Tattoos just got even more permanent. Scientists have developed a method to uncover old tattoos that have been altered or surgically removed. The technology involves infrared cameras and could be particularly useful to law enforcement agents, according to Tech Radar:

Often used as a distinguishing factor to identify criminals, tattoos can be altered or removed relatively easily, but a team at the University of Derby has come up with a solution.

Using infrared means that removed tattoos, or even tattoos that have been altered, can be spotted in the deeper layers of skin.

Guess that means DISCOVER’s CEO and Publisher Henry Donahue will never be able to fully get rid of his fish. Let’s hope he stays out of trouble!

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Image: flickr / House of Sims

Craters on the "dark side". Don't see "craters"? Read on. Credit:NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University.

Here is an image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The image shows secondary craters.  Secondary craters are  those craters formed not by an foreign body hitting the moon, rather they are formed by the stuff blown out from a crater forming impact.

The NASA caption for the image is below, but before you get there, I know there are some of you taking issue with the title…Dark Side indeed. The dark side of the moon exists maybe in some of the areas around the poles and in Pink Floyd songs…the reality is there is no dark side. Yes I know that, interestingly enough the LRO site titled the page “Craters on the dark side of the moon” (linked below).

Now how many of you don’t see craters and instead you see “lumps”?  It’s a trick your eyes are playing on you, click  here and you will see the very same image just rotated 180^o. The image opens in a new window so you can move it around and get the two side by side (you may need to resize the new window).  Did you do it? Pretty cool eh?

Ok here’s the caption from the LRO site:

When people envision a “moonscape” it probably looks something like this — craters, craters everywhere.

There are two types of impact craters on the Moon: primary and secondary. Primary craters form as the result of an asteroid or comet (or spacecraft) impacting the Moon. Secondary impact craters formed from the impact of ejecta expelled during primary crater formation. Secondary impact craters dominate this scene, possibly from the relatively recent impact that created nearby Jackson crater (43.5 miles across), located 42 miles to the west.

Geologists use small secondary craters to help unravel the stratigraphy of the lunar surface. These secondary craters reside on the floor of a 8.7 mile wilde crater. What is the age of this host crater? If these secondary craters originated from the Jackson event, then it is a fair bet the Jackson impact was more recent. If you look at the bottom of this NAC frame in the LROC Image Gallery at ASU, you can see that this crater also has a very subdued rim, in contrast to Jackson’s well-defined rim, providing more evidence of it’s age.

Scientists at MIT’s Senseable City Laboratory have designed a bicycle wheel that can give riders a boost when they need it most. Kinetic energy is released when a rider hits the brakes, and the new wheel, called the Copenhagen Wheel, captures that energy for later use. The new wheel uses a kinetic energy recovery system, the same technology used by hybrid cars, like the Toyota Prius, to harvest otherwise wasted energy when a cyclist brakes or speeds down a hill. With that energy, it charges up a battery inside the wheel’s hub [The New York Times].

The Copenhagen Wheel made its debut today in Copenhagen, one of the most bicycle friendly cities in the world and the site of the current international talks on climate change regulations.The special wheel can be swapped in for any bike’s rear wheel, and includes other bells and whistles such as an odometer, a sensor to track air quality, and a GPS. The wheel can even talk to your iPhone though a Bluetooth connection so you can check your speed, direction, distance traveled, monitor traffic, and find your biking buddies. The wheel is expected to retail for between $500 and $1,000.

Check out the video below for a preview of the Copenhagen Wheel:

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Image: the COPENHAGEN WHEEL; Video: YouTube / senseablecitylab

They may look simple, but our red blood cells are the sophisticated result of evolution. So to create new ways to study our bodies and perhaps even disperse drugs to different organs and body parts, scientists played copycat. A team of researchers announced this week that they have developed synthetic red blood cells that mimic our natural ones in both form and function. They describe their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To make red blood cells in the lab, study leader Samir Mitragotri and colleagues started with spheres of biodegradable polymer. They then exposed the spheres to isopropanol, which collapsed them into the discoid shape characteristic of red blood cells. The researchers then layered proteins — either albumin or hemoglobin — onto the doughnut-shaped disks, cross-linked the proteins to give them extra strength and stability, and finally dissolved away the PLGA template to leave only a strong but flexible shell [The Scientist].

