next week.

Headline watch
Que? Spanish crew's lack of English sank the Mary Rose – The Times
Was Henry VIII's Mary Rose lost in translation? – Reuters
All at sea: Mary Rose sank because foreign sailors couldn't understand their commander's orders – Daily Mail

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 01, 2008
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