Good News For Wind, Bad For Ethanol In Major Energy Study

From Ars Technica:

Growing concerns over climate change and energy security have kicked research on alternative energy sources into high gear. The list of options continues to expand, yet few papers have comprehensively reviewed them. And fewer still have weighed the pros and cons in as much depth as a new study published earlier this month in the journal, Energy & Environmental Science. The results are a mixed bag of logical conclusions and startling wake-up calls.

The review pits twelve combinations of electric power generation and vehicular motivation against each other. It is a battle royal of nine electric power sources, three vehicle technologies, and two liquid fuel sources. It rates each combination based on eleven categories. And it was all compiled by one man, Mark Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.

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10 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy

From Reuters:

Daily habits can affect our well-being. Here are 10 simple actions that research has shown makes people feel good.

In the last few years, psychologists and researchers have been digging up hard data on a question previously left to philosophers: What makes us happy? Researchers like the father-son team Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, Stanford psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, and ethicist Stephen Post have studied people all over the world to find out how things like money, attitude, culture, memory, health, altruism, and our day-to-day habits affect our well-being. The emerging field of positive psychology is bursting with new findings that suggest your actions can have a significant effect on your happiness and satisfaction with life. Here are 10 scientifically proven strategies for getting happy.

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One More Mystery To Think About

Mystery: Archeologists have uncovered a 100-year-old watch in a tomb believed to have been undisturbed for 400 years

Mystery As Century-Old Swiss Watch Discovered In Ancient Tomb sealed for 400 years -- Daily Mail

Archeologists are stumped after finding a 100-year-old Swiss watch in an ancient tomb that was sealed more than 400 years ago.

They believed they were the first to visit the Ming dynasty grave in Shangsi, southern China, since its occupant's funeral.

But inside they uncovered a miniature watch in the shape of a ring marked 'Swiss' that is thought to be just a century old.

The mysterious timepiece was encrusted in mud and rock and had stopped at 10:06 am.

Watches were not around at the time of the Ming Dynasty and Switzerland did not even exist as a country, an expert pointed out.

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"First Contact With Inner Earth": Drillers Strike Magma

A collapsed vent allows hot lava to peek through solidified rock at Hawaii's Kilauea volcano in an undated photo. For the first time on record, workers drilling at a geothermal plant near Kilauea accidentally hit a pocket of magma in its natural environment deep inside Earth. Announcing the find at a December 2008 meeting, one volcano expert likened the discovery to a paleontologist finding a dinosaur romping on a remote island. Photograph courtesy Hawaii Volcano Observatory

From National Geographic:

A drilling crew recently cracked through rock layers deep beneath Hawaii and accidentally became the first humans known to have drilled into magma—the melted form of rock that sometimes erupts to the surface as lava—in its natural environment, scientists announced this week.

"This is an unprecedented discovery," said Bruce Marsh, a volcanologist from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, who will be studying the find.

Normally, he said, volcanologists have to do "postmortem studies" of long-solidified magmas or study active lava during volcanic eruptions.

But this time they'd found magma in its natural environment—something Marsh described as nearly as exciting as a paleontologist finding a dinosaur frolicking on a remote island.

"This is my Jurassic Park," he said at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

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Earth's Original Ancestor Was LUCA, Not Adam Nor Eve

From E! Science News:

Here's another argument against intelligent design. An evolutionary geneticist from the Université de Montréal, together with researchers from the French cities of Lyon and Montpellier, have published a ground-breaking study that characterizes the common ancestor of all life on earth, LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor). Their findings, presented in a recent issue of Nature, show that the 3.8-billion-year-old organism was not the creature usually imagined. The study changes ideas of early life on Earth. "It is generally believed that LUCA was a heat-loving or hyperthermophilic organism. A bit like one of those weird organisms living in the hot vents along the continental ridges deep in the oceans today (above 90 degrees Celsius)," says Nicolas Lartillot, the study's co-author and a bio-informatics professor at the Université de Montréal. "However, our data suggests that LUCA was actually sensitive to warmer temperatures and lived in a climate below 50 degrees."

