Why NCAR’s Meehl Paper On High/Low Temperature Records Is Bunk

This graphic shows the ratio of record daily highs to record daily lows observed at about 1,800 weather stations in the 48 contiguous United States from January 1950 through September 2009. Source NCAR

From Watts Up With That?

One wonders why the story of a new paper covered on WUWT: NCAR: Number of record highs beat record lows – if you believe the quality of data from the weather stations did not include the 1930’s and 1940’s and earlier, conspicuously missing from the NCAR graphic above.

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United States Using Less Water Than 35 Years Ago

Crop irrigation. The largest uses of fresh surface water were power generation and irrigation. (Credit: USDA - Natural Resources Conservation Service)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 16, 2009) — The United States is using less water than during the peak years of 1975 and 1980, according to water use estimates for 2005. Despite a 30 percent population increase during the past 25 years, overall water use has remained fairly stable according to a new U.S. Geological Survey report.

Assistant Secretary of the Interior Anne Castle announced the report, Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2005, as part of her keynote speech on October 29 at the Atlantic Water Summit in the National Press Club.

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Texting A Pain In The Neck, Study Suggests

From Live Science:

Texting long messages can be a pain in the neck — literally.

The repetitive action of working your fingers across the number pad of your cell phone can cause some of the same chronic pain problems previously confined to those who'd spent a lifetime typing, a new study suggests.

The possible connection is particularly worrying given how much teens and young adults — and increasingly those in professional settings — are texting nowadays, said Judith Gold of Temple University in Philadelphia, who carried out one of the first studies on the potential connection.

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Using CO2 To Extract Geothermal Energy

Photo: Hot air: The Soultz-sous-Fôrets geothermal plant in Alsace, France, pumps water into fractured rock to extract heat and thus generate electricity. Researchers backed by $16 million in federal stimulus funds seek to prove that such geothermal plants could generate 50 percent more heat by cycling carbon dioxide underground instead.
Credit: Géothermie Soultz

From Technology Review:

Carbon dioxide captured from power plants could make geothermal energy more practical.

Carbon dioxide generated by power plants may find a second life as a working fluid to help recover geothermal heat from kilometers underground. Such a system would not only capture the carbon dioxide and keep it out of the atmosphere, it would also be a cost-effective way to use the greenhouse gas to generate new power.

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Two Rival Supercomputers Duke It Out For Top Spot

Kraken, a Cray XT5 system, is the world's sixth-fastest computer. Photo/Adam Brimer

From PC World:

The top two systems on June's list of the Top 500 supercomputers swapped places on the latest list, released Monday.

A Cray supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has regained the title of the world's most powerful supercomputer, overtaking the installation that was ranked at the top in June, while China entered the Top 10 with a hybrid Intel-AMD system.

The upgraded Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge, in Tennessee, now boasts a speed of 1.759 petaflops per second from its 224,162 cores, while the IBM Roadrunner system at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico slowed slightly to 1.042 petaflops per second after it was repartitioned. A petaflop is one thousand trillion calculations per second.

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Egypt To Apply For First Arabic-Alphabet Internet Domain Name

From CTV News/AP:

SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt — Egypt will apply for the first Internet domain written in Arabic, its information technology minister said Sunday at a conference grouping Yahoo's co-founder and others to discuss boosting online access in emerging nations.

Tarek Kamel said Egypt on Monday would apply for the new domain -- pronounced ".masr" but written in the Arabic alphabet -- making it the first Arab nation to apply for a non-Latin character domain. The effort is part of a broader push to expand both access and content in developing nations, where the Internet remains out of reach for wide swaths of the population.

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The Ghost Wineries of Napa Valley

The Freemark Abbey is a fully functional ghost winery located in the
Napa Valley just north of St. Helena. Matt Kettmann

From The Smithsonian:

In the peaks and valleys of California’s wine country, vinters remember the region’s rich history and rebuild for the future

Atop Howell Mountain, one of the peaks that frame California’s wine-soaked Napa Valley, the towering groves of ponderosa pines are home to one of the region’s legendary ghost wineries. Born in the late 1800s, killed off by disease, disaster, depression, and denial in the early 20th century, and then laid to solemn rest for decades, La Jota Vineyard — like its countless sister specters found throughout the region — is once again living, breathing, and making world-class wine. And for those who care to listen, this resurrected winery has plenty to say about everything from America’s melting pot history and the long-celebrated quality of West Coast wine to strategies for sustainability and using the power of story to boost sales.

