Author: Discover Main Feed

This week’s addition to The Science of Kissing Gallery features the collection’s second interspecies kiss! (and LOLCats fans are encouraged to offer headline suggestions in comments!)

Gabrielle Stern reminds us that, “Some receivers of kisses aren’t as gracious as others. Here’s my cat and I. Clearly, I’m more affectionate than he is, which often makes for fun pictures.”

Thanks to both of you for such an expressive photo!

Submit your original photograph or artwork to the gallery here and remember to include relevant links.

Speaking of NASA and the Shuttle, the last planned night launch of the Shuttle is scheduled for February 7 at 04:39 Eastern time (09:39 GMT). This will be a 13 day mission for Endeavour, which will install the Tranquility node, a connector, and a cupola to the ISS. After this, five more launches are planned, the last being in September.

I got an email today from a college student interested in becoming a science writer, asking how I got into the field and how it works. I get these emails from time to time, and in the past I’ve replied with an email of my own. But it occurred to me today that it would be better to direct them a podcast.

In November, when I visited the University of British Columbia, I gave a talk at their journalism school about how I became a science writer, and what it’s like for me today. It may not be interesting to people who are interested in science, rather than the business of science writing. But if you’re curious about this peculiar way of life, check it out.

This link takes you to the University of British Columbia on Itunes. Scroll down to find the podcast with my name on it.

For criminy’s sake. What is it with people and all the rending of garments over the impending doom of NASA?

First:

1) The reports of Spirit’s death are greatly exaggerated.

OK, yes, Spirit is now stuck. It looks like even if it survives the Martian winter it may no longer be able to traverse the Red Planet’s landscape. But that doesn’t mean it’s dead. Instead of a rover, it’s now a stationary platform capable of doing a lot of science on the cheap (since most of the cost was getting it there).

If you’d rather not have a lander sitting on the surface of Mars doing science that we simply cannot do from millions of kilometers away on Earth, then fine. But astronomers and scientists and science journalists should know better. Stop saying it’s dead.

[And I can picture Opportunity on the other side of Mars, waving its mast frantically, saying, Hey, remember me? Still moving, still doing cool stuff!]

Next, and more importantly:

2) The reports of the manned spaceflight’s death are greatly exaggerated.

OK, yes, it does look like (assuming the rumors are true) the Obama budget for NASA is cutting out the Constellation rocket program in general and Ares in particular. But that doesn’t mean manned spaceflight is dead.

As I said in that above link, private space companies are still a ways off from putting people in orbit. However, I strongly suspect they’ll be doing it before Ares would’ve been ready to do it anyway. Private companies like Space X may be two years from that, while Ares wouldn’t have been ready for five, assuming NASA could even get Ares ready by the scheduled time and in the assigned budget (which I would give a chance of, oh, say, precisely 0). So it’s possible, perhaps even likely, that after the Shuttle retires later this year (or early next) companies like Space X will be able to reach the International Space Station with rockets before NASA could.

As far as going back to the Moon, we still don’t know exactly what the budget for NASA will be like, but it was made clear in the leaked reports (again, assuming they are true) that money will be spent to look for a better heavy lift vehicle than Ares. No specifics were given (though the Commercial Spaceflight Federation says it may be 6 billion bucks, a huge chunk of change), so let’s wait until we actually see the report, hmmm?

Also, a lot of folks thought Ares was a waste of time, money, and with little or no chance of working well. Heck, the Space Frontier Foundation praises the killing of Ares! So not only is it unfair to lament the death of manned spaceflight, some people think — with some evidence, mind you — this will spur it on even more.

That last sentiment rings true to me. NASA’s manned program has been endlessly circling the Earth for almost 40 years now, with no real end in sight. I don’t have a lot of faith, so to speak, that Ares can do the job in breaking this cycle. I suspect a lot of the same folks who are decrying this move by Obama are the same ones who would be first in line to say that NASA has had its wings cut for decades now, making one bad decision after another when it comes to space exploration. Maybe it’s time — maybe it’s long after time — that we let someone else have a stab at this.

