Category Archives: Science

Peak Soil

An interesting article. Obvious the author has a biased viewpoint (that doesn’t mean the conclusions are wrong but it certainly can make one cautious – just as if a drug company shows results that their drug is effective or safe – you just have to pay a bit more attention…). I would be interested in others thoughts on this. My perception (though it is just an opinion based on limited facts) is that topsoil loss is a problem and that using corn for ethanol is more a federal government payoff to buy votes than a wise national policy. I am less inclined to accept some of the more extreme suggestions in the article. Peak Soil: Why cellulosic ethanol, biofuels are unsustainable and a threat to America

“The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.” – President Franklin D. Roosevelt
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When you take out more nutrients and organic matter from the soil than you put back in, you are “mining” the topsoil. The organic matter is especially important, since that’s what prevents erosion, improves soil structure, health, water retention, and gives the next crop its nutrition. Modern agriculture only addresses the nutritional component by adding fossil-fuel based fertilizers, and because the soil is unhealthy from a lack of organic matter, copes with insects and disease with oil-based pesticides.

I believe it makes sense to research things like bio-fuels. However I am not convinced massive payments to the political well connected is a wise course of action.

More on Amazing Aerogel

We added a post on aerogel earlier this month. Here is another article on the incredible substance – Scientists hail ‘frozen smoke’ as material that will change world:

It is expected to rank alongside wonder products from previous generations such as Bakelite in the 1930s, carbon fibre in the 1980s and silicone in the 1990s. Mercouri Kanatzidis, a chemistry professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said: “It is an amazing material. It has the lowest density of any product known to man, yet at the same time it can do so much. I can see aerogel being used for everything from filtering polluted water to insulating against extreme temperatures and even for jewellery.”
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It also has green credentials. Aerogel is described by scientists as the “ultimate sponge”, with millions of tiny pores on its surface making it ideal for absorbing pollutants in water. Kanatzidis has created a new version of aerogel designed to mop up lead and mercury from water. Other versions are designed to absorb oil spills.

Megaflood Created the English Channel

Ancient Megaflood Made Britain an Island, Study Says

“It is probably one of the largest floods ever identified,” said Phillip Gibbard, a geographer at the University of Cambridge who wasn’t involved in the study. At its peak, the flood would have discharged water at a rate of about 264 million gallons (a million cubic meters) a second, gushing at speeds of up to 62 miles (100 kilometers) an hour, the researchers say. This is roughly equivalent to ten times the combined flow rate of all the rivers in the world.

In addition to making Britain an island, the authors add, the huge flood had wide-ranging environmental consequences. For example, the gigantic pulse of freshwater entering the Atlantic Ocean likely caused a period of climate cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, Gibbard said. “The introduction of ice and freshwater into an ocean drives climate oscillations and causes marked cooling events,” he explained.

The flood also marooned many animals and plants, so those species gradually evolved into different forms than their mainland cousins.

via: Pre-Chunnel Flood

NSF Graduate Research Fellow Profiles

Over at my regular job I was finally able to get us to put into place something that I have wanted to for several years: profiles of past NSF Graduate Research Fellows [link broken, so link removed]. We started with probably the most famous and certainly the richest: Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin.

“Obviously everyone wants to be successful, but I want to be looked back on as being very innovative, very trusted and ethical and ultimately making a big difference in the world.”

Sergey Brin, Co-Founder of Google, graduated from University of Maryland with high honors in mathematics and computer science in 1993 and, as a NSF Graduate Research Fellow, went on to Stanford to further study Computer Science. Early in his graduate studies, he showed interest in the Internet, specifically data-mining and pattern extraction…

In his short executive biography, Brin [link broken, so link removed] lists the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship that supported him while at Stanford among his top achievements. Like NSF, Brin understands the importance of research in innovation, and sponsors it in part through Google’s “20% time” program – all engineers at Google are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them.

Read the full NSF Fellow profile of Sergey Brin [link broken, so link removed].

