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The Inside Story on Climate Scientists Under Siege

By Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian and James West, Climate Desk Email Author February 17, 2012 | 3:05 pm | Categories: Environment | Edit

[ http://www.youtube.com/embed/ztKFTxC6kVI?rel=0 ]

It is almost possible to dismiss Michael Mann’s account of a vast conspiracy by the fossil fuel industry to harrass scientists and befuddle the public. His story of that campaign, and his own journey from naive computer geek to battle-hardened climate ninja, seems overwrought, maybe even paranoid.

But now comes the unauthorized release of documents showing how a libertarian thinktank, the Heartland Institute, which has in the past been supported by Exxon, spent millions on lavish conferences attacking scientists and concocting projects to counter science teaching for kindergarteners.

Mann’s story of what he calls the climate wars, the fight by powerful entrenched interests to undermine and twist the science meant to guide government policy, starts to seem pretty much on the money. He’s telling it in a book out on March 6, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines.

“They see scientists like me who are trying to communicate the potential dangers of continued fossil fuel burning to the public as a threat. That means we are subject to attacks, some of them quite personal, some of them dishonest.” Mann said in an interview conducted in and around State College, home of Pennsylvania State University, where he is a professor.

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Tags: Climate, climate change, Climate Desk, hockey stick, michael mann

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Crab Nebula’s Pulsar May Be Fast Particle Accelerator

By Ars Technica Email Author February 17, 2012 | 1:54 pm | Categories: Physics, Space | Edit

The pulsar at the heart of the Crab nebula. Image: NASA/HST/CXC/ASU/J. Hester et al. (high-resolution)

By Matthew Francis, Ars Technica

The Crab Nebula (also designated M1 or NGC 1952) is visible through small telescopes, which has allowedÂ astronomers to observe its growth and evolutionÂ since the supernovae that created it became visible in 1054 CE. A pulsar was found in the center of the Crab in 1968. This rapidly rotating neutron star is the core of the star that went supernova to make the nebula. In the intervening decades, x-ray, gamma ray, and radio observations have mapped the region of the nebula closest to the pulsar. During that mapping, it became apparent that the Crab pulsar is one of the brightest sources of gamma rays observable from Earth.

Despite all of those observations, we still don’t fully understand the Crab’s precise gamma ray spectrum, particularly recently observed pulses of intense gamma radiation seen by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Existing models certainly do well at describing much of the complex interplay between the intense magnetic fields of the pulsar and the winds of charged particles flowing outward. But no single scheme seems sufficient to cover all the observed phenomena.

A potentially promising new model, proposed by F. A. Aharonian, S. V. Bogovalov, and D. Khangulyan, may fill in some of these blanks. It proposes that areas near the pulsar are acting as rapid particle accelerators, but don’t boost electrons and heavier particles to the same extent.

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Tags: Ars Technica, astrophysics, Crab Nebula, gamma rays, neutron star, particle accelerators, pulsar

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Ancient Galaxy Collision Created Enormous Stellar Swirls

By Adam Mann Email Author February 17, 2012 | 6:30 am | Categories: Space | Edit

NGC 5907. Image: R. Jay GaBany/Wikimedia

New simulations suggest that enormous swirls of stars surrounding a distant galaxy formed when two equal-sized galaxies collided.

The galaxy, named NGC 5907, is located 50 million light-years away in the constellation Draco. Its loops and currents, containing stars, gas and dust, are 150,000 light-years across.

Researchers studying these swirls previously thought they were formed when a relatively small galaxy hit a larger one, getting torn apart in the process.

But in the new study, a massive computer simulation shows that it would have been impossible for a very small galaxy to produce the observed streams. More likely, two roughly equal-sized galaxies crashed into each other 8 or 9 billion years ago. The simulation also showed that the galaxies must have been very gas-rich in order to produce the swirls surrounding NGC 5907.

Most large spiral galaxies are thought to have formed from similar processes. Over the history of the universe, smaller galaxies have collided with one another and merged, producing ever-larger galaxies. Our own Milky Way galaxy is headed on a crash course with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy in 4.5 billion years.