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Astronomers Use Ultra-sensitive Camera To Measure Size Of Planet Orbiting Star

When the planet WASP-10b crosses the disk of its star, WASP-10, the brightness of the star decreases, allowing scientists to measure the precise size of the planet. (Credit: Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Manoa)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 17, 2008) — A team of astronomers led by John Johnson of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy has used a new technique to measure the precise size of a planet around a distant star. They used a camera so sensitive that it could detect the passage of a moth in front of a lit window from a distance of 1,000 miles.

The camera, mounted on the UH 2.2-meter telescope on Mauna Kea, measures the small decrease in brightness that occurs when a planet passes in front of its star along the line-of-sight from Earth. These "planet transits" allow researchers to measure the diameters of worlds outside our solar system.

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Want A Retired Space Shuttle? They're Up For Grabs

From Yahoo News/AP:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA's soon-to-be-retired space shuttles are up for grabs. The space agency said Wednesday it's looking for ideas on where and how best to display its space shuttles once they stop flying in a few years. It's put out a call to schools, science museums and "other appropriate organizations" that might be interested in showcasing one of the three remaining shuttles.

Beware: NASA estimates it will cost about $42 million to get each shuttle ready and get it where it needs to go, and the final tab could end up much more.

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Bright Future: LEDs Revolutionize Lighting

LEDs (light emitting diodes) are similar to regular light bulbs but have no filament. Their light is generated by electrons moving through a semiconductor material. They produce more light, less heat, and consume less energy than other types of lighting. Credit: NIST

From Live Science:

You might have noticed energy-efficient LED lights replacing the traditional holiday bulb lights on many store shelves this year. They're not cheap, but the sales pitch is they save energy, cut the risk of fire and last practically forever.

By all accounts, LED lighting has a very bright future, and the future is arriving rapidly as utility companies tout the benefits of LEDs, and individuals and businesses make the switch both for environmental reasons and to save money.

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Bringing Stem Cells to War: Meet the Blood Pharmers

(Photograph by Davies and Starr/Getty Images)

From Popular Mechanics:

New research from DARPA could open the door to on-demand blood-cell manufacturing on battlefields and in hospitals. All medics need is a machine that uses a nanofiber that mimics bone marrow to turn a handful of stem cells into gallons of blood. Who needs blood donations when you have blood pharming?

Fresher blood is better than stale: It carries more oxygen and, when transfused into patients, speeds recovery. Military medics are all too familiar with this problem in the field, where donated blood may take two or more weeks to reach soldiers who need it immediately. But medical researchers—also known as blood pharmers—are working on manufacturing the red stuff on the spot.

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Aging Brains Allow Negative Memories To Fade

From E! Science News:

It turns out there's a scientific reason why older people tend to see the past through rose-coloured glasses. A University of Alberta medical researcher, in collaboration with colleagues at Duke University, identified brain activity that causes older adults to remember fewer negative events than their younger counterparts.

"Seniors actually use their brain differently than younger people when it comes to storing memory, especially if that memory is a negative one," said study author Dr. Florin Dolcos, an assistant professor of psychiatry and neuroscience in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry.

The study, published online in December in the U.S.-based journal Psychological Science, found age-related changes in brain activity when participants with an average age of 70 where shown standardiz

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The Rise Of The Machines

From The IEEE Spectrum:

There are now 1 million industrial robots toiling around the world, and Japan is where they’re the thickest on the ground. It has 295 of these electromechanical marvels for every 10 000 manufacturing workers—a robot density almost 10 times the world average and nearly twice that of Singapore (169), South Korea (164), and Germany (163).

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Earth’s Magnetic Field Has Massive Breach - Scientists Baffled

(Click To Enlarge)

Watts Up With That:

I know. This sounds like a plot of a 1950’s scifi movie. But it is real. From my view, our localized corner of the solar system is now different than it used to be and changes in the magnetic interactions are evident everywhere. First we have the interplanetary magnetic field that took an abrupt dive in October 2005 and has not recovered since and remains at very low level:

Then we have the recent discovery that the ionosphere has dropped in altitude to unexpected and unexplained low levels.

We have a solar cycle 24 (driven by the solar magnetic dynamo) which can’t seem to get out of the starting gate, being a year late with forecasts for activity from it being revised again and again.

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Leaks Found In Earth's Protective Magnetic FieldI

A close-up of a solar flare taken with the Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) spacecraft in Sept. 2005. Credit: NASA

From Live Science:

Scientists have found two large leaks in Earth's magnetosphere, the region around our planet that shields us from severe solar storms.