When I look at the Moon, I see a place where people will one day work, live, breathe, play, and explore. I also see that future receding two years for every year NASA doesn’t have a rocket to go there, and I’ve been watching that movie play for many years now.

I’m tired of it. When I look out my window now I see a future I’ve been dreaming of my whole life, a future that seems just out of my reach. When my children, my grandchildren, look out their windows in that future, y’know what I want them to see?

The blue-green crescent Earth hanging in a pitch black sky over a cratered horizon.

Let’s give space a chance.

Were you out last night to see the Moon and Mars together? It was a lovely get-together! I took some pictures, and here’s the best one:

Mars is the reddish “star” to the left of the Moon. A couple of actual stars are visible as well, and the pink blob on the left is a reflection of the Moon inside the camera.

Funny, you can barely see Mars in the picture, but it was really obvious by eye. That’s because cameras see things linearly — an object twice as luminous as another will appear twice as bright in a picture — while our eyes see things logarithmically — a mathematical function that lets our eyes see a much larger range of brightness based on multiplication, not addition. It’s actually a bit more complicated than this, but the point is while to the camera the Moon was vastly brighter than Mars (about 30,000x as bright!), to my eye the difference wasn’t nearly as much (only about 10x as bright). This allows our eye to detect faint and bright objects at the same time, which a camera can’t do easily.

You may have read that the Moon looked so bright last night because it was at perigee, the point in its orbit when it’s closest to Earth. Honestly, that makes no difference to the casual observer. While it really was a bit bigger and brighter, the difference over a normal full Moon is pretty small, and you don’t have anything to compare it with. If you could have superimposed a normal full Moon next to the Moon last night you might have seen a difference, but with just the one Moon sitting there you’d never notice.

This reminds me of the time in 1999 when people said the perigee full Moon would be so bright you could drive at night without headlights! Yeah. Bad idea.

But I do hope that some of the hype got people outside and noticing the sky. It’s amazing what you can see, what lovely things await you, if you simply look up.

If climate-watchers found no solutions in December’s failed Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, then they might be heartened by the fact that billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates thinks there needs to be a greater focus on researching technologies that can slow global warming.

ScienceInsider reports that the Microsoft founder had provided at least $4.5 million of his own money to be distributed over 3 years for the study of methods that could alter the stratosphere to reflect solar energy, techniques to filter carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere, and brighten ocean clouds [ScienceInsider]. These and other geoengineering techniques have been hotly debated in the scientific world, with some critics arguing that tinkering with Earth’s natural systems could do more harm than good.

Methods that divert some incoming solar energy, like spraying reflective aerosols into the stratosphere or making clouds more reflective, have been deemed potentially effective but also risky; the abrupt halt of a large-scale project would result in sudden, extreme warming. On the other hand, techniques that reduce the amount of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere are considered less risky, but they’re currently too expensive to implement widely.

Some of Gates’ money has been granted to Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Palo Alto, California and physicist David Keith of the University of Calgary in Canada–two of Gates’ informal energy and climate advisers for many years. They have also advised Gates on dispensing the money, some of which has already been granted to Armand Neukermans, an inventor based in Silicon Valley who is working with colleagues to design spray systems for the marine clouds, and students and scientists working for Keith and Caldeira. Funding has also helped support scientific meetings in geoengineering in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Edinburgh, Scotland, and aeronautics research related to altering the stratosphere [ScienceInsider]. Caldeira clarified that Gates’ money had not funded any field experiments; he also noted that some of the funding goes to more general research on climate change.

Gates’ funding is in line with his recent essay on climate policy in which he called for radical innovations in electricity generation and transportation. “If the goal is to get the transportation and electrical sectors down to zero emissions you clearly need innovation that leads to entirely new approaches to generating power,” Gates wrote. “While it is all well and good to insulate houses and turn off lights, to really solve this problem we need to spend more time on accelerating innovation” [Wired.com].

This is not the first time that Gates has shown an interest in geoengineering research. He is an investor in a Seattle, Washington-area firm called Intellectual Ventures that is investigating techniques to geoengineer the stratosphere. Gates worked with them to apply for a patent in 2008 to sap hurricanes of their strength by mixing warm surface water and with cold, deep ocean water.