Mitragotri’s creations are about 7 microns across—the same diameter as real red bloods cells—and they have the same disc-like shape as their real-world counterparts. They act like real cells, too, he says. “The soft protein shell makes them squishy and elastic,” says Mitragotri. “They can squeeze through capillaries smaller than their own diameter, just like real blood cells” [New Scientist]. And perhaps most impressively, they can carry substances like the real thing does. Mitragotri’s team of researchers experimented with hemoglobin and the anti-blood clotting drug heparin; the synthetic cells could soak up either one and release it later.

The lab-created cells could use that talent to aid drug dispersal, or provide other useful functions like distributing iron oxide, which ups the contrast in MRI images. And now that they can make healthy-shaped blood cells, they also can begin experimenting with abnormal cells (like those found in people who have sickle-cell anemia or hereditary elliptocytosis) to better understand the physical properties of the diseases and work toward new therapies [Scientific American]. The next step remains to test the synthetic cells safety and effectiveness in vivo.

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Image: Nishit Doshi

Last week I Twittered/Facebooked some provocative results from a poll of philosophers. In particular, this little tidbit:

Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?

Accept or lean toward: survival	337 / 931 (36.1%)
Other	304 / 931 (32.6%)
Accept or lean toward: death	290 / 931 (31.1%)

Yes, that’s all the detail presented in the question: “Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?” As a professional philosopher, you’re supposed to be familiar with the issue, which I reconstruct as follows. Imagine that someone has invented a working teleportation device. You step in the box, lights flash and sparks fly, and “you” rematerialize in another box, exactly the same in every way, but constructed out of a completely new collection of atoms. The original version of you is destroyed. Did you die? (And then, what if a million years passed in between the two events?)

It would probably be annoying to real philosophers, but I personally put this question in the category of “Not that hard.” And I would phrase my answer as: “Who cares?” What we should care about is how well the teleporter actually works — is the reconstructed person really in exactly the same quantum state as the original one was in? Same memories, feelings, etc? That’s an interesting technology question.

But there’s no interesting question associated with “Did you really die when you were teleported?”, or “Are you really the same person after being teleported?” These are just bad questions. They assume a certain way of looking at the world that ceases to be useful once we’ve invented teleportation. Namely, they assume that there’s a certain “essence of you-ness” that is (somehow) associated with your physical body and continues through time. That’s a perfectly sensible way of talking in the real world, where we don’t have access to duplicator devices or transporter machines. But if we did, that conception would no longer be very useful. There is a person who stepped into the first box, and a person who stepped out of the second box, and obviously they have a lot in common. But to sit down and demand that we decide whether they are “really” the same person is just a waste of time — there is no such “really.”

Which isn’t to say there aren’t interesting questions along these lines, but they are operational questions — how should I actually act, or what should I actually expect to happen, in these situations? — rather than arid metaphysical ones. What if you murdered someone, and then teleported — would the reconstructed person still be guilty of murder? That’s not quite the right question, because it still relies on the slippery essence of continuous personhood, but there’s a closely related sensible question — should we treat the reconstructed person as if they had committed murder? And it seems to me that the answer is clearly “yes” — whatever good reasons we had for treating the pre-teleportation person in a certain way, those reasons should still apply to the post-teleportation person.

The issue of duplication seems much thornier to me than the issue of teleportation. If someone made an exact copy of a known murderer, should we treat both the original and the copy as murderers? (I vote “yes.”) Fine, but what about the view from the inside? Let’s say you have an offer to get paid $100 if you let yourself be copied, with the proviso that after being copied one of the two of you will randomly be chosen for immediate painless execution. Do you take that deal?

I think problems like that are legitimately interesting, although to a great extent their mystery relies on the inadequacy of our conceptions of death. Most of us don’t want to die, at least not right away. But if we did die, we’d be gone, and wouldn’t have any wants or desires any more — but it’s very hard to consistently reason that way. Note that if we replaced “immediate painless execution” with “prolonged torture,” it seems like a much more straightforward question.

