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Saturn Watch
Yet more science from Saturn and its many moons. This time, it's Tethys, which may have had a liquid ocean once.

Tethys is a mid-sized satellite with a density close to that of pure ice.

But a large valley system visible today must have formed when the crust was being heated and under great strain.

The team thinks that tidal heating, followed by cooling which froze Tethys' ocean, could have formed the giant Ithaca Chasma rift.

Basically, I guess Tethys is a big snowball now, but once, it was a snowball with a yummy liquid center.

Source: The BBC

Our Own Giant Chasm
Also known as the Grand Canyon, is under threat from mining interests.

Flagstaff, Arizona - One of the great natural wonders of the world - the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River - is threatened by uranium exploration. Three conservation groups filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging the approval of up to 39 new uranium drilling sites within a few miles of Grand Canyon National Park.

In December, the Kaibab National Forest granted British firm Vane Minerals approval to conduct exploratory uranium drilling on national forest lands along the park's southern boundary with no public hearing and no environmental review. It is the first of five such projects slated for the area.

"Grand Canyon simply isn't the place for uranium development," said Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the plaintiff groups. "Our national treasures deserve better than the calamity of an adjacent industrial zone."

Filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club, and Grand Canyon Trust, the lawsuit claims that the U.S. Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act and two other laws when it approved the uranium exploration using a "categorical exclusion," the least rigorous analysis available to the agency.

The lawsuit claims that the Forest Service failed to consider the controversy surrounding uranium development, the significance of its proximity to the Grand Canyon, the overall cumulative impacts of four other future uranium exploration projects and the potential opening of Denison Corporation's Canyon Mine - all located in the same area.

Seriously folks. We only have one Grand Canyon. Can't you guys mine somewhere else?

Jerks.

Source: Truthout

Speaking of Nukes...
We seem to have a bit of a corporate betrayal of national security on our hands.

A US company and the Indian head of an international firm have admitted to violating laws on export of weapons technology and nuclear power testing equipment to India, the US Justice Department said Thursday.

Decade-long US sanctions over illegal Indian nuclear tests prohibit US-based companies from exporting certain goods and services to India.

Parthasarathy Sudarshan, the Indian CEO of Cirrus Electronics with offices in the United States, Singapore and India, pleaded guilty in Washington Thursday to a charge of shipping restricted weapons technology to the Indian government.

He admitted exporting controlled microprocessors and electronic components to Indian state entities involved in developing ballistic missiles, space launch vehicles and fighter jets.

...

In the second case, Minnesota company MTS Systems Corp. was fined 400,000 dollars after it pleaded guilty Wednesday in connection with submitting false US export license applications over proposed shipments to India, the Justice Department said.

The company admitted to two misdemeanor counts of "false certification or writing" by omitting critical information linked to test equipment for nuclear-power plants.

"In this case, the omission clearly was an attempt to disguise the end-use of testing structural components of nuclear-power plants," said Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Enforcement Darryl Jackson.

The CEO in the first case faces probation and a fine; the second company gets just a fine.

Amazing how seriously the Bush administration takes this issue, isn't it?

Source: Raw Story

Back to Space
ABC has some trivia about life in space and how, err, disgusting it really is.

Laundry: Astronauts never worry about doing laundry -- there is simply no way to wash clothes in space; water and resources are too scarce. So for 12 days, or however long the mission runs, they wear the same clothes over and over. Their T-shirts, socks and underwear have a special silver thread lining that absorbs odor and keeps items wearable longer. NASA recycles the astronauts' clothes for other missions, including the underwear.

There's other stuff too, seriously. Not just underwear triva.

Source: ABC News

Beery Science
So a Czech scientist crunched the numbers and it seems that the more beer you drink the less successful a scientist you are.

What is it that turns one scientist into more of a Darwin and another into more of a dud?

After years of argument over the roles of factors like genius, sex and dumb luck, a new study shows that something entirely unexpected and considerably sudsier may be at play in determining the success or failure of scientists — beer.

According to the study, published in February in Oikos, a highly respected scientific journal, the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper’s quality and importance.

The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to stumble back to the lab. Publication did not simply drop off among the heaviest drinkers. Instead, scientific performance steadily declined with increasing beer consumption across the board, from scientists who primly sip at two or three beers over a year to the sort who average knocking back more than two a day.

This is a tragic discovery indeed. Though there is an alternative explanation.

More important, as Dr. Grim pointed out, the study documents a correlation between beer drinking and scientific performance without explaining any correlation. That leaves open the possibility that it is not beer drinking that causes poor scientific performance, but just the opposite.

