Friday, September 3, 2010
Hurricane's Path Unfamiliar to U.S. Northeast
From CBS News:
Earl Heads Uncomfortably Close to Area Relatively Few Hurricanes Tend to Go.
(AP) Pushed by an ill-timed trough of low pressure, Hurricane Earl is heading uncomfortably close to an area relatively few hurricanes tend to go: the northeastern United States coastline.
Earl's path may in fact be foreshadowing more northerly big storms to come with global warming, two hurricane experts said Thursday.
Read more ....
Counting Down To Commercial Space Launches
Image: Space pioneer: This image shows an artist’s rendering of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule. Credit: SpaceX From Technology Review:
The next few years will see at least two new commercial spacecraft put into orbit.
A small fleet of privately developed spacecraft will head into orbit in the next few years--assuming that current levels of public and private funding can be sustained. If it happens, this will mark a new chapter in space exploration and research, as NASA comes to rely more on private companies for the technology to put manned and unmanned vehicles in space.
Read more ....
Global Energy Use In The 21st Century
World energy consumption by type in 2006 - Image: Wikimedia
From Watts Up With That?:
Guest Post by Thomas Fuller
This is a great time to talk about energy use worldwide. Not because it’s topical, or politically important, or anything like that. It’s a great time because the math is easier now than ever before, and easier than it ever will be again.
It’s similar to a time a few years ago when there were almost exactly 100 million households in the United States. It made a lot of calculations really easy to do. And this year, the United States Department of Energy calculates that the world used 500 quads of energy. Ah, the symmetry.
Read more ....
DARPA's Cyber Insider Threat Program Is The Agency's Great Hope For Ending Leaks
Protecting Military Networks Thinking about WikiLeaking? Think again. U.S. NavyFrom Popular Science:
The recent WikiLeaks exposure was a huge black eye for the U.S. Department of Defense, supposedly one of the more secure state organizations we have working for us. Its impact clearly wasn’t lost on the Pentagon, whose blue sky research arm has launched a new project designed to ferret out malicious behavior on DoD networks. Named CINDER – Cyber INsiDER Threat – the project is designed not to sniff out people, but adversarial actions as they happen.
Read more ....
My Comment: I am skeptical that such a program will be successful .... but hey .... Darpa has surprised us on many occasions and should not be underestimated.
Charlie Bamforth Tells All About The Beer Industry
Charlie BamforthUC Davis, College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences
From Popular Mechanics:
In the forthcoming book, Beer Is Proof God Loves Us (to be published October 2010 by FT press), beer expert and master brewer Charlie Bamforth talks about the fast-changing world of beer. From the loss of the pub to the growth of homebrewing, corporate takeovers, and the rise of craft culture, Bamforth outlines the recent history of beer and helps beer-lovers, home brewers and aspiring brewmasters navigate the modern-day beerscape. We got Bamforth on the phone to talk about his views on Big Beer, home brewing and how to become a brewmaster.
Read more ....
A Traffic Cop For Satellites
As more and more spacecraft are put into orbit, the chance of a collision increases.Click to enlarge this image. ESA
From Discovery News:
Satellite crashes may be rare, but when they happen, the impact can be long-lasting.
Collisions in space don't happen very often, but when they do the impact is long-lasting. A coalition of satellite traffic cops, however, aims to prevent these episodes from occurring at all.
In orbit, chunks and fragments from a crash won't settle down. They'll keep moving -- extremely rapidly -- upping the odds of additional crashes.
Read more ....
Black Holes Formed Soon After Big Bang
Supermassive black holes are found at the centre of galaxies - including our galaxy, the Milky Way. Credit: NASAFrom Cosmos/AFP:
PARIS: The first supermassive black holes formed just a billion years after the Big Bang, showing that big structures build up quickly in the universe, scientists said.
Ordinary black holes are entities of mass whose gravitational pull is so huge that not even light can escape them. But they are dwarfs compared to so-called supermassive black holes, which are many orders of magnitude bigger.
Read more ....