This showed up in our long-ago discussion of the quantum suicide experiment. In the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, you can make measurements that split the wave function of the universe into distinct branches. In some sense, then, you really do have a duplicator machine — it’s just that the whole universe gets duplicated, not just you. Some folks have tried to argue against this idea by pushing adherents into a logical cul de sac. You shouldn’t (to make a long story short) be averse to bargains that leave you dead with large probability, as long as there exist branches of the wave function where you are alive and flourishing — after all, in the branches where you are dead you don’t care any more, right?

My point in that earlier post — a point I somehow managed to completely obscure — was that these are misleading thought experiments, because very few of us would take seriously the corresponding classical suicide experiment. “Here, I’ll flip a coin, and give you $100 if it’s heads and shoot you instantly dead if it’s tails. Deal?” Very little temptation to take that offer. But the logic is essentially the same — if you’re dead you don’t care, right? (For purposes of these thought experiments we always assume you have no friends or loved ones who would miss you; it’s just part of the philosophical game, not a comment on your actual social situation.)

At some point in thinking about the many-worlds interpretation, issues like this inevitably do come up. That’s what David Albert and I talked about a bit on Bloggingheads. There might be a certain measurement that yields result A 10% of the time, and result B 90% of the time. But in the MWI, the measurement splits the universe into two branches, and you end up either in the branch where you saw A or the branch where you saw B. What does it mean to say that you had a “10% chance of measuring A”? You either did or you didn’t — there is no ensemble of millions of you all doing the same experiment. People have made progress on these questions — here’s a talk by David Wallace on his work with David Deutsch in attacking this problem. (Don’t ask me why everyone who thinks about these issues is named “David.”) I haven’t ever looked at this work closely enough to have an informed opinion.

All I know is that being able to teleport around would be really cool.

Charles Darwin lived to the ripe old age of 73 (which was pretty darn good for the 19th century), but despite his longevity, he spent many of the years of his life famously dogged by ill health. Today’s doctors have tried to apply what medical science has learned since Darwin’s time to diagnose the famous naturalist, and now another researcher has tossed out a suggestion: Darwin had cyclical vomiting syndrome (CVS).

Writing in the British Medical Journal, physician John Hayman argues that CVS was most likely responsible for Darwin’s intermittent malaise. The disease, caused by a mitochondrial DNA mutation, shows up mainly in children, Hayman says, but can persist into adulthood. Its symptoms, including headaches, anxiety, and abdominal problems, match many of Darwin’s. From the Los Angeles Times:

In addition to the match in symptoms, research shows that Darwin’s mother, Susannah, suffered vomiting and boils and motion sickness as a child, as well as excessive sickness during pregnancies. She died with abdominal pain when Charles was 8. Her younger brother, Tom, had similar symptoms, and a sister, Sarah, said that Tom and Charles had the same illness. That is consistent with a mitochondrial genetic defect, which is passed down through the maternal line.

CVS now joins Chagas disease (which Darwin could have acquired in the tropics), repressed anger and guilt, panic attacks, hypochondria, and other possibilities put forth as candidates for Darwin’s mystery ailment. Here’s guessing that researchers will keep playing Dr. House with Darwin, who saw his 200th birthday this year.

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Image: Wiki Commons

I just saw this story–it reads very consistently, if also disturbingly, with yesterday’s Andrew Revkin news. Natalie Angier, the celebrated science writer and author of The Canon, among other works, now opines that newspaper science reporting is “basically going out of business.” She ought to know–having reported at the New York Times for nearly two decades. Plus, she ought to know because her husband, Rick Weiss (whose story is discussed in Unscientific America) last year left the Washington Post.

It is a tough world out there for those who produce the content that we here care about. And it is getting tougher. And so far, I have not seen the media-economic model that can save us….

Global warming typically takes the rap for melting glaciers, but in the case of the Himalayan mountain range’s dwindling ice, it could have a co-conspirator: soot. Today, at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting, scientists said that the black carbon spewed out as industrial pollution from the heavily populated areas nearby could be a much larger contributor to glacier melt than previously thought.

