Tag: science

smaller planets are preferentially found in low-eccentricity orbits.

9:24 am

More Kepler results: From the abstract of a preprint paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph website:

The mean eccentricity of the Kepler candidates decreases with decreasing planet size indicating that smaller planets are preferentially found in low-eccentricity orbits.

In other words, the smaller a planet is, the more likely its orbit will be circular like the Earth’s. This result is encouraging news for the search for life on other worlds. Before Kepler, astronomers had found that the orbits of most exoplanets were far more eccentric than the orbits of the planets in our solar system, a condition that scientists thought was unfriendly for the development of life. These new results counter that conclusion. The orbits of the planets in our solar system might not be as unusual as first thought.

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When a solar storm slammed into both the Earth and Mars in January 2008, scientists were able to directly measure the importance of the Earth’s magnetic field in protecting our atmosphere from oxygen loss.

9:22 am

When a solar storm slammed into both the Earth and Mars in January 2008, scientists were able to directly measure the importance of the Earth’s magnetic field in protecting our atmosphere from oxygen loss.

They found that while the pressure of the solar wind increased at each planet by similar amounts, the increase in the rate of loss of martian oxygen was ten times that of Earth’s increase. Such a difference would have a dramatic impact over billions of years, leading to large losses of the martian atmosphere, perhaps explaining or at least contributing to its current tenuous state. The result proves the efficacy of Earth’s magnetic field in deflecting the solar wind and protecting our atmosphere.

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Chinese physicists have discovered a key measurement that helps explain why and how can neutrinos magically oscillate between three different states.

9:12 am

Chinese physicists have discovered a key measurement that helps explain why and how neutrinos can magically oscillate between three different states. Moreover, the data

implies that there could be a slight asymmetry between neutrinos and antineutrinos—called CP violation—a slight asymmetry that might help explain why the universe evolved to contain so much matter and so little antimatter.

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Comparing all the global warming climate models for the past twenty years with the actual data.

9:15 pm

A scientist compares all the global warming climate models developed during the past twenty years with the actual data:

We’ve checked all the main predictions of the climate models against the best data. The climate models get them all wrong. … Therefore:

  • The climate models are fundamentally flawed. Their assumed threefold amplification by feedbacks does not in fact exist.
  • The climate models overestimate temperature rises due to CO2 by at least a factor of three.

Read the whole article. Not only does Evans outline the failures of all the climate models, he also clearly and distinctly describes the actual debate that has been going on in the climate field for the past three decades. It isn’t the effects of carbon dioxide that climate scientists have been arguing about, but, as Richard Lindzen explained to the UK Parliament last week, whether other climate factors, called feedbacks, will amplify or suppress the warming produced by CO2.

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Dissecting the bad arguments on both sides of the climate debate.

1:33 pm

Dissecting the bad arguments on both sides of the climate debate.

What I find intriguing about Singer’s analysis is that the bad arguments from the global warming camp seem to come from noted scientists writing for the IPCC, while the bad arguments on the skeptical side mostly come from non-scientists on the fringes.

In either case, they remain bad arguments, but it is tragic that so many scientists participate in it.

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JPL has issued a press release “reality check” on the impact possibilities of asteroid 2011 AG5 in 2040.

9:37 am

JPL has issued a press release “reality check” on the impact possibilities of asteroid 2011 AG5 in 2040.

“In September 2013, we have the opportunity to make additional observations of 2011 AG5 when it comes within 91 million miles (147 million kilometers) of Earth,” said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “It will be an opportunity to observe this space rock and further refine its orbit. Because of the extreme rarity of an impact by a near-Earth asteroid of this size, I fully expect we will be able to significantly reduce or rule out entirely any impact probability for the foreseeable future.” Even better observations will be possible in late 2015.

In other words, we really will not know anything more about these possibilities until late next year.

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Astronomers have discovered a five hundred foot wide asteroid that has a 1 in 600 chance of hitting the Earth in 2040.

6:35 pm

Astronomers have discovered a five hundred foot wide asteroid that has a 1 in 600 chance of hitting the Earth in 2040.

“2011 AG5 is the object which currently has the highest chance of impacting the Earth … in 2040. However, we have only observed it for about half an orbit, thus the confidence in these calculations is still not very high,” said Detlef Koschny of the European Space Agency’s Solar System Missions Division in Noordwijk, The Netherlands.

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New evidence suggests that Stone Age hunters from Europe reached the New World ten thousand years before their Asian counterparts.

5:38 pm

New evidence suggests that Stone Age hunters from Europe reached the New World ten thousand years before their Asian counterparts.

