Barack Obama Answers the Science Questions
Aug 30 at 11:11pm by Aileen
Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama has submitted his Answers to the Top 14 Science Questions facing America. Drawing on the expertise of a squadron of science, economic, foreign policy and educational advisors that includes several committed Nobel Laureates, many will be happy to get the religious and political ideology out of the way and really start addressing these issues.
Please go to the ScienceDebate 2008 website, take a hard look at Obama’s answers for our future, and don’t forget to drop the crew a dime (or ten) on your way out. These folks have been hard at it since November of last year, and have gathered some very impressive institutional support. The future is important to all of us - and our children - and the future needs the very best science we can possibly field to meet it head-on.
Resurrecting the 1918 Flu Pandemic
Aug 19 at 4:04pm by Aileen
…and the antibodies for survival
1918 Flu Antibodies Resurrected from Elderly Survivors
Back in 2005 some researchers journeyed to the Alaskan permafrost to dig up some bodies of victims of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed 50-100 million people worldwide as World War 1 came to a close. They were able to recover the virus from these bodies because they have been frozen since burial.
Now researchers at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt have recovered antibodies against this deadly flu virus from survivors of the pandemic. They collected blood samples from 32 survivors age 91 to 101, and found that all samples reacted to the virus - indicating that immunity has been preserved for 90 years. This represents the longest immune system ‘memory’ thus far observed.
The real test came when researchers at the CDC infected mice with the 1918 influenza and then administered the antibodies. Those receiving the lowest dose of antibodies died, all mice given the highest dose survived. The “extremely rare” B cells that produced the antibodies in all the survivors’ blood are some of “the most potent antibodies ever isolated against a virus,” and may prove invaluable against other viruses or for developing new antibodies against expected future pandemics.
Cassini Revisits Enceladus
Aug 14 at 7:07pm by Aileen
Returns Very Cool Pix
Fractures, or “tiger stripes,” where icy jets erupt on Saturn’s moon Enceladus will be the target of a close flyby by the Cassini spacecraft on Monday, Aug. 11. - JPL/NASA
Calling all space geeks! Check out the photos returned from Monday’s 50-km fly-over of Enceladus’ ridged south pole “geyser region” at JPL’s Cassini-Huygens Images page. Well done indeed!
And to get the low-down on what they’re looking at and why, Discover magazine collects the data in readily accessible links here.
Saturn and its 52 moons are a fascinating system, and Cassini keeps returning spectacular images and data that will have scientists scratching their heads for years. I personally am following the Titan and Iapetus fly-bys due to long time fascination with these particular moons, but Enceladus is one of the solar system’s most likely places to find life that’s not right here on planet earth. Here’s some useful links…
Cassini-Huygens Images
Discover: Cassini Snaps Pictures of Saturn’s Geyser-Spouting Moon
Moons: Titan
Moons: Iapetus
I Gotta Get Me One of Those!
Aug 12 at 3:03pm by Aileen
Invisibility Cloak One Step Closer: New Metamaterials Bend Light Backwards
In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the boy wizard inherited an invisibility cloak from his father. He could use it to sneak around undetected through the stony halls of Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, to escape the confines of the same place, and to spy on the plots and plans and deeds of other characters in the story. If you’re 8 years old, the thought of your own personal invisibility cloak is highly entertaining.
Enter scientists - presumably older than 8 - at the University of California at Berkeley, who announced this week that they have engineered some nifty “metamaterials” that can bend light rays around an object to render them effectively invisible. The entertaining dream just became reality, but will likely be reserved mostly for spies and other, more lethal tools of military stealth. Alas, we probably won’t be able to buy our own invisibility cloaks at WalMart any time soon.
Research published in Science describes a metamaterial composed of silver nanowires grown inside a porous aluminum oxide. The result is a structure about 10 times thinner than a sheet of paper that can refract light ‘backwards’ to render a cloaked object invisible to human eyes, radar, and near-infrared wavelengths as short as 660 nanometers. Nature looks at a ‘fishnet’ metamaterial and its possibilities.
We should probably not let the Romulans know about this development. Let them invent their own cloaking device!
Biofuels: Something Even Better Than Corn or Switchgrass
Aug 4 at 10:10pm by Aileen
University of Illinois crop sciences researchers released results of the largest-ever field trial of its kind in the US for growing a giant perennial grass Miscanthus x giganteus, reporting that this crop could significantly reduce the acreage necessary to meet government biofuels production goals.
Rather than re-dedicating a full 25% of US cropland to biofuels - something that would put a serious dent in food production and increase the price of everything grown - Miscanthus would require re-dedication of just 9.3% of current agricultural acreage. The findings were reported in the August issue of the journal Global Change Biology.
Researchers were judging raw amount of biomass generated each year from this perennial (meaning it regrows itself every season from roots without reseeding), and you can see from the accompanying photo that this grass takes up some vertical room. Even better, Miscanthus requires fewer chemical and mechanical inputs than corn, which is a consideration for water quality and soil fertility. Moreover, in many parts of the country farmers could reap two or more ‘crops’ a year (by mowing, as with hay). Highest productivity, in fact, came from the south in the poorest of agricultural soils. Thus Miscanthus may be a very good crop for marginal land and land not even used for crop production at present, which would lower its demand on food producing cropland further.
Miscanthus also serves as a ‘carbon sink’, accumulating and binding carbon in the soil at greater efficiency than any annual crops, such as the great biomass annual industrial hemp. Which is also a good biomass crop for fuels, fiber, oil and land conservation.
Perhaps some combination of alternatives may yet allow independence from fossil fuels, and that comes with improvements in global warming, general civilizational peace and prosperity, etc. If we were to plan ways to power our homes, churches, community buildings and businesses while at the same time developing biofuels for transportation and shipping, we might find the world economy and standards of living rising quickly instead of falling fast.
It would seem that we do still have some useful scientific creativity and inventiveness to offer the world in these trying times. All we need to do now is see to it that Big Oil doesn’t shove it all under the rug, and that we get the necessary government investments in these technologies.
Links:
Giant Grass Miscanthus Can Meet US Biofuels Goal Using Less Land
Hemp: Our Original Industrial Crop
MIT Scientist Offers Solar Revolution
MIT Scientist Offers ‘Solar Revolution’
Aug 1 at 5:05pm by Aileen
‘Safe, Clean, Too Cheap to Meter’ finally means something!
photo: Donna Coveney
MIT and Science [July 31] announce that Scientists mimic essence of plant’s energy storage system in a breakthrough that promises to make rooftop solar power a reliable mainstream energy source, even for when the sun isn’t shining.
Nocera and postdoctoral fellow Matthew Kanan have developed a process of artificial photosynthesis that will use solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and using the gases to power a fuel cell that will provide electricity at night and on cloudy days. A leader in the study of photosynthesis James Barber said of the work, “The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production, thus reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem.”
The inexpensive catalyst Nocera and Kanan developed can split the molecules in a glass of water at room temperature, a process that until now has been expensive because suitable catalysts were too expensive or made of rare materials. The discovery is an outgrowth of research into artificial photosynthesis (the process plants use to split water for energy) by many chemical research groups.
“This discovery is simply groundbreaking,” said Karsten Meyer, professor of chemistry at a German university. In the development of solar energy, Meyer said, “this is probably the most important single discovery of the century.”
Nocera predicts the technology can be developed quickly and readily available within ten years to address the world’s energy needs. Technical details of the discovery and process are sketched out in the MIT release, and examined in more depth in Technology Review in their article Solar-Power Breakthrough.
RECENT COMMENTS