The leaks are defying many of scientists' previous ideas on how the interaction between Earth's magnetosphere and solar wind occurs: The leaks are in an unexpected location, let in solar particles in faster than expected and the whole interaction works in a manner that is completely the opposite of what scientists had thought.

The findings have implications for how solar storms affect the our planet. Serious storms, which involved charged particles spewing from the sun, can disable satellites and even disrupt power grids on Earth.

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Over 2T Tons Of Ice Melted In Arctic Since '03

In this July 19, 2007 file photo, an iceberg melts off Ammassalik Island in Eastern Greenland. More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming. (AP Photo/John McConnico)

From Yahoo News/AP:

WASHINGTON – More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming.

More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA's GRACE satellite, said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays, he said, and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating.

NASA scientists planned to present their findings Thursday at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. Luthcke said Greenland figures for the summer of 2008 aren't complete yet, but this year's ice loss, while still significant, won't be as severe as 2007.

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Can Nuclear Power Compete?

From Science America:

Newly approved reactor designs could reduce global warming and fossil-fuel dependence, but utilities are grappling with whether better nukes make market sense

On an August afternoon in Washington, D.C., typically miserable for its heat, humidity and stillness, reporters gathered at a downtown hotel not known for its air-conditioning. Stuffed inside a windowless conference room that was being heated still further by the television people’s lights, we waited for Michael J. Wallace, who had been trying, in fits and starts, to unveil nuclear power’s second act.

On arrival, Wallace, a meticulous manager not known for ad-libbing, looked out over the sweating reporters and smiled. “It’s days like today that highlight the real need for new, emissions-free, baseload power,” he said. Unless we get started soon, he added, rolling blackouts could become the norm.

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'Death Map' Shows Heat A Big Hazard To Americans

From Reuters:

WASHINGTON, Dec 16 (Reuters) - Heat is more likely to kill an American than an earthquake, and thunderstorms kill more people than hurricanes do, according to a U.S. "death map" published on Tuesday.

Researchers who compiled the county-by-county look at what natural disasters kill Americans said they hope their study will help emergency preparedness officials plan better.

Heat and drought caused 19.6 percent of total deaths from natural hazards, with summer thunderstorms causing 18.8 percent and winter weather causing 18.1 percent, the team at the University of South Carolina found.

Earthquakes, wildfires and hurricanes combined were responsible for fewer than 5 percent of all hazard deaths.

Writing in BioMed Central's International Journal of Health Geographics, they said they hoped to dispel some myths about what the biggest threats to life and limb are.

"According to our results, the answer is heat," Susan Cutter and Kevin Borden of the University of South Carolina wrote in their report, which gathered data from 1970 to 2004.

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'Peak Oil Theory' Demands Energy Alternatives

Oil workers operate a rig in Midland County, Texas, in June 2008. AFP/Getty Images

From NPR:

Plummeting gasoline and diesel prices have given consumers relief at the pump. But oil pessimists believe the current slump in demand will pass. And when it does, the world will be in the same fix it was before the global recession. The era of easy oil is behind us. According to those who believe in what's called "peak oil theory," world oil production has already peaked, or flattened, and in the foreseeable future, the declining resource will inevitably change the way we live.

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Wisdom: We Still Don't Get It

"The Thinker" is a sculpture by Rodin. Credit: Dreamstime

From Live Science:

There is more information than ever at our fingertips, yet we’re none the wiser it seems.

And many old people are wise, as most of them will tell you, but sometimes they can’t remember your name, so how smart is that?

It’s paradoxes like these that lie at the heart of a new $2 million research project called Defining Wisdom. Based at the University of Chicago, the four-year initiative, supported by the Templeton Foundation, has enlisted 23 scholars ranging from historians to economists to psychologists to computer scientists to examine the idea of wisdom, with the aim of cultivating it and better understanding its nature.

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Google Says It Still Stands By Net Neutrality

From Yahoo Finance/AP:

Google denies Wall Street Journal claim that it's giving up on `Net neutrality'

NEW YORK (AP) -- Google Inc. denied that it had reversed its stance on the issue of "Net neutrality" and dismissed a story in Monday's edition of The Wall Street Journal on the subject as "confused."

