And still no one has died from this particular failure: Japan confirms that all three nuclear reactors melted down after the quake and tsunami.
The benefits of CO2 increase: The density of the world’s forests has been increasing as they act as a carbon sink.
The authors say most regions and almost all temperate nations have stopped losing forest and the study’s findings constitute a new signal of what co-author Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller calls “The Great Reversal” under way in global forests after centuries of loss and decline. “Opportunities to absorb carbon and restore the world’s forests can come through increasing density or area or both.”
Check out the spectacular images of the eruption of this Chilean volcano, its first in 50 years.
In new research at CERN physicists now have captured atoms of antimatter for more than 15 minutes.
The James Webb Space Telescope: The disaster that destroyed NASA’s astrophysics program.
The photography of the first clown in space.
A melanoma cure in sight? Drug combination shows incredible promise in early trial.
Some squealing from the journal Science: NSF faces uphill budget battle in Congress.
When he asked the witnesses for ideas on shrinking the government’s $1.6 trillion deficit, Mo Brooks (R-Alabama) [chairman of the research panel of the House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee] made it clear he was talking about possible cuts to NSF’s entire $7 billion budget, not simply its SBE directorate.
Note that in 2008 the NSF budget was a $6.1 billion. Cutting it back to that number would hardly destroy social science research in this country.
The Russian/ESA Mars 500 mission has completed a year of its 520-day simulated flight to Mars.
The crew, who spent 250 days working on maintenance and scientific experiments before a 30-day stint performing tasks on a simulated Martian surface, are currently on their “return trip” to Earth.
This simulated all-male flight is going better than the last:
In 1999, an experiment in the same Moscow warehouse fell to pieces after a Russian team captain forced a kiss on a Canadian woman, and two Russian crewmembers had a bloody fistfight.
Opportunity’s travels on Mars have now exceeded 30 kilometers.
Lockheed Martin buys the first commercial quantum computer. More here on the science of quantum computing.
Quantum computers could revolutionize the way we tackle problems that stump even the best classical computers, which store and process their data as ‘bits’ — essentially a series of switches that can be either on or off. The power of quantum bits — or qubits — is that they can be on and off simultaneously. Connect enough qubits together using quantum entanglement and a computer should be able to zip through a multitude of calculations in parallel, at astonishing speed.
NASA lunar lander test sparked a grass fire yesterday.
Good news for trout fisherman: A new study of the evasive algae Didymo has figured out why the algae blooms in places it shouldn’t.
The result may help managers identify water bodies susceptible to Didymo blooms, and develop management strategies. “It also has the potential to lead to discoveries that may stem this organism’s prolific growth in rivers around in the world,” says [P.V. Sundareshwar of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City].
The Russian greenhouse on ISS underwent an upgrade today.
The onboard greenhouse was dismantled in April last year, as a need arose to replace the outdated control unit, recalled head of the Rasteniya-2 (Plants-2) experiment, chief of the laboratory of the Institute of Medico-Biological Problems (IMBP) of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) Vladimir Sychev. In early 2010, the crop area of the orbital garden was extended twice – the second leaf chamber was delivered to the ISS in which the crew managed to harvest the Mizuna lettuce, before the greenhouse was dismantled. Now, the cosmonauts will plant in these two chambers different cultures – super-dwarf wheat and dwarf tomatoes.
As I described in detail in Leaving Earth, the Russians have decades of experience in growing plants in space, with the goal of not only providing a natural system to recycle the station’s atmosphere, but also giving the astronauts a morale-boosting activity (gardening) that also gives them something tasty to eat. Though the engineering has still not made it possible to germinate seeds in weightlessness and then have grow there, this will be an absolute requirement if humans are ever to travel to the planets and beyond to the stars.
The scientific battle over arsenic life goes on.
Planetary scientists push for Enceladus mission to search for alien life.
Cowards: Two New York Metropolitan Opera stars, fearing radiation, have backed out of a Japanese tour in the cities of Tokyo and Nagoya. This, despite the documented lack of radiation:
Tokyo briefly registered nominally higher radiation levels in its air and water, but they have subsided to pre-tsunami levels. There was never any scientific concern of a radiation impact on Nagoya, which is much farther away.
Meanwhile, the efforts to stabilize the reactors in Fukushima are proceeding.
China’s largest inland lake has disappeared in the worst drought in more than half a century.
Four spectacular waterspouts were seen off the coast of Australia today. With images!
Robot exploration in the Great Pyramid at Giza.
The robot explorer that took the images is named Djedi, after the magician whom Pharaoh Khufu consulted when planning the layout of the Great Pyramid. It was designed and built by engineers at the University of Leeds, in collaboration with Scoutek UK and Dassault Systemes, France.
Opportunity’s journey across the deserts of Mars continues; with pictures.
The un-owned feral cats had larger territories than the house cats, but both had larger territories than expected. One of the male feral cats had a home range of 1,351 acres, while the pet cats had a mean home range of about 5 acres.
Budget deficits signal a decline in spending for astronomy telescopes, both on the ground and in space, for the next decade.
Did a spotless sun cause the Little Ice Age after all?
The dark ages return: Italy is going to put seven earthquake scientists on trial for failing to predict an earthquake in 2009. More details here, from Nature.
Asteroid sample return mission on slate for NASA in 2016. The asteroid chosen in 1999 RQ36, which is significant.
The space rock has been classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid, since its orbit brings it close to Earth in the year 2182. There is an extremely remote chance (a recent study pegs it at about 1-in-1000) that the 1,900-foot-wide (579-meter) asteroid could pose a threat to Earth.
A bullet dodged? The next Mars rover, the Mars Science Lab, appears to be okay after last week’s mishap.
