News this week from the rarified realm of science research is both interesting and far-reaching. And no, by far-reaching I’m not talking about discovery that the planet Saturn has a huge, invisible ring nobody noticed before.

In the field of physics, some may have heard of Paul Dirac’s postulated magnetic monopoles – the quantum of the magnetic force, with a single pole instead of two. Dirac postulated that these must exist, and led to his famous ‘strings’ (which eventually led to some current GUT models). But nobody has ever actually ‘seen’ a monopole, so it’s been an open question of whether such beasties exist. Now, an NIST research team believe they’ve found the next best thing, monopoles the size of molecules!

They of course aren’t real monopoles, but apparently behave the same predicted way. Thus these synthetic compounds could allow scientists to do further research in the lab rather than just on paper napkins. They will be testing monopole predictions with these spin ice molecules, such as whether the postulated particles obey Coulomb’s Law. Stay tuned, this could get fascinating quickly!

Next up is a study about the ubiquitous BPA body burdens 93% of us carry around these days. BPA is a common chemical found in some plastics and epoxy resins. A paper published in Environmental Health Perspectives this week from researchers at Simon Fraser University, UNC-CH and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital linked prenatal BPA exposure to unusually aggressive, hyperactive behavior in 2-year old girls.

Neurodevelopmental disorders – ADD, ADHD, the Autism spectrum, etc. – have been most prevalent in young boys, who represent some 80% of the diagnoses. Further research on this environmental contaminant should be watched, as if the connection is solid, we can expect more and more young girls to suffer the same sorts of problems. BPA has also been linked to fertility problems, growth retardation and learning disorders as well as permanent changes to DNA in mice.

Speaking of Autism’s spectrum of neurodevelopmental disorders, researchers from MIT and the Center for Human Genetic Research at Massachusetts General Hospital have discovered that a single letter change in DNA may be indicative of Autism. This is known as a Single Nucleotide Polymorphism [SNP], and researchers tied it to chromosomes 5, 6, 20. The gene on chromosome 5 is associated with neuron development and autistic children showed lower expression.

This is just one piece of what researchers expect is a highly complex genetic puzzle, but it might lead to tests that can identify those at risk of producing autistic children, and identifying it in children very early. It also could help lead to specific treatments in the future. Progress is being made at last in dealing with this spectrum as a real medical condition and not just an indicator of lousy parenting skills. Which has been one of the most hurtful urban myths ever propagated by people who had no idea what they were talking about. That some of them were psychologists and physicians is sad, so we can all be thankful that some real answers are coming in.

Researchers from Oregon State University and other institutions have published an article in the journal Science that they say puts to rest a long scientific debate on the causes of periodic ice ages in the history of our planet. The conclusion? Earth Wobbles.

The last major ice age reached its peak about 26,000 years ago, held steady for about 7,000 years, then began melting 19,000 years ago. The melting was caused by an increase in solar radiation, the researchers say, and not by carbon dioxide’s “greenhouse” effect, or any changes in ocean temperatures. These mechanisms have been cited recently by some scientists trying to understand what appears to be happening now with the increase in global temperatures termed “Global Warming” and said to be caused primarily by pollution from human activities.

The researchers analyzed 6,000 dates and locations of ice sheets to define when they started to melt. This confirmed a theory developed more than fifty years ago that held small but definable changes in Earth’s rotation as the trigger for both the accumulation of ice and its melting cycle. Putting that together with changes in the Earth’s axis and rotation going back 50 million years, they found that the gravitational influences of the larger planets – primarily Saturn and Jupiter – leads to predictable cycles.

Right about now, the scientists say, we should be changing from an interglacial period toward conditions that will ultimately lead to another ice age. That is, if human contributions to Global Warming don’t thwart the process. Meanwhile, a close look at plans to mitigate global warming with ‘Geoengineering’ suggests that such plans may well do more harm than good.

Research presented at a symposium at the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting concludes that geoengineering is potentially dangerous, and that the risks outweigh the benefits. Plans such as limited nuclear detonations and subsequent fires to release lots of carbon into the atmosphere, seeding the atmosphere with light colored sulfur particles to mimic gigantic volcanic eruptions, and seeding the oceans with iron to increase carbon uptake all come with side-effects that could be disastrous, ecologists say.

Indeed, if we are starting to ‘wobble’ to the gravitational tune of our giant planetary neighbors toward another ice age, taking big efforts to cool the planet right now could actually speed up the process! Perhaps we should put off the big projects until we know more about all this, eh?

As the economy slips ever farther down the black hole of imaginary values and criminal greed, the looming necessity for using this crossroads of history to re-make our energy future has moved the issues up on the To-Do list. America’s automakers are lining up, hats in hand, to obtain enough funding to keep their (union) workers employed, and the funds they want may come attached to serious strings that require more gas-efficient cars, hybrids, flex-fuel and even new lines of plug-in electric cars to help get us off our addiction to other nations’ oil.

Which then begs questions about what sources of electrical energy we need to develop that do not spew greenhouse gases into the air, leave us with millions of tons of toxic or radioactive industrial waste, and cause serious detrimental health effects (and death) to the population. Following on the issue of our choices for future development is the antiquated state of our electrical grid, which is both inefficient and dangerously likely to fail altogether without much trouble.