First, NASA’s William Lau says, atmospheric circulation leaves a layer of soot at the base of the Himalayas, and that soot then combines with dust and forms an opaque cloud that absorbs energy. As this layer heats up in the Himalayan foothills, it rises and enhances the seasonal northward flow of humid monsoon winds, forcing moisture and hot air up the slopes of the majestic mountain range. As these particles rise on the warm, overturning air masses, they produce more rain over northern India, which further warms the atmosphere and fuels this “heat pump” that draws even more warm air to the region [LiveScience].

Half of Tibetan glaciers were shrinking between 1950 and 1980, Chinese scientists say, but the total has shot up to 95 percent in this century. NASA’s James Hansen was a member of one of the two study teams that tackled this problem, and said black carbon could account for as much as half of the glacial retreat, with climate change representing the remainder. “The science suggests that we’ve got to better monitor the flue on our ‘rooftop to the world,’” Lau said. [LiveScience].

Beyond the cultural loss and climate change worries, the Himalayas bind the two most populous countries in the world and provide water for a huge chunk of the world’s people. One of the persistent worries in Asia remains a deepening water crisis as high mountain glaciers shrink. Three northern states in India have lost 17.7 cubic kilometers a year for the past decade [GreenTech Media].

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Image: Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Photo: Australian Science Media Center

Man. The stories out of here about how hard it is to get into the Bella Center–home to the COP15 meetings–are enough to convince anybody not to try it. That includes me–even though media credentials are waiting for me inside the building.

But listen to Catherine Brahic of New Scientist describe her experience of the lines outside:

Five hours, zero degrees centigrade, no food, no water. Snow flurries. Dozens of large (very large) Danish police manhandling the crowds, arms linked to form human walls and cordon off the hundreds of waiting people, who teetered between hilarity and fury.

The scene was repeated at the various gates to the Copenhagen climate conference, from 7 am this morning to when the doors closed at 6 pm. I waited five hours in the blistering cold to get in, and I was among the lucky ones. My colleague, Fred Pearce, waited nine before the gates were shut before his nose. Above him a digital sign fastidiously counted the growing number of climate refugees around the world. He’ll have to do it all again tomorrow.

Brahic continues, hilariously:

What was behind the monumental screw-up? A staggering inability to do maths.

The conference centre has a maximum capacity of 15,000, yet NGOs alone were allowed to register 20,000 delegates. That’s not counting the 5000 members of the media, nor the 7000 staffers who are running the place, totalling 32,000 before you even get to the people who are meant to be doing the real work here: the negotiators. There were ministers hopelessly waving their diplomatic passes in the queues outside. They weren’t let in any faster than anyone else.

Amanda Little of Grist adds to the depictions of utter misery:

On my first day in Copenhagen, after a sleepless red eye, I and thousands of others—including delegates, business leaders, and other accredited journalists—were prevented from entering the conference center because the event has been way overbooked. Word is that more than 45,000 people have registered to attend, but only 15,000 can actually fit into the event location. You do the math. Many of us had paid thousands of dollars and traveled thousands of miles to get here. Despite the miserable weather, lack of food and toilets, and obvious mismanagement of the proceedings, U.N. officials seemed unable or unwilling to deal with the problem.

My co-sufferers had some choice words to describe the situation: “Profoundly miserable.” “The day of the living dead.” “The slowest torture imaginable.” I arrived at 1:30 p.m. and left at 5:30; there were plenty of people who had come at 8:00 a.m. and were still there at 5:00 p.m., blue lips angrily curled.

So, here I am in a cozy coffeehouse, a short walk from Tivoli Gardens, about to go out to dinner in Christiana, and I’m wondering: Is this insanity really worth it? Just so I can add to the genre of griping-waiting-in-line articles? Just to penetrate the inner sanctum?

I don’t think so. My reporting from Copenhagen will simply have to take a different angle–as did my geoengineering piece yesterday for Mother Jones. Because with just a few days in this beautiful town, I am not at all sure I want to spend one of them freezing in a nightmarish line…..

Twitter: Bane of employers … but friend of science?

At a scientific meet-up in California this week, researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey proposed that the 140-character micro-blogging site could help to speed up responses to earthquakes. “Why would such a system work?” asked Paul Earle, a geologist at the USGS, at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting Monday. “Because people like to tweet after an earthquake” [Wired.com].