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Recipe For Water: Just Add Starlight
Giant star IRC+10216. (Credit: ESA/PACS/SPIRE/MESS Consortia)From Science Daily:
ScienceDaily (Sep. 2, 2010) — ESA's Herschel infrared space observatory has discovered that ultraviolet starlight is the key ingredient for making water in space. It is the only explanation for why a dying star is surrounded by a gigantic cloud of hot water vapour.
Read more ....
Why Older People Repeat Stories
From Live Science:There may be a reason grandparents repeat the same stories over and over again. According to a new study, older people are more likely than younger people to forget with whom they've shared information.
The study investigated two types of memory: source memory, or your recollection of who told you a piece of information; and destination memory, which is your recollection of which people you've informed. Not only were older people bad at remembering to whom they'd told information, they were very confident in their mistaken memories. [10 Ways to Keep Your Mind Sharp]
Read more ....
My Comment: I am repeating stories .... and I am 50. Oh .... oh ....
NASA Planning Mission To Visit The Sun
Artist Representation of Solar Probe Plus(Credit: NASA)
From The CBS:
We know it's hot up there but NASA wants to know a bit more about the Sun and its environs. And so sometime before 2018, the agency intends to send a spacecraft into the solar atmosphere.
This will mark the first time that a spacecraft from earth will actually visit a star.
The decision to chart a mission to the Sun also realizes a dream that astronomers almost realized a half century ago, when the National Academy of Science's "Simpson Committee" in 1958 recommended a probe to investigate. Several studies were subsequently carried out testing the feasibility of the project. But nothing came of them.
Read more ....
Robotic Storm Tracker Gets A Big Test With Earl
Bearing down: NASA'S Global Hawk flies over the eye of Hurricane Earl. Thus far it has made numerous passes over the eye and will continue to monitor the storm until Thursday evening. Credit: NASA/NOAAFrom Technology Review:
The largest-ever storm monitoring mission is now gathering scientific data that was previously impossible to get.
As Hurricane Earl barrels toward the eastern seaboard of the United States, coastal residents don't know if they should evacuate in case the storm makes landfall. They rely on forecasters analyzing computer models, but those predictions differ. A new hurricane-monitoring mission that's now underway hopes to reduce this uncertainty by gathering atmospheric and environmental storm data never before obtained.
Read more ....
My Comment: They must have spent a fortune on this system, but considering the damage that hurricanes can cause, any leg up on what they are about to do makes it all worth while.
Where Are The Solar Power Projects?
Electric towers and power lines cross the proposed site of a BrightSource Energy solar plant near Primm, Nev. The presence of existing towers make the area a prime site for solar development. From Watts Up With That?:
From the Ventura County Star:
ROACH DRY LAKE, Nev. — Not a light bulb’s worth of solar electricity has been produced on the millions of acres of public desert set aside for it. Not one project to build glimmering solar farms has even broken ground.
Instead, five years after federal land managers opened up stretches of the Southwest to developers, vast tracts still sit idle.
Read more ....
My Comment: A blunt and accurate assessment on the politics behind solar power.
Archive Gallery: 138 Years Of Architectural Landmarks
The Pentagon, 1943From Popular Science:
PopSci's first looks at the Empire State Building, the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more.
We've heard it said that Rome wasn't built in a day. And while Popular Science isn't old enough to have witnessed the Colosseum going up, we have covered in our pages some of the 20th century's most important architectural achievements rise from nothing but a dream and a blueprint.
Read more ....
Top 5 Ways The Universe Could Wipe Out Humankind
From Popular Mechanics:
The Universe looks like a pretty tranquil place to live, doesn't it? During the day the sun shines steadily, and at night the heavens are reassuring and unchanging.
Dream on. The Universe is filled to the brim with dangerous, nasty things, all jostling for position to be the one to wipe us off the face of the planet. Happily for us, they're all pretty unlikely—how many people do you know who have died by proton disintegration?—but if you wait long enough, one of them is bound to get us.
But which one?
Read more ....