Or, as Dr. Mike Webster, an ornithologist and a beer enthusiast at Washington State University in Pullman, said, maybe “those with poor publication records are drowning their sorrows.”

Take that, lousy, depressed scientists.

Source: The New York Times

Virtual H2O
No, it's not in a videogame.

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A scientist who developed a way to calculate how much water is used in the production of anything from a cup of coffee to a hamburger was awarded the 2008 Stockholm Water Prize on Wednesday.


Professor John Anthony Allan of the University of London in Britain won the award for introducing the concept of "virtual water," a calculation method that has changed the nature of trade policy and research.

...

"Behind that morning cup of coffee, there are 140 liters of water that was consumed to grow, produce, package and ship the beans."

That is about as much water as a person in England uses on average for all daily drinking and household needs.

"For a single hamburger, an estimated 2,400 liters of water are needed. In the USA, the average person consumes nearly 7,000 liters of virtual water every day." It said that was more than three times the average consumption of a Chinese person.

It makes me thirsty just to read that.

Source: Raw Story

Plasma Cooling
You can cool stuff with superheated plasma. Huh.

Boffins in the US have developed a microchip fan with no moving parts that operates silently and generates enough wind to cool a laptop computer..

The solid-state fan, developed with support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), is touted as the most powerful and energy efficient fan of its size.

The device produces three times the flow rate of a typical small mechanical fan and is one-fourth the size.

RSD5 is the culmination of six years of research by Dan Schlitz and Vishal Singhal of Thorrn Micro Technologies when they were NSF-supported graduate students at Purdue University.

...

He explained that RSD5 incorporates a series of live wires that generate a micro-scale plasma (an ion-rich gas that has free electrons that conduct electricity).

The wires lie within uncharged conducting plates that are contoured into half-cylindrical shapes to partially envelop the wires.

Within the intense electric field that results, ions push neutral air molecules from the wire to the plate, generating a wind. The phenomenon is called corona wind.

Even more surprising, something useful came out of Purdue.

Hehe.

Source: iTnews Australia

Project West Ford
From Tom Morris, mad scientist, came a link or two about a mad science project from the early space age.

Project West Ford (also known as Westford Needles and Project Needles) was a test carried out by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory on behalf of the United States military in 1961 and 1963 to create a ring of copper dipole antennas (2cm long needles) in orbit which would allow global radio communication. After a failed first attempt in 1961 (the needles failed to disperse), the project was eventually successful with the 1963 launch, with radio transmissions carried by the man-made ring. However, the technology was ultimately shelved, partially due to the development of the modern communications satellite and partially due to protests from other scientists.[1] The needles were placed in orbits between 3500 and 3800 km high at 96 and 87 degree inclinations and contributed to Earth's orbital debris.[2] British radio astronomers, together with optical astronomers and the Royal Astronomical Society, protested this action.[3][4] The international protest resulted in a consultation provision included in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.[3] As of 2006 several clumps of the needles are still in orbit,[5][6] and occasionally re-entering.[7]

Yeah, throw a huge number of needles into orbit. That couldn't possibly cause a problem.

The project itself was a virtually unqualified success. Though the first launch ended in failure, the second launch went without a hitch on May 10th, 1963. Inside the West Ford spacecraft, the needles were packed densely together in blocks made of a napthalene gel that would rapidly evaporate in space. This entire package of needles weighed only 20 kg. After being released, the hundreds of millions of copper needles gradually spread throughout their entire orbit over a period of two months. The final donut-shaped cloud was 15 km wide and 30 km thick and encircled the globe at an altitude of 3700 km.

...

Because of the great distance between the tiny needles, the West Ford belt was visible only in the first few days after launch when the spacing was much smaller. A denser belt intended for permanent communications would probably not have been visible except by very powerful optical telescopes. But, at radio and microwave frequencies, the final dipole clouds may have become scars on the night sky, forever obscuring the universe beyond.


...

Most of the West Ford dipoles re-entered Earth's atmosphere sometime around 1970, according to theoretical and observational evidence. The needles slowly drifted down to the Earth's surface, unscathed by re-entry because of their size. Some consideration was given to recovering one or more of the dipoles in order to learn more about the space environment. Calculations showed that as many as five dipoles would have landed per square kilometer in the high Arctic. But the exceptional cost of recovering these tiny needles from the haystack of billions of tons of Arctic snow killed off any practical attempts at recovery. Back in space, the failed 1971 1961 spacecraft and some larger clumps of the 1973 1963 dipoles remain in orbit like so many other pieces of space junk, silently carrying the long-dead hopes of this nearly forgotten experiment.

