Welcome to Science Saturday, where the Overnight News Digest crew informs and entertains you with this week's news about science, space, and the environment.
Meteor Blade’s Green Diary Rescue celebrates Daily Kos eco diarists 6 days a week!
H/T to Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse for this phrasing.
This week's featured story comes from MSNBC.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HUBBLE
Alan Boyle
There's plenty to celebrate today as the Hubble Space Telescope turns 19 years old: The billion-dollar orbiting observatory is still in business, even though some people thought it should have failed by now. And after years and months of delay, it looks as if help is finally on the way. The shuttle Atlantis is set to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of belated birthday gifts next month.
More science, space, and environment news after the jump.
Slideshows/Videos
Wired: Hubble Images Capture Universe's Beauty, Awe
By Betsy Mason
Entering its 20th year of service, the Hubble Space Telescope has made more than 880,000 observations, taken 570,000 images of 29,000 different celestial objects, and piled up a load of impressive scientific accomplishments.
After a rocky start that included a delay due to the Challenger shuttle disaster and a flaw in the optical mirror that prevented the fine focus the telescope was designed to achieve, Hubble has had a glorious career. The scope helped determine the age of the universe and the rate at which it is expanding, as well as the prevalence of black holes in the universe and the existence of dark matter.
The telescope was designed to allow servicing using the space shuttle, which has visited it four times. The final shuttle service mission is scheduled for May and will involve five spacewalks to refurbish and upgrade the telescope and replace parts that have stopped working. Hubble, with any luck, will have several more years of life after that.
Astronomy/Space
Science News: Blob may signal monster galaxy feeding
Body may be early galaxy caught in the act of forming
By Ron Cowen
Quick, Marge, call the Cosmic Enquirer! Astronomers have discovered a monster blob lurking at the edge of the universe. The blob may be the earliest known galaxy to be caught in the act of its first feeding frenzy.
The giant parcel of gas and stars stretches for 55,000 light-years, a little more than half the diameter of the Milky Way’s disk today. Yet this newfound object hails from a time when the universe was only 6 percent its current age.
Wired: Hubble Snaps Fantastic Galaxy Collision
By Betsy Mason
This group of galaxies, known as Arp 194 is 600 million light years away from Earth in the constellation Cepheus. There are three galaxies in the image: Two are colliding at the top and the third in the lower part of the image is actually in the background.
Wired: Astronomers Closer to Exoplanet 'Holy Grail'
By Brandon Keim
In the astronomical equivalent of meeting someone who reminds you of yourself, scientists have discovered a planet outside the solar system that weighs just twice as much as Earth.
The relatively small size of the new planet, dubbed Gliese 581e, prompted Grenoble Observatory astronomer Xavier Bonfils to call it "the least massive exoplanet ever detected" in a press release. The discovery comes exactly 15 years to the day after the first exoplanet discovery was announced.
The largest exoplanet yet found, named TrES-4 and found — quite appropriately — orbiting a star in the Hercules constellation, is roughly twice the diameter of Jupiter, which itself could house 1,000 planet Earths. Corot-7b, the previous smallest-exoplanet designee, is twice the size of Earth and about five times as heavy.
Wired: Pieces of Infant Solar System Found in Comet's Wake
By Alexis Madrigal
Using particles collected by NASA aircraft after the Earth passed through a comet's wake, researchers found grains of dust from the nebula out of which our solar system formed.
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The grains of dust are considered samples of our solar system's building blocks, almost like time capsules of what our neighborhood was like before the sun and planets formed four-and-a-half billion years ago. Scientists try to find the primitive materials on comets — as in the Stardust mission — but that's difficult and expensive.
Wired: The Geomagnetic Apocalypse — And How to Stop It
By Brandon Keim
For scary speculation about the end of civilization in 2012, people usually turn to followers of cryptic Mayan prophecy, not scientists. But that's exactly what a group of NASA-assembled researchers described in a chilling report issued earlier this year on the destructive potential of solar storms.
