Tag: science

More Earthlike exoplanets confirmed

8:28 am

Worlds without end: Astronomers have confirmed from Kepler data the existence of 8 new exoplanets, all capable of having liquid water on their surface, with two more like Earth than any previous discovery.

These findings nearly double the number of known planets in the habitable zone, but researchers are especially excited about two of the new exoplanets: Their size, location, and star type means they could be rocky planets like Earth — which means they could have evolved life as we recognize it.

One of the planets, Kepler-438b, is only 12 percent bigger than Earth in diameter. That means it’s quite likely a rocky planet. Scientists have given it a 70 percent chance. Kepler-442b is a bit bigger at around 33 percent larger than Earth, but still has a 60 percent chance of being rocky.

But while 438b hits the sweet spot in size, 442b has it beat when it comes to distance from the sun. Both planets orbit a small red dwarf star, cooler than Earth’s Sun, but they also orbit more closely. 438b gets 40 percent more light than Earth, which means it has around a 70 percent chance of being able to hold liquid water. But with 66 percent as much light as our own planet, 442b has a 97 percent chance of being in the habitable zone.

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Why the pause in global temperature rise?

10:48 pm

The pause in global temperature rise has now lengthened past 18 years, and climate scientist Fred Singer asks some good scientific questions why.

Global warming skeptics like myself have been quick to note the long pause in any temperature increase since 1998, the lack of which has essentially invalidated all the climate models put forth by the global warming activists in the climate community. Singer goes one step further, however, asking the next question: Why has the temperature not risen? He doesn’t know, but he does put forth a number of suspects that the good scientists in the climate field should be pursuing, assuming they can open their eyes and work with real data for a change.

As usual, it isn’t as simple as we would like. The sun for example might explain it, but so could a lot of other factors, including a number put forth by global warming advocates. Good science demands that we look at them all, and find out the truth, rather than cherry-pick our favorite answer and ignore all other evidence.

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Climate scientists massage data to create illusion of ocean acidification

10:03 am

More climate fraud: NOAA scientists deliberately excluded huge swathes of the ocean acid dataset going back 100 years in order to create the false impression that there has been an increase in ocean acid due to increased CO2. More details here.

How did they do it? They cherry-picked when their dataset would begin, in 1988, rather than using the full dataset beginning in 1920. In addition, they also only used computer models that showed this correlation.

Below the fold I have posted the 2004 graph, produced by these so-called scientists, above a graph using the full dataset of real data. You will see that that the 2004 graph is utter crap.
» Read more

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Possible ebola exposure at CDC

2:54 pm

Government marches on! As many as a dozen scientists might have been mistakenly exposed to ebola at an Atlanta CDC lab.

The potential exposure took place Monday when scientists conducting research on the virus at a high-security lab mistakenly put a sample containing the potentially infectious virus in a place where it was transferred for processing to another CDC lab, also in Atlanta on the CDC campus.

The CDC statement is remarkably uninformative. From what little they say, it appears as if the sample was left out uncovered in the lab as people came in and out. It also suggests that this unsecured sample was also transferred improperly to another lab.

No need to worry however. Just like its previous investigation of errors in the handling of anthrax, CDC officials are on the case, doing investigations and writing press releases, just so us ordinary citizens won’t get worried and cut their funds.

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Loose fibers significantly cuts Gaia’s output

5:24 pm

Europe’s Gaia telescope, designed to precisely measure the motions of a billion stars in the Milky Way, will have its accuracy cut in half because of the presence of loose fibers on the telescope’s sun shield that are allowing too much stray light in.

These fibres were spotted on Gaia before launch, but cutting them off was considered too risky, because that could allow small particles to enter the spacecraft. Another option, taping them down, was also ruled out because the increased stiffness could prevent the sunshield from unfolding.

The stray light shouldn’t affect measurements of the galaxy’s brightest stars, says Gaia science team member Anthony Brown at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, but it will double the expected errors on most of the stars in the Milky Way, which are much fainter.

For astronomers this is a great tragedy. Gaia will still teach us much, just not as much as they had hoped.

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New data says volcanoes, not asteroids, killed dinosaurs

1:38 pm

The uncertainty of science: A careful updating of the geological timeline has strengthened the link between the dinosaur extinction 66 million years ago and a major volcanic event at that time.

A primeval volcanic range in western India known as the Deccan Traps, which were once three times larger than France, began its main phase of eruptions roughly 250,000 years before the Cretaceous-Paleogene, or K-Pg, extinction event, the researchers report in the journal Science. For the next 750,000 years, the volcanoes unleashed more than 1.1 million cubic kilometers (264,000 cubic miles) of lava. The main phase of eruptions comprised about 80-90 percent of the total volume of the Deccan Traps’ lava flow and followed a substantially weaker first phase that began about 1 million years earlier.