While Gates’ $4.5 million contribution to climate change research is significant, it does pale in comparison to his other philanthropic efforts. Endorsing vaccines as the world’s most cost-effective public health measure, Bill and Melinda Gates said Friday that their foundation would more than double its spending on them over the next decade, to at least $10 billion [The New York Times].

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80beats: Obama’s Science Adviser Kicks Up a Fuss Over Geoengineering
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DISCOVER: 5 Most Radical Ways to Squelch a Climate Crisis (photo gallery)

Image: iStockphoto

The poor potato seems to be suffering from an identity crisis. Particularly in the United Kingdom, where there seems to be a great deal of confusion among consumers over whether the potato is a vegetable or just a starchy carbohydrate or both.

In order to vanquish this confusion and get people to pile on the potatoes, The Potato Council in the U.K. has put forth a petition to Downing Street to re-classify the spud as a “supercarb”–a new food group that, according to the council’s website, would help highlight “how much goodness potatoes contain.”

The Council hope this re-branding restores the potatoes tattered image that has suffered in the hands of those health-conscious folks who believe that a carb is a four-letter word.

The BBC reports:

Spurned by dieters on low-carbohydrate regimens such as Atkins, the vegetable also appeared to score poorly on the Glycaemic Index (GI) — which measures how quickly foods are broken down. The slower, the better — and the potato was quick. And then it seemed it was no longer a vegetable at all, passed over by the Department of Health when it compiled its list of “five-a-day.”

In the United Kingdom, the potato is classified a starchy carbohydrate. But while it is starchy, research published in the British Nutrition Journal argued that the vegetable had been subject to “unjustified generalization” and pointed out that the potato’s nutrition was entirely dependent on the way it was cooked, pointing out that an overcooked french fry was quite different from a boiled new potato.

So should we or not scarf down that order of fries?

Tom Sanders, professor of nutrition and dietetics at King’s College, London told the BBC that potatoes are an important source of Vitamin C and several other important nutrients, and noted that they’re healthiest when baked or boiled. He added that big, freshly cut fries only take up about 7% fat because of their relatively small surface area, and fries baked in the oven are even better with just 5 percent fat.

We’ll take that as a yes.

Related Content:
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Image: iStockphoto

Brown dwarfs are poorly named: they’re not really brown. They’re objects that are too small to really be called stars; they lack the oomph needed to fuse hydrogen into helium in their cores, which is the the mark of a true star. Because of this, they are far cooler than actual stars. Since cool stars are red, you’d think brown dwarfs would actually be really red.

And they are. Unless they’re blue.

Yeah, let me explain this one. First, here are two images of a newly discovered brown dwarf, perhaps the coolest ever seen, and certainly one of the closest to the Earth:

[Click to redgiantize.]

The star SDSS1416+13A is the brighter one in the image, and is a regular ol’ brown dwarf. The other star is its lower mass and cooler companion, called SDSS1416+13B. How cool is it? Scientists estimate that it’s at about 200 Celsius (400° F). I ate chicken last night hotter than that! So as stars go, 1416+13B is pretty cool.

Observations taken some time apart show that the two stars are in fact binary, orbiting around each other. Since we don’t know exactly how far away these two are, we can’t say exactly just what their masses are, but the way they give off light is a dead giveaway they are both brown dwarfs. It’s possible to estimate their distance, and scientists think they are between 15 and 50 light years away. That makes them very close to us as stars go! The Milky Way is 100,000 light years across, so these guys are basically sitting in our front yard.

Now, let me take a sec to explain some jargon. Blue light has a shorter wavelength than red light. Because of this, astronomers sometimes use the words “blue” and “red” as adjectives, meaning shorter and longer wavelengths, respectively. So blue is bluer than red, and red is redder than blue. Duh. But they can also say with a straight face that red is bluer than infrared, and infrared is redder than red! That’s because red has a shorter wavelength than IR, and is therefore “bluer”, while the IR is longer wavelength than red, and is therefore “redder”. Got it? It actually makes sense, and you eventually get used to it. I’ll be using this jargon below, so be ye fairly warned.