It's truly amazing the stupid things people can come up with. A ring of trash around the earth? Yeah, let's do that!

Source: Wikipedia
Damn Interesting

Evil of the Morning
Some truly evil people are working on a way to use blue LEDs to generate a color of light that resets your biological clock to think it's morning, and then put them inside cars.

The idea is to make people less sleepy while driving.

Those of us who are naturally sleepy in the morning, or who just don't want bright blue light in their eyes, are boned, I guess.

Source: Slashdot

More Water News
Good thing that guy came up with virtual water, so we can find out just how doomed we are.

By 2025, fully a third of the planet's growing population could find itself scavenging for safe drinking water, the United Nations has warned ahead of World Water Day on Saturday.

More than two million people in developing countries -- the vast majority children -- die every year from diseases associated with unsanitary water.

There are a number of interlocking causes for this scourge.

Global economic growth, population pressures and the rise of mega-cities have all driven water use to record levels.

Mexico City, Jakarta and Bangkok, to name a few, have underground water sources -- some of them nonrenewable -- depleting at alarming rates.

...

"In the coming decades, water scarcity may be a watchword that prompts action ranging from wholesale population migration to war, unless new ways to supply clean water are found," comment a team of researchers in a review of water purification technology published Thursday in the British journal Nature.

But even as scientists and governments look for ways to satisfy a thirsty world, another threat looms on the horizon: global warming.

Rising sea levels are already forcing salt water into aquifers beneath megadeltas that are home to tens of millions, and changing weather patterns are set to intensify droughts in large swathes of Africa, southern Europe and Asia, according to UN's Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC).

...

Experts and policy makers point to three broad categories of initiatives to ease the shortage of clean, drinkable water, especially in the world's poorest regions: sanitation, purification, and water management.

"Poor sanitation combines with a lack of safe drinking water and inadequate hygiene to contribute to the terrible global death toll," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said earlier this month.

"Every 20 seconds, a child dies as a result of the abysmal sanitation conditions endured by some 2.6 billion people globally," he said in launching the International Year of Sanitation.

Less than half the households in major Asian cities are connected to sewers, which means that tonnes of raw sewage runs into rivers and oceans, according to the UN.

In Latin America and Africa that figure drops to 40 and 20 percent, respectively.

While governments attempt to improve sanitation infrastructure, scientists are developing new technology to purify the water available, said Mark Shannon, a professor at the University of Illinois and Director of the US government funded Center of Advanced Materials for the Purification of Water with Systems.

"Desalination with reverse osmosis is already the largest single growth area in terms of new water supplies," he told AFP in an interview.

New techniques of reverse osmosis use membranes with nanometer-size pores to filter out salt and other contaminants from water, and could for the first time pave the way for industrial-scale use.

Micro-filters are also used to decontaminate bodies of water increasingly laced with pesticides, arsenic, heavy metals, nitrates and pharmaceutical derivatives.

...

With worldwide food production set to expand 50 percent by 2030, scientists are also developing genetically modified grain plants that consume less water and can withstand harsh conditions.

Researchers in the US, for example, have developed genetically engineered rice with a higher tolerance for drought, salt and low temperatures, the three main causes of crop failure.

Expect a lot of resistance to the GM crop ideas from whackos, naturally. Though drought resistance is one of the things you have to be careful of in GM plants, to be fair. It provides a serious evolutionary advantage over plants that don't have it, so if you have a GM crop that can interbreed with a wild relative, you might end up with drought resistant superweeds via transgene escape.

The most obvious solution to that is to avoid planting GM crops near their wild relatives, of course.

Most food plants are not that great as evolutionary products, spending so much energy producing huge, and often sterile or semi-sterile fruits, so there's less risk of wild GM foods themselves running amok by far.

Source: Raw Story

Methane AND Water News
This time from far away.

An organic chemical that could be an indicator of extraterrestrial life has been identified on a distant planet.

Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope have shown that the atmosphere of a planet called HD 189733b contains methane, which can be a precursor of life or generated by living organisms.

HD 189733b is too hot to be anything but barren, and its methane must therefore come from a nonliving source, but the successful identification of the “marker” chemical gives scientists confidence that they may make similar discoveries on planets that are capable of supporting life.

...

The Hubble observations of HD 189733b have also confirmed that the planet, which lies 63 light years from Earth in the constellation Vulpecula (“the little fox”), has water vapour in its atmosphere.

The chemical signature of water was first picked up last year by the same team, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, which observes in the infra-red spectrum. “With this latest observation there is no question whether there is water or not,” Dr Swain said. “Water is present.”

Ahh, science. Lovely.

Source: The Times Online