The results support the idea that the Deccan Traps played a role in the K-Pg extinction, and challenge the dominant theory that a meteorite impact near present-day Chicxulub, Mexico, was the sole cause of the extinction. The researchers suggest that the Deccan Traps eruptions and the Chicxulub impact need to be considered together when studying and modeling the K-Pg extinction event.

The general public might not know it, but the only ones in the field of dinosaur research that have said the asteroid was the sole cause of the extinction have been planetary scientists.

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CO2 satellite overcomes design flaw

10:37 am

Despite a decade of development, including the production of two satellites, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 was launched in July with a basic design flaw that was never spotted.

Scientists and engineers on the project have ridden an emotional roller coaster. In 2009, a rocket failure doomed the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, their first attempt at a carbon-mapping probe. Its replacement, OCO-2, launched successfully. But after the JPL turned on the main instrument — a trio of spectrometers that measure sunlight light reflecting off Earth’s surface — the team discovered a problem in OCO-2’s data. They eventually determined that it was caused by a design flaw that reduced the amount of light entering the instrument during one mode of operation. The problem dated to 2004 and had never been caught in testing, says JPL’s David Crisp, the science team leader of the OCO-2 mission. “It was a stupid mistake. Embarrassing to the instrument designer and to me,” he says.

This flaw was apparently in both OCO satellites and was never noticed.

Fortunately, they have improvised a work-around that is allowing the spacecraft to get its data, which interestingly shows the highest concentrations of CO2 are coming not from the U.S. and the First World but from poorer parts of Africa and South America (caused by “burning savannas and forests,” not SUVs) and from China.

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The seas of Titan

9:27 am

Thar’s black gold up thar! Data from Cassini has confirmed the presence of ocean waves on Titan’s seas, while also providing suggesting that they are made mostly of liquid methane, not ethane as had been predicted.

The maximum depth of Kraken Mare appears to be 160 meters, and Ligeia Mare could be as much as 200 meters deep, reported Marco Mastrogiuseppe of Sapienza University of Rome. The fact that the radar signals could bounce off the sea bottom suggests that the seas were more transparent than expected and thus must contain mostly methane, not ethane. Hayes says his best estimate is about 90% methane. Essam Marouf, a planetary scientist at San José State University in California, reported on the first results from a separate radar experiment that sent radar reflections to Earth instead of back to the spacecraft. Those tests provide independent evidence that the seas are dominated by methane, Marouf says, and it implies that the lakes are kept filled by precipitating methane.

As the article also notes, this methane is “55 times Earth’s oil reserves.”

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Venus Express mission ends

6:51 pm

After eight years, the European Space Agency has officially ended the Venus Express mission.

After this month of ‘surfing’ in and out of the atmosphere at low altitudes, the lowest point of the orbit was raised again through a series of 15 small thruster burns, such that by 26 July it was back up to about 460 km, yielding an orbital period of just over 22 hours. The mission then continued in a reduced science phase, as the closest approach of the spacecraft to Venus steadily decreased again naturally under gravity.

Under the assumption that there was some propellant still remaining, a decision was taken to correct this natural decay with a new series of raising manoeuvres during 23–30 November, in an attempt to prolong the mission into 2015. However, full contact with Venus Express was lost on 28 November. Since then the telemetry and telecommand links had been partially re-established, but they were very unstable and only limited information could be retrieved.

The agency has decided that further attempts to contact the spacecraft would essentially be a wasted effort, and has closed the books on this very successful mission. The spacecraft itself will soon burn up in Venus’s atmosphere when its orbit decays.

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Curiosity finds organic materials on Mars, including fluctuating levels of methane

2:53 pm

Data from Curiosity has found both organic chemicals in the surface of Mars as well as quickly changing levels of methane in the nearby atmosphere.

NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover has measured a tenfold spike in methane, an organic chemical, in the atmosphere around it and detected other organic molecules in a rock-powder sample collected by the robotic laboratory’s drill. “This temporary increase in methane — sharply up and then back down — tells us there must be some relatively localized source,” said Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Curiosity rover science team. “There are many possible sources, biological or non-biological, such as interaction of water and rock.”

The organic material does not prove there is or was ever life on Mars. What it shows is that conditions on Mars could have once supported life. The methane detection, however, is a more significant finding, as it suggests that something very nearby to Curiosity is causing the spike. It could be life, or it could be chemical activity, but in either case, it means there is activity.

The one caveat is that the spike still did not amount to much, 7 parts per billion. Whatever is causing it is not really doing very much.

