New Theory On Largest Known Mass Extinction In Earth's History

Hypothetically speaking, large areas of the hyper saline Zechstein Sea and its direct environment could have looked like this, which in the Permian Age was situated about where present day Central Europe is. At the end of the Permian Age the Zechstein Sea was irrevocably disconnected from the open sea and the remaining sections of sea soon dried out after that. As a result the microbial-limited halogenated gases from the Zechstein Sea stopped and vegetation was able to regenerate again. The pink colour of the Zechstein Sea was probably brought about by microbes with an extreme preference for salt, as is the case with salt lakes today. In the background sand dunes can be recognised from a landscape with hardly any water. (Credit: Dr. Karsten Kotte/Universität Heidelberg)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 31, 2009) — The largest mass extinction in the history of the earth could have been triggered off by giant salt lakes, whose emissions of halogenated gases changed the atmospheric composition so dramatically that vegetation was irretrievably damaged.

At least that is what an international team of scientists has reported in the most recent edition of the Proceedings of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Dokladi Earth Sciences). At the Permian/Triassic boundary, 250 million years ago, about 90 percent of the animal and plant species ashore became extinct. Previously it was thought that volcanic eruptions, the impacts of asteroids, or methane hydrate were instigating causes.

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Coffee Lessens The Pain Of Exercise

Former competitive cyclist Robert Motl, now a professor of kinesiology and community health, is studying the effects of caffeine on pain during exercise. Credit: L. Brian Stauffer

From Live Science:

That cup of coffee that many gym rats, bikers and runners swill before a workout does more than energize them. It kills some of the pain of athletic exertion, a new study suggests. And it works regardless of whether a person already had a coffee habit or not.

Caffeine works on a system in the brain and spinal cord (the adenosine neuromodulatory system) that is heavily involved in pain processing, says University of Illinois kinesiology and community health professor Robert Motl. And since caffeine blocks adenosine, the biochemical that plays an important role in energy transfer and thus exercise, he speculated that it could reduce pain.

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Women Excluded From 'Mars Mission' Crew To Prevent Sexual Tension Ruining 105-Day Voyage

Five of the crew during survival training near Star City, Russia.
They will live together for 105 days in cramped conditions.

From The Daily Mail:

Today an all-male crew of six space enthusiasts were shut inside the Mars-500 'spaceship' in Moscow, for a simulated 105-day mission.

The purpose of the reality TV-like mission is to study the psychological and physiological effects of isolation on stress levels, sleep quality, mood and immunity levels.

The experiment paves the way for a 500 day mission which will completely replicate the conditions of a real mission to Mars.

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Cosmonaut: Russians Can't Use American Toilet in Space

Which bathroom do I use? The International Space Station as seen from the departing space shuttle Discovery on March 25. NASA

From FOX News:

MOSCOW — Squabbles on Earth over how cosmonauts and astronauts divide up the space station's food, water, toilets and other facilities are hurting the crew's morale and complicating work in space, a veteran Russian cosmonaut said, according to an interview published Monday.

Gennady Padalka told the Novaya Gazeta newspaper as saying space officials from Russia, the United States and other countries require cosmonauts and astronauts to eat their own food and follow stringent rules on access to other facilities, like toilets.

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My Comment: This news is getting better everyday.

Hobbit Skeleton Replica Goes On Display

Image: Artist's rendition of Homo floresiensis. Credit: National Geographic Society/ Peter Schouten

From Live Science:

A cast of a "hobbit" skeleton will go on public display for the first time as part of a human evolution symposium April 21 on Long Island, New York.

The hobbit fossils (and near fossils) were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003. Some scientists think the discovery represents a new species of human. Others argue it was human like us, only with a disorder called microcephaly which gave it an unusually small head.

The skeleton is set to go on display at Stony Brook University's Staller Center for the Arts as part of the 7th Human Evolution Symposium there.

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Why Some People Shake Off The Flu In A Couple Of Days, While Others Suffer Longer, Or Die

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 30, 2009) — For some people it is a certainty: as soon as the annual flu season gets underway, they are sure to go down with it. It is little comfort to know that there are other people who are apparently resistant to flu or overcome the illness after just a couple of days. It is this phenomenon that is now being investigated by researchers at the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research, using various strains of mice.

"Where there are many scientific works dealing solely with the flu virus, we have investigated how the host reacts to an infection," says Klaus Schughart, head of the Experimental Mouse Genetics research group. In infection experiments the researchers have now discovered that an excessive immune response is responsible for the fatal outcome of the disease in mice. This overreaction has genetic roots.

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Discover Interview The Man Who Found Quarks And Made Sense Of The Universe

From The Discover Magazine:

Murray Gell-Mann had a smash success with particles, notorious dustups with Feynman, and a missed opportunity with Einstein.