While it can take scientists up to 20 minutes to process the wave of information that hits their instruments after an earthquake, Earle says, people start tweeting immediately, often with tags like “#earthquake.” A prototype system aggregates tweets based on key words such as “earthquake” or the equivalent in different languages. It can then send an e-mail listing the cities where the tweets came from and what the tweets said [AP].

Earle’s project isn’t the first to suggest that Twitter’s method of spreading info around the world within seconds could be invaluable during an emergency. But his team’s system runs into the same problems as others, especially sorting through the clutter of tweets. “Because there is a lot of noise in this data and we don’t believe this system could ever be used to initiate a critical response such as shutting down a nuclear power plant, but what it may do is give us an initial heads-up in a region which doesn’t have a dense seismic network that further scientific evaluation is needed,” said Dr Earle [BBC News].

Just as long as the spike in earthquake-related tweets doesn’t bring a visit from the fail whale.

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Image: flickr / Michperu

Razib Khan is always up to something creative and Sunday night was no exception. Check out the google trend for “depression” he spotted unintentionally while searching for the economic meaning of the word:

This graph shows a clear seasonal trend and brings to mind the study on birth season that came out earlier this year from the University of Notre Dame. So perhaps we have yet another factor to consider in the equation of why winter babies seem to fall behind their peers… Might a parent’s emotional state at birth influence the child’s health and achievement later in life?

It’s just amazing to listen to. Here’s Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), stating completely misleading or wrong things like the following:

A Copenhagen agreement will “destroy millions of American jobs and damage our economic competitiveness for decades to come.”

“Also absent from the discussion in Copenhagen is the Climategate scandal. Recently leaked e-mails reveal climate scientists have a long track record of manipulating data to hide scientific evidence that contradicts the global warming establishment…This scandal raises serious questions about Democrats’ climate control plans, questions that deserve a transparent investigation – not a rush to judgment – by the bureaucrats in Copenhagen.”

What can you even really say to this kind of stuff?

Every year, this gets harder.

Not that deciding what pictures to use in 2006, 2007, or 2008 was all that easy! But astronomy is such a beautiful science. Of course it has scientific appeal: the biggest questions fall squarely into its lap. Where did this all begin? How will it end? How did we get here? People used to look to the stars asking those questions, and coincidentally, for the most part, that’s where the answers lie. And we’ll be asking them for a long time to come.

But astronomy is so visually appealing as well! Colorful stars, wispy, ethereal nebulae, galactic vistas sprawling out across our telescopes… it’s art no matter how you look at it. And our techniques for viewing the heavens gets better every year; our telescopes get bigger, our cameras more sensitive, and our robotic probes visit distant realms, getting close-up shots that remind us that these are not just planets and moons; they’re worlds.

So every year the flood of imagery takes longer to sort through, and far longer to choose from. And the choices were really tough! This year leans a bit more toward planetary images than usual, but that’s not surprising given how many spacecraft we have out there these days.

I don’t pick all these images for their sheer beauty; I consider what they mean, what we’ve learned from them, and their impact as well. But have no doubts that they are all magnificent examples of the intersection of art and science. At the bottom of each post is a link to the original source and to my original post on the topic, if there is one. If you disagree with my picks, or think I’ve missed something, put a link in the comments! All the pictures have descriptions, and are clickable to bring you to (in most cases) much higher resolution version. So embiggen away!

And welcome to my annual Top Ten Astronomy Pictures post. Enjoy.

ENTER THE TOP TEN GALLERY

Great news, everyone! The 365 Days of Astronomy citizen podcast will go on for at least another year!

365DoA is an International Year of Astronomy project that lets you, the astronomy enthusiast, create your own astronomy podcast, upload it, and let everyone on this pale blue dot hear it. It was wildly successful, with spots filling up rapidly once it was announce last year. It also won a coveted Parsec podcast award this year, too.

But given this was an IYA 2009 project, I was wondering if it would continue on to 2010 and beyond, and it will! It’ll become a legacy project, and will be handled by Astrosphere New Media Association, a (charitable and tax-deductible!) online astronomy support group made up of dedicated people. I know this for a fact, because I’m a part of it.