Citing undisclosed sources, the newspaper reported that Google had been in talks with major cable and phone companies about getting preferential treatment for traffic to and from its sites.

That would conflict with the principle of Net neutrality, under which carriers traditionally give the same treatment to traffic from different sites. The Federal Communications Commission has voiced support for the principle, and sanctioned Comcast Corp. this year for slowing some types of file-sharing traffic. Google has been a vocal supporter of Net neutrality.

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Google Wants Its Own Fast Track On The Web

From The Wall Street Journal:

The celebrated openness of the Internet -- network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic -- is quietly losing powerful defenders.

Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.

At risk is a principle known as network neutrality: Cable and phone companies that operate the data pipelines are supposed to treat all traffic the same -- nobody is supposed to jump the line.

But phone and cable companies argue that Internet content providers should share in their network costs, particularly with Internet traffic growing by more than 50% annually, according to estimates. Carriers say that to keep up with surging traffic, driven mainly by the proliferation of online video, they need to boost revenue to upgrade their networks. Charging companies for fast lanes is one option.

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Doctor's Advice: Leave the Toilet Seat Up

From Live Science:

One of the longest-running spousal debates may now be settled in favor of men and for the sake of little boys.

Leave the toilet seat up, some British doctors now say. The reason: a rising trend for heavy wooden and ornamental toilet seats to fall down onto the penises of unsuspecting (and just potty-trained) toddlers.

Dr. Joe Philip and his colleagues of Leighton Hospital, Crewe, in England detail such penis-crush injuries in the December issue of the journal BJU International. The team reports on four boys between the ages of 2 and 4 who were admitted to hospitals with injuries serious enough to require an overnight stay.

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NASA Chief Grumbles About Obama

From Foreign Policy Blog:

Overall, Bush administration officials deserve credit for making this transition as painless and drama-free as possible. One notable exception is NASA Administrator Mike Griffin:

Tensions were on public display last week at the NASA library, as overheard by guests at a book party. According to people who were present, Logsdon, a space historian, told a group of about 50 people he had just learned that President John F. Kennedy’s transition team had completely ignored NASA.

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Google Admits That Its Staff Picks And Chooses What Appears In Its Search Results

From The Register:

Manufacturing isn't dead - it just went to Mountain View

Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance.

Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that:

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Supermassive Black Hole Dissected With Natural Magnifying Glasses: 1,000 Times Clearer Than Best Telescopes Can Do

Close-up of the Einstein Cross, as observed with the SINFONI instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope. SINFONI makes use of the adaptive optics technique and so, allows astronomers to overcome the blurring effect of the atmosphere, thereby providing very sharp images. The central blob is the nucleus of the lensing galaxy, surrounded by the four mirage images of the distant quasar. (Credit: ESO/F. Courbin et al)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 13, 2008) — Combining a double natural "magnifying glass" with the power of ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have scrutinised the inner parts of the disc around a supermassive black hole 10 billion light-years away. They were able to study the disc with a level of detail a thousand times better than that of the best telescopes in the world, providing the first observational confirmation of the prevalent theoretical models of such discs.

The team of astronomers from Europe and the US studied the "Einstein Cross", a famous cosmic mirage. This cross-shaped configuration consists of four images of a single very distant source. The multiple images are a result of gravitational lensing by a foreground galaxy, an effect that was predicted by Albert Einstein as a consequence of his theory of general relativity. The light source in the Einstein Cross is a quasar approximately ten billion light-years away, whereas the foreground lensing galaxy is ten times closer. The light from the quasar is bent in its path and magnified by the gravitational field of the lensing galaxy.

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Dreams Imaged, Scientists Claim

From Live Science:

Japanese researchers say they've imaged thoughts and dreams and displayed them on a computer screen.

At the web site of the journal Neuron, where the findings are to be published, the researchers summarize their work: "The results suggest that our approach provides an effective means to read out complex perceptual states from brain activity."

Brain imaging is nothing new. And the images are reportedly very simple, but the researchers claim the technique could lead to the ability to unlock the secrets of dreams.

