Year: 2011

The cause of white nose, the killer of bats

11:14 am

Scientists today confirmed that the fungus, Geomyces destructans, causes white nose syndrome, the deadly killer that has been wiping out cave-hibernating bats throughout the eastern United States.

A science team led by David Blehert of the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin captured healthy little brown bats and infected them with the fungus while they were in hibernation, some by direct application and others by putting them in contact with already infected bats. After 102 days, all of the first group had developed white nose on their muzzles and wings, while 16 of 18 of the second group had become infected as well.
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The battle in Congress of the EPA’s effort to regulate dust

10:02 am

The battle in Congress over the EPA’s effort to regulate dust.

Not surprisingly, the Democrats all support the EPA’s effort, while there are Republicans who oppose. What I consider significant is that more than a hundred agricultural organizations oppose the regulations.

One of the agricultural groups that is supporting the bill [to block the EPA regulations], the National Association of Wheat Growers (NAWG), wrote a letter to the committee last month, saying that a slight raise in overall particulate matter standards would require the EPA to regulate farm dirt under the current standards. “And, for what purpose? Scientific studies have never shown rural dust to be a health concern at ambient levels,” said the NAWG letter. [emphasis mine]

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Has dark matter been identified?

9:21 am

From a paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph preprint website, scientists suggest that three different physics experiments might have identified dark matter. From the abstract:

Three dark matter direct detection experiments (DAMA/LIBRA, CoGeNT, and CRESST-II) have each reported signals which are not consistent with known backgrounds, but resemble that predicted for a dark matter particle with a mass of roughly ~10 GeV. . . . In this article, we compare the signals of these experiments and discuss whether they can be explained by a single species of dark matter particle, without conflicting with the constraints of other experiments. We find that the spectrum of events reported by CoGeNT and CRESST-II are consistent with each other and with the constraints from CDMS-II, although some tension with xenon-based experiments remains. Similarly, the modulation signals reported by DAMA/LIBRA and CoGeNT appear to be compatible, although the corresponding amplitude of the observed modulations are a factor of at least a few higher than would be naively expected, based on the event spectra reported by CoGeNT and CRESST-II. This apparent discrepancy could potentially be resolved if tidal streams or other non-Maxwellian structures are present in the local distribution of dark matter.

The last sentence above suggests that the differences between the various experiments might be explained by the motion of dark matter itself as it flows through the solar system.

This conclusion is very tentative. The scientists admit that there remain conflicts between the results of the three experiments, and that there also could be explanations other than dark matter for the results. Furthermore, the results of other experiments raise questions about this conclusion.

Nonetheless, it appears that physicists might be closing in on this most ghostlike of all particles in the universe.

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Eradicating polio: not this year

8:35 am

The effort to eradicated polio entirely by the end of 2012 will not be met.

Afghanistan and Nigeria, two of the three remaining endemic countries, have had more cases in the first nine months of this year than in 2010 altogether. Several other countries targeted by the plan have also seen more cases to date this year compared to this time in 2010. Additionally, polio had popped up in countries where it had previously been eradicated — notably China, which went polio-free for 11 years until this summer.

Sadly, politics and culture are almost certainly the main reasons polio still survives in these countries.

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VAB to be opened to tourists for the first time in years

6:56 pm

The Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral is going to be opened to tourists for the first time in years.

Back in around 1977 I was down in Florida for that year’s science fiction Worldcon convention. At one point we went out to the space center to take the tour. Since this was after Apollo but before the shuttle, the VAB was then part of the tour, and they took us inside at the ground level so we could look up into its vast height. Hopefully, the new tours will let the tourists see more.

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NASA steals moon rock given to widow of NASA engineer

7:53 am

In a sting operation, NASA steals a moon rock from the widow of an retired NASA engineer.

Five months after NASA investigators and local agents swooped into the restaurant and hailed their operation as a cautionary tale for anyone trying to sell national treasure, no charges have been filed, NASA isn’t talking and the case appears stalled. The target, Joann Davis, a grandmother who says she was trying to raise money for her sick son, asserts the lunar material was rightfully hers, having been given to her space-engineer husband by Neil Armstrong in the 1970s.

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Tea Party in Space argues for more money for commercial space

7:43 am

Andrew Gasser at the Tea Party in Space website today argues strongly for Congress to fully fund the new commercial space program at the $850 million amount requested by the Obama administration.

As much as I am for these new commercial companies, I do not think it a good idea to fund them at these high levels.

For one thing, the government is still broke. It can’t afford to spend that much money. It is therefore unseemly for a website that uses the “tea party” label to advocate more spending at this time.

For another, the more money the government commits to these companies, the more control the government is going to demand from them. Far better to keep the government participation as small as possible. Make it just enough to allow the companies to succeed but not enough so as to make the whole effort a government program.

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NASA Is Considering Fuel Depots in the Skies

8:34 pm

NASA is considering putting fuel depots in orbit.

Under the plan outlined in the document, the propellant depot would be launched first, and then other rockets would carry fuel to the depot before a spacecraft arrived to fill up. That would increase the complexity for an asteroid mission — 11 to 17 launchings instead of four — but could get NASA astronauts to an asteroid by 2024, the study said. The total budget needed for the project from 2012 through 2030 would be $60 billion to $86 billion, the study said.

By contrast, a study last year that designed an asteroid mission around a heavy-lift rocket estimated that it would cost $143 billion and that the trip could not happen until 2029. The earlier study briefly considered propellant depots but quickly dismissed them.

This idea of putting fuel depots in space merely mirrors the 1960s proposal of using the Gemini capsule and the Titan rocket to assemble a spaceship in orbit for getting to the moon. According to the earlier proposal it would have been faster and cheaper to use existing smaller rockets and many additional launches than to build a giant Saturn 5 rocket that could put everything into orbit in only one launch. I have always thought this idea had merit.

The fuel depot concept is further confirmation that a heavy-lift rocket is not necessarily the only way one can get humans beyond Earth orbit.

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