The pictures above are false color; both are in infrared light (the left is from the ground-based UKIRT telescope, while the one on the right is from the space-based Spitzer telescope). You might expect that since 1416+13B is cooler than its companion, it should be giving off more long-wavelength (redder) IR light. But in the case of the left image, the blue color still means 1416+13B is giving off more light at the shorter (bluer) end of the IR part of the spectrum. What gives?

Brown dwarfs are weird, that’s what gives. They have atmospheres almost like planets do, and that air is filled with methane, water vapor (steam!), and sometimes even vaporized iron for hotter ones — in cooler brown dwarfs, that iron precipitates out… in other words, it rains molten iron droplets!

In the case of 1416+13B, the atmosphere is cool enough that methane and steam absorb the light coming from below. Those two molecules are picky about what light they absorb, and they soak up quite a bit of IR at different wavelengths, allowing other wavelengths through. So what’s happening here is that some of the redder IR light gets sucked up, while bluer IR passes right through. What we see from outside is the star emitting bluer IR light, so images taken in IR make the star look blue.

This spectrum, taken with the Subaru telescope, might help:

Think of the vertical axis telling you how much light the gas in the star’s atmosphere lets through, and the horizontal is the color. Bluer IR is on the left, redder on the right. You can see that a handful of blue colors blast right through, but the star emits very little in the red. So when we look at it with our infrared telescopes, we see it looking blue.

Mind you, to our eyes, this guy would look very, very red. But that’s in visible light, off to the left (blue) of this graph.

So, given all this, why does the star look red in the Spitzer image? Aiiiiieeee!

OK, don’t panic. That’s because Spitzer looks at a different part of the IR spectrum. It sees light at 3.6 and 4.5 microns, well off to the right (red) of the spectrum shown above. In those wavelengths, 1416+13B looks redder.

So here we have a brown dwarf that looks red, or maybe blue. It all depends on how you look at it.

But that’s the whole point! By looking at stars at different wavelengths, we can find out a lot about them. In this case, we can estimate the distance to the star, its temperature, and even what’s in its atmosphere… all from hundreds of trillions of kilometers away!

Things like this never cease to amaze me. Science! I love this stuff.

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Related posts:
Dim, faint, and small is no way to go through life, son
Astronomers weigh in on teeny stars
Welcome to our tiny family

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Image credits: JAC/UKIRT, Spitzer Space Telescope, University of Hertfordshire, and Subaru Telescope (NAOJ), University of Hertfordshire.

Last week in Aspen we learned that this week would be when a major decision was reached by CERN at the annual Chamonix meeting as to how to operate the LHC at high energy. Following the magnet quench incident in September 2008, a year-long shutdown ensued for repairs to the magnets, and retrofitting of the rest of the machine for better quench protection circuitry and helium pressure release valves. Not all sectors were warmed up to room temperature for the retrofit last year, but all magnets were trained to go as high as beam energies of 5 TeV (design energy is 7 TeV per beam).

In November and December the LHC commissioning resumed, and it became the world’s highest energy collider on December 8, eventually delivering about 50,000 collisions at 2.36 TeV to CMS and ATLAS before shutting down for Christmas.

But the question facing the LHC managers this week was whether attempting to operate the LHC at 5 TeV on 5 TeV in 2010 was worth the risk to the machine itself. Clearly another disaster of the scale of the one in 2008 would cripple the program for a long time. In the end the decision is to operate the LHC at 3.5 TeV on 3.5 TeV (7 TeV collision energy, 3.5 times that of the Tevatron) and accumulate a substantial amount of physics-quality data: 1 inverse femtobarn, or stop by the end f 2011, whichever comes first. This corresponds to something like ten trillion proton-proton collisions, of which only a small fraction will yield events interesting enough to record for later analysis by the experiments, and of these, only a tiny fraction yielding data relevant for physics.