It is no accident that the quark—the building block of protons and neutrons and, by extension, of you and everything around you—has such a strange and charming name. The physicist who discovered it, Murray Gell-Mann, loves words as much as he loves physics. He is known to correct a stranger’s pronunciation of his or her own last name (which doesn’t always go over well) and is more than happy to give names to objects or ideas that do not have one yet. Thus came the word quark for his most famous discovery. It sounds like “kwork” and got its spelling from a whimsical poem in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. This highly scientific term is clever and jokey and gruff all at once, much like the man who coined it.

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How Enormous Batteries Could Safeguard The Power Grid

Big battery: Wind turbines charge these large-scale batteries in Luverne, Minn., while the wind blows. If the breeze calms, the batteries keep power flowing into the utility grid. (Courtesy of XCel Energy)

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Since sunlight and wind can be unreliable, renewable utilities install big backups.

One evening in late February 2008, the famously steady winds of west Texas began to wane until, at last, hundreds of giant wind turbines were becalmed – their enormous blades slowed or stilled.

In just three hours, grid operators at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas watched wind power output fall by 1,400 megawatts – power needed to supply roughly 600,000 homes. Following emergency procedures, a blackout was avoided by quickly cutting power to several industrial customers.

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Giant Laser Experiment Powers Up

From BBC:

The US has finished constructing a huge physics experiment aimed at recreating conditions at the heart of our Sun.

The US National Ignition Facility is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of nuclear fusion, a process that could offer abundant clean energy.

The lab will kick-start the reaction by focusing 192 giant laser beams on a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel.

To work, it must show that more energy can be extracted from the process than is required to initiate it.

Professor Mike Dunne, who leads a European venture that is also pursuing nuclear fusion with lasers, told BBC News that if NIF was successful, it would be a "seismic event".

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Volcanoes Spawn Mini-Cyclones, Then Lightning "Sheaths"

A waterspout forms offshore from an erupting Kilauea volcano vent in Kilauea, Hawaii. A March 2009 study revealed a newfound link between two of nature's most violent phenomena that could explain how volcanic ash clouds can generate lightning and tornado-like dust devils and waterspouts. Photograph by Steve and Donna O'Meara

From National Geographic:

A newfound link between two of nature's most violent phenomena could explain how volcanic ash clouds can generate bolts of lightning and tornado-like dust devils and waterspouts.

Scientists have long known that tornadoes are the products of colossal columns of spinning air—mesocyclones—inside large storm clouds.

A new study suggests mesocyclones can also form in the ash plumes of volcanic eruptions.

Under certain circumstances, these volcanic mesocyclones can aid in lightning production and create tornado-like structures that corkscrew toward the Earth, said study team member Pinaki Chakraborty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Cosmonaut Grumbles About Space Bureaucracy

Image top: The International Space Station, the largest scientific
cooperative program in history Credit: NASA

From Yahoo News/AP:

MOSCOW – Squabbles on Earth over how cosmonauts and astronauts divide up the space station's food, water, toilets and other facilities are hurting the crew's morale and complicating work in space, a veteran Russian cosmonaut said, according to an interview published Monday.

Gennady Padalka told the Novaya Gazeta newspaper as saying space officials from Russia, the United States and other countries require cosmonauts and astronauts to eat their own food and follow stringent rules on access to other facilities, like toilets.

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New Portable Energy Source Utilizes Microbes To Turn Electricity Directly To Methane

This photo shows Bruce E. Logan, Shaoan Cheng and Defeng Xing with a microbial cell that produces methane directly from electricity. (Credit: Bruce Logan's Lab, Penn State)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 30, 2009) — A tiny microbe can take electricity and directly convert carbon dioxide and water to methane, producing a portable energy source with a potentially neutral carbon footprint, according to a team of Penn State engineers.

"We were studying making hydrogen in microbial electrolysis cells and we kept getting all this methane," said Bruce E. Logan, Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering, Penn State. "We may now understand why."

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Mysterious East Coast Boom Was Falling Russian Rocket

A look at Russia's Soyuz rocket stages. Credit: SPACE.com Graphic.

From Live Science:

The mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the U.S. Naval Observatory.

"I'm pretty convinced that what these folks saw was the second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched the crew up to the space station," said Geoff Chester of the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.

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Nathan Wolfe: Did We Mention This Guy Was Brilliant?

From Popsci.com:

PopSci "Brilliant 10" alum takes the TED stage to talk about his groundbreaking work as a virus hunter; see the video!

When it comes to viruses, especially the serious kind that can make you bleed from your eye sockets and wipe out entire villages, most people naturally prefer to keep their distance. Not Nathan Wolfe. The 39-year-old epidemiologist has spent the past 10 years hunting them down in the jungles of Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. By collecting thousands of blood samples from wild animals and the people who live in close contact with them, Wolfe and his team have uncovered new viruses related to HIV and smallpox. He's even documented how these animal-borne killers leap to humans, with blood serving as a vector in transmitting viruses from slaughtered animals to hunters.

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A (Radioactive) Cut in the Earth That Will Not Stay Closed

DANGEROUS ELEMENT: The uranium for the original atomic bombs came from a mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Shinkolobwe. ©ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/DAVID FREUND

From Scientific American:

Tom Zoellner's book Uranium explores how a historic mine in Africa poses an existential threat in this excerpt.

