Could you please give me your views on the cancellation of daily steam boiler tests.
I am working in a hospital running 2 steam boilers that are unmanned. The steam that they produce is used for the sterilisers. It is a legal requirement that they should be tested every day. and the types of te
We experience some problems with a siemens 2000 Kw master drive:F025
We found a cable with the red phase down to earth. The cable was repaired but still the drive trips on F025
M -T - M arrangement with tie closed in normal operation. What are the advantages and disadvantages? How will the protection scheme look like?
If you have used main tie main arrengement with tie breaker close in normal operation
We are welding a thin wall (0.048") bushing to 1/8" thick material, both are 304 Stainless Steel using TIG with the appropriate rod. The weld is thee pretty good sized tacks. Would a post weld heating be recommended to prevent cracking? If so, at what temperature and how long?
Thanks,
Electrical outlets in O’Hare are like gasoline in The Road Warrior.
(Outfits aren’t as good, though.)
When a Tennessee man hacked Sarah Palin’s e-mail account and wrote of his exploits on the forum 4chan, federal investigators asked the site’s founder Christopher “Moot” Poole for server logs. Court testimony from April and published yesterday shows that federal prosecutors had other pressing questions for Poole: for example, the meaning of “peeps” and “rickroll.”
Assistant to the U.S. Attorney Mark Krotoski questions Poole:
Q. Certain terms, have a meaning unique to 4chan?
A. Yes.Q. Like “OP,” what is “OP”?
A. OP means original poster.Q. Are you familiar these terms, having been the founder and administrator of the 4chan site?
A. Yes.Q. What would “lurker” mean?
A. Somebody who browses but does not post, does not contribute.Q. What do the words “caps” mean?
A. Screenshots.Q. And is there any significance to “new fags”?
A. That is the term used to describe new users to the site.Q. What about “b tard”?
A. It’s a term that users of the /b/- Random board use for themselves.Q. What about “troll”?
A. Troublemaker.Q. “404″?
A. 404 is the status code for not found. It means essentially gone or not found.Q. Not found on where, the 4chan site?
A. 404 is the http status code for not found, a page not found by the Web server.Q. In what about “peeps”?
A. People.Q. “Rickroll”?
A. Rickroll is a mean [sic] or Internet kind of trend that started on 4chan where users — it basically a bait and switch. Users link you to a video of Rick Astley performing Never Gonna Give You Up.
Bonus humor points for the fact that the court reporter had apparently never heard the word “meme” before. The story went viral yesterday; we found it on Gawker’s Valleywag and the complete testimony on The Smoking Gun. Apologies to those hoping to find a reference to LOLcats: relevancy?
Check out DISCOVER on Facebook.
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Image: flickr /Andrew Dupont
Was Lucy a tool user and a meat eater?
Quite possibly, argues a new study in Nature. Archaeologist Shannon McPherron turned up animal bones at an Ethiopian site that he says show markings of stone tool cutting dating back nearly 3.4 million years. That would be a big jump in the record: Right now the oldest known evidence of tool use among our ancestral species dates back about 2.6 million years.
McPherron’s date falls in the time of Australopithecus afarensis, the species to which the famous Lucy find belongs. But thus far he’s found only the markings on bones—not the tools themselves. Perhaps not surprisingly, though, at least one scientist behind the 2.6 million-year-old find says the new study is not convincing evidence that tool use dates back all the way to 3.4 million years ago.
For plenty more about the find—and the differing opinions—check out DISCOVER blogger Ed Yong’s post.
Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Human Ancestors Carved Meat with Stone Tools Almost a Million Years Earlier Than Expected
80beats: Lucy’s New Relative, “Big Man,” May Push Back the Origin of Walking
DISCOVER: How Loyal Was Lucy?
Image: Dikika Research Project
NASA and Israel Space Agency Sign Statement of Intent for Future Cooperation
"During a meeting Tuesday at NASA Headquarters in Washington, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and Israel Space Agency Director General Zvi Kaplan signed a joint statement of intent to expand the agencies' cooperation in civil space activities. The signing followed a meeting between Bolden, Kaplan and Professor Daniel Hershkowitz, Israel's minister of Science and Technology. It advanced discussions that began when Bolden visited Israel in January."