After a one to one-and-a-half year shutdown in 2012 to retrofit the rest of the machine and make other preparations, the LHC will attempt to double the energy, to 14 TeV in the center of mass, in 2013 and accumulate substantial physics data. My best guess is that if the Higgs boson is to be discovered, it will be at high energy with this large sample of 14 TeV data. We might be able to rule it out at 95% confidence in certain mass ranges if it’s not there, but we ought not be able to do that if it is, right? Patience, patience!

Nevertheless, there is no question that in a few weeks, when operated at 7 TeV collision energy, the LHC will become an awesome discovery machine. There are many new physics scenarios in which we will be able to see new phenomena with just a fraction of the full 1 fb^-1 sample. Will nature give up her secrets so readily though? She may not – we may spend this year and the next rediscovering the Standard Model, building up understanding of the detector, and sharpening our analysis tools in order to discover quite subtle effects. No matter what happens, this is the most exciting time in particle physics in decades.

I’m not the only person to find it endlessly amusing that Jürgen Habermas, octogenarian theorist of communicative rationality, has taken to Twitter. (The account seems to be legit, but it’s hard to be sure.) This is so over-determined that just last year Lauren Fisher gave a presentation entitled “If Habermas could Twitter.” Well, now we know.

He’s still trying to master the 140-character limit, though. Here’s his latest set of tweets:

Well, yeah. The internet is (in some sense) an egalitarian public sphere, but it raises the danger of fragmentation into self-reinforcing interest groups. Remains to be seen how it will all ultimately play out.

The Shorty Award nomination process ends tonight at midnight Pacific time (08:00 UT Saturday). If you have an existing Twitter account, please help my friend and quack-fighter Rachael Dunlop beat out that alt-med gufru^* Joe Mercola. You can vote for her here, and you can get some backstory in this earlier post.

This is just the nomination process, but it simply makes my heart sing to know that someone who represents actual science and a real defender of health gets the most votes. Thanks.

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“Gufru” = “guru” + “goof”. This time I checked and found no definition for this word, so I now claim it for my own personal use when referring to someone who claims to be a guru, but is in fact a goofball peddler of nonsense.

As if soccer, wars of incredible length, and the relative worth of wine vs. beer didn’t account for enough disagreements between Britain and France, add another spat to the pile: whether or not the G-spot really exists.

A few weeks ago, a team of scientists from King’s College London joined the ongoing scientific fray by publishing a new study on the much-debated female erogenous zone. It was the biggest to date, involving 1,800 women – all of whom were pairs of identical or non-identical twins. If the G-spot did exist, it said, then genetically identical twins would have been expected to both report having one. However, no such pattern emerged [The Telegraph]. As a result of the study, coauthor Tim Spector said, the study “shows fairly conclusively that the idea of a G-spot is subjective.”

It didn’t take long, however, for this news to reach the French, who aren’t about to start taking sex advice from across the channel. A group of gynecologists there convened their own conference in Paris to denounce this assault on female pleasure. Surgeon Pierre Foldes told a “G-Day” conference across La Manche: “The King’s College study shows a lack of respect for what women say. The conclusions were completely erroneous because they were based solely on genetic observations” [The Register].

The angry French gynecologists said they’d found the real problem with their British counterparts: that they’re British. The King’s College study, they said, had fallen victim to an Anglo-Saxon tendency to reduce the mysteries of sexuality to absolutes. This attempt to set clear parameters on something variable and ambiguous, they said, was characteristic of British scientific attitudes to sex [The Guardian].

Gynecologist Odile Buisson went even further in blaming national sex attitudes for supposedly leading the British researchers astray: “I don’t want to stigmatise at all but I think the Protestant, liberal, Anglo-Saxon character means you are very pragmatic. There has to be a cause for everything, a gene for everything,” she said, adding: “I think it’s totalitarian” [The Guardian]. She also told The Telegraph that the G-spot is real for upwards of 60 percent of women, and that saying anything else is “medical machismo.”

No word yet of the British team responding to this challenge to their study (and national pride).

