What Goes Into Naming A New Species? A Lot

An American scientist named Charles Paul Alexander is said to have named 10,000 species of crane flies, like the one above.

From NPR:

September 23, 2008 · There wasn't a whole lot to do in the Garden of Eden, as the Bible tells it. Adam, the original resident, just bided his time, snacked when he felt like it, avoided one particular tree, and hung out. Except once — just once — he was given an assignment: to name a vast array of "beasts of the field," plus "fowl of the air," after which, presumably, he rested. And people have been naming creatures ever since.

In the 1700s, the Swedish scholar Carl Linnaeus created a new way to classify creatures that is still in use today, genus plus species. He classified thousands of organisms.

But the all-time record may go to an American insect scientist by the name of Charles Paul Alexander, who specialized in crane flies. I'm not exactly sure what a crane fly is, but apparently they come in many, many flavors; Alexander is said to have named more than 10,000 species.

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A Trip Inside The "Big Bang Machine"

Steve Kroft descends into the Large Hadron Collider some call it the "big bang machine" - that took billions of dollars and 9,000 physicists to build in the hope it will provide valuable insights.

From CBS 60 Minutes:

(CBS) As a rule, physics rarely makes news, but it did this past week after equipment malfunctions delayed for several months the start up of one of the biggest science experiments in history. We are talking about the Large Hadron Collider, a massive, multibillion dollar project designed to unlock the secrets of the universe.

For several years now, thousands of the world's most accomplished scientists have been gathering in Europe, not to explore the heavens but the frontiers of inner space. They are hoping to discover subatomic particles so tiny that they have never been detected. They think these particles will help explain why the universe has organized itself into so many different things - planets and stars, tables and chairs, flesh and blood.

To do it, they have constructed one of largest, most sophisticated machines ever built to replicate what the universe was like a few nanoseconds after it was created. And as Steve Kroft reports, it is all going to happen 300 feet underground on the border between Switzerland and France.

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Are Some Solar Projects No Longer ‘Green’?

Workers install solar panels on the roof of an Austin, Texas, homeowner. (Ann Hermes / The Christian Science Monitor / FILES)

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Conservationists worry that a plan for the Mojave desert will upset species’ habitats.

Solar companies proposing large power plants in the Mojave Desert are facing opposition from conservationists. They say a rush to build solar here threatens to tear up large tracts of desert habitat and open space.

The squabble is likely to intensify now that Congress this week moved forward on a long-term extension of the solar tax credit. Two other proposed bills would fast-track solar power projects looking to build on federal lands. State mandates on utilities to provide more renewable energy has created an enormous market for solar, an energy that requires two things the Mojave has in spades – acreage and sunshine. But the desert’s defenders argue that solar panels should be located on city rooftops rather than pristine lands.

“If there were just one [proposed plant], we could deal with that. But we are looking at essentially every valley that is not protected as a national monument or park as being a potential site for solar,” says John Hiatt, a Las Vegas-based environmental activist. “It will be the industrialization of the Mojave Desert.”

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Einstein's long-lost telescope goes on display after being restored

In this undated photo made available by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on Monday, Sept. 22, 2008, an unidentified man adjusts a telescope that once belonged to Albert Einstein, at the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS/Hebrew University in Jerusalem, HO

From CNews/Science:

JERUSALEM - Albert Einstein's long-lost telescope, forgotten for decades in a Jerusalem storage shed, goes on display this week after three years and $10,000 spent restoring the relic.

The old reflecting telescope is cumbersome by modern standards, but a demonstration for The Associated Press showed it still works well enough to see five of Jupiter's moons and stripes on the surface of the huge planet.

The legendary physicist who famously theorized relations among energy, speed and mass received the telescope in 1954, the year before he died.

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When Wind Power Goes Wrong

Wind Power -- Watts Up With That

I was in a conversation today at lunch with a fellow who told me that “wind power is better than anything we’ve ever done for generating electricity”. That made me wonder, how reliable (beyond the constancy of wind issues) is it?