Fact is, energy use conservation could make a more serious dent in our consumption without doing anything at all. This is what happened this past summer when gasoline prices climbed to around $5 per gallon, and diesel prices became inverted. Millions of people limited their driving, pooled for shopping excursions, and stayed home instead of driving long distances for vacation. Petroleum usage plummeted, which informs us that we don’t really have to use as much as we do. Changing light bulbs and turning off lights and appliances and turning down the thermostat can save quite a bit of our generation capacity too, but that will of course jump when we have to charge our cars at night.

But the inefficiency of the grid system itself wastes ~30% of what we already do generate. In order to diversify our sources, we are going to need to modernize the grid to lose less of the available ‘trons between the wind or wave farm and our refrigerators. The Obama transition team is already looking into a possible massive CCC-type project to modernize the grid, and with a genuine scientist at the head of the Department of Energy (Steven Chu), we might expect more forward-looking options for how to do that than the old-timers in the outgoing administration could ever have offered.

Meanwhile, many states and industrial concerns are planning for the alternative energy sources that the new grid will rely upon for generation capacity. Since there’s no such thing as “Clean Coal,” many planners would dearly love to get away from coal and nuclear plants (that take decades to bring on-line and are increasingly expensive). Wind, wave, geothermal, hydroelectric, there are many possibilities to be developed that not only don’t emit greenhouse gases, but also don’t emit waste heat into the environment like boiler and heat transfer systems do.

The Industrial Wind Action Group understands the grid issue better than many, as the siting of industrial-strength wind farms in regions of the country that enjoy steady winds enough to achieve peak performance is going to need transmission accessibility from parts of the country that managed to get electrified mostly as an afterthought. There are even some fairly radical ideas out there about concentrating wind farms in the midwest by swapping-out government-owned land in the far west for a huge reserve in the heartland. Even the investor class is getting in on the action, as Great Ideas: Where the Buffalo Roam… Turbines Spin from the Common Sense Investor demonstrates.

We’ll keep up with developments in all areas of alternative power research and development as well as initiatives to modernize the grid. Stay tuned!

Links:

US Electric grid needs modernization
A Vision for a Modernized Electric Grid: Clean Infrastructure for a 21st Century Economy
Industrial Wind Action Group
Great Ideas: Where the Buffalo Roam… Turbines Spin
What is an Intelligent Grid?

ScienceNews reported last week that research on mice suggests these new fullerene-based wonder-fibers may be as dangerous as asbestos in the environment. The study showed that multi-walled (rigid) nanotube fibers longer than 15 micrometers cannot be removed from sensitive organic tissues by microphages, and that this causes inflammation that could lead to asbestos-like diseases including mesothelioma, a fatal form of cancer.

The study was published in the May 20 online edition of Nature Nanotechnology, and according to the Washington Post serves as a preliminary warning that there may be serious issues with the technology that warrant very careful planning to protect industrial workers, the public and the environment as nanotube fibers become more common in consumer and industrial products.

Companies around the world produce thousands of tons of nanomaterials a year, not all of them in the form that poses the threat identified by these researchers. Nanotubes alone are expected to become a multi-billion dollar industry within the next few years. While the government pumps about $1.5 billion a year into R&D for nanotechnology, only about 5 percent of that goes into health and safety concerns.

It would be quite refreshing if, for a change, we incorporated the lessons of history as we develop this promising new technology to forestall issues related to health, safety and environmental pollution before they become just more grim statistics attached to greed over due caution. And for this reason the situation bears watching to see if identified areas of concern are simply denied and swept under a profit rug, or rationally dealt with as if humans could accept responsibility – and minimize risks – per the less than hopeful side-effects of our intelligent designs.

The “germ-free” craze not only contributes to a generation of homebound children who have no developed resistance to real world ‘germs’ or irritants, we’ve also been warned over and over again for more than a decade that those bacteria we’re fighting will themselves develop resistance to the anti-biotics we use against them. Now a study by the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University has traced the active ingredients in antibacterial soaps to their final resting place in the shallow sediments of estuaries into which treated wastewater is dumped.

The active ingredients traced are triclosan (TCS), which is structurally similar to dioxin, and triclocarban (TCC), a closely related compound. Biodesign Institute researcher Rolf Halden and coworkers traced these compounds to the shallow sediments of New York City’s Jamaica Bay and the Chesapeake Bay, the world’s largest estuary. Both of these compounds operate as endocrine (hormone) disruptors in mammals, much as agricultural chemicals operate to disrupt the sexual development of amphibians in the midwest.

Halden made use of concentrations of radioactive fallout from nuclear testing in the last half of the 20th century to determine how long ago the antimicrobial residues were deposited (and thus how long they’re lasting in the environment). And while core samples determined that a 1978 improvement in a Baltimore waste treatment plant did drop the levels of deposited TCC, the upgraded technology just put more of the substance into the sewage sludge that is disposed of by being applied as “fertilizer” on agricultural cropland.

Halden is planning to continue his research and study body burdens and health effects in pregnant women, nursing mothers and infants. Ecologically speaking, we are probably better off living with a few germs, and hand washing with regular soap has been shown to be just as effective as with antimicrobial soaps in sanitizing hands. Yet another good reason to reconsider our fear of germs – sometimes, it seems, the cure is worse than the disease.