Category: Science

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rePost :: Solar salamanders have algae in their cells | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine

Damn this actually tingled my spine, I need a symbiote, hehe.
 

In 1888, a biologist called Henry Orr was collecting spotted salamander eggs from a small, swampy pool when he noticed that some of them were green. He wrote, “The internal membrane of each egg was coloured a uniform light green by the presence in the membrane of a large number of minute globular green Algae.” Orr decided that the eggs “present a remarkable case of symbiosis.” The salamanders and the algae co-existed in a mutually beneficial relationship.
Orr was right that the two species have formed a partnership, but he was wrong in one crucial regard. He thought that the algae (Oophila amblystomatis) simply hung around next to the salamander embryos in the same egg. They don’t. More than 120 years later, Ryan Kerney from Dalhousie University has found that the algae actually invade the cells of the growing embryo, becoming part of its body.
With algae inside them, the salamanders become solar-powered animals, capable of directly harnessing the energy of the sun in the style of plants.
The spotted salamander isn’t the only animal to form partnerships with algae. The emerald green sea slug steals the genes and photosynthetic factories from a type of algae that it eats. Coral reefs are built upon a partnership between corals – a type of animal – and algae that provide them with energy. Many other animals, from sponges to worms have developed similar alliances. But the spotted salamander is the only back-boned animal (vertebrate) to have done so.
Since Orr’s discovery, several scientists have teased apart the details of this relationship. With algae in their eggs, the salamanders are more likely to hatch, they do so earlier, and they’re bigger and more developed when they emerge. All of this depends on light – the algae need it to photosynthesise and provide nutrients and oxygen to the embryos. If the eggs are kept in darkness, they never accumulate algae. In return for their services, the algae feast upon the salmanaders’ waste; if they are presented with eggs that have no embryos inside them, they hardly grow.
via Solar salamanders have algae in their cells | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine.

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rePost::Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium – Telegraph

We could then stop arguing about wind mills, deepwater drilling, IPCC hockey sticks, or strategic reliance on the Kremlin. History will move on fast.
Muddling on with the status quo is not a grown-up policy. The International Energy Agency says the world must invest $26 trillion (£16.7 trillion) over the next 20 years to avert an energy shock. The scramble for scarce fuel is already leading to friction between China, India, and the West.
There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power.
Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday – produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.
Thorium burns the plutonium residue left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. “It’s the Big One,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.
“Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels,” he said.
Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.
via Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium – Telegraph.

Is the science of this sound? WTF.

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Science :: 100-year floods – Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

I wonder what type of flood the floods Ondoy brought were? I’m guessing probably a toss up between 50 and 100 year floods.

100-year floods
By Andrew Gelman on March 25, 2011 9:37 AM | 5 Comments
According to the National Weather Service:
What is a 100 year flood? A 100 year flood is an event that statistically has a 1% chance of occurring in any given year. A 500 year flood has a .2% chance of occurring and a 1000 year flood has a .1% chance of occurring.
The accompanying map shows a part of Tennessee that in May 2010 had 1000-year levels of flooding.
At first, it seems hard to believe that a 1000-year flood would have just happened to occur last year. But then, this is just a 1000-year flood for that particular place. I don’t really have a sense of the statistics of these events. How many 100-year, 500-year, and 1000-year flood events have been recorded by the Weather Service, and when have they occurred?
via 100-year floods – Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

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How energy alternatives can make us safer and healthier « Science in the Triangle

James Bartis, a senior policy researcher with the RAND Corp., a global policy think tank with an office in the Middle East emirate of Qatar, was one of the speakers at the conference. In testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources two years ago, Bartis urged that there was “a compelling need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” and a need for research on technologies that would allow us to use less oil, coal and natural gas, the three fossil fuels linked to almost 90 percent of the emissions.
At the NCSU conference, where he participated on a panel of alternative energy experts, Bartis was asked why lawmakers aren’t heeding his advice more. “There’s a lot of money to be had [with fossil fuels] and there’s a lot of inertia,” he responded.
About 83 percent of the U.S. economy runs on fossil fuels and Alan Hegburg, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the conference’s keynote speaker, didn’t expect much will change the next 10 years.
Coal is plentiful and cheap – no country has more coal reserves than the U.S. Crude oil is also still plentiful and cheap to extract – in the Middle East, which has more than half of the world’s oil reserves.
Fossil fuels pack a lot of energy. Their production is efficient. The delivery infrastructure is finetuned. And markets are well developed. In contrast, energy alternatives cost more and are less energy-dense. And functioning delivery systems to drive demand are rudimentary at best where they exist.
“Getting this train to change tracks will take a huge effort,” Hegburg said.
Then why try? Speakers at the conference offered as the main reason the hidden costs of fossil fuels.
Generating electricity from coal and burning oil for transportation is a dirty business. In 2005, pollution caused an estimated $120 billion in damages to human health, crops, timber yields, buildings and recreation nationwide, according to a report the National Research Council published 18 months ago.
Another study published a few weeks ago in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences estimated that extracting, transporting, processing and combusting coal caused $345 billion in damages to the health and the environment in 2005.
Factor in the hidden costs and electricity would be at least twice as expensive, according to the study. Do the same with oil and gasoline prices would be at least $1.50 per gallon higher, Bartis said.
Suddenly, wind and solar energy and investments to boost energy efficiency and conservation become competitive. Calls from research hubs for more funding to make cleaner energy alternatives cheaper and more efficient begin to make sense.
via How energy alternatives can make us safer and healthier « Science in the Triangle.