So I’ve recently moved to Washington, D.C., and into a newish building. And I’ve been getting a utility bill with a rather large number being charged (on the order of $ 75 per month) for something called “HVAC,” or, heating, ventilation and air conditioning.
My inquiries into what this charge is for, and whether I can do anything to avoid it, speak volumes about the inefficiencies of our current energy system.
Turns out HVAC is calculated in the following way. There’s a total HVAC value for the building, and then an algorithm is used to apportion a supposedly fair fraction of the bill to each resident. The algorithm centrally takes into account 1) square footage of your apartment unit; 2) number of occupants. All of this is carried out by a sub-metering company, which then sends you the bill.
Let me acknowledge at the outset that I have no idea why things are set up this way–whether it is the choice of my building, or of some utility, or some other possibility. So I’m not laying blame. But I am interpreting the consequences of the arrangement–because as far as I can tell, the consequences are that there is absolutely no incentive for anybody in the building to save energy.
In fact, the incentive is probably the opposite–to blast cold air all the time. After all, you’re not really paying for it–your neighbors are.
In my case, I have a unit that gets no direct sunlight, so that even in this hot DC summer, the temperature remains about 75 degrees on average. Mostly, that’s fine with me, and I rarely use A/C. Furthermore, I travel a lot, and I turn everything off before I leave. So there will be a week or more at a time when there is no air conditioning at all being used in the apartment.
Up until now, then, I’ve been acting as a conscientious energy saver–a perfect little tree hugger. Up until now, I knew nothing about this HVAC business, or that my greenish behavior would have little to no effect on a key component of my energy bill.
But now that I do know, the question becomes, why be green? Heck, I’m tempted to start cranking the A/C. Everybody else in the building is, apparently. I’m no economist, but doesn’t this sound a bit like the tragedy of the commons scenario?
In fairness, I probably get a little bit of cooling from the A/C use of the other apartments, even if my A/C remains turned off. That’s probably worth taking into account. And maybe I’ll want more HVAC in the winter than I do in the summer, due to my lack of sunlight (though I doubt it).
Still, I don’t think these considerations outweigh the fundamental inefficiency and perverse incentives of this situation.
Now multiply my experience by the number of people living in buildings employing a similar sub-metering scenario (I have no idea how many there are, but somebody out there does). My guess is that you will end up with a very large inefficiency and dysfunctionality in our energy economy–a lot of waste, and a lot of discouragement of energy conserving behavior.
Smart metering, anyone?
Every time we slice into a steak or cut into some chicken, we’re taking part in a technological heritage that stretches back at least 3.4 million years. Back then, the only cutting implements around were sharp pieces of stone and there were no true humans around to wield them. But there were still butchers– one of our ancestral species, Australopithecus afarensis, was already using stone tools to flay meat off bones, leaving small nicks with every cut. Such marked bones have been found and they push back the earliest estimates of tool use among human ancestors by 800,000 years.
In January 2009, a team led by Shannon McPherron from the Max Planck Institute found bones which had clearly been worked over with stone tools. The bones, uncovered in Dikika, Ethiopia, include the rib of a cow-sized animal and the thighbone of a goat-sized one. Both bore cuts and scratches inflicted by sharp objects and dents produced by crushing hammers.
By peering at the marks under powerful microscopes and analysing their chemical composition, McPherron confirmed that they were made by stone rather than teeth, and they were created before the bones fossilised. These were not accidental scratches, but the remnants of strikes used to carve off the meat and break into the marrow.
Based on the surrounding rock layers, which have been very accurately dated, McPherron calculated that the bones are at least 3.39 million years old. These relics push back both the history of butchery and the use of stone tools by human ancestors, by almost a million years. Until now, the oldest evidence for the manufacture of stone tools comes from finds in Gona, Ethiopia that are just 2.6 million years old, while the oldest cut-marked bones were found in nearby Bouri and dated to around 2.5 million years ago.