Highest-Paid Athlete Hailed From Ancient Rome
From Discovery News:
Ultra millionaire sponsorship deals such as those signed by sprinter Usain Bolt, motorcycle racer Valentino Rossi and tennis player Maria Sharapova, are just peanuts compared to the personal fortune amassed by a second century A.D. Roman racer, according to an estimate published in the historical magazine Lapham's Quarterly.
According to Peter Struck, associate professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, an illiterate charioteer named Gaius Appuleius Diocles earned “the staggering sum" of 35,863,120 sesterces (ancient Roman coins) in prize money.
Read more ....
My Comment: I am just curious to know what happened to all of that money.
Web-Crawling Computers Will Soon Be Calling The Shots In Science
Computers may by programmed to generate hypotheses with little human intervention required. Photograph: CorbisFrom The Guardian:
Within a decade, computers will be able to plough through scientific data looking for patterns and connections – then tell scientists what they should do next.
Move over scientists – computers will be asking the questions from now on. They will trawl the millions of scientific papers on the web and suggest new hypotheses for humans to test, according to an article in tomorrow's issue of Science.
Read more ....
Richest Planetary System Discovered
A close-up of the sky around the star HD 10180. Credit: ESO and Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De MartinFrom Cosmos:
PARIS: A distant star orbited by at least five planets has been found, according to European astronomers, in the biggest discovery of so-called exoplanets since the first was logged 15 years ago.
The star is similar to our Sun and its planetary lineup has an intriguing parallel with own Solar System, although no clue has so far been found to suggest it could be a home from home, they said.
The star they studied, HD 10180, is located 127 light years away in the southern constellation of Hydrus, the male water snake, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) said.
Read more ....
Discovery Of Ancient Cave Paintings In Petra Stuns Art Scholars
Detail of a winged child playing the flute, before and after cleaning. Photograph: Courtesy of the Courtauld InstituteFrom The Guardian:
Exquisite artworks hidden under 2,000 years of soot and grime in a Jordanian cave have been restored by experts from the Courtauld Institute in London.
Spectacular 2,000-year-old Hellenistic-style wall paintings have been revealed at the world heritage site of Petra through the expertise of British conservation specialists. The paintings, in a cave complex, had been obscured by centuries of black soot, smoke and greasy substances, as well as graffiti.
Read more ....
Commercial Organic Farms Have Better Fruit and Soil, Lower Environmental Impact, Study Finds
A new study found that organic farms produced more flavorful and nutritious berries while leaving the soil healthier and more genetically diverse. (Credit: iStockphoto/Margarita Borodina)From Science Daily:
ScienceDaily (Sep. 1, 2010) — Side-by-side comparisons of organic and conventional strawberry farms and their fruit found the organic farms produced more flavorful and nutritious berries while leaving the soil healthier and more genetically diverse.
"Our findings have global implications and advance what we know about the sustainability benefits of organic farming systems," said John Reganold, Washington State University Regents professor of soil science and lead author of a paper published in the peer-reviewed online journal, PLoS ONE. "We also show you can have high quality, healthy produce without resorting to an arsenal of pesticides."
Read more ....
My Comment: This scientific study only reveals what every farmer knows .... stay away from pesticides and fertilizers and you will produce a better product.
Hurricane Alley Heats Up With Stormy Threesome
As Hurricane Earl nears the East Coast Thursday, two tropical systems linger behind: Tropical Storm Fiona, located north-northeast of San Juan, and Tropical Storm Gaston, located east of the Lesser Antilles. Credit: NOAA.From Live Science:
Three swirling storms are roaring across the Atlantic with nervous East Coast residents keeping a close eye on the conveyor belt of tropical activity as hurricane season enters its busiest time.
Hurricane Earl is bearing down on the Carolinas and has strengthened into a Category 4 storm, with maximum winds of 145 mph (235 kph), according to the latest update from the National Hurricane Center (NHC). Category 3 storms or higher on the Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane strength are classified as major hurricanes. [In Images: Hurricane Hunters Flying into Earl.]
Read more ....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)