Whenever I drive through Techachapi or Altamont passes here in California I note that there always seems to be a fair number of these three blade windmills that are out of commission. Perhaps failure is more common than one would expect. I found a couple of examples:

New Era Dawns At Home Of The Internet

A network of supercomputers called the Grid will allow information to be downloaded quicker than ever. Tasks that took hours will now take seconds

From Times Online:

The dawn of a new internet age has begun. A network of supercomputers, known as the Grid, is to revolutionise the speed at which information is downloaded to personal computers.

The power of the Grid is such that downloading films should take only seconds, not hours, and processing music albums just a single second. Video-phone calls should also cost no more than a local call. More importantly, it should help to narrow the search for cures for diseases.

The Grid, a network of 100,000 computers, is to be connected to the world’s largest machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It is designed for projects, such as large research and engineering jobs, which need to crunch huge quantities of data, but scientists believe it will eventually be used on home computers.

The Grid allows scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, to get access to the unemployed processing power of thousands of computers in 33 countries to deal with the data created by the LHC.

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CERN Rivals See Melting Magnets As Par For Course

A Sept. 10, 2008 file photo shows European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) scientists working at computers in the Cern's control center during the switch on operation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's biggest atom-smasher in a mission to answer some of the most perplexing questions in the cosmos controol, Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008, in Geneva, Switzerland. The daring success of the world's largest atom smasher on its opening day was more surprising to scientists than the troubles it subsequently developed. The meltdown of a connection between superconducting magnets nine days later at CERN was more expected. (AP Photo/Fabrice Coffrini, Pool, File)

From Yahoo News/AP:

GENEVA - The daring success of the world's largest atom smasher on its opening day was more surprising to many scientists than the troubles it subsequently developed.

A problem with a magnet connection will delay the start of experiments for half a year, partly because the $3.8 billion accelerator is so complicated to repair. Physicists — some of whom waited two decades to use the new equipment — will now have to wait three more weeks for the damaged section to be warmed up to room temperature.

They can then get inside to see what went wrong.

Yet such glitches are not uncommon. Michael Harrison, who worked on Fermilab's Tevatron collider and designed and built the United States' other superconducting collider at Brookhaven on Long Island, said both machines had similar startup problems.

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Why The Large Hadron Collider Is Already On The Fritz

From Time Magazine - Science:

Anyone who has struggled to change a fuse in their home should pity the scientists at the CERN laboratory in Geneva. Last Friday, just nine days after celebrating the successful test run of the largest particle accelerator ever constructed, a tiny electrical connection between two magnets overheated and caused a minor meltdown.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) broke.

Although a final evaluation is yet to be completed, scientists believe the fault caused the machine to lose the near absolute-zero temperature it must maintain to operate. For now, however, repair work can't begin because the machine is still too cold; it will take about a month to warm up the area to a temperature at which replacement parts can be inserted. It will take another month to cool it back down, and given that CERN has pledged not to run its giant machine — which requires as much power as the entire city of Geneva — during winter months when Europe's energy needs are highest, Friday's breakdown could delay the actual smashing of atoms until early next year.

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PHOTOS: Best Science Images of 2008 Announced

First Place, Photography: "The Glass Forest"

From The National Geographic:

September 25, 2008--Tiny green diatoms create the illusion of a fernlike forest as they attach to their marine-invertebrate hosts.

Mario De Stefano of the Second University of Naples, Italy, captured this miniscule "jungle" from the Mediterranean Sea with a scanning electron microscope.

The image earned first place in the photography category of the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

The awards are given annually by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science for images that employ modern technology to visualize complex scientific topics. (See some of last year's winners.)

The winners will be announced in tomorrow's issue of Science.