Entitled "Severe Space Weather Events — Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts," it describes the consequences of solar flares unleashing waves of energy that could disrupt Earth's magnetic field, overwhelming high-voltage transformers with vast electrical currents and short-circuiting energy grids. Such a catastrophe would cost the United States "$1 trillion to $2 trillion in the first year," concluded the panel, and "full recovery could take four to 10 years." That would, of course, be just a fraction of global damages.
Needless to say, shorting out the electrical grid would cause major disruptions to developed nations and their economies.
Wired: Building a Better Alien-Detection System
By Brandon Keim
By measuring the photon signatures left when light bounces off photosynthesizing cells, astronomers may soon have a new tool for detecting extraterrestrial organisms.
"When you look at objects in the solar system, what's a high-probability way of determining whether or not that planet has life?" said Neill Reid, a Space Telescope Science Institute astrobiologist. "Circular polarization has the potential to be a signature of life."
Other proposed signs of life include gases produced by biological processes, or infrared light reflected by radiation-tolerant microbes. However, those methods are limited. Not all microbes are radiation-tolerant, and nonbiological processes can sometimes produce gases typically associated with life.
CNet: NASA: No shuttle damage from dropped socket
by William Harwood
A one-and-one-eighth-inch socket from a torque wrench fell from a service platform and hit the shuttle Atlantis' left payload bay door radiator during Hubble Space Telescope cargo installation earlier this week. In a lucky break for NASA's shuttle team, no one was injured, coolant lines in the radiator were not damaged, and a dent where the socket impacted will not need repairs.
CNet: NASA retargets Atlantis launch for May 11
by William Harwood
Launch of the shuttle Atlantis on a mission to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope has been moved up one day and retargeted for May 11 at 2:01:49 p.m. EDT.
NASA officials said Wednesday that they hoped to push the launch date up in order to increase the odds of a successful launch before a deadline of May 14. But they needed to assess whether such a schedule change was feasible. Engineers and managers concluded Friday that processing could, in fact, be accelerated without affecting required work. Senior managers will hold an executive-level flight readiness review next Thursday to discuss final clearance for launch.
By moving launch up one day, NASA will have three days in which to get Atlantis off the ground before standing down to make way for a military operation on the Air Force Eastern Range, the agency that provides telemetry and tracking support for all rockets launched from Florida.
Evolution/Paleontology
Physorg.com: Scientists discover 2 new dinosaur species
By James Janega
Researchers from Field Museum in Chicago have helped discover two new dinosaur species in China's Gobi Desert: a 5-foot-tall forebear of Tyrannosaurus rex and a half-ton beaked dinosaur reminiscent of a giant ostrich.
The findings, reported online this week in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, follow two summers of collaborative research between U.S. and Chinese scientists who found the new species and several others in rocky strata in the southern Gobi.
Both dinosaurs lived about 110 million years ago, researchers said.
The Packet and Times (Canada): Evolutionary stumble
ARCHAEOLOGY: University student from Orillia discovers 20-million-year-old fossil of 'walking seal'
Posted By COLIN MCKIM, THE PACKET AND TIMES
A 20-million-year-old fossil discovered in the high Arctic by a university student from Orillia is believed to be a "missing link" in the evolution of seals from land to sea creatures.
"It's pretty significant ," said Elizabeth Ross, 23, a graduate of Orillia District Collegiate and Vocational Institute where her father Jamie Ross taught biology.
"I had no idea at the time."
Dubbed the "walking seal," the mammal had long legs and webbed feet and hunted both on land and in the water 20 to 25 million years ago when the Arctic was forested and much warmer than today.
The above discovery was also profiled in National Geographic asa Seal With "Arms" Discovered -- Evolution at Work
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above two articles.
Scientific American: What Makes Us Human?
By Katherine S. Pollard
Six years ago I jumped at an opportunity to join the international team that was identifying the sequence of DNA bases, or "letters," in the genome of the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). As a biostatistician with a long-standing interest in human origins, I was eager to line up the human DNA sequence next to that of our closest living relative and take stock. A humbling truth emerged: our DNA blueprints are nearly 99 percent identical to theirs. That is, of the three billion letters that make up the human genome, only 15 million of them—less than 1 percent—have changed in the six million years or so since the human and chimp lineages diverged.