Slots for 2010 are going fast, so you better grab a date if you want to participate! And if you want to help, then we could use some sponsors, too:

The podcast team also invites people and organizations to sponsor the podcast by donating $30 to support 1 day of the podcast, with your dedication appearing at the start of the show. For just $360, it is possible to sponsor 1 episode per month. Alternatively, you can also have a dedication message at the end of the show for a week, for a donation at the $100 level. These donations will help pay for editing, and posting of the podcasts.

Each episode gets between 5000 and 10,000 listeners, so it’s not a terrible way to advertise if you’re looking for that. But submitting an entry is free. If you read this blog — and you do, I see you there — then astronomy is something you enjoy. I bet you can think of some topic here that inspires you, that fires you up, that makes you think.

Go ahead! Make my year.

As the tally of known planets beyond our solar system continues to grow, so does the number of them that look familiar—planets close to Earth’s size around stars that resemble our sun. Today astronomers announced that they’ve found a new batch of planets that not only fit that description but also reside in our cosmic neighborhood.

Three planets with masses ranging from 5.3 to 24.9 Earth masses were found orbiting the star 61 Virginis, which is 28 light years from Earth in the constellation of Virgo [Herald Sun]. That star can be seen with the naked eye under dark skies, and team member Chris Tinney says the system is strikingly like our own, noting that Neptune is only 17 Earth masses. In addition, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope recently found a ring of dust around 61 Virginis that’s about twice the distance from that star as Pluto is from our sun. The region between the newly discovered planets and that disk remains unexplored, the astronomers say, and could be the home of even more planets.

Further afield, the fourth planet discovered has a Jupiter-mass planet orbiting the Sun-like star 23 Librae, which lies in the constellation of Libra. It has a 14-year orbit compared to Jupiter’s 12-year orbit and is the second planet found around this star since 2006 [The Telegraph]. This star is about 84 light years away.

Tinney’s team found the new exoplanets by detecting the slight gravitational tugs they exert on their stars, and their proximity has him excited for what else might be in our vicinity, astronomically-speaking. “It looks like there may be many Sun-like stars nearby with planets of about that mass. They point the way to even smaller planets that could be rocky and suitable for life” [Herald Sun].

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Image: J. Langton, Principia College

The world’s largest network of fully wired undersea science stations has gone live off Canada’s western coast. The NEPTUNE network has begun streaming data from undersea instruments and sensors located on the Pacific Ocean floor directly to the Internet. The network is expected to produce 50 terabytes of data annually, all of which will inform scientists about everything from earthquake dynamics to the effects of climate change on the water column, and from deep-sea ecosystems to salmon migration [Scientific American].

NEPTUNE will also feature a deep sea rover nicknamed Wally that will measure the temperature, salinity, methane content, and sediment characteristics on the ocean floor. The $100 million project will produce more than pretty pictures and a fire hose of data—it can also provide advanced tsunami warnings that could save both lives and money.

The NEPTUNE network is already heralded as a revolutionary advancement for ocean explorers, a step toward wiring the oceans so researchers can remotely observe one of the last great unexplored areas on earth. Prior to NEPTUNE, communicating with a submersible required either a radio-equipped buoy or physically docking with the craft. Now, NEPTUNE lets a range of experiments, instruments, and undersea robots broadcast their data directly onto the web [Popular Science]. A fiber-optic cable loop, stretching 497 miles off the coast of Canada, links the undersea instruments to the Internet.

While the instruments will occasionally transmit images of the deep sea to the web, don’t expect a web cam on the seabed. Due to the sensitivity of deep-sea ecosystems to light, images from the remote-controlled NEPTUNE Rover are available only when researchers are moving the rover between locations. The lights will remain off most of the time and it’s unclear when they will be switched on next [Globe and Mail]. In the meantime, Scientific American has a slideshow of the project here.