--Brian Handwerk
—Image courtesy Mario De Stefano/The Second University of Naples/Science

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Top 10 Scrapped Spaceship Designs

Space: the final frontier, and a veritable graveyard of wacky, premature or impossible concepts for getting people there. From radioactive Mars ships to Russian space shuttle knock-offs, check out our top 10 spaceship drop-outs.

From Discovery Magazine:

10. Von Braun Ferry Rocket

Wernher Von Braun, designer of the German V-2 rocket, also dreamed up plenty of spaceships in his day -- including the Saturn V launch system that made it possible for Americans to step onto the moon.

But one that never left the drawing board was this three-stage "ferry rocket." Collier's Magazine ran the drawing on the cover of a 1952 issue touting "Man Will Conquer Space Soon".

So far, the difficulty of space travel is the only thing conquering anyone.

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Chinese Astronauts Return To Earth

China's Shenzhou-7 spacecraft's re-entry module landed safely in Siziwang Banner in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Sunday, Sept. 28, 2008. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Wang Jianmin)

From CBS News/Science:

(AP) Chinese astronauts returned to earth and emerged triumphant from their capsule Sunday after successfully completing the country's first-ever spacewalk mission.

State broadcaster CCTV showed their Shenzhou 7 spaceship landing under clear skies in the grasslands of China's northern Inner Mongolia region at 5:37 p.m. local time. Premier Wen Jiabao applauded at mission control in Beijing.

"The astronauts feel very good," mission commander Zhai Zhigang said as the vessel floated down to earth on a red-and-white-striped giant parachute.

After landing, the three astronauts were seen sipping bottled water as they were given medical examinations inside the module. They stayed inside for about 45 minutes to adapt to the Earth's gravity before slowly crawling out of the narrow circular entrance of the capsule.

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Bees Can Count

From Live Science:

Honeybees are clever little creatures. They can form abstract concepts, such as symmetry versus asymmetry, and they use symbolic language — the celebrated waggle dance — to direct their hivemates to flower patches. New reports suggest that they can also communicate across species, and can count — up to a point.

With colleagues, Songkun Su of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and Shaowu Zhang of the Australian National University in Canberra managed to overcome the apian impulse to kill intruders and cultivated the first mixed-species colonies, made up of European honeybees, Apis mellifera, and Asiatic honeybees, A. cerana. The researchers confirmed that the two species have their own dialects: foraging in identical environments, the bees signaled the distance to a food source with dances of different durations.

Remarkably, despite the communication barrier, A. cerana decoded A. mellifera's dance and found the food.

Also at the Australian National University, Marie Dacke and Mandyam V. Srinivasan trained European honeybees to pass a particular number of colored stripes in a tunnel to get a food reward, which was placed by a stripe. When they removed the food, the bees still returned to the same stripe.

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Earth's Magnetic Field Reversals Illuminated By Lava Flows Study

Polarity reversals have occurred hundreds of times at irregular intervals throughout the planet's history – most recently about 780,000 years ago – but scientists are still trying to understand how and why. (Credit: iStockphoto/Tobias Machhaus)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 26, 2008) — Earth's north magnetic pole is shifting and weakening. Ancient lava flows are guiding a better understanding of what generates and controls the Earth's magnetic field – and what may drive it to occasionally reverse direction.

The main magnetic field, generated by turbulent currents within the deep mass of molten iron of the Earth's outer core, periodically flips its direction, such that a compass needle would point south rather than north. Such polarity reversals have occurred hundreds of times at irregular intervals throughout the planet's history – most recently about 780,000 years ago – but scientists are still trying to understand how and why.

A new study of ancient volcanic rocks, reported in the Sept. 26 issue of the journal Science, shows that a second magnetic field source may help determine how and whether the main field reverses direction. This second field, which may originate in the shallow core just below the rocky mantle layer of the Earth, becomes important when the main north-south field weakens, as it does prior to reversing, says Brad Singer, a geology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Memory Surprisingly Unreliable, Study Shows

From Cosmos:

LIVERPOOL, UK: Our memories of major past events can be surprisingly unreliable, says a new study of the July 2005 London bombings, which found that people can easily convince themselves they've seen things that never happened.