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Hubble's Replacement Now Taking Shape

Technicians gingerly handle the honeycombed beryllium mirror segment that will eventually join 17 others to form the primary mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope. Axsys

From SKY Telescope:

Against a backdrop of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, no one quite knows what will happen to NASA's future plans once Barack Obama becomes president. Will Michael Griffin remain the agency's chief? Will plans to return astronauts to the Moon be scrapped? Will space exploration in general — viewed by some as frivolous waste and by others as a ray of accomplishment amid all the bleakness — be slashed to a bare minimum?

We'll know soon enough. In the meantime, NASA continues to work toward assembling and launching the eventual replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, currently the crown jewel of its astronomy program.

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Year's Biggest Full Moon Friday Night

From Space.com

The full moon Friday night will be the biggest one of the year as Earth's natural satellite reaches its closest point to our planet.

Earth, the moon and the sun are all bound together by gravity, which keeps us going around the sun and keeps the moon going around us as it goes through phases. The moon makes a trip around Earth every 29.5 days. But the orbit is not a perfect circle.

The moon's average distance from us is about 238,855 miles (384,400 km). Friday night it will be just 221,560 miles (356,567 km) away. It will be 14 percent bigger in our sky and 30 percent brighter than some other full moons during the year, according to NASA.

Tides will be higher Friday night, too. Earth's oceans are pulled by the gravity of the moon and the sun. So when the moon is closer, tides are pulled higher. Scientists call these perigean tides, because the moon's closest point to Earth is called perigee. The farthest point on the lunar orbit is called apogee.

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Satellites Spy On Washington From On High [Slide Show]

OBAMA'S NEW ADDRESS: From its orbit 423 miles (681 kilometers) above Earth, the GeoEye 1 looks down on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The satellite, launched September 6, can capture natural and man-made features to within nine feet (three meters) of their actual location on Earth's surface.

From Scientific American:

A satellite imaging company provides clear new pix of features on Earth's surface as India mulls the role played by such imagery in the deadly Mumbai attacks

Washington, D.C., home of the CIA, National Security Administration (NSA) and FBI, is a well-known haven for spies and surveillance. But new satellite pictures of the White House, Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial show these government agencies aren't the only ones watching and being watched.

These latest images from Dulles, Va., satellite-imaging company, GeoEye, are among the first to be collected by the GeoEye 1, a satellite launched into polar orbit on September 6 that can "see" objects on Earth as small as 16 inches (0.41 meter) in size in black-and-white mode or 64.6 inches (1.64 meters) in color. Images from the GeoEye 1, which stands 20 feet (6.1 meters) high and weighs more than 4,300 pounds (1,950 kilograms), so impressed Google that the Internet search giant plans to add the satellite's high-resolution, digital color photos to Google Earth next month.

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The Shopping Mall: A 2,000-Year-Old Tradition

An archaeological team found the very first traces of an Illyrian trading post that is more than 2,000 years old, including more than 30 boats. Credit: University of Mostar

From Live Science:

At this time of the year, the pressure to shop, buy and wrap is overwhelming. And so we drag ourselves to the mall, a hopefully one-stop shopping place where any number of stores can accommodate any holiday shopping list. Checking that twice, we schlep up and down until our bags are full and our minds are empty.

And every year, it seems like the list grows longer, the schlep more tedious, and the time deciding on gifts endless. Eventually we sit down, have a holiday drink and thank our lucky stars for the mall, because without this modern market place, we'd be also be driving all over town and screaming.

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Does Obama Want to Ground NASA's Next Moon Mission?

Barack Obama and NASA administrator Michael Griffin,
Charles Dharapak / AP; NASA; Matt Stroshane / Getty

From Time Magazine:

Getting into a shouting match with the HR rep is not exactly the best way to land a job. But according to the Orlando Sentinel, that's just what happened last week between NASA administrator Mike Griffin and Lori Garver, a member of Barack Obama's transition team who will help decide if Griffin keeps his post once the President-elect takes office. If the contretemps did occur, it could help doom not only the NASA chief's chances, but the space agency's ambitious plans to get Americans back to the moon.

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Look Up Tonight For A Spectacular Treat In The Sky

From Times Online:

Biggest full moon for years enhanced by shooting stars

If the full moon tonight looks unusually large, it is not your imagination – it is the biggest and brightest full moon to be seen for 15 years.

Each month the Moon makes a full orbit around the Earth in a slightly oval-shaped path, and tonight it will swing by the Earth at its closest distance, or perigee. It will pass by 356,613km (221,595 miles) away, which is about 28,000km closer than average.