Evolutionary theory holds that the vast majority of these changes had little or no effect on our biology. But somewhere among those roughly 15 million bases lay the differences that made us human. I was determined to find them. Since then, I and others have made tantalizing progress in identifying a number of DNA sequences that set us apart from chimps.
Biodiversity
The Journal (UK): Ambitious bid to save plateau set for £2m boost
by Tony Henderson
AN ambitious North East bid to rescue one of the rarest landscapes in the world is set for a £2m boost. The magnesian limestone plateau, with its unique geology and grassland communities of plants and insects, stretches along the coast from South Tyneside to Hartlepool.
It also covers inland areas including Newton Aycliffe, Cassop and Quarrington in County Durham and Houghton and Hetton near Sunderland, adding up to 200sq kms.
A Limestone Landscapes Partnership has been set up to explore how sites can be saved, linked up and improved, with better access and community involvement. The North East has two thirds of the world’s magnesian limestone grassland, which is rich in orchids.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above article.
Biotechnology/Health
Science News: Yeast bred to bear artificial vanilla
By Rachel Ehrenberg
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and now, vanilla.
Yeast has long been pressed into service for making food and drink, and now scientists have recruited the fungus for a loftier flavor: vanillin, vanilla’s dominant compound. Scientists report in an upcoming Applied and Environmental Microbiology that they have engineered strains of beer and baker’s yeast to produce vanillin from glucose, a greener and cheaper route than previous methods.
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Vanillin is the dominant compound of the hundreds that are found in vanilla — an extract from the seed-bearing pods, called beans, of two orchids, Vanilla planifolia and Vanilla tahitensis. But real vanilla beans are precious, rare and costly. Today, less than a percent of the vanillin sold each year is derived from the orchids. The majority of vanillin is synthesized in chemistry labs, and typically made from lignin, a constituent of wood left over from the paper-making industry, or guaiacol, a petroleum product derived from wood creosote.
Wired: Return of The Doc Who Cried Clone
By Brandon Keim
Five years after Panayiotis Zavos shocked the world by claiming to implant a cloned human embryo, the rogue fertility doctor says he's done it again — and this time, with no fewer than 11 clones.
It's hard to know what to make of Zavos' boasts, which emerged yesterday in the wakeof a Discovery Channel press release promoting its upcoming documentary, Human Cloning.
Zavos' original claims were roundly dismissed after he failed to produce any proof. The same went for a 2006 announcement that he'd put cloned embryos in five British women.
Climate/Environment
Scientific American: Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?
The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse
By Lester R. Brown
One of the toughest things for people to do is to anticipate sudden change. Typically we project the future by extrapolating from trends in the past. Much of the time this approach works well. But sometimes it fails spectacularly, and people are simply blindsided by events such as today’s economic crisis.
For most of us, the idea that civilization itself could disintegrate probably seems preposterous. Who would not find it hard to think seriously about such a complete departure from what we expect of ordinary life? What evidence could make us heed a warning so dire—and how would we go about responding to it? We are so inured to a long list of highly unlikely catastrophes that we are virtually programmed to dismiss them all with a wave of the hand: Sure, our civilization might devolve into chaos—and Earth might collide with an asteroid, too!
For many years I have studied global agricultural, population, environmental and economic trends and their interactions. The combined effects of those trends and the political tensions they generate point to the breakdown of governments and societies. Yet I, too, have resisted the idea that food shortages could bring down not only individual governments but also our global civilization.
Wired: To Save the Earth, Start With Data
By Alexis Madrigal
You can't cast a stone without hitting a list of tips to save the planet, but few of them come with any hard data on how hand-washing your dishes will save polar bears. And all those companies "going green" just to do something on Earth Day could be hurting the cause, not helping.