"Some people think that our memories are like video recorders and that if you press play the memories come flooding back. It doesn't work like that at all and should not form the basis of legal decision making" said James Ost, a psychologist from the University of Portsmouth, England.

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Does Hot Water Freeze Faster Than Cold Water?

From Live Science:

Determining whether or not hot water can freeze faster than cold water may seem like a no-brainer. After all, water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius. And wouldn’t water hot enough to kill E. coli bacteria (about 120 degrees Fahrenheit or 50 degrees Celsius) take a longer path than cooler water at a fall New England beach (about 60 degrees Fahrenheit or 15 degrees Celsius) towards a frigid future as ice? While a logical assumption, it turns out that hot water can freeze before cooler water under certain conditions.

This apparent quirk of nature is the "Mpemba effect," named after the Tanzanian high school student, Erasto Mpemba, who first observed it in 1963. The Mpemba effect occurs when two bodies of water with different temperatures are exposed to the same subzero surroundings and the hotter water freezes first. Mpemba’s observations confirmed the hunches of some of history’s most revered thinkers, such as Aristotle, Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon, who also thought that hot water froze faster than cold water.

Evaporation is the strongest candidate to explain the Mpemba effect. As hot water placed in an open container begins to cool, the overall mass decreases as some of the water evaporates. With less water to freeze, the process can take less time. But this doesn’t always work, especially when using closed containers that prevent evaporated water from escaping.

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Rocket Man Is Sucessful Crossing The English Channel -- News Updates And Links

Yves Rossy flies across the channel using his jet wing. The former Swiss Air pilot traced the route first flown by French aviator Loius Bleriot (Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty Images)

Rocket Man Completes First One-Man Jetpack
Flight Across Channel -- Daily Mail

He came. He soared. He conquered.

Birdman Yves Rossy powered into the record books yesterday with a remarkable cross-Channel flight - and a grin almost as big as his wingspan.

The Swiss adventurer stood on the White Cliffs of Dover after flying from France with a jet-propelled wing on his back and declared: 'It's like a dream come true.'

He parachuted into an English field 22 miles from Calais 13 minutes after takeoff. The 49-year-old aviator flew at up to 125mph after jumping from a plane 8,200ft above France.

Four jet engines on the single, 8ft wing allowed him to prove what he has always believed - that with a little help from technology, there's no reason why man shouldn't fly like a bird.

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More News on The Rocket Man

"Fusion Man" makes historic Channel flight -- Reuters
Exclusive: I followed jetman Yves Rossy during the historic Channel crossing -- Times Online
To infinity... or just Dover?: Jetman crosses the English Channel -- The Independent
Jet Man Crosses English Channel -- New York Times
Swiss pilot flies across English Channel by jetpack -- National Post
Swiss 'rocketman' crosses the English Channel in 10 minutes (Pictures) -- L.A. Times

What's Driving China's Space Efforts?

This undated photo released on Tuesday September 23, 2008, by China's official Xinhua news agency shows technicians help the Shenzhou-7 manned spaceship to dock with the Long-March II-F rocket at an assembly plant. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Qin Xian'an)

From The BBC:

The launch of Shenzhou-VII by China is another reminder of the country's growing confidence and capability in space.

It delivers a message to the traditional space powers: after a slow start, China is rising fast.

This mission is a critical step in a "three-step" human spaceflight programme aimed at docking spacecraft together to form a small orbiting laboratory and, ultimately, building a large space station.

It has sent a robotic spacecraft, Chang'e, to the Moon and there are plans to land a robotic rover on the lunar surface in 2010.

Last year, China faced international criticism when it used a medium-range ballistic missile to destroy an ageing weather satellite in a weapons test.