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Image: NEPTUNE Canada

I don’t know why this hasn’t (apparently) been reported before. But as I note today in Mother Jones:

Although so far it has received little or no attention, the journal Russian Meteorology and Hydrology recently published a new kind of geoengineering study whose lead author is the journal’s editor, the prominent Russian scientist Yuri A. Izrael. Known for his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, his skepticism of human-caused global warming, and his enthusiasm for geoengineering, Izrael also happens to be a top scientific adviser to Vladimir Putin. And now, his paper reports on what is probably the very first geoengineering field trial. Israel and his team of scientists mounted aerosol generators on a helicopter and a car chassis, and proceeded to blast out particles at ground level and at heights of up to 200 meters. Then they attempted to measure just how much sunlight reaching the earth was reduced due to the aerosol plume.

The intervention was effective, the Russian scientists say. And in an accompanying article on geoengineering alternatives, Izrael and colleagues note that “Already in the near future, the technological possibilities of a full scale use of [aerosol-based geoengineering] will be studied.”

Up until now, scientists have largely studied the possibilities of geoengineering in relatively unthreatening computer models—not out in nature itself. They’ve just run a series of simulations to try to assess likely impacts. In this context, the apparent trajectory of Russian research sounds like something quite new. And it may prompt increasing calls for regulation of geoengineering interventions, even at the small scale research level where environmental consequences would be relatively minimal.

Note that this is a small scale field test; it is not like global climate is going to change because of this study. However, it does appear to break new ground, and moves us a step closer to actual interventions.

My report on all this is part of a much larger article on how failure at Copenhagen will give geoengineering advocates an even stronger hand than they are already obtaining. You can read the full report here.

Dreams that major geothermal energy plants could power our future took a major hit last week, as worries over earthquakes and technical failures killed two ambitious projects in consecutive days. The two projects both hoped to harvest the heat of deeply buried bedrock by drilling down, fracturing the rock, and then circulating water through the fissures to produce steam that could drive turbines.

First, on Thursday, the $60 million plan to tap geothermal energy beneath Basel, Switzerland, died for good after a Swiss government study said it would cause millions of dollars in damage through earthquakes each year. The project, led by Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, was suspended in late 2006 after it generated earthquakes that did no bodily harm but caused about $9 million in mostly minor damage to homes and other structures. Mr. Häring is to go to trial next week on criminal charges stemming from the project [The New York Times].

The Swiss project required drilling more than 16,000 feet into the ground, and would have provided electricity to 10,000 homes. But the government’s report stated that the region could see as many as 170 earthquakes during the project’s 30-year lifespan, including 30 during just the first phase of drilling, though most would be minor.

The United States’ geothermal hopes suffered, too, as the AltaRock project located north of San Francisco announced on Friday that it will shut down, despite extensive financial support. In addition to a $6 million grant from the Energy Department, AltaRock had attracted some $30 million in venture capital from high-profile investors like Google, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers [The New York Times]. AltaRock broke drill bits while trying to tap deep rock, and annoyed and worried nearby California residents with its earthquake potential.

This certainly isn’t the end for geothermal power. Other attempts in Switzerland to tap the heat of the Earth’s crust to produce clean energy continue in zones that are less earthquake-prone. Engineers in Zurich started preliminary drilling last month to see if the area was suitable for such a geothermal project [AP]. Scientists say the Swiss government’s report shouldn’t be used to doom other projects, since it focused narrowly on Basel. Here in the United States, the Department of Energy has allocated $440 million just this year to geothermal projects and doesn’t plan to give up on the idea, especially because there are other methods that don’t require fracturing rock or drilling so deep.

Related Content:
80beats: Geothermal Energy Project May Have Caused an Earthquake
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DISCOVER: The Great Forgotten Clean-Energy Source: Geothermal

Image: flickr/Hitchster

An Argonne National Laboratory scientist thinks he has developed a better way to recycle a ubiquitous scourge of the environment—the plastic bag.

New Scientist reports:

Waste plastic from “throwaway” carrier bags can be readily converted into carbon nanotubes. The chemist who developed the technique has even used the nanotubes to make lithium-ion batteries.

This is called “upcycling” – converting a waste product into something more valuable. Finding ways to upcycle waste could encourage more recycling…

The process isn’t cheap, however. It involves an expensive catalyst in cobalt acetate, which is not easily recovered, to convert the high or low-density polyethylene (HDPE and LDPE) into carbon nanotubes. But if the nanotubes are then used to make lithium-ion or lithium-air batteries, that might overcome this problem, since these batteries are already recycled at the end of their use to recover cobalt.