One of the most potentially dangerous places in the world is called Shinkolobwe, the name of a now-destroyed village in central Africa which took its name from a thorny fruit resembling an apple. After boiling, the outside of the fruit cools quickly but the inside is like a sponge. It retains hot water for a long time. Squeezing it results in a burn.

The word is also local slang for a man who is easygoing on the surface but becomes angry when provoked.

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The Tech Behind 3D's Big Revival

Left: James Cameron on the set of his 3D epic Avatar. Right: An NFL Films cameraman captures last season’s San Diego—Oakland game using a stereo­scopic camera rig built by 3ality. (Photograph by Associated Press)

From Popular Mechanics:

3D has been around for a century, but only now are we seeing 3D in Super Bowl ads and in big Hollywood 3D releases like Coraline and Monsters vs. Aliens. So what has convinced Hollywood that 3D is finally ready for its closeup? The short answer is that technology has finally caught up with the concept.

Hollywood is buzzing about 3D. Dreamworks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg has compared it to the introduction of color. Director James Cameron delayed the release of his stereoscopic epic Avatar in part to give theaters more time to convert to 3D capability. A dozen or more stereoscopic films will be released in 2009, and more than 30 movies are in production. But stereoscopic films are not a revolutionary concept; in fact, audiences have been paying for them since The Power of Love in 1922. The golden age of 3D was in the 1950s, with a brief resurgence in the 1980s. Each time experts heralded the format as the next big thing in filmmaking, and each time, the surge quietly subsided.

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Solar Activity And Climate Change: New Sun-Watching Satellite To Monitor Sunlight Fluctuations

During periods of peak activity (front three images) sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections are more common, and the sun emits slightly more energy than during periods of low activity (back images). The amount of energy that strikes Earth's atmosphere -- called total solar irradiance (TSI) -- fluctuates by about 0.1 percent over the course of the sun's 11-year cycle, even though the soft X-ray wavelengths shown in this image vary by much greater amounts. (Credit: Steele Hill, SOHO, NASA/ESA)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 29, 2009) — During the Maunder Minimum, a period of diminished solar activity between 1645 and 1715, sunspots were rare on the face of the sun, sometimes disappearing entirely for months to years. At the same time, Earth experienced a bitter cold period known as the "Little Ice Age."

Were the events connected? Scientists cannot say for sure, but it's quite likely. Slowdowns in solar activity -- evidenced by reductions in sunspot numbers -- are known to coincide with decreases in the amount of energy discharged by the sun. During the Little Ice Age, though, few would have thought to track total solar irradiance (TSI), the amount of solar energy striking Earth's upper atmosphere. In fact, the scientific instrument needed to make such measurements -- a spaceborne radiometer -- was still three centuries into the future.

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Perfect Running Pace Revealed

The kinematics of walking (left) and running are quite different. © Nature

From Live Science:

Most regular runners can tell you when they reach that perfect equilibrium of speed and comfort. The legs are loose, the heart is pumping and it feels like you could run at this pace forever.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison now have an explanation for this state of running nirvana, and we can thank our ancestors and some evolutionary biology for it.

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Scientists Map The Brain, Gene By Gene

"The brain is details on top of details on top of details." — Michael Hawrylycz
Photo: David Clugston

From Wired Magazine:

The human brain is surprisingly bloody. I've worked in neuroscience labs, and I'm used to seeing brains that are stored in glass jars filled with formaldehyde, the preserved tissue a lifeless gray. But this brain—removed from a warm body just a few hours ago—looks bruised, its folds stained purple. Blood drips from the severed stem, forming puddles on the stainless steel table.

I'm in the dissection room of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, and the scientist next to me is in a hurry: His specimen—this fragile cortex—is falling apart. Dying, the gray matter turns acidic and begins to eat away at itself; nucleic acids unravel, cell membranes dissolve. He takes a thin, sterilized knife and slices into the tissue with disconcerting ease. I'm reminded of Jell-O and guillotines and the meat counter at the supermarket. He saws repeatedly until the brain is reduced to a series of thin slabs, which are then photographed and rushed to a freezer. All that remains is a pool of blood, like the scene of a crime.

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Leaving Computers On Overnight = $2.8 Billion A Year

Vice President Gore's Office

From Yahoo Tech:

Admittedly I don't think much about it at all. I leave my laptop running overnight because I know it'll take five minutes or more to get things going in the morning -- not just booting up, but launching the various apps I start the day with, downloading my overnight email, filtering out the spam, and otherwise "getting settled."

But all the power wasted while computers are sitting idle overnight adds up, and one study has finally tried to measure it. The tally: An estimated $2.8 billion wasted on excess energy costs each year in the U.S. alone.

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My Comment: I think it is more than that. I have 3 computers in my office. I have always left them on 24 hours. About 6 months ago I started to shut them down when I was no longer working with them. My electricity bill has dropped appreciably since then.