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Evaporating dry ice chunks create gouges on Mars

9:27 am

Scientists think they have solved the mystery of the gouges that appear seasonally on some hillsides on Mars: Chunks of dry ice that slide down the slope and then evaporate, leaving no trace.

During the martian winter, carbon dioxide ice freezes over parts of the planet’s surface and sublimates back into a gas during the spring thaw. But according to the model presented here today at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, chunks of warming dry ice may also break off from the crests of dunes and skid down slopes. This is no ordinary tumble—according to the model, the bases of the chunks are continually sublimating, resulting in a hovercraftlike motion that gouges the dune while propelling the ice down slopes. Solid ice that survives to the bottom settles into a pit before dissipating back into the atmosphere.

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The arrival of two new childhood diseases to America

10:42 am

Link here.

In the span of four months, at least 94 children in 33 U.S. states have developed a devastating form of paralysis with symptoms similar to polio. Some require a ventilator to breathe. And some of the greatest government health minds in the country say they have no idea what’s causing it. At the same time, during the past four months, at least 12 children have died after falling ill with a respiratory virus called Enterovirus D-68 (EV-D68). Again, federal health officials are at a loss to explain the origin of the epidemic.

It appears that the first, now dubbed acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), might be linked to the second.

In a November 7 alert to practitioners, the CDC noted, “the unusual clustering of acute limb weakness occurred against a background of a nationwide outbreak of severe respiratory illness among children due to enterovirus-D68 (EV-D68). Several of the patients in California and nearly half of the 11 cases identified in Colorado had tested positive for EV-D68 from nasopharyngeal (NP) swabs at the time of admission for their neurologic illness. This raised a possible association between these neurologic illnesses and the ongoing outbreak of respiratory disease due to EV-D68.”

Whether both are linked to the flood of illegal immigrant children allowed to enter the U.S. this past summer remains unclear.

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When did humans begin using fire?

10:21 am

A cave in Israel suggests that the human use of fire began around 350,000 years ago.

The researchers examined artifacts previously excavated from the site, which are mostly flint tools for cutting and scraping, and flint debris created in their manufacture. To determine when fire became a routine part of the lives of the cave dwellers, the team looked at flints from about 100 layers of sediments in the lowermost 16 meters of the cave deposits.

In layers older than roughly 350,000 years, almost none of the flints are burned. But in every layer after that, many flints show signs of exposure to fire: red or black coloration, cracking, and small round depressions where fragments known as pot lids flaked off from the stone. Wildfires are rare in caves, so the fires that burned the Tabun flints were probably controlled by ancestral humans, according to the authors. The scientists argue that the jump in the frequency of burnt flints represents the time when ancestral humans learned to control fire, either by kindling it or by keeping it burning between natural wildfires.

There are enormous uncertainties here, but the data also appears to match with what has been found in Europe. The problem however is that this date is long after humans had already migrated to colder climates, which means that they were somehow surviving for a long time in these hostile environments without fire, something that is puzzling.

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NIH panel recommends cancelling multi-billion dollar study

10:13 am

An government advisory panel has recommended the NIH cancel a controversial nationwide study to track the health of 100,000 children.

The study has already cost one billion, has had two scientists resign because they didn’t like how the study was being run, and has as yet only enrolled 4,000 children.

Update: The NIH officially cancelled the study later the same day the panel’s report was released.

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Comet 67P/C-G in color

9:49 am

Comet 67P/C-G in color

You might not believe it, but the image on the right is the first color image taken by Rosetta of Comet 67P/C-G. (Click on the link to see a full image.)

To create an image revealing 67P’s “true” colours, the scientists superposed images taken sequentially through filters centred on red, green, and blue wavelengths. However, as the comet rotated and Rosetta moved during this sequence, the three images are slightly shifted with respect to each other, and are taken from slightly different observing perspectives. Painstaking work is needed to superimpose the images accurately, which is one reason it has taken so long to come up with the first meaningful colour image of 67P/C-G.

As you can see, there really isn’t much color there. Moreover, the comet is so coal-dark that they had to brighten the images to bring out any detail.

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Global views of six Saturnian moons

9:37 am

Using images collected after ten years in orbit around Saturn, Cassini scientists have released global color maps of six of Saturn’s icy moons, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea and Iapetus.

These enhanced colour views have yielded several important discoveries about the icy moons. The most obvious are differences in colour and brightness between the two hemispheres of Tethys, Dione and Rhea. The dark reddish colours on the moons’ trailing hemispheres are due to alteration by charged particles and radiation in Saturn’s magnetosphere. The blander leading hemispheres, the sides that always face forward as the moons orbit Saturn, are all coated with icy dust from Saturn’s E-ring, formed from tiny particles erupting from the south pole of Enceladus.

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