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Tags: galaxy merger, NGC 5907, spiral galaxy

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Video: Behind the Scenes at Giant Keck Telescopes

By Adam Mann Email Author February 16, 2012 | 4:30 pm | Categories: Space | Edit

Amazing space photos don’t just happen. A lot of work goes into making them. This new video offers a behind-the-scenes look at how one facility, the W. M. Keck Observatory, produces its superb images.

The Keck observatory is comprised of two telescopes, each with a 33-foot mirror. The telescopes, which sit at the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, move together and their combined images exceed the individual resolution of each.

Engineer and amateur astronomer Andrew Cooper created the video using two different techniques. Some scenes, such as those showing the telescope moving, were shot with standard video and then sped up in editing. Others, like those featuring clouds and the night sky, are made from thousands of separate photographs stitched together to create time-lapsed video.

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Tags: Astronomy, Keck telescope, Mauna Kea, time lapse

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Eagle Cam Returns: New Chicks Coming Soon

By Daniela Hernandez Email Author February 16, 2012 | 2:30 pm | Categories: Animals, Tech | Edit

[ http://www.ustream.tv/embed/3064708 ]

The Decorah Bald Eagle Cam, last year’s runaway internet sensation, is back. Go do whatever you need to for the next few months right now. You might not get much done once the eaglets hatch.

Last year, more than 200,000 people from about 180 countries watched eagle parents hatch three eggs, brave bad weather, raise their chicks and teach them to fly in Decorah, Iowa. The eagle cam, Wired Science’s most popular post of 2011, created our very own online community of eaglophiles. So many people tuned in, the traffic crashed our website more than once. But this year, we’re ready!

And now, the eagles are back. The mom’s about to lay her eggs any day now.

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Tags: birds, decorah eagles, webcams

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Nanosecond Trading Could Make Markets Go Haywire

By Brandon Keim Email Author February 16, 2012 | 6:30 am | Categories: Tech | Edit

The afternoon of May 6, 2010 was among the strangest in economic history. Starting at 2:42 p.m. EDT, the Dow Jones stock index fell 600 points in just 6 minutes. Its nadir represented the deepest single-day decline in that market’s 114-year history. By 3:07 p.m., the index had rebounded. The “flash crash,” as it came to be known, was big, unexpected and scary — and a new study says flash events actually happen routinely, at speeds so fast they don’t register on regular market records, with potentially troubling consequences for market stability.

The analysis involved five years of stock market trading data gathered between 2006 and 2011 and sorted in fine-grained, millisecond-by-millisecond detail. Below the 950-millisecond level, where computerized trading occurs so quickly that human traders can’t even react, no fewer than 18,520 crashes and spikes occurred. The study’s authors call those events “financial black swans,” though they’re so common that the black swan label probably doesn’t fit anymore.

Moreover, those events fell into patterns that didn’t fit market patterns seen at other time scales. It’s as if computerized trading has created a new world, one where the usual rules don’t apply, populated by algorithms and only dimly understood by the people who made them. The extent to which that world influences our own — perhaps making events like the 2010 flash crash more likely, or causing markets to be generally more volatile — is an open question.

“There’s this whole world below 650 milliseconds. It’s like landing on another planet,” said Neil Johnson, a complex systems specialist at the University of Miami and co-author of the study, released Feb. 7 on arXiv. “It’s an enormous part of the market which is out of human reach. We have a glimpse of the kind of ecology that’s going on down there.”

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Tags: Complexity, economics

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Odd Black Hole Is Last Survivor of Its Galaxy

By Adam Mann Email Author February 15, 2012 | 2:01 pm | Categories: Space | Edit

Image: NASA, ESA and S. Farrell (University of Sydney, Australia, and University of Leicester, U.K.)

The Hubble space telescope has spotted a supermassive black hole floating on the outskirts of a large galaxy.

The location is odd because black holes of this size generally form in the centers of galaxies, not at their edges. This suggests the black hole is the lone survivor of a now-disintegrated dwarf galaxy.

The black hole — named HLX-1 — is 20,000 times more massive than the sun, and is situated 290 million light-years away at the edge of the spiral galaxy ESO 243-49.