But what are the forces driving Beijing's space endeavours?

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In A Storm Surge, Elevation Is The Key To Survive

Ike Obliterated Most Homes, But Spared One On Church Street -- Houston Chronicle

There's a new landmark in Gilchrist, one of the towns on Bolivar Peninsula that Hurricane Ike ravaged and left for dead.

The fire station is gone. The post office is gone. Every structure on the gulf side of this tight-knit community is gone.

Except for one house.

Standing tall, as if in defiance of Ike's windy, watery wrath, is the home of Pam and Warren Adams, who built the place in 2005 after Hurricane Rita destroyed their older home on the same lot.

On Friday, the first day many residents were allowed back on the peninsula, the couple returned to Church Street, ready to help neighbors whose homes no longer stood with theirs.

"I think I'm going through survivor's guilt," said Pam Adams, even though her home is uninhabitable, its main floor covered with mud brought in by the storm surge. "But the fact that the house is standing, that it survived, is awesome. Gilchrist is still here. It's faith and hopefulness."

The Adams had already been back to see their house, so they knew what to expect. But for the people who live west of Rollover Pass — the residents and homeowners returning to the peninsula for the first time since the hurricane — it was surreal.

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UN Urged To Coordinate Killer Asteroid Defences

From The New Scientist:

The technology to detect and deflect dangerous space rocks already exists – all that's missing is someone to coordinate its use.

That is the finding of a two-year investigation by the Association of Space Explorers (ASE), an international group of astronauts, cosmonauts, and members of space community. The group unveiled the results of its research at the offices of the Google Foundation in San Francisco yesterday.

The report asks the UN to assume responsibility for responding to potentially catastrophic asteroid threats. "For 4.5 billion years, we've been bashed continuously by asteroids. It's time for that to stop," former Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart told the assembly.

The ASE's vision is first for a global information network, coordinated by the UN, that uses data from ground- and space-based telescopes to find, track and rate the risk of near-Earth objects (NEOs).

Currently, NASA is watching 209 NEOs, none of which is considered to be dangerous. But a threat is likely to be detected within the next 15 years, according to the ASE. "New telescopes coming online will increase these discoveries by a factor of 100," said Ed Lu, astronaut on space shuttle Atlantis.

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Extracting Energy From The Tides

Water Powered: Two prototype balloons for CETO’s wave farm. Photo by Jason Thomas

Burning the Tide -- Popsci

Alan Burns made a fortune in the oil business. But as oil wanes, he’s convinced that clean energy will be—must be—the next big thing. And so this inventor has poured his fortune into a challenge far greater than finding new oil deposits: extracting energy from the ocean

Alan Burns breaks the surface with a huge grin on his face, his baggy black wetsuit hanging off his body like walrus skin. It’s a scorching February afternoon, and we’re floating in the clear blue water of the Indian Ocean. To our left is the Australian resort island of Rottnest. To our right—just beyond Burns’s dazzling white yacht—is several thousand miles of open sea. And beneath us, the kelp forest where we had been diving moments before is swaying to the rhythm of the waves. “Can you feel the power down there?” Burns asks as we bob in the water, his sunburned cheeks puckered up behind a dripping diving mask. “This is what made me think of it, really.”

Burns is a prodigious inventor and a staunch supporter of clean energy, but he’s no sentimental environmentalist. He’s an oilman. He made his first fortune in the mid-1970s with oil and gas discoveries off Australia’s northwestern coast. In 1987 he founded the exploration company Hardman Resources, which, after an extremely profitable series of finds off the coast of Africa, was sold in 2006 to another oil company for more than $1 billion. Today the 67-year-old entrepreneur is among the wealthiest men in Perth, the tropical, seaside capital of Western Australia. And although he still runs a mineral-exploration company, he spends 90 percent of his time nurturing the wave-power-generation system he first sketched out some 30 years ago.

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