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Image: flickr/ takomabibelot

Human parents can get into a huge lather about keeping their kids safe. So why should some species of frog be any different? Male Tungara frogs (Engystomops pustulous) will huff and puff and literally kick up a huge clump of foam that serves as a nest to shelter his mate’s eggs. The floating foam nests sound flimsy, but they’re actually incredibly durable–surviving the sun, high temperatures, infections, and parasites for four whole days until the eggs housed inside mature into tadpoles.

While scientists already knew of these foam nests, they didn’t know quite how the frogs made them. Now research (pdf) published in the Royal Society’s journal Biology Letters provides some answers. New footage filmed of an amorous pair of Tungara frogs foaming up a nest in the West Indies shows a carefully calibrated approach to nest-building that’s part yoga, part physics.

In the first stage of foam-making, the male hops onto the female’s back and begins to collect a foam-precursor fluid. Then he begins kicking his legs in short bursts, mixing air bubbles into the fluid just like an eggbeater does. In the next stage, he carefully pushes in eggs from the female underneath him into the center of the foam before eventually slowing down and stopping.

Scientists are hopeful that understanding the nest building process would help us create a similar “bio-foam” in the laboratory.

Study coauthor Malcolm Kennedy, an evolutionary biologist from University of Glasgow, told the BBC:

“This material is resistant to bacterial and microbial damage — and if you could make a spray can that could produce this, it could potentially be used on burn victims, for example, because it would prevent them from infection, but it doesn’t damage cells.”

Check out the eggbeater action for yourself:

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Image: Malcolm Kennedy

Today’s xkcd comic takes a somewhat different stance on the plight of Spirit than I did.

Still, it’s funny how we anthropomorphize objects, especially when they are vaguely human or animal looking. Especially if they’re cute. And Spirit is very cute.

Who’s a good rover? Hmmm? You are! You’re a good rover!

This is the third in a series of guest posts by Joel Barkan, a previous contributor to “The Intersection” and a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The renowned Scripps marine biologist Jeremy Jackson is teaching his famed “Marine Science, Economics, and Policy” course for what may be the last time this year (along with Jennifer Jacquet), and Joel will be reporting each week on the contents of the course.

Last week, I wrote about raising fish in our own backyards using aquaculture. Today, I’ll discuss fish that don’t come from farms, but instead make their way to our dinner plates from very far away: the high seas. The high seas, or international waters, are areas more than 200 miles offshore from any country and thus not regulated by any individual nation. The huge factory fishing fleets of rival nations compete on the high seas to out-fish the other boats, reenacting Garret Hardin’s famous “The Tragedy of the Commons” in the middle of the ocean.

This week, it was my turn, along with three other classmates, to present to the rest of the class about high seas fishing. We highlighted two different fishing methods: drift netting and bottom trawling. Drift nets pluck fish like tuna and swordfish from the top of the water column, while bottom trawls drag the seafloor for valuable halibut and orange roughy. Both methods are indiscriminate: you’re almost as likely to catch a common dolphin in a drift net as an albacore tuna, and bottom trawling is akin to plowing a whole forest just to harvest a few edible mushrooms. Both sound pretty bad, right? Consider this: high seas drift netting was banned in 1991 by a UN resolution, but several countries still bottom trawl within international waters to this day.

The moratorium on high seas drift net fishing succeeded because most countries agreed that the fishery’s immense bycatch was unsustainable. In class, we discussed what might need to happen to raise the necessary two-thirds majority for a similar UN resolution on destructive high seas bottom trawling. Striking images of charismatic animals like dolphins and albatrosses tangled in nets made drift netting an easy target for a moratorium. How can we raise awareness about a dark ecosystem no one sees and obscure species like deep-water coral that most people don’t care about?

A potential solution may be tied to that familiar influential source: money. Countries like Spain, Russia, Iceland, and a few others continue to bottom trawl on the high seas because they profit from it. Opposition from these nations has stymied efforts to ban deep sea trawling in international waters. Can we give these countries economic incentives to change their ways? Perhaps the deep sea trawlers would be willing to employ new gear types or limit their trawling to State waters if a wealthy country such as the U.S. or Australia subsidized their gear overhauls.