Hubble detected a great deal of energetic blue light coming from the black hole’s accretion disk — a massive collection of gas and dust that spirals into the black hole’s maw, generating x-rays. But scientists studying Hubble’s data also noticed the presence of cooler, red light, which shouldn’t have been there.

Astronomers suspect the red light indicates the existence of a cluster of young stars, roughly 200 million years old, orbiting around the black hole. These stars, in turn, are the key to explaining the chaotic history of the supermassive black hole.

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Tags: dwarf galaxy, ESO 243-49, HLX-1, Hubble telescope, supermassive black hole

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World’s Tiniest Chameleons Found in Madagascar

By Adam Mann Email Author February 14, 2012 | 8:14 pm | Categories: Animals, Biology | Edit

Researchers have recently discovered four new chameleon species, which rank among the world’s tiniest reptiles. Adults of the smallest species are just over an inch from snout to tail.

The four new species belong to the genus Brookesia, also known as the leaf chameleons, which live in remote rainforests in northern Madagascar. The genus is already known to contain some very small species, with members typically resembling juvenile versions of larger species.

As small as these guys are, a super-tiny dwarf gecko found in the British Virgin Islands might be just a tad more wee.

Since the chameleons all look extremely similar, researchers used genetic analysis to determine that they belonged to separate species. The findings appear Feb. 14 in PLoS ONE.

Brookesia species tend to live within a very small range. Half the members of this genus are found in only a single location and the smallest of the newly found species — Brookesia micra — lives only on a small island called Nosy Hara. Extreme miniaturization of this sort is common in island populations. Known as island dwarfism, it may occur due to limited resources and pressure to reproduce faster.

“The extreme miniaturization of these dwarf reptiles might be accompanied by numerous specializations of the body plan, and this constitutes a promising field for future research,” said herpetologist Frank Glaw, lead author of the study, in a press release. “But most urgent is to focus conservation efforts on these and other microendemic species in Madagascar which are heavily threatened by deforestation.”

Images: Glaw, F., et al., PLoS ONE

Citation: “Rivaling the Worldâ€™s Smallest Reptiles: Discovery of Miniaturized and Microendemic New Species of Leaf Chameleons (Brookesia) from Northern Madagascar.” Frank Glaw, Jorn Kohler, Ted M. Townsend, Miguel Vences, PLoS ONE, Vol 7, Issue 2, http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0031314

Tags: Brookesia, chameleon, island dwarfism, reptiles

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New Quantum Record: Physicists Entangle 8 Photons

By Ars Technica Email Author February 14, 2012 | 3:43 pm | Categories: Physics | Edit

By Matthew Francis, Ars Technica

One of the most mind-blowing areas of quantum mechanics is entanglement: two or more particles separated in space can have physical properties that are correlated. A measurement performed on one particle will tell us the result of the same measurement taken on an entangled particle. Entanglement is important but difficult to study, both in terms of a theoretical understanding and doing experiments. While entangling relatively small groups of particles has been accomplished several times over the last 30 years (pioneered by Aspect et al. in 1982), scaling these experiments up in sizes sufficient to create quantum computers and other complex systems has eluded researchers.

A significant step forward has been accomplished by entangling eight photons (previously six had been the largest number). Researchers from Shanghai’s University of Science and Technology of China created a system where eight photons were equally likely to be polarized in a specific orientation, something known colloquially as a “SchrÃ¶dinger cat” state. In a paper published in Nature Photonics, authors Xing-Can Yao et al. describe a new technique that uses ultra-bright photon sources to control for some of the problems that plagued earlier entanglement experiments.

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Tags: Ars Technica, photons, quantum computing, quantum entanglement, quantum physics, schrodinger's cat

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Plants Use Body Clocks to Prepare for Battle

By Wired UK Email Author February 14, 2012 | 10:30 am | Categories: Animals, Biology | Edit

By Olivia Solon, Wired UK

Biologists at Rice University have discovered that while plants might look fairly inactive in the day, they are surreptitiously preparing for battle with hungry insects.

“When you walk past plants, they don’t look like they’re doing anything,” said Janet Braam, one of the investigators on a new study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It’s intriguing to see all of this activity down at the genetic level. It’s like watching a besieged fortress go on full alert.”

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Tags: Biodefense, circadian clocks, insects, Plants, Wired UK

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