tingilinde

stalking methane leaks

Natural gas is being hailed as a clean fuel and a bridge to a world where much less carbon is emitted to the atmosphere.  It does burn cleaner than oil or coal (roughly 30% less carbon dioxide than oil and 50% than coal) and other pollutants are lower.  But a problem is half as much as coal is still far too high - it may be fine for short term replacement for coal, but creating new infrastructure that uses it is a problem as power plants tend to last for five or more decades.

I said may be fine.  It turns out there is a fly in the ointment.  While burning natural gas is cleaner, not all of it is burned.  Some escapes to the atmosphere.  Natural gas is mostly methane which happens to be a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.   It varies with the type of coal burned, but if natural gas leakage is greater than about four percent the end result is greater green house gas emissions than coal.

Leakage exists, but it is poorly monitored.  Estimates are in the two to three percent range for the US - meaning natural gas may be worse for global warming than burning oil.  Some measurements have been very high - figures in the high single digits have been recorded at some fracking sites, but it should be stressed very little has been done in the form of actual measurements.

NPR recently profiled atmospheric scientist Ira Leifer who made a trek taking some measurements.  Great stuff, but we need an instrumented infrastructure measuring this.  My guess is there are industry and political pressures that would make the expense difficult.  The next best thing would be solid amateur measurements - inexpensive instruments that could be easily calibrated would be a nice development.   Then again a few percent waste is money that just blows away...

 

 

throwing darts at a glacier

possibly inspired by a game in a pub, a group of UK scientists have devised a novel method for instrumenting hard to reach areas in the Antarctic.

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The slender javelins are very similar to "sonobuoys" - the floating instruments that are dropped from aeroplanes to study the oceans.

Like sonobuoys, the new BAS projectiles are released down a tube and exit from the belly of an aircraft.

They fall rapidly towards the ice, using a 20cm-wide parachute to stabilise their descent.

When javelins hit the surface, they are travelling at about 50m per second (120mph) and have had to be engineered to withstand the highg-forces associated with a very rapid deceleration.

Small fins, or ice brakes, fitted to the sides of the spears prevent them from driving too deep.

This ensures the tail of the javelin containing its satellite communications antenna sticks upright above the snow and is able to relay the GPS data back to BAS.

"The javelins need to go to a certain depth so that they don't get blown over by the wind. On the other hand, the mast must be sufficiently tall that it doesn't get buried by snow," explained Dr David Jones, who leads the technical development on Project Javelin.

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(hat tip to Bjarne)

time to short canada's long term prospects?

Very troubling - Canada is becoming something of a red state...   You can't work out where the benefits in basic  research may be.  This could lead to a serious brain drain.

Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value," John McDougall, president of the NRC, said in announcing the shift in the NRC's research focus away from discovery science solely to research the government deems "commercially viable".

backwards in so many ways ..

Of course there are pressures in the US to follow a similar path.

 

 

back pains?

If you suffer from pain associated with a slipped disc it may be that an inexpensive and mostly safe treatment will be effective.  Bjarne notes a high level report on some fascinating research.

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the discovery was the culmination of 10 years of hard work. "It's been tough. There have been ups and downs. This is one those questions that a lot of our colleagues did not understand at the beginning. To find bacteria really confronts all we have thought up to this date as back pain researchers," he said.

The Danish team describe their work in two papers published in the European Spine Journal. In the first report, they explain how bacterial infections inside slipped discs can cause painful inflammation and tiny fractures in the surrounding vertebrae.

Working with doctors in Birmingham, the Danish team examined tissue removed from patients for signs of infection. Nearly half tested positive, and of these, more than 80% carried bugs called Propionibacterium acnes.

The microbes are better known for causing acne. They lurk around hair roots and in the crevices in our teeth, but can get into the bloodstream during tooth brushing. Normally they cause no harm, but the situation may change when a person suffers a slipped disc. To heal the damage, the body grows small blood vessels into the disc. Rather than helping, though, they ferry bacteria inside, where they grow and cause serious inflammation and damage to neighbouring vertebrae that shows up on an MRI scan.