"All these major media companies are giving people green tips. Frankly, three quarters of the time they have no clue what they're talking about," said Thomas Scaramellino, founder of Efficiency 2.0, which makes energy-efficiency software for utilities. "We think the general awareness is helpful, in principle. But you're setting yourself up for a backfire into a deep skepticism."
Conserving the Earth's biodiversity and natural resources will not be simple and can't be accomplished by a smallish group of like-minded people turning out their lights for an hour or walking to work for a day. The scale of that solution doesn't fit the scale of the world's intertwined energy problems. We've got declining petroleum resources in an oil-addicted world, too much carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere and billions of people without electricity.
Wired: Second Life for Test-Tube Earth
By Brandon Keim
Nearly 15 years after the first managerial team of Biosphere 2 was ordered out by federal marshals, scientists yearn for a way to fulfill the true promise of Earth-in-a-bubble experiments.
"We need to do this again, and better," said Daniel Botkin a University of California, Santa Barbara naturalist who sat on Biosphere 2's original advisory committee. "We don't understand how ecosystems function, how life is sustained on the Earth. The way you study any system is to take a part of it and try to understand the principles inside."
Researchers still work inside the $200 million, glass-and-steel complex, but with slightly less modest ambitions. The sphere's windows, once sealed tighter than the space shuttle, open to Arizona air. Most of the original biomes are a tourist attraction. Research focuses on plant function in an arid semi-desert environment, rather than the ecological dynamics of a miniature planet.
Wired: Biosphere 2 Not Such a Bust
By Brandon Keim
In most people's minds, Biosphere 2 was a fabulously expensive failure, a $200 million earth-in-a-bottle that choked on carbon dioxide and was overrun by ants. But not everybody feels that way.
"In our view, Biosphere 2 was a tremendous success," said Bill Dempster, the project's engineering systems director and designer of the sphere's remarkable lungs. "Many people don't realize that hundreds of papers were written about it."
Columbia University and the University of Arizona eventually took over the sphere, and its original inhabitants are largely remembered for personality conflicts, controversy and general New Age oddness. But they left some interesting science behind.
San Francisco Chronicle: Wildfires add to speed of global warming
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Wildfires that ravage California and other major forested areas around the world are speeding the pace of global warming as they pump more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
And the planet's rising temperatures that spur droughts and hotter summers, in turn, are sparking even more widespread fires.
Those warnings come from an international team of fire specialists from six nations, who declare that the global science agency that governs international actions aimed at reversing climate change must include the effects of forest fires in predicting how fast temperatures will rise in coming years.
The Business Insider: Oil, Coal, Auto Industry Lobbyist Lied About Global Warming For Years
Jay Yarow
Newly obtained documents reveal that a group that lobbied on behalf of the oil, coal and auto industry intentionally misled the public about the causes of global warming during the mid-nineties, The New York Times reports.
The Global Climate Coalition spent millions of dollars in the nineties running ads to convince the public that global warming was not caused by humans and that joining the Kyoto Protocol was a mistake. However, its own internal documents said, "The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied."
Science News: A little air pollution boosts vegetation’s carbon uptake
Aerosols bumped up world’s plant productivity by 25 percent in the 1960s and 1970s, new research suggests
By Sid Perkins
The world’s vegetation soaked up carbon dioxide more efficiently under the polluted skies of recent decades than it would have under a pristine atmosphere, a new analysis in the April 23 Nature suggests. The trend hints that relying on forests and other vegetation to sequester carbon may not be effective if skies continue to clear, researchers say.
Major volcanic eruptions throw large quantities of aerosols, such as small bits of fractured rock and droplets of sulfuric acid, high into the atmosphere. Those particles scatter incoming solar radiation, preventing some of it from reaching Earth’s surface and thereby cooling climate temporarily (SN: 11/5/05, p. 294).
That scattering also, however, boosts how much carbon vegetation takes in, says Lina M. Mercado, an ecosystem modeler at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in Wallingford, England. Although aerosols, including many types of air pollution, decrease the overall amount of light falling onto a tree, the particles diffuse the radiation that reaches the ground so that it actually illuminates more leaves. In that case, leaves below the tree’s outer canopy are less likely to be shaded.
