Tag: science
Mars atmosphere has more water vapor than predicted
Data from Mars Express has found that the Martian upper atmosphere has far more water vapor than predicted.
“The vertical distribution of water vapour is a key factor in the study of Mars’ hydrological cycle, and the old paradigm that it is mainly controlled by saturation physics now needs to be revised,” said Luca Maltagliati [of the Laboratoire Atmosphères, Milieux, Observations Spatiales (LATMOS) in Guyancourt, France]. “Our finding has major implications for understanding the planet’s global climate and the transport of water from one hemisphere to the other.”
“The data suggest that much more water vapour is being carried high enough in the atmosphere to be affected by photodissociation,” added Franck Montmessin, also from LATMOS, who is the Principal Investigator for SPICAM and a co-author of the paper. “Solar radiation can split the water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen atoms, which can then escape into space. This has implications for the rate at which water has been lost from the planet and for the long-term evolution of the Martian surface and atmosphere.”
Scientists push for monitoring network to collect environmental and socioeconomic data from around the world
What could go wrong? Scientists push for a monitoring network to collect environmental and socioeconomic data from around the world.
Sandy Andelman, an ecologist with Conservation International in Arlington, Virginia, discussed her work setting up a pilot project that began two years ago in southern Tanzania. In addition to basic environmental data about soils, nutrients and land cover, the project tracks agricultural practices. It also incorporates data about income, health and education that is maintained by the government. Andelman says that all the data she collects can be broken down to the level of individual households, and that initial results from the project have already prompted the Tanzanian government to adjust the way it zones agricultural land in the area. [emphasis mine]
Lord help the farmers whose lives will be tracked by this network.
NASA has identified ninety percent of the largest near-Earth asteroids
Data from the infrared telescope WISE has now identified ninety percent of the largest near-Earth asteroids.
NASA researchers also downgraded their estimate of the number of medium-sized asteroids, saying there are 44 percent fewer than previously believed. The downside is that scientists have yet to find many of these mid-sized asteroids, which could destroy a metropolitan city.
Mercury is weirder than scientists thought.
Messenger’s data has found that Mercury is weirder than scientists thought.
Energy Department approves $737 million solar loan guarantee
More money wasted? The Energy Department has approved another solar power company loan guarantee, this for $737 million.
I’m not sure this project will go belly-up, as Solyndra did. I just find it questionable for this to be approved at this moment.
A new report from the EPA Office of the Inspector General has said that EPA violated its own peer review process in determining that greenhouse gases endanger “the public health and welfare.”
A new report from the EPA Office of the Inspector General has said that EPA violated its own peer review process in determining that greenhouse gases endanger “the public health and welfare.”
The coming blindness of astronomy
The European Southern Observatory today released this infrared image today of what astronomers have named the Fried Egg Nebula. Taken by the Very Large Telescope in Chile, the picture shows the concentric dust shells surrounding a post-red supergiant star, thought to be transitioning to the next stage of stellar evolution called a yellow hypergiant. As the press release explains,
The monster star, known to astronomers as IRAS 17163-3907, has a diameter about a thousand times bigger than our Sun. At a distance of about 13 000 light-years from Earth, it is the closest yellow hypergiant found to date and new observations show it shines some 500 000 times more brightly than the Sun. . . . If the Fried Egg Nebula were placed in the centre of the Solar System the Earth would lie deep within the star itself and the planet Jupiter would be orbiting just above its surface. The much larger surrounding nebula would engulf all the planets and dwarf planets and even some of the comets that orbit far beyond the orbit of Neptune. The outer shell has a radius of 10 000 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
Yellow hypergiants are in an extremely active phase of their evolution, undergoing a series of explosive events — this star has ejected four times the mass of the Sun in just a few hundred years. The material flung out during these bursts has formed the extensive double shell of the nebula, which is made of dust rich in silicates and mixed with gas.
According to the science paper [pdf] describing this research, the stage of yellow hypergiants is a preliminary to the star evolving into a luminous blue variable, of which Eta Carinae is the most famous. In this next stage a star is thought to have a good chance of going supernova.