A remarkable series of several dozen European-style stone tools, dating back between 19,000 and 26,000 years, have been discovered at six locations along the US east coast. Three of the sites are on the Delmarva Peninsular in Maryland, discovered by archaeologist Dr Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware. One is in Pennsylvania and another in Virginia. A sixth was discovered by scallop-dredging fishermen on the seabed 60 miles from the Virginian coast on what, in prehistoric times, would have been dry land. …

What’s more, chemical analysis carried out last year on a European-style stone knife found in Virginia back in 1971 revealed that it was made of French-originating flint.

None of this is really surprising. Once we humans became the creatures we are, it became second nature for us to spread out quickly across the globe. In the case of these first European settlers, however, they came in too small numbers, and were thus eventually overwhelmed by the later settlers coming from Asia.

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The problems of making both wind and solar power practical sources of electrical power on the grid.

5:29 pm

The difficulties making both wind and solar power practical sources of electrical power on the grid.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, when intermittent sources such as solar or wind reach about 20 percent of a region’s total energy production, balancing supply and demand becomes extremely challenging: rolling blackouts can sometimes become inevitable. The same problem exists elsewhere, notably in Germany, where a vast photovoltaic capacity has sprung up thanks to generous subsidies.

The article proposes several reasonable solutions for storing power for use when there are lulls in wind or sunlight. All, however, appear costly, and all appear to end up making fossil fuels themselves more cost effective. For example,

A pumped-hydro facility consists of two reservoirs with a substantial drop in height between them. When there is excess electricity to go around, electric pumps move water from the lower reservoir into the upper one, thereby storing energy in the form of gravitational potential energy. When wind and solar wane or simply cannot keep up with demand, operators let water flow down and through turbines, generating electricity. In compressed-air facilities, excess electricity pumps air into underground caverns, and it is later released at high pressure to turn turbines.

Pumped hydro has been used for decades to balance the load on large U.S. grids. About 2.5 percent of the electricity used by U.S. consumers has cycled through one of these plants. In Europe the amount is 4 percent and in Japan 10 percent.

Reading this, I immediately asked, why not use this technology now to help reduce the amount of fossil fuels you need to burn? Japan seems to have figured this out. Why not us?

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The 3D printer that can build a house

4:54 pm

The 3D printer that can build a house.

The D-Shape is potentially capable of printing a two story building – complete with stairs, partition walls, columns, domes, and piping cavities – using only ordinary sand and an inorganic binder. The resulting material is said to be indistinguishable from marble, and exhibits the same physical properties, with durability highly superior to that of masonry and reinforced concrete.

The building process is very close to what we’d expect of a huge 3D printer. A nozzle moves along a pre-programmed path, extruding a liquid adhesive compound on a bed of sand with a solid catalyst mixed in. The binding agent reacts with the catalyst, and the solidifying process begins. Meanwhile, the remaining sand serves to support the structure. Then, another layer of sand is added and the whole process is repeated. Since it’s computer assisted, no specialist knowledge is required to use the printer. All that’s needed is a CAD design file.

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The sky is falling.

10:40 am

The sky is falling.

Over the last 10 years, the height of clouds has been shrinking, according to new research. The time frame is short, but if future observations show that clouds are truly getting lower, it could have an important effect on global climate change. Clouds that are lower in the atmosphere would allow Earth to cool more efficiently, potentially offsetting some of the warming caused by greenhouse gases.

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A supernova twenty-five years later.

9:29 am

A supernova twenty-five years later.

SN 1987A, it turns out, was like a dust-bomb, with estimates of the total dust it threw into space, based on the infrared brightness of the dust … implying enough dusty material to build the equivalent of 200,000 Earth-mass planets. Mingled within the dust are elements as diverse as oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, silicon, carbon and iron. This immense amount of dust has been beyond expectations and, if all supernovae spew out this much dust, it helps explain why young galaxies that we can see existing in the early Universe, which have high rates or star birth and death, are so dusty. The dust, however, isn’t a nuisance to be wiped away – this is the material that goes into building new planets, moons and even life. The iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones all came from supernovae like SN 1987A, as mostly did the oxygen we breath and the carbon in our constituent molecules.

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“Science in the service of politics.”

11:18 pm

Climate scientist Richard Lindzen of MIT spoke before a public meeting of the House of Commons in Great Britain yesterday. You can read his entire speech here [pdf]. Please do. He know his stuff. More important, he begins his presentation by immediately accepting these points:

  • Carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere.
  • There is a greenhouse effect.
  • There has been a doubling of CO2 in the past 150 years.
  • There has probably been a warming of about 0.8 degrees Celsius in the past 150 years.
  • Increasing CO2 alone should cause some warming.

He then notes that while none of these points are controversial among serious climate scientists, none of these facts are a cause for alarm.

The evidence is that the increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming, and that the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is also minimal. The arguments on which the catastrophic claims are made are extremely weak – and commonly acknowledged as such. They are sometimes overtly dishonest. [emphasis mine]

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