Psychology/Behavior
Wired: Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion
By Jonah Lehrer
For Teller (that's his full legal name), magic is more than entertainment. He wants his tricks to reveal the everyday fraud of perception so that people become aware of the tension between what is and what seems to be. Our brains don't see everything—the world is too big, too full of stimuli. So the brain takes shortcuts, constructing a picture of reality with relatively simple algorithms for what things are supposed to look like. Magicians capitalize on those rules. "Every time you perform a magic trick, you're engaging in experimental psychology," Teller says. "If the audience asks, 'How the hell did he do that?' then the experiment was successful. I've exploited the efficiencies of your mind."
Now that on-the-job experimentation has taken an academic turn. A couple of years ago, Teller joined a coterie of illusionists and tricksters recruited by Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, to look at the neuroscience of magic. Last summer, that work culminated in an article for the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience called "Attention and Awareness in Stage Magic." Teller was one of the coauthors, and its publication was a signal event in a field some researchers are calling magicology, the mining of stage illusions for insights into brain function.
"Tricks work only because magicians know, at an intuitive level, how we look at the world," says Macknik, lead author of the paper. "Even when we know we're going to be tricked, we still can't see it, which suggests that magicians are fooling the mind at a very deep level." By reverse-engineering these deceptions, Macknik hopes to illuminate the mental loopholes that make us see a woman get sawed in half or a rabbit appear out of thin air even when we know such stuff is impossible. "Magicians were taking advantage of these cognitive illusions long before any scientist identified them," Martinez-Conde says.
Wired: Op-Ed: What Marmots Teach Us About Terrorism
By Daniel Blumstein for Wired Science
When dealing with national security, we would be wise to take lessons from nature about managing risks. Animals that fail to evolve or learn effective ways to avoid predation leave no descendants. Thus, by studying the diversity of anti-predator adaptations, we may learn about what works and what doesn't work with respect to our own risks.
Since Sept. 11, we've all become more aware of our security, and since the start of military activities in Afghanistan and Iraq, we’re more aware of the costs of defense. In a time where resources are limited, we have to make some hard decisions about how to allocate resources to defense versus other worthwhile things, like education, health care and social security. Can biology inspire new defenses and security solutions?
I think the answer is yes.
Wired: Twitter Telepathy: Researchers Turn Thoughts Into Tweets
By Brandon Keim
Early on the afternoon of April 1, Adam Wilson posted a message to Twitter. But instead of using his hands to type, the University of Wisconsin biomedical engineer used his brain. "USING EEG TO SEND TWEET," he thought.
That message may be a modern equivalent of Alexander Graham Bell's "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you." Brain-computer interfaces are no longer just a gee-whiz technology, but a platform for researchers interested in immediate real-world applications for people who can think, but can't move.
"We're more interested in the applications," said Justin Williams, head of the University of Wisconsin's Neural Interfaces lab. "How do we actually make these technologies useful for people with disabilities?"
Science News: Morning birds buckle under sleep pressure
By Tina Hesman Saey
Early to bed, early to rise makes a man sleepy and inattentive at twilight.
A new brain imaging study suggests morning people’s circadian clocks can’t resist the biological pressure to sleep, while night owls don’t buckle as easily. The research, appearing in the April 24 Science, could change the way scientists view the relationship between sleep and the circadian clock.
Archeology/Anthropology
Time: The Hobbit: Out of Africa
A very small human ancestor made a very big splash back in 2004, when researchers discovered the remains of Homo floresiensis, a 3-ft., prehuman "hobbit," in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. The origin of the species and the route it took to Flores have been much discussed since then. Earlier this month, researchers presented work at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, in Chicago, suggesting that H. floresiensis may have left Africa a full million years earlier than any other hominids were thought to have ventured out from the home continent.