The unusual feature of tonight is that the perigee also coincides with a full moon, which will make it appear 14 per cent bigger and some 30 per cent brighter than most full moons this year – so long as the clouds hold off from blocking the view.

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Ancient Indian Ocean Coral Points To Another Disastrous Tsunami

From Times Online:

The eastern Indian Ocean could be due for another earthquake rivalling the one that caused the deadly tsunami in December 2004, according to research on ancient corals in the area.

It has long been said that earthquakes occur in cycles, yet until now evidence has been hard to come by. Now a pioneering study of the corals off the west coast of Sumatra has revealed that the region's earthquakes during the past 700 years occurred in series of shocks that spanned decades.

Corals lay down growth rings every year, just like trees, and these record environmental changes including upheavals of the seabed. They show that the region's earthquakes usually come in a sequence.

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Hubble Finds Carbon Dioxide On An Extrasolar Planet

This is an artist's impression of the Jupiter-size extrasolar planet, HD 189733b, being eclipsed by its parent star. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have measured carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in the planet's atmosphere. The planet is a "hot Jupiter," which is so close to its star that it completes an orbit in only 2.2 days. Credit: ESA, NASA, M. Kornmesser (ESA/Hubble), and STScI

(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star. This is an important step along the trail of finding the chemical biotracers of extraterrestrial life as we know it.

The Jupiter-sized planet, called HD 189733b, is too hot for life. But the Hubble observations are a proof-of-concept demonstration that the basic chemistry for life can be measured on planets orbiting other stars. Organic compounds can also be a by-product of life processes, and their detection on an Earth-like planet may someday provide the first evidence of life beyond Earth.

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Previous observations of HD 189733b by Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope found water vapor. Earlier this year, Hubble astronomers reported that they found methane in the planet's atmosphere.

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Wind, Water And Sun Beat Biofuels, Nuclear And Coal For Clean Energy

Wind power is the most promising alternative source of energy, according
to Mark Jacobson. (Credit: LM Glasfiber)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 11, 2008) — The best ways to improve energy security, mitigate global warming and reduce the number of deaths caused by air pollution are blowing in the wind and rippling in the water, not growing on prairies or glowing inside nuclear power plants, says Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford.

And "clean coal," which involves capturing carbon emissions and sequestering them in the earth, is not clean at all, he asserts.

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The Energy Debates: Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion

From Live Science:

The Facts

Most of the planet is covered by the oceans, and they absorb a staggering amount of energy from the sun each day. Ocean thermal energy conversion, or OTEC, taps into this energy to produce electricity.

Ocean thermal energy conversion relies on the fact that water near the surface is heated by sunlight while seawater deep in the dark is much colder. OTEC plants use warm surface water to heat ammonia or some other fluid that boils at a low temperature. The resulting gas is used to drive turbines that produce electricity. The gas is then cooled by cold water pumped up from the ocean depths and the resulting fluid is recycled to help generate power.

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The Dirty Side Of Clean Coal

DIRTY COAL Mountaintop removal mining pollutes communities in Appalachia.
Courtesy of Douglas Fischer, The Daily Climate

From Scientific American:

DOROTHY, W. Va. – Larry Gibson lives on an island in the sky.

It didn’t start that way: His land was once a low hill in a rugged hardwood forest – cherry, oak, hickory – skipping from ridge to ridge across one of the poorest, most rural areas of the Lower 48.

Then came the mining companies with their dynamite and trucks. They clear-cut the forest, blew the tops off the ridges and scraped the rocks into the hollows, pushing hundreds of feet of mountains into the valleys below.

They came for the coal – energy that provides half of the nation’s electricity and has been touted as a major plank in the United State’s bid for energy independence. They left, in Gibson’s view, a swale of extirpation and death.

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1/5 Of Coral Reefs Lost Due To Acid-Filled Oceans

From National Geographic:

The world has lost nearly one-fifth of its coral reefs, and much of the rest could be destroyed by increasingly acidic seas if climate change continues unchecked, a conservation group warned Wednesday.

Rising temperatures from greenhouses gases are the latest and most serious threats to coral, which are already being damaged by destructive fishing methods and pollution, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

About 19 percent of coral reefs have disappeared during the last 20 years, said IUCN's director general, Julia Marton-Lefèvre.