The Dikika site has been thoroughly studied by a team led by Zeresenay Alemseged (photo below), who also had a hand in the latest discovery. In fact, the new bones were found just 200 metres away from Alemseged’s most famous find – the bones of a three-year-old Australopithecus afarensis girl, known as Selam. No other hominin (a term for members of the human lineage) lived in the same area. This provides strong evidence that A.afarensis , such as the famous Lucy, used stone tools and ate meat. Selam may even have watched or helped as her family members carved up the carcass of a large animal.
In a way, this isn’t surprising. Recent discoveries have done much to strip A.afarensis of its early reputation as a primitive hominin and even other primates like chimpanzees use stone tools. McPherron says, “A. afarensis had a similar sized brain and perhaps somewhat better hands for the job, at some level it is not surprising that A. afarensis should use stone tools. However, we can’t assume that simply because chimps use stone tools and we use tools that the behaviour is as old as our common ancestor.”
Nonetheless, both tool use and meat-eating are critically important events in human evolution. “Some have argued that meat consumption is what set us down the path towards the large brained, behaviorally complex species that we are today,” says McPherron. “It has been said that meat made us human. It provides a more nutrient rich diet that made possible a larger brain.”
The use of tools also gave our ancestors access to rich sources of meat, namely the carcasses of large, dead animals. Most other primates would turn their noses up at such foods but it’s clear that A.afarensis did not. Indeed, the costs of eating such carcasses, such as competition with predators, may have driven the use of more sophisticated tools and close teamwork.
For now, McPherron hasn’t actually found any of the actual cutting tools or, in fact, any sharp-edged stones nearby. That’s to be expected – the area where the bones were found used to be part of the floodplain of a river and probably didn’t contain any stones larger than fine gravel. The nearest suitable materials were around 6 kilometres away. “If the stone tool had been made elsewhere and carried to this spot, as it almost certainly was, the odds of us finding it would be small even if they dropped it there,” says McPherron.
There is, of course, another explanation: McPherron’s team could be wrong. Sileshi Senaw, who discovered the Gona tools, certainly thinks so and says that the data just aren’t strong enough to support their conclusions. The Dikika researchers are making a huge claim based on very meager data,” he says. “Researchers who study bone surface modifications from archeological sites have shown that fresh bones trampled by animals can create marks that mimic stone tool cut marks… I am not convinced of the new discovery.”
But McPherron stands by his interpretation and has other explanations: the butchers might just have picked up naturally sharp rocks from their surroundings; they could have made them so infrequently that they’ll be hard to find; or, simply, no one has looked hard enough. “I favor a combination of the last two,” he says.
Alison Brooks from George Washington University agrees. She thinks the sudden appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record, some 2.6 million years ago, doesn’t represent the point where early humans started using them, but the point where they started making them at concentrated sites where they’re more likely to be found. There was a long time window before that when stone tools were used in a more scattered way, a window that McPherron’s team have been lucky enough to look through.
McPherron plans to return to Dikika in January 2011 for a more intensive search. “There’s a location nearby where raw materials for stone tool production may have been available 3.4 [million years ago], and I hope to target this area to see if we can find evidence of stone tool manufacture.”
Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09248
Images by the Dikika Research Project
More on archaeology:
If the citation link isn’t working, read why here
Ever wanted to see a Tarantula up close? Up really close? Here’s your chance!
[Click to hugely enarachnidate, or grab the atomically-mutated, 130 Mb, 9000 x 12000 pixel megaspider version here. But be ye fairly warned, says I: you'll lose your afternoon looking at it.]
That is a new image of the Tarantula Nebula (ha! Got you!) from the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA survey telescope in Chile. The telescope can see in the near-infrared, just outside the range of our human vision, and is being used to map a big chunk of the southern sky.