The new theory comes from recent analyses of the interior of the skull of Flo — as some call the 18,000-year-old fossil remains. A young female, Flo exhibits features that bear an uncanny resemblance to skulls from the hominid genus Australopithecus, which lived in Africa from roughly 4 million to 1.5 million years ago. The best-known australopithecene fossils are the 3.2 million–year-old A. afarensis Lucy, discovered in Ethiopia, and the 3 million–year-old A. africanus Taung Child, unearthed in South Africa.
Fox News: Controversial Hobbit Looks Tiny in Person
A skeleton cast of tiny and controversial Homo floresiensis, nicknamed the Hobbit, went on public display for the first time Tuesday at Stony Brook University on Long Island.
The specimen, discovered in 2003 in Indonesia, is hotly debated among scientists. Some claim it represents a new diminutive hominin species, while others argue it is simply a modern human dwarfed by some medical condition.
Western Mail (Wales, UK): Could Welsh star Stanley Baker’s ancestors be Bronze Age copper miners from Spain?
by Darren Devine
EVER wondered where the Welsh get their dark, swarthy looks from?
The brooding looks of Welsh characters like Sir Stanley Baker and Richard Burton are well known – and now new research aims to prove that the genetic make-up may come from the Spanish and Portuguese.
The researchers believe Wales became home to an influx of migrant workers from the Iberian Peninsula and the Balkans 4,000 years ago that helped shape the biological construction of modern Wales.
MSNBC: 3,000-year-old temples discovered in Egypt
By Hadeel Al-Shalchi
CAIRO - Archaeologists exploring an old military road in the Sinai have unearthed four new temples amidst the 3,000-year-old remains of an ancient fortified city that could have been used to impress foreign delegations visiting Egypt, antiquities authorities announced Tuesday.
Among the discoveries was the largest mud brick temple found in the Sinai with an area of 77 by 87 yards and fortified with mud walls 10 feetthick, said Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Columbus Dispatch:
By Alan Johnson
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
A $2 million federal stimulus grant might bring Ohio closer to solving one of its great prehistoric mysteries: the Hopewell Culture.
Money from the U.S. Department of the Interior will be used to build a curatorial facility at the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park at Chillicothe. Cuyahoga Valley National Park will receive $7.8 million to complete projects, and the Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial at Put-in-Bay will get $7.6 million for improvements.
Rick Perkins, acting superintendent and chief ranger at Hopewell, said the money will pay for a new facility for 150,000 artifacts, most of which are now stored underground. Trails and expanded parking are not included.
Hutchinson News via the Lawrence Journal-World: Reservoir site yields ancient artifacts
By Kathy Hanks - The Hutchinson News
JETMORE — Before bulldozers moved mountains of dirt for the construction of HorseThief Reservoir, a gentler excavation took place.
Archaeologists arrived in April 2008 at the dam site — eight miles west of Jetmore in Hodgeman County — ahead of the heavy equipment.
The team led by Dr. Holly Jones, a professor at Missouri State University, spent three weeks with shovels and buckets, unearthing artifacts along Buckner Creek, dating back 1,000 years ago.
BBC: Wreck artefacts to go on display
Artefacts from a 17th Century ship wreck found off the Dorset coast are set to go on display.
Students and experts from Bournemouth University have worked for two years on the wreck site, in an area off Poole Harbour known as The Swash Channel.
The ship, which lies about 23ft (7m) down, is thought to date from the 1620s but its country of origin is unknown.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above articles.
Wired: Artificial Intelligence Cracks 4,000-Year-Old Mystery
By Brandon Keim
An ancient script that's defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers.
Computational analysis of symbols used 4,000 years ago by a long-lost Indus Valley civilization suggests they represent a spoken language. Some frustrated linguists thought the symbols were merely pretty pictures.
"The underlying grammatical structure seems similar to what's found in many languages," said University of Washington computer scientist Rajesh Rao.
Wired: American Stonehenge: Monumental Instructions for the Post-Apocalypse
By Randall Sullivan
The strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern. The rocks are each 16 feet tall, with four of them weighing more than 20 tons apiece. Together they support a 25,000-pound capstone. Approaching the edifice, it's hard not to think immediately of England's Stonehenge or possibly the ominous monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Built in 1980, these pale gray rocks are quietly awaiting the end of the world as we know it.