"If current trends in carbon dioxide emission continue, many of the remaining reefs will be lost in the next 20 to 40 years," Marton-Lefèvre said at Wednesday's U.N. talks, which are focused on creating a new climate change treaty.

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Henry M. Dies At 82; Victim Of Brain Surgery Accident Offered Doctors Key Insights Into Memory

From The L.A. Times:

For 55 years, he was known to the world at large only as HM or Henry M., the survivor of brain surgery that went catastrophically wrong, leaving him with a form of amnesia that prevented him from collecting any new memories and living in a pre-1953 world.

But when he died Dec. 2 of respiratory failure at a nursing home in Windsor Locks, Conn., his tightly guarded identity was finally revealed to the world. His name was Henry Gustav Molaison and he was 82.

The ill-conceived surgery was a personal disaster, but it was a major boon to the scientific community, providing researchers with the first window into how and where memories are formed in the brain.

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The Physics Every President Should Know

BROOKS KRAFT/CORBIS (Photo from Businessweek)

From NPR:

From gravity to the greenhouse effect, Richard Muller, a physicist at University of California at Berkeley, details the basic physics President-elect Barack Obama should know. Muller is author of Physics for Future Presidents and teaches a class at Berkeley by the same name.

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What's Inside A Black Hole?

Image from NASA

From The Guardian:

At the centre of the Milky Way lies a giant black hole, but can we shed light on what lurks in the darkness?

Thanks to German astronomers, we now have the most accurate measurements yet of the giant black hole that sits at the centre of our galaxy.

And what a beast it is: as wide as Earth's orbit around the sun and 4.3 million times more massive than our home star. Lucky, then, that it is 27,000 light years away.

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Unprecedented 16-Year-Long Study Tracks Stars Orbiting Milky Way Black Hole

This is the central parts of our galaxy, the Milky Way, as observed in the near-infrared with the NACO instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope. By following the motions of the most central stars over more than 16 years, astronomers were able to determine the mass of the supermassive black hole that lurks there. (Credit: ESO/S. Gillessen et al.)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 10, 2008) — By watching the motions of 28 stars orbiting the Milky Way's most central region with admirable patience and amazing precision, astronomers have been able to study the supermassive black hole lurking there. It is known as "Sagittarius A*" (pronounced "Sagittarius A star"). The new research marks the first time that the orbits of so many of these central stars have been calculated precisely and reveals information about the enigmatic formation of these stars — and about the black hole to which they are bound.

"The centre of the Galaxy is a unique laboratory where we can study the fundamental processes of strong gravity, stellar dynamics and star formation that are of great relevance to all other galactic nuclei, with a level of detail that will never be possible beyond our Galaxy," explains Reinhard Genzel, leader of the team from the Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching near Munich.

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Sugar Can Be Addictive, Study Suggests

From Live Science:

A study of rats finds they show all the signs of addiction to sugar. The finding could help better understand eating disorders in humans.

Professor Bart Hoebel and his team in the Department of Psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute have been studying signs of sugar addiction in rats for years. They had previously demonstrated a behavioral pattern of increased intake and then showed signs of withdrawal.

New experiments captured craving and relapse to complete the picture.

"If bingeing on sugar is really a form of addiction, there should be long-lasting effects in the brains of sugar addicts," Hoebel said. "Craving and relapse are critical components of addiction, and we have been able to demonstrate these behaviors in sugar-bingeing rats in a number of ways."

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Google Doubles Street View Coverage

US coverage by Google Maps Street View. (Google)

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Memphis, Maine, Birmingham, Charleston: Google’s been watching.

The search giant on Tuesday rolled out the biggest update ever to its mapping feature that lets visitors take a virtual stroll down the Champs Elysees, the National Mall, or their (well, in this case, my) old street.

This update includes parts of some states that hadn’t yet gotten the Google treatment, including Maine, West Virginia, and the Dakotas (yes, you can click your way through downtown Fargo, but the pictures were taken in the summertime.)

Besides being fun to play with, the feature makes it easy to get to know an area before going there. Street View was also recently added to the mobile version of Google Maps to enhance driving directions.

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Black Hole Found In Milky Way

From BBC:

There is a giant black hole at the centre of our galaxy, a study has confirmed.