It’s obvious that conservation takes a backseat to political and economic influences when dealing with multilateral agreements. Let’s hope the superpowers can work something out before we turn our shared deep sea ecosystems into wastelands.

The hunt for fusion energy is one that has been plagued by false starts and overly-optimistic announcements. This week, however, researchers at the National Ignition Facility in California announced a major new step: firing all of its 192 lasers together for the first time, and channeling the beam into an area no bigger than a pencil eraser.

That tiny target is called the hohlraum. It’s a gold-plated cylinder intended to contain the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, which would fuse together during a potential fusion reaction. In this test, documented in the journal Science this week, the 192 lasers heated up the hohlraum to “only” about 6 million degrees Fahrenheit. But, team member Jeffrey Atherton says, the NIF is working its way up to the really powerful reactions. “The point is that we were doing it at a scale that’s about 20 times larger than has been done, with a laser power that accordingly is about 20 times higher than has been done, with a precision and efficiency that hasn’t been done before,” he said [MSNBC].

Particularly important is the fact that plasma in the hohlraum didn’t block the materials from absorbing energy from the lasers, one of the key problems some researchers had predicted for fusion projects. Instead, the cylinder was able to absorb 95 percent of the energy. Says Mike Dunne of the U.K.’s Central Laser Facility: “I can’t overstate how dramatic a step that is. Many people a year ago were saying the project would be dead by now” [BBC News] .

As the NIF’s name would imply, what the scientists are really after is the ignition of a true thermonuclear reaction. And Atherton, an eternal optimist, says they could start ignition tests this summer, now that the laser tests have proven successful. To achieve that thermonuclear reaction, the scientists will attempt to use the lasers’ immensely powerful beams to reach temperatures of more than 200 million degrees Fahrenheit and pressures millions of times greater than Earth’s atmosphere – conditions found only in the interior of the sun and stars [San Francisco Chronicle].

But, as with all fusion energy project, don’t expect too much too fast. The classic joke is that fusion is the “energy source of the future – and always will be” [MSNBC].

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: The Laser To End All Lasers

Image: National Ignition Facility, Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The interior of the target chamber.

[Update: I’m getting notes from people saying that the site linked below has some NSFW content on it. I didn’t see that when I posted this; the link itself is rated G and quite safe, but be warned if you click anywhere else.]

A while back I posted a link to a nifty interactive graphic that let’s you zoom down from human scales to that of the atom. In that post, I said I wish someone would make one that goes out to the size of the Universe, too.

My wish has been answered. NewGrounds is a Flash animation portal, and a user by the handle of Fotoshop has created a wondrous and lovely interactive tool to show you the relative sizes of things in the Universe, from the largest galaxies down to the quantum foam. I don’t know what else to say about it except This. Freaking. Rocks.

You can use the slider along the bottom to change the scale, and see where different objects fall. Unlike the famous “Powers of Ten” movie, you’re not touring the Universe or moving through space; this just shows how relatively big things are. It’s really very well done, and gives you a good sense of things. My favorite part is on the smallest end, when you have to go through several factors of ten with nothing happening to get to the Planck scale, the smallest scale in the Universe. It’s really quite a forbidding notion.

I even like the music (though I don’t recognize it; anyone know?). : )

Well done, Fotoshop!

Tip o’ the meter stick to Tocsin.

“OBJECTIVES: To perform a retrospective study to evaluate the circumstances, extent of trauma, and modalities of treatment for penile injuries caused by firearms in a large metropolitan area. The management of civilian injuries differs significantly from that of the military, and experience with penetrating trauma to the external male genitalia in civilian life has been minimally reported. METHODS: From 1989 to 2006, 58 patients with gunshot wounds of the penis were evaluated at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, Florida… … CONCLUSIONS: Gunshot wounds to the penis are rare and are commonly associated with injuries of other organs. In sharp contrast to military injuries, minimal tissue destruction is seen, and minimal debridement is needed. If corporal injuries are suspected, penile exploration is warranted.”