Called the Georgia Guidestones, the monument is a mystery—nobody knows exactly who commissioned it or why. The only clues to its origin are on a nearby plaque on the ground—which gives the dimensions and explains a series of intricate notches and holes that correspond to the movements of the sun and stars—and the "guides" themselves, directives carved into the rocks. These instructions appear in eight languages ranging from English to Swahili and reflect a peculiar New Age ideology. Some are vaguely eugenic (guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity); others prescribe standard-issue hippie mysticism (prize truth—beauty—love—seeking harmony with the infinite).
What's most widely agreed upon—based on the evidence available—is that the Guidestones are meant to instruct the dazed survivors of some impending apocalypse as they attempt to reconstitute civilization.
Physics
Science News: Living Physics
From green leaves to bird brains, biological systems may exploit quantum phenomena
By Susan Gaidos
Until a century or so ago, nobody had any idea that there even was such a thing as quantum physics. But while humans operated for millennia in quantum darkness, it seems that plants, bacteria and birds may have been in the know all along.
Quantum effects, human researchers have only recently discovered, may explain how the first steps of photosynthesis convert light to chemical energy with such high efficiency. Other studies suggest that quantum tricks may enable migratory birds to navigate using Earth’s magnetic field lines.
Through studies like these, scientists are beginning to understand how quantum mechanics — weirdness supposedly confined to the realm of subatomic physics — affects everyday biology.
Science News: Nanoclusters seem to skirt physics law
In simulations, tiny loophole allows colliding nanoclusters to increase speed after impact
By Laura Sanders
Nobody’s above the law. But tiny clusters of colliding atoms may duck below the second law of thermodynamics. In simulations, researchers in Japan found that in rare cases, tiny clusters of atoms ricochet off each other faster than their approaching speeds. The results, which appeared in the March Physical Review E, seem to violate the second law’s requirement that any work squanders a little bit of energy in the form of waste heat, leaving the system a little more disheveled, with higher entropy.
In collisions big enough to see, like those between a tennis ball and a gym floor, the speed of an object’s approach is always faster than its speed after impact. A tennis ball dropped against the floor bounces a little slower and comes up shorter on each bounce because a small amount of the ball’s energy is siphoned off in the form of waste heat.
In the nanoworld, though, the new results suggest that normal rules do not always apply.
Chemistry
Scientific American: An indirect by-product of catalytic converters: Osmium pollution
By John Matson
Catalytic converters have been an environmental success, but not an unqualified one. The tailpipe devices reduce the toxicity of auto emissions and cut down on the formation of smog, but they also output greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Now a new study faults widespread adoption of catalytic converters for another environmental issue, albeit one without a clear immediate impact: osmium pollution.
Osmium is an extremely hard metal that exists in seawater and in the Earth's crust—and, crucially, in ores extracted and processed for platinum, which is commonly used in catalytic converters. (Platinum also finds use as a catalyst in fuel cells, another green technology.) Smelting those ores can produce osmium tetroxide, a toxic chemical, but that's not the real issue with osmium pollution, says lead study author Cynthia Chen, a graduate student in the department of Earth sciences at Dartmouth College. "I don't think we need to worry about it from a human health standpoint," Chen says, as osmium's concentrations, even as elevated by platinum production, are extremely small.
What is potentially concerning, she adds, is that it appears that humans have upset the geochemical cycle of osmium by extracting it from the Earth and releasing it into the atmosphere. "We've disturbed the natural budget of this element," Chen says. In other words, osmium provides a small reminder of the ways in which human activities can transform the face of the planet.
Scientific American: Have scientists discovered Spider-Man's secret to superstrong silk?
By Katherine Harmon
Spider silk alone is stronger than steel, but researchers in Halle Germany have found that it can be made even stronger. A new paper, published today in Science reports that spider silk can be infused with metals such as aluminum, zinc and titanium.