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rePost::Goodbye academia, I get a life. – blog.devicerandom

It has been long and painful to discover that it was just an illusion. When I found that academia was not working for me, I got immediately depressed -my whole worldview was crumbling. Then I remembered that I had a life. I liked my life. I had a billion things that I loved to do. I want to do them again. Quitting and reclaiming back your life is not failing. It is waking up and winning.
A week ago I was with friends, talking about my job, and I found myself comparing science to a drug addiction. Being a scientist, from the brain chemicals point of view, is one week of adrenaline rush when you’re finally on to something and pieces go together -followed by six months (if you are lucky) of pain and suffering, only to get again that adrenaline shot.
Well, noble addiction as it is, it is toxic the same. The next month I’ll be 30. It’s really time to get my life back.
via Goodbye academia, I get a life. – blog.devicerandom.

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rePost::Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic | The Economist

Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year’s new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else. They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that.
via Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic | The Economist.

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rePost:: NASA scientist finds evidence of alien life – Yahoo! News

Aliens exist, and we have proof.

That astonishingly awesome claim comes from Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, who says he has found conclusive evidence of alien life — fossils of bacteria found in an extremely rare class of meteorite called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites. (There are only nine such meteorites on planet Earth.) Hoover’s findings were published late Friday night in the Journal of Cosmology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

“I interpret it as indicating that life is more broadly distributed than restricted strictly to the planet earth,” Hoover, who has spent more than 10 years studying meteorites around the world, told FoxNews.com in an interview. “This field of study has just barely been touched — because quite frankly, a great many scientist would say that this is impossible.”

Hoover discovered the fossils by breaking apart the CI1 meteorite, and analyzing the exposed rock with a scanning-electron microscope and a field emission electron-scanning microscope, which allowed him to detect any fossil remains. What he found were fossils of micro-organisms, many of which he says are strikingly similar to those found on our own planet.

via NASA scientist finds evidence of alien life – Yahoo! News.

SOME COMMENTS ON PAPER from SCIENCEBLOGS here.

Reading the text, my impression is one of excessive padding. It’s a dump of miscellaneous facts about carbonaceous chondrites, not well-honed arguments edited to promote concision or cogency. The figures are annoying; when you skim through them, several will jump out at you as very provocative and looking an awful lot like real bacteria, but then without exception they all turn out to be photos of terrestrial organisms thrown in for reference. The extraterrestrial ‘bacteria’ all look like random mineral squiggles and bumps on a field full of random squiggles and bumps, and apparently, the authors thought some particular squiggle looked sort of like some photo of a bug. This isn’t science, it’s pareidolia. They might as well be analyzing Martian satellite photos for pictures that sorta kinda look like artifacts.

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rePost:: ::On Competitive Collaboration § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

A deeper understanding of the universe, new technologies, and a role model for managing broadly distributed and culturally varied organizations: These are outcomes of basic science that are valuable to society. And it’s reasonable to expect the scientific community to deliver them in the short term. The most valuable in terms of sustained improvement of the world is the one closest to my heart—understanding the universe and in the process laying down a new seam of fundamental scientific knowledge for future generations to mine. Human ingenuity being what it is, the future will undoubtedly bring applications based on discoveries made with the LHC. Although, as with Newton’s gravity, it may be some time before we’re privy to all of them, and to their implications. For our children and grandchildren, however, I am sure that the wait will have been worthwhile.
via On Competitive Collaboration § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM.

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rePost :: Op-Ed Columnist – New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer – NYTimes.com

I know only smart people read this blog but I think I have to give the context or subtext of this article. I am assuming that  Kristoff highlighted that the two doctors in the 3 doctor panels were both appointees of former president bush to inform the readers of how grave these results/reviews appear to be. The Bush appointees have had a long reputation proven time and time again of an ideological problem with regulation and in general government intervention of any kind. To declare make a report like this is akin to a climate change skeptic (the rational evidence based ones) warning against climate change. Now my problem with this is what the fuck do I drink when I travel?  damn.

Traditionally, we reduce cancer risks through regular doctor visits, self-examinations and screenings such as mammograms. The President’s Cancer Panel suggests other eye-opening steps as well, such as giving preference to organic food, checking radon levels in the home and microwaving food in glass containers rather than plastic.
In particular, the report warns about exposures to chemicals during pregnancy, when risk of damage seems to be greatest. Noting that 300 contaminants have been detected in umbilical cord blood of newborn babies, the study warns that: “to a disturbing extent, babies are born ‘pre-polluted.’ ”
It’s striking that this report emerges not from the fringe but from the mission control of mainstream scientific and medical thinking, the President’s Cancer Panel. Established in 1971, this is a group of three distinguished experts who review America’s cancer program and report directly to the president.
One of the seats is now vacant, but the panel members who joined in this report are Dr. LaSalle Leffall Jr., an oncologist and professor of surgery at Howard University, and Dr. Margaret Kripke, an immunologist at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Both were originally appointed to the panel by former President George W. Bush.
“We wanted to let people know that we’re concerned, and that they should be concerned,” Professor Leffall told me.
The report blames weak laws, lax enforcement and fragmented authority, as well as the existing regulatory presumption that chemicals are safe unless strong evidence emerges to the contrary.
“Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety,” the report says. It adds: “Many known or suspected carcinogens are completely unregulated.”
via Op-Ed Columnist – New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer – NYTimes.com.