Photo: flickr/Willie Lunchmeat

Like any good author, one of my duties is taking to the airwaves to flog my book. A list of upcoming events can be found at Booktour.com, and of course you can always subscribe to the Facebook page or Twitter feed. But I wanted to highlight some stuff coming up over the next two weeks:

• Friday January 29, 12:30 p.m. Pacific: I’ll be appearing on NPR’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow. (That’s today/tomorrow, depending on when you’re reading this.) Listen online, or via your favorite public radio station.
• Saturday January 30, 2:00 p.m. Pacific: From Eternity to Here will be the subject of a Firedoglake Book Salon. I’ll be answering questions online, and our host will be none other than Chad Orzel, who has a book of his own you should check out.
• Saturday February 6, 10:00 a.m. Pacific: Crank up your avatars, I’m giving a talk in Second Life. (And if you don’t already have an avatar, it’s easy to get one. And you can shop for clothes!) Sponsored by MICA, it will be held at the large amphitheater on StellaNova.
• Saturday February 6, 5:00 p.m. Pacific: For everyone here in Los Angeles and environs, I’m doing a good old-fashioned book reading/signing at Skylight Books, an awesome independent bookstore in Los Feliz. 5:00 on Saturday night — what better way to kick off the evening’s festivities?

Hope to see you there, virtually or in person!

NASA is sending a radar-equipped jet to conduct flights over Haiti and the Dominican Republic to capture 3-D images that could help predict future earthquakes. An estimated 170,000 people were killed in the 7.0 earthquake that battered Haiti on January 12. Unfortunately, experts predict more quakes as the country is situated in a seismically volatile zone.

A Gulfstream III jet is now on its way to map Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the two nations that share the island of Hispaniola. The Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar, or UAVSAR, was originally on its way to Central America to study volcanoes, forests, and Mayan ruins, but on its way south it will now also study Hispaniola’s fault lines.

The principal investigator for the Hispaniola overflights, Paul Lundgren, said the aircraft will take images of the Earth’s surface and other changes associated with the Haiti earthquake. He said NASA will then analyze the 3-D results for features that could signal “aftershocks, earthquakes that might be triggered by the main earthquake farther down the fault line, and the potential for landslides” [Wired.com]. Lundgren expects the future earthquakes to be “either along adjacent sections of the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault that was responsible for the main earthquake, or on other faults in northern Hispaniola, such as the Septentrional fault”[Wired.com]. NASA has used this kind of radar-equipped jet in the past to examine California’s dangerous San Andreas fault.

UAVSAR flies at 41,000 feet and sends microwaves, from a pod located on the aircraft’s belly, down to the ground. It then records the returning signal. The differences in the times it takes waves to return from points on the ground to the plane gives information about the topography. By hitting the same target from different angles as the plane flies overhead, a 3-D image can be made. Very precise details about ground motion can be calculated by flying over the same area later, giving scientists information about strain buildup on a fault [Wired.com].

Haiti is located on a part of the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone–a fault that had been building up strain over the last 240 years. Scientists were expecting an earthquake in that region, but no one could predict exactly when and where. But about 100 miles to the northeast is a long segment of a similar fault, the Septentrional, that has not had a quake in 800 years. Researchers have estimated that a rupture along that segment — and again, they have no idea when one might occur — could result in a magnitude 7.5 quake that could cause severe damage in the Dominican Republic’s second-largest city, Santiago, and the surrounding Cibao Valley, together home to several million people [The New York Times] . The data collected by the UAVSAR is expected to help scientists study the potential for future earthquakes on this particular fault. The 3-D images are due to be released to the public in a few weeks.

Related Content:
80beats: Where in the World Will the Next Big Earthquake Strike?
80beats: Satellite Images Show the Extent of Haiti’s Devastation
80beats: Haiti Earthquake May Have Released 250 Years of Seismic Stress
80beats: Science Via Twitter: Post-Earthquake Tweets Can Provide Seismic Data
80beats: A Major Quake Could Release Plutonium from Los Alamos Lab
The Intersection: Ways to Support the Relief Effort in Haiti

Image: NASA/JPL