In the second paper, the scientists proved they could cure chronic back pain with a 100-day course of antibiotics. In a randomised trial, the drugs reduced pain in 80% of patients who had suffered for more than six months and had signs of damaged vertebra under MRI scans.

Albert stressed that antibiotics would not work for all back pain. Over-use of the drugs could lead to more antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which are already a major problem in hospitals. But she also warned that many patients will be having ineffective surgery instead of antibiotics that could alleviate their pain.

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It will be very intereting to follow this ...

 

huge shoes to fill

Eugenie Scott announced she is retiring from her director role at the National Center for Science Education.  It will be difficult to find someone as dedicated and talented.  They've often been about the only firewall between real science and creationism in the schools.  Extremely important work.

Their big focus has traditionallly been evolution, but they've had to expand to climate change.  Creationists are often climate change deniers.  

One of her talks a few years ago..

anti education efforts in louisiana

It is remarkable Louisana is so backward.  Imagine being a business trying to attact an educated workforce.  Imagine putting your children through that non-education in science.

(hat tip to Jim)

 

 

 

 

 

beethoven on speed

I just caught this short episode on RadioLab - what about metronome marks and Beethoven? What about how you hear something in your mind vs a physical place and what of the relative perception of time?



And after you have listened (but only then), check this out

 

 

on homophobia and sexual repression

A lot of people have suspected this - it will be intereting to see future research confirms it.

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Using this methodology we identified a subgroup of participants who, despite self-identifying as highly straight, indicated some level of same-sex attraction (that is, they associated “me” with gay-related words and pictures faster than they associated “me” with straight-related words and pictures). Over 20 percent of self-described highly straight individuals showed this discrepancy.

Notably, these “discrepant” individuals were also significantly more likely than other participants to favor anti-gay policies; to be willing to assign significantly harsher punishments to perpetrators of petty crimes if they were presumed to be homosexual; and to express greater implicit hostility toward gay subjects (also measured with the help of subliminal priming). Thus our research suggests that some who oppose homosexuality do tacitly harbor same-sex attraction.

What leads to this repression? We found that participants who reported having supportive and accepting parents were more in touch with their implicit sexual orientation and less susceptible to homophobia. Individuals whose sexual identity was at odds with their implicit sexual attraction were much more frequently raised by parents perceived to be controlling, less accepting and more prejudiced against homosexuals.

It’s important to stress the obvious: Not all those who campaign against gay men and lesbians secretly feel same-sex attractions. But at least some who oppose homosexuality are likely to be individuals struggling against parts of themselves, having themselves been victims of oppression and lack of acceptance. The costs are great, not only for the targets of anti-gay efforts but also often for the perpetrators. We would do well to remember that all involved deserve our compassion.

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a student project to see use tomorrow

NASA's Greenland robot project GROVER came out of a series of Summer Engineering boot camps.  The notion is a small robot to roll around Greenlands ice cap with radar that is used to study the ice.  Potentially less expensive and safer than currently used aircraft and snowmobiles.

 

what we are

Smithsonian Magazine has an article on the microbial life in and around us - the microbioeme

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he new insights into NEC suggest why the microbiome suddenly seems so important to almost everything in the medical and biological worlds, even our understanding of what it means to be human. We tend to think that we are exclusively a product of our own cells, upwards of ten trillion of them. But the microbes we harbor add another 100 trillion cells into the mix. The creature we admire in the mirror every morning is thus about 10 percent human by cell count. By weight, the picture looks prettier (for once): Altogether an average adult’s commensal microbes weigh about three pounds, roughly as much as the human brain. And while our 21,000 or so human genes help make us who we are, our resident microbes possess another eight million or so genes, many of which collaborate behind the scenes handling food, tinkering with the immune system, turning human genes on and off, and otherwise helping us function. John Donne said “no man is an island,” and Jefferson Airplane said “He’s a peninsula,” but it now looks like he’s actually a metropolis.

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(hat tip to Sukie)