German astronomers tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the centre of the Milky Way, using the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

The black hole is four million times heavier than our Sun, according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal.

Black holes are objects whose gravity is so great that nothing - including light - can escape them.

According to Dr Robert Massy, of the Royal Astronomical Society, the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit.

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NASA Delays Mars Science Laboratory Launch To 2011

In a rare astronomical occurrence, called planetary conjunction, planets Venus (top l.), and Jupiter (top r.), were seen with a crescent moon. The three orbs created a momentary smiley face in the sky over Asia on Monday. Bullit Marquez/AP

From Christian Science Monitor:

For folks looking forward to the launch of another ground-breaking Mars mission next year, you’ll have to wait. Top officials with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced today that they have pushed back the launch of the Mars Science Laboratory by two years.

In the process, the agency’s green-eye-shade crew will have to come up with an extra $400 million for the project. That’s the delay’s cost on a mission whose price tag already is estimated at $1.88 billion before all is said and done.

The delay is the second in a year, with the project currently running about two months behind schedule.

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Hubble Finds Carbon Dioxide on Extrasolar Planet

From Wired Science:

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside of the solar system, a significant step in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Though the planet is more similar to Jupiter than Earth and is too hot to harbor life, the ability to identify organic compounds on other planets is key to being able to find other habitable worlds, and potentially life.

"The carbon dioxide is kind of the main focus of the excitement, because that is a molecule that under the right circumstances could have a connection to biological activity as it does on Earth," astronomer Mark Swain of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a press release. "The very fact that we're able to detect it, and estimate its abundance, is significant for the long-term effort of characterizing planets both to find out what they're made of and to find out if they could be a possible host for life."

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Top 100 Innovations of 2008

From Popsci:

The 100 fastest, biggest, safest, greenest and most powerful innovations of the year

For decades, we've fantasized about watching paper-thin TVs, soaring hundreds of feet with personal jetpacks, riding in cars that drive themselves, and re-growing organs.

The 21st annual Best of What's New celebrates all of those dreams coming true. Now we've collected them all into one single slideshow. Launch it here to learn about these achievements and 96 other breakthroughs that, whether long awaited or completely unexpected, are equally amazing.

Please click here to launch the list.

What Is Truth Serum?

From Scientific American:

Indian officials plan to inject captured Mumbai terrorist with the "truth serum," sodium pentothal, but history tells us that the technique isn't up to the task

The baby-faced gunman of Mumbai, Azam Amir Kasab, now in the custody of Indian police, is the sole surviving attacker in the three-day rampage that began on the night of November 26 and left more than 170 people dead and scores of others injured.

After the attacks, Indian officials immediately began pointing fingers at longtime rival, Pakistan, as the source of the 10 militants—a charge that Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari disputed last night on CNN. During police interrogations, Kasab himself claimed to hail from the Punjab region of Pakistan and to have trained with the Pakistan-based extremist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba.

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Global Cancer Deaths to Double by 2030

Breast Cancer Cell (Photo from Alernative Treatments)

From WebMD:

Dec. 9, 2008 -- Cancer deaths are projected to more than double worldwide over the next two decades, largely from a dramatic increase in cancer incidence in low- and middle-income countries driven by tobacco use and increasingly Westernized lifestyles.

A new report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) explores the global burden of cancer, which is poised to become the leading cause of death worldwide by 2010.

The report predicts that:

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Never Say Die

William Finch, 96, gets ready to play Badminton in Greenville, N.C. At right, 97-year-old June McCann enjoys a game of Bocce ball. Photos: Michael Edwards for Newsweek

From Newsweek:

Step aside, quacks. The search for longer life is a real science now.

By the time it reaches the age of 18 days, the average roundworm is old, flabby, sluggish and wrinkled. By 20 days, the creature will likely be dead—unless, that is, it's one of Cynthia Kenyon's worms. Kenyon, director of the Hillblom Center for the Biology of Aging at the University of California, San Francisco, has tinkered with two genes that turn simple worms into mini-Methuselahs, with life spans of up to 144 days. "You can beat them up in ways that would kill a normal worm—exposing them to high heat, radiation and infectious microbes—and still they don't die," she says. "Instead, they're moving and looking like young worms. It's like a miracle—except it's science."

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