Energy
Scientific American: Beyond Fossil Fuels: Energy Leaders Weigh In
Climate change. Energy independence. Air pollution. There are countless arguments for moving beyond fossil fuels for our energy needs. Unfortunately, there are just as many hurdles that must be cleared before we can feasibly count on other sources to supplant oil, coal and natural gas, which currently provide the lion's share of U.S. electricity generation and transportation fuels.
To illuminate the scope of the task, Scientific American recently surveyed a number of top executives at firms engaged in developing and implementing energy technologies—solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, biofuels—that could reduce our global dependence on fossil fuels.
Science, Space, Environment, and Energy Policy
New York Times: 'Green jobs' at heart of Obama's Earth Day push on energy
By ALEX KAPLUN
The Obama administration is using Earth Day for launching another all-out effort to sell the American public and key lawmakers on "green jobs" as the solution for the United States' environmental and economic woes.
The jobs push starts at a critical time for the administration's energy agenda. The House Energy and Commerce Committee is starting hearings on a comprehensive climate and energy bill that President Obama has long portrayed as key to in his efforts toward economic recovery (see related story).
The administration must also try in the next few weeks to push through Congress a budget resolution that raises spending in several energy-related areas, again with the promise of creating millions of new jobs in the renewable-energy arena.
Wired: Open Data: FAA Releases Bird Strike Database
By Alexis Madrigal
The Federal Aviation Administration released its database of wildlife strikes on planes this week in an abrupt about-face from previous policy.
The data is now available through web forms as well as in a downloadable Microsoft Access database.
There is a detailed record for each incident including the species of animal (when known), the airline, the airport, the height and speed of the plane, and occasionally intriguing notes ("FOUND FEATHERS AND REMAINS ON NOSE COWL. INGESTION").
Science Education
The Christian Science Monitor: The Earth Day generation
By Judy Lowe
The current generation of schoolchildren has grown up with Earth Day. They’ve celebrated it at school and often at home. It’s spawned a regular part of their school curriculum as they’re taught about recycling, organic gardening, endangered species, pollution, solar and other types of renewable energy, as well as everyday steps they and their families can take. And many have embraced this wholeheartedly.
Does this make today’s kids more knowledgeable about geoscience and environmental issues? More aware of global environmental issues? More likely to take steps that they feel will help protect and improve the world? More willing to help find solutions to possible environmental challenges of the future?
Some answers are found in a survey and a study released in time for Earth Day.
Martinsville Bulletin: Jefferson Awards presented
VMNH honors six recipients
The Virginia Museum of Natural History honored businesses, groups and individuals at the 22nd annual Thomas Jefferson Awards on Wednesday.
The award recipients were recognized for their contributions to and support for natural science. The recipients ranged from a professor emeritus of biology to a local quarry and a veteran volunteer.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above article.
Science is Cool
Wired: Mission Impossible: The Code Even the CIA Can't Crack
By Steven Levy
The most celebrated inscription at the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, used to be the biblical phrase chiseled into marble in the main lobby: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." But in recent years, another text has been the subject of intense scrutiny inside the Company and out: 865 characters of seeming gibberish, punched out of half-inch-thick copper in a courtyard.
It's part of a sculpture called Kryptos, created by DC artist James Sanborn. He got the commission in 1988, when the CIA was constructing a new building behind its original headquarters. The agency wanted an outdoor installation for the area between the two buildings, so a solicitation went out for a piece of public art that the general public would never see. Sanborn named his proposal after the Greek word for hidden. The work is a meditation on the nature of secrecy and the elusiveness of truth, its message written entirely in code.
Almost 20 years after its dedication, the text has yet to be fully deciphered. A bleary-eyed global community of self-styled cryptanalysts—along with some of the agency's own staffers—has seen three of its four sections solved, revealing evocative prose that only makes the puzzle more confusing. Still uncracked are the 97 characters of the fourth part (known as K4 in Kryptos-speak). And the longer the deadlock continues, the crazier people get.