Though this image is truely spectacular, taken by a ground-based telescope of a star 13,000 light years away, what I find most significant about this image is its fuzziness. It reminds me of the kind of images astronomers and the public routinely accepted as the best possible, before the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.
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NASA science administrator Ed Weiler is retiring after 33 years
Science administrator Ed Weiler is retiring after almost 33 years at NASA.
Among Weiler’s many achievements, he was crucial to getting the Hubble Space Telescope launched. Even more important, though others had conceived the idea of using the shuttle to maintain Hubble, he designed the maintenance schedule for the telescope. Seven years before it was launched, he insisted that a regular schedule of repair missions be placed on the shuttle manifest. He also insisted that a duplicate of the telescope’s main camera be built, so that if anything went wrong with the first a repaired unit could be launched quickly. It was his foresight here that made the first repair of Hubble in December 1993 go so smoothly. For this, astronomers will always be grateful.
The Accelerating Universe and Dark Energy Might Be Illusions
The uncertainty of science: A new theory posits that the accelerating universe and dark energy might be illusions caused by motion of our galaxy through space.
Sunspot 1302 Continues to Turn Toward Earth
Giant sunspot 1302 turns its aim towards Earth.
Virtual monkeys typing Shakespeare
A computer programmer has created a legion of virtual monkeys programmed to randomly type until the works of Shakespeare are reproduced.
If the nine-letter sequence appears anywhere in one of Shakespeare’s writings, it is matched against the relevant passage in a copy of the Bard’s complete works, and is checked off the list. The monkeys, which started typing on August 21, have already completed more than five trillion of the 5.5 trillion possible nine-letter combinations, but have so far only finished one whole work.
They appear to be doing better than Congress’s attempt to balance the federal budget.
Anthropologists have uncovered what appears to be the first and only evidence of preserved flesh from an early pre-human ancestor nearly 2 million years old
Anthropologists have uncovered what appears to be the first and only evidence of preserved flesh from an early pre-human ancestor nearly 2 million years old.
Obama: “You’ve got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change.”
Obama on Sunday at a fundraiser, attacking Rick Perry: “You’ve got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change.”
Here is another example of a politician making a fool of himself. The wildfires in Texas have nothing to do with climate change. And if Obama thinks they do, he immediately shows himself to be completely ignorant of the science behind the Earth’s climate.
EPA admits regulating CO2 is impossible; will go ahead anyway
The EPA — after admitted in court papers submitted September 16 that regulating CO2 is “impossible to administer” and “absurd” — will go ahead anyway.
Note also that the Clean Air Act did not give the EPA the power to regulate carbon dioxide.
Faster than light?
Can neutrinos travel faster than light? After three years of gathering data, an experiment at CERN says they do, though by only a tiny amount.
[Physicist Antonio] Ereditato says that he is confident enough in the new result to make it public. The researchers claim to have measured the 730-kilometre trip between CERN and its detector to within 20 centimetres. They can measure the time of the trip to within 10 nanoseconds, and they have seen the effect in more than 16,000 events measured over the past two years. Given all this, they believe the result has a significance of six-sigma — the physicists’ way of saying it is certainly correct.
You can download and read a preprint of their paper here.
What I find intriguing about this result, other than its exciting groundbreaking possibilities, is how it illustrates sharply the contrast between normal and healthy science, and the sad and sick state of the field of climate science.
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Obama Administration Set to Ban Asthma Inhalers Over Environmental Concerns
We’re here to help you! The Obama Administration is banning the only over-the-counter asthma inhaler because of environmental concerns.
UARS crash updated
The most recent prediction now says that the UARS satellite will come down tonight between 9 pm and 3 am Eastern time, during one of four orbits, all of which pass over North America, Europe, and Africa. One orbit also passes over Australia.
The first global map of the ocean’s saltiness
Astronomers argue about the legitimacy of the first exoplanet to be directly imaged
Astronomers question the legitimacy of the first exoplanet to be directly imaged.