The Tarantula is a sprawling star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small companion galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy. Of course, "small" is a matter of perspective; the LMC is still tens of thousands of light years across and has several billion stars in it. From its distance of 180,000 light years, the LMC appears as a smudge in the sky to the unaided eyes of southern observers.
In astronomy terms the image above is huge; it covers a square degree of sky, several times the area of the full Moon! However, in real terms, if you lived in the southern hemisphere and went outside on a clear night, you could block out the entire region of the picture with the tip of one finger held at arm’s length.
But VISTA’s 4-meter mirror has fine vision, and the image is crammed with detail. It’s hard to see in the embedded image above because I had to compress it wildly to have any hope of letting y’all see it here. The higher-resolution images, however, are simply spectacular! Here’s a taste; I cropped out a small portion:
Wow! Mind you, this is from the medium resolution image! It’s a section to the right and a bit below the nebula proper. And while it’s crammed with stars, gas, and dust, I didn’t pick it randomly. It has one other object in it of note: Supernova 1987A, an exploded star whose light reached us on February 23, 1987. It was, for a few shining moments, among the brightest objects in the entire Universe… but now is lost in a sea of stars, in a small section of one image of a small galaxy.
The Tarantula Nebula is a forbidding object. It’s well over 600 light years across, has millions of times the Sun’s mass worth of gas jammed into it, and is forming stars so furiously that astronomers think it may actually be creating a globular cluster, a spherical ball of hundreds of thousands of stars. You may have heard of the Orion Nebula, one of the largest and brightest of all nebulae in the Milky Way. Well, the Tarantula is thousands of times more luminous; if it were as far away as the Orion Nebula, the Tarantula would be bright enough to cast shadows on the ground!
VISTA will eventually map out 184 square degrees of the sky, which is truly an enormous swath of the sky at this resolution. It will guide astronomers for years to come, giving us a highly-detailed and, yes, beautiful map of stars, galaxies, and nebulae… and best of all, stuff we’re not even aware of yet. Big surveys always help us piece things together, put the details into perspective.
But oh, sometimes, the details themselves are worth gawking at.
ESO/M.-R. Cioni/VISTA Magellanic Cloud survey. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit
Related posts:
- Hubble sees spectacular star birth and death
- The Orion VISTA
- Incredible VISTA of the cosmos
- Touring the Tarantula
- This Tarantula is definitely deadly
Just days before we lost Stephen Schneider, he sat down for this interview with Climate Science Watch director Rick Piltz. Over a thoughtful and poignant conversation, they touch on climate policy, the so-called “experts” who get quoted by the media, and the anti-regulation ideologues with special interests muddying the waters of sound science and policy decisions.
From the transcript:
CSW: Last thoughts to leave us with?
Schneider: The main thing I want people to remember is that when we’re talking about expertise, we’re not talking about expertise in what to do about a problem. That is a social judgment and every person has the same right to their opinion as any person in climate. However, we are talking about the relative likelihood that there could be serious or even dangerous changes. Because before you even decide how you want to deploy resources as a hedge against a wide range of important social problems, you have to know how serious the problems are. All we’re trying to do in science is give the best estimate that honest people with a lot of evidence can, about the relative risks, so they can make wise decisions in their own lives and in who they elect about how we should deal with it.
If you have no idea about the risk, it’s very hard to rationally do risk management. And we feel that there many people deliberately muddying the risk waters because of a combination of ideology and special interest. We have every right to point out that they have weaker credentials in science than those who are convinced on the basis of the forty year record and longer that the scientific community has been successively examining, year after year after year. That is how we make decisions in medical, in health, or in business. We operate on the basis of preponderance of evidence. The same thing must be done for the planetary life support system. That’s why it’s so important to understand who’s credible.
I strongly encourage everyone to watch.
The fires in western Russia continue to burn. Though the overall area now ablaze has shrunk, the number of individual fires has actually risen today. The death rate in Moscow has doubled, and Russia is racing to stop the flames from spreading to areas still affected by radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster a quarter-century ago.