Getting the bags to a recycling facility in the first place may be a hurdle as well. As the picture above shows, asking the public to put forth any effort sometimes seems to be asking too much.

Related Content:
80beats: How to Make a Battery Out of Office Paper & Nanotubes
DISCOVER: The World’s Largest Garbage Dump: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Discoblog: Prison for Plastic? Indian City Initiates Harsh Penalties for Using Plastic Bags
Discoblog: It’s In the Bag! Teenager Wins Science Fair, Solves Massive Environmental Problem
DISCOVER: 9 Ways Carbon Nanotubes Just Might Rock the World

Image: flickr / Sam Felder

This spring I blogged about some marvelous videos made by scientists at Brown University in their quest to understand how bats manage to be bats. Turning your hands into membrane-lined wings makes for some awkward trade-offs. Moving around on the ground, for example, gets to be a special challenge. Bats have not simply evolved a single solution to these trade-offs, however. Instead, they’ve explored lots of different compromises. While many bats can only creep awkwardly on the ground, for example, vampire bats can actually gallop.

Today one of the Brown scientists, Dan Riskin (who has just set up a lab at City College in New York), published a new study on another extraordinary solution to being a bat. Most bats are well-adapted to roosting by hanging upside-down from long claws. But that is not a universal rule. A few bats have evolved a Spiderman strategy.

These bats have pads on their wrists and ankles that they clamp onto surfaces. The sucker-footed bat of Madagascar (Myzopoda aurita), for example, roosts on the inner wall of a rolled-up leaf, its head pointed up instead of the usual down.

The Spiderman strategy has evolved many times in animals. Many insects and spiders can cling to walls, as can frogs and gecko lizards. Mammals–not so much. It’s true that many mammals have pads on their hands and feet that add friction to their grip. But sucker-footed bats are among the few mammal species that can really stick to vertical surfaces.

Last year, Riskin and Paul Racey of the University of Aberdeen went to Madagascar to figure out how sucker-footed bats manage this feat. They filmed the bats climbing sheets of glass and brass. As the bats climbed, the scientists tried to drag and pull them around to measure the forces they generated. They came to a surprising conclusion:

The sucker-footed bats of Madagascar, despite their common name, do not actually suck at all.

Suction works in a distinctive way. If you pull a suction cup away from the surface it’s attached to, the cup will strongly resist your efforts. But you can drag the cup along the surface with much less force. When Riskin and Racey tested the bats, they found that the animals could easily be pulled off a surface. Dragging the bats, however, required much more force. In fact, they calculated that a single wrist pad is so strong that it could hold the weight of eight bats.

But there’s one important caveat to the strength of the bat pads. Riskin and Racey measured strong forces when they pulled down on the bats. But when they pushed the bats upwards on a surface, the pads peeled off right away.

These results indicate that a sucker-footed bat sticks to a leaf by gluing its wrists and ankles to it. Riskin and Racey observed that the pads glistened with some kind of fluid. If they tried to dry the pads off, they got wet again before long. It’s possible that this fluid serves as the glue.

While glue (or, more technically, wet adhesion) may be useful for sticking to surfaces, it poses a challenge of its own: once stuck, a bat needs a way to get unstuck. It appears that sucker-footed bats produce a fluid that’s just sticky enough to keep them clamped to the side of a leaf. But they can peel away easily from one end. This technique may explain why sucker-footed bats defy the heads-down rule among roosting bats. If they tried to hold onto a leaf with their heads pointed down, they’d slide off.

The sucker-footed bats were not the only bats to evolve the Spiderman strategy. In Central and South America, there are four species of disk-winged bats (Thyroptera) that can also cling to leaves with pads. Riskin studied disk-winged bats in graduate school and demonstrated that they can form a seal with the disks on the leaves. In other words, they really do suck. Combined with his latest results, the lesson is clear: there’s more than one way to mimic Spiderman when you’re a bat.

Reference: Daniel K. Riskin and Paul A. Racey, “How do sucker-footed bats hold on, and why do they roost head-up?” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, in press.