Nanotechnology Investment as Strategic National Economic Policy

We have quite a few posts on the intersection of science, research, economic, investment… such as: Diplomacy and Science Research, Science and Engineering in Global Economics and Engineering the Future Economy. Here is another example, from the Wired Science BlogBeating the United States in the Race for Nanotechnology:

When the United States began the National Nanotechnology Initiative, it became clear to a number of small countries including Singapore, Taiwan, and Israel that it was time to invest heavily in similar frontier areas of science. With a level of decisiveness and determination comparable to the efforts of the United States after the launch of Sputnik, Singapore quickly became a global niche player in nanotechnology.

It’s fascinating to hear a high ranking government official who is so incredibly technology savvy and focused on economic development through investment in science. It makes the current climate in the U.S. look really bad, but on the other hand the other countries followed our lead. Since then, they have sort of outdone us at our own game.

Singapore is doing the right things to invest in a science and engineering economy. 10 minute webcast of Foreign Minister George Yeo at the 3rd International Conference on Bioengineering and Nanotechnology:

Discover the Supercollider

The Biggest Thing in Physics

It has taken over 20 years, $8 billion, and the combined efforts of more than 60 countries to create this extraordinary particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, built and operated by CERN, the European physics consortium.
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When the machine is switched on for the first time at the end of this year, particles will make a lap around the LHC in less than one ten-thousandth of a second. Keeping those particles on track requires serious bending power from more than 1,200 superconducting magnets, each of which weighs several tons apiece. Each magnet must be kept at –456 degrees Fahrenheit—colder than the void between galaxies—requiring CERN to build the world’s biggest cryogenic system to handle the 185,000 gallons of liquid helium that will be used to chill the magnets.

Yet another interesting article on the LHC. See previous posts: New Yorker on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider – CERN Pressure Test Failure – CERN Prepares for LHC Operations

Best Research University Rankings – 2007

There are several rankings of universities. They can be interesting but also have obvious limitations. I find Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University’s the most interesting (especially the international nature of it). Their real focus seems to be in providing a way for China to get a feel for how they are progressing toward developing world class universities (interesting slide presentation on their efforts). The methodology values publications and faculty awards and is provides a better ranking of research (rather than teaching). Results from the 2007 rankings of Top 500 Universities worldwide showing country representation of the top schools:

location	Top 101	% of World Population	% of World GDP	% of top 500
USA	54	4.6%	27.4%	32.7%
United Kingdom	11	0.9	4.9	8.3
Germany	6	1.3	6.0	8.1
Japan	6	2.0	9.0	6.3
Canada	4	0.5	2.6	4.3
France	4	0.9	4.6	4.3
Sweden	4	0.1	0.8	2.2
Switzerland	3	0.1	0.8	1.6
Australia	2	0.3	1.6	3.3
Netherlands	2	0.3	1.4	2.4
Israel	1	0.1	0.3	1.4
Finland	1	0.1	0.4	1.0
Norway	1	0.1	0.6	0.8
Denmark	1	0.1	0.6	0.8
Russia	1	2.2	2.0	0.4
China		20.1	5.5	2.8
India		17.0	1.9	0.4

China has 1 ranked in the 151-202 range as do Taiwan, Korea and Brazil. Singapore has one in the 102-151 range. The other country without any in the top 101 with representation in the next 101 is Italy with 3 schools in the 102-151 range and 2 in the 152-202 range. India has 2 in the 305-401 range.

Top 10 schools (same schools as last year, Cambridge moved from 2nd to 4th):

Harvard University
Stanford University
University of California at Berkeley
Cambridge University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT)
California Institute of Technology
Columbia University
Princeton University
University Chicago
Oxford University

University of Wisconsin – Madison is 17th 🙂 My father taught there while I grew up.
Continue reading →

Galactic Dust with the Ability to Reproduce?

Dust ‘comes alive’ in space:

An international panel from the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Max Planck institute in Germany and the University of Sydney found that galactic dust could form spontaneously into helixes and double helixes and that the inorganic creations had memory and the power to reproduce themselves.

The new research, to be published this week in the New Journal of Physics, found nonorganic dust, when held in the form of plasma in zero gravity, formed the helical structures found in DNA. The particles are held together by electromagnetic forces that the scientists say could contain a code comparable to the genetic information held in organic matter. It appeared that this code could be transferred to the next generation.