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In 2012, Neutrinos Melt The Earth's Core, And Other Disasters

Scence from 2012 courtesy of Columbia Tristar Marketing Group

From Scientific American:

During an early screening of Roland Emmerich's latest disaster flick 2012, which opens today, laughter erupted in the audience near the end of the film thanks to corny dialogue and maudlin scenes (among the biggest guffaw getters: a father tries to reconnect with his estranged son on the telephone, only to have the son's house destroyed just before he could say anything). Nobody wants to take anything seriously in a movie like this, in which digital mayhem is the draw. But if it were an audience of physicists, the laughter probably would have started in the first five minutes. You can't take any of the science seriously, although I give the filmmakers credit for creativity.

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2009 Leonid Meteor Shower: "Strong Outburst" Expected

Leonid meteors streak across the sky over Joshua Tree National Park in California on November 18, 2001. The horizontal streaks are stars and planets caught moving in the long-exposure photograph. During the 2009 Leonid meteor shower, sky-watchers—depending on where they are—may see anywhere from 30 to 300 shooting stars an hour, experts say. Photograph by Reed Saxon, AP

From National Geographic:

During the 2009 Leonid meteor shower, you may see anywhere from 30 to 300 shooting stars an hour, depending on whether you're in the right place to see the showy peak on November 17, experts predict.

With the highest number of meteors streaking across the skies around 4:45 p.m. ET, the Leonids peak will be effectively invisible for viewers in North America and Europe.

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World's Worse Case of Arsenic Poisoning Solved

Many people in Bangladesh continue to drink arsenic contaminated water (Source: USGS)

From ABC News (Australia)/AFP/Reuters:

Researchers have finally worked out what led to the widespread release of arsenic into drinking water in rural Bangladesh, affecting millions of people.

Dubbed 'the worst mass poisoning in history', the incident has puzzled scientists for decades.

Now a team publishing in Nature Geoscience say that tens of thousands of man-made ponds are to blame.

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Space Shuttle To Haul Spare Parts For Monday Afternoon Launch

Space Shuttle Atlantis on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center on Sunday in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Matt Stroshane/Getty Images

From The New York Times:

The space shuttle has often been called a pickup truck to orbit, and the next flight of the shuttle Atlantis, scheduled to launch Monday afternoon, lives up to that description.

The Atlantis is lugging up to the International Space Station a cargo bay full of spare parts, including a couple of refurbished gyroscopes, pumps, tanks for ammonia and nitrogen and piece called the “trailing umbilical system reel assembly” for the railway system that moves the station’s robotic arm.

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Love and Envy Linked By Same Hormone, Oxytocin

Studies have shown that the oxytocin hormone has a positive effect on positive feelings. The hormone is released in the body naturally during childbirth and when engaging in sexual relations. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 13, 2009) — A new study carried out at the University of Haifa has found that the hormone oxytocin, the "love hormone," which affects behaviors such as trust, empathy and generosity, also affects opposite behaviors, such as jealousy and gloating. "Subsequent to these findings, we assume that the hormone is an overall trigger for social sentiments: when the person's association is positive, oxytocin bolsters pro-social behaviors; when the association is negative, the hormone increases negative sentiments," explains Simone Shamay-Tsoory who carried out the research.

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The Beautiful Aftermath Of Tropical Storm Ida

Clouds of sediment clouded the Gulf of Mexico on Nov. 10, 2009, after Hurricane Ida came ashore. Credit: Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC.

From Live Science:

One of the dramatic and often unseen effects of tropical storms and hurricanes is the muck they churn up from the ocean floor as they come ashore.

These clouds of sediment in the Gulf of Mexico were spotted Nov. 10, after Tropical Storm Ida made landfall and then moved on.

The image was made from data collected by NASA’s Aqua satellite.