Professor Greg Morfill, of the Max Planck institute of extra-terrestrial physics, said: “Going by our current narrow definitions of what life is, it qualifies. “The question now is to see if it can evolve to become intelligent. It’s a little bit like science fiction at the moment. The potential level of complexity we are looking at is of an amoeba or a plant.”

“I do not believe that the systems we are talking about are life as we know it. We need to define the criteria for what we think of as life much more clearly.”

Interesting, though I don’t really understand what they mean by memory and reproduction in this context.

Related: Cosmic ‘DNA’: Double Helix Spotted in Space – “Magnetic forces at the center of the galaxy have twisted a nebula into the shape of DNA, a new study reveals. The double helix shape is commonly seen inside living organisms, but this is the first time it has been observed in the cosmos.”

Lake Under 2 Miles of Ice

Vostok Under-ice Lake

Raiders of the Lost Lake by Alan Bellows:

In the early 1990s, a Russian drilling rig encountered something peculiar two miles beneath the coldest and most desolate place on Earth. For decades, the workers at Vostok Research Station in Antarctica had been extracting core samples from deep scientific boreholes, and analyzing the lasagna-like layers of ice to study Earth’s bygone climate. But after tunneling through 414,000 layers or so– about two miles into the icecap– the layers abruptly ended.
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Unbeknownst to the Russians, their drill had mingled with the uppermost reaches of one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world; a pristine pocket of liquid whose ecosystem was separated from the rest of the Earth millions of years ago. As for what sort of organisms might lurk in that exotic environment today, no one can really be certain.
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Extremophile organisms have turned up in the unlikeliest of places, including within volcanic vents on the ocean floor, in the rocks deep in the Earth’s crust, and in frozen arctic soil. It is not unreasonable to suggest that cold-tolerant creatures could thrive in the waters of Lake Vostok, overcoming the oxygen saturation with extraordinary natural antioxidants. But millions of years of evolutionary isolation in an extreme environment may have created some truly bizarre organisms. This notion is supported by the ice samples drawn from the ice just above Lake Vostok, where some unusual and unidentifiable microbial fossils have been found. But the possibility that they are merely contaminates has not yet been completely ruled out.

Very interesting. Related: The Brine Lake Beneath the Sea – Life Untouched by the Sun

Aerogels – Cool Substances

First Prize for Weird

A solid that’s up to 99 percent gas, it is rigid to a light touch, soft to a stronger one, and shatters like glass if it’s put under too much pressure too quickly; it’s one of the most enigmatic of materials, as well as one of the most versatile.

It can withstand the heat of a direct flame; engineers use it for insulation on oil rigs and for warmth in the insoles of hiking boots worn in the coldest temperatures on Earth. NASA uses it to trap comet dust blowing through the universe at six kilometers per second.
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Nicknamed “frozen smoke” after its ethereal appearance, aerogel is neither frozen nor smoke. It’s also surprisingly low tech—it’s been known since 1931
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Together, these ingredients can form a structure that chemically resembles glass but is so full of whorls and crevices that one cubic centimeter has a total surface area equal to a football field’s. The lightest-weight solid in the world, aerogel weighs 1.2 milligrams per cubic centimeter—barely more than the air molecules around it. In fact, the material itself is almost entirely made of air, like a sponge that consists mostly of holes. Don’t let its lightness fool you: it’s strong. NASA photos show two grams of the material easily supporting a 2.5-kilogram brick.
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And because the aerogels pack an enormous surface area into a tiny volume, small pieces can clear out many liters of water. Kanatzidis’s aerogels sopped up so much mercury that they diluted a solution of 645 parts per million down to 0.04 parts per million. They had similar effects on lead and cadmium, two other pollutants.

The new aerogels aren’t ready for widespread use: they’re made with platinum, so they’re extraordinarily expensive. But if other metals can be used to make them instead (Kanatzidis says they can), chunks of them could be dropped into polluted water, removing contaminants.

Cool. NASA Aerogel FAQ