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In A Malaria Hot Spot, Resistance To A Key Drug

From Time Magazine:

Every year, thousands of workers arrive at the sapphire and ruby mines of Pailin, Cambodia, risking their lives to unearth gems in the landmine-ridden territory. Soon, however, they could be the ones to put millions of others at risk. On the Thai-Cambodian border, a rogue strain of malaria has started to resist artemisinin, the only remaining effective drug in the world's arsenal against malaria's most deadly strain, Plasmodium falciparum. For six decades, malaria drugs like chloroquine and mefloquine have fallen impotent in this Southeast Asian border area, allowing stronger strains to spread to Burma, India and Africa. But this time there's no new wonder drug waiting in the wings. "It would be unspeakably dire if resistance formed to artemisinin," says Amir Attaran, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Ottawa who has written extensively on malaria issues.

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Penis Implant Brings Hopes To Thousands

From The Independent:

An unusual organ implant grown in the laboratory and rigorously tested on highly-sexed male rabbits could bring new hope to thousands of men.

Scientists in the US completely rebuilt the "stiffening" elements of the penis from donor cells - and showed that they worked.

Rabbits given the implants attempted to mate within one minute of being introduced to a female partner, and 83 per cent succeeded.

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Drink Culture: It's As Old As The Hills

From The New Scientist:

QUESTS don't come much more appealing than this. But while for most people the quest ends in the nearest bar, biomolecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern has gone much further. He has spent decades travelling the world and journeying back in time, scraping dirty crusts from ancient cauldrons, retrieving dribbles of liquid from sealed jars and extracting residues from the pores of prehistoric pots, all in the name of investigating the origins of ancient alcoholic beverages.

After he famously identified the world's oldest wine - a resinated grape wine found in two clay jars from the Neolithic village of Hajji Firuz in Iran, in 2004 he found an even older sample in China. At a 9000-year-old site called Jiahu on the banks of the Yellow river, he recovered the remains of grog made from rice, hawthorn fruit, grapes and honey. Another of his recent revelations is that the people of Central America got drunk on fermented chocolate, giving new meaning to the word chocoholic.

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Weekend Lie-Ins For Teenagers Wards Off Obesity

The scientists, who studied children aged five to 15, found those who slept in on Saturdays and Sundays were much less likely to have weight problems Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

Teenagers lying in at the weekend might seem like laziness, but it will actually help them stay slim and healthy, claim scientists.

New research suggests lazing in bed at the end of a busy week is just what children need to ward off obesity.

The scientists, who studied children aged five to 15, found those who slept in on Saturdays and Sundays were much less likely to have weight problems.

They believe the weekend snooze is crucial for school-age children to catch up on the sleep they miss out on during a busy week.

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Surf's Up! Hawaiian Sea Turtles Take To The Waves

Here comes the wave: A giant Hawaiian sea turtle prepares to ride the surf

From The Daily Mail:

He has eaten a big lunch and had a snooze on the beach. So this turtle is looking for a nice quiet journey home.

Rather than be crashed about on the breakers as he makes his way back out to sea, he ducks down to the sand for a smoother ride.

The Hawaiian green sea turtle makes the same journey every day to and from the Laniakea Beach in Hawaii, where he munches on seaweed and takes his rest.

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Tick-Tock - The Clock Is Running On Europe's Proposed Sat-Nav System, Galileo

From The BBC:

Most people have had a pop at Europe's proposed sat-nav system, Galileo, down the years. Let's face it, it's been an easy target.

Artist's impression of an IOV satellite in orbit"How not to implement a large-scale infrastructure project" is the criticism you often hear. "The Common Agricultural Policy in the sky" also became a popular jibe for a while.

Galileo will be at least five years late on its original timescale and hugely over budget.

It should have been fully operational by now and have cost the European taxpayer no more than 1.8bn euros.

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Scientists Find Key To Creating Clean Fuel From Coal And Waste

From The Guardian:

'Gasification' process enhanced to save millions of tonnes of carbon and provide energy

Millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide could be prevented from entering the atmosphere following the discovery of a way to turn coal, grass or municipal waste more efficiently into clean fuels.

Scientists have adapted a process called "gasification" which is already used to clean up dirty materials before they are used to generate electricity or to make renewable fuels. The technique involves heating organic matter to produce a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, called syngas.

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