While firefighting goes on, attention turns to the “why?” Russia’s fire explosion has people wondering if there’s a bigger reason behind it. The topic seems particularly urgent because another major natural disaster is happening not so far away: in northern Pakistan, where exceptionally heavy monsoon rains have caused crushing floods. The big question–whether global warming is responsible–is still unanswered, but scientists do agree that a large weather pattern links the events.
According to meteorologists monitoring the atmosphere above the northern hemisphere, unusual holding patterns in the jet stream are to blame. As a result, weather systems sat still. Temperatures rocketed and rainfall reached extremes [New Scientist].
You’ve probably seen diagrams of the jet stream on weather charts, where a thick band represents its air currents that surge from west to east. However, New Scientist reports, a “blocking event” caused by west-pushing Rossby waves has slowed the jet stream’s flow. This happens from time to time, and it sets the stage for extreme conditions when weather systems hover over the same area.
Says Jeff Knight, climate scientist at the U.K. Met Office:
“Circulation anomalies tend to create warm and cool anomalies: while it has been very hot in western Russia, it has been cooler than average in adjacent parts of Siberia that lie on the other side of the high pressure system where Arctic air is being drawn southwards” [BBC News].
Pakistan also got stuck with a weather system that plunked down and wouldn’t move. The problem there, though, is that it’s monsoon season, and the weird circulation worsened that.
According to Knight, you’d expect to see more such extremes in a warming Earth. Though you can’t point to any one storm, drought, or other event and say “that’s because of global warming,” Russian President Dmitry Medvedev may have been moved by seeing his country on fire. He reportedly linked Russia’s current calamity to climate change in his public comments. According to the World Wildlife Fund’s Alexey Kokorin, that’s quite a step for the nation—though it’s one that’s measured in words.
“These are not brave statements for European leaders or Obama, but for a Russian president, it’s a new statement,” said WWF’s Kokorin. Even last year, Medvedev’s speeches on climate change were more about helping other continents like Europe and Asia without really focusing on the negative and severe impacts for Russia itself, he said [The New York Times].
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Image: NASA Goddard
If your car could talk, it might tell you to stop texting. At least that’s what one research team hopes: after paying young drivers to perform texting-like games while driving a simulator, they found that visual warnings from an in-car “coach” helped keep drivers’ eyes on the road.
For high-risk drivers, the warning system “more than doubled their time until a virtual crash,” a University of Washington press release says. That might not sound entirely reassuring. But the researchers say a similar system installed on a real car might help risky drivers avoid a crash altogether.
A team led by Linda Ng Boyle, an industrial and systems engineer at the University of Washington, first had a group of 53 drivers, ages 18 to 21, attempt to drive a simulator while simultaneously playing a matching game. As an incentive to take the game seriously, they paid drivers according to the correct number of matches they made. The riskiest drivers took their eyes off the road for between two and a half to three seconds, compared to moderate and low-risk drivers who would glance off the road for less than two seconds during their longest glances.
In later tests the researchers activated the driving coach, which flashed warnings on the matching game’s screen. The study noted that the coach decreased the length of high-risk drivers’ glances by an average of 0.4 seconds, decreased their longest glances by about one second compared to risky coach-less drivers, and increased high-risk drivers’ time to collision by around 8 seconds. In the press release, Ng Boyle says the research shows that driver coaching systems can work for both risky and safer drivers:
“I think that drivers are coachable…. The worst drivers can benefit the most, because we can change their behavior the most dramatically. We can also reinforce the good behavior for safer drivers.”
If future driving coaches can talk, we suggest the voice of Knight Rider’s KITT or, better yet, Obi-wan.
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Discoblog: Woman Receives First Ever PhD in Texting
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Discoblog: The New Defense Against Despotism: Text Messaging
Image: Linda Ng Boyle / University of Washington News
A month or more ago, some folks from the American Geophysical Union interviewed me by flip cam about climate science communication, and the short, edited video has just gone up. Here it is:
Hypervelocity stars, such as the on referenced in Tom’s post, are stars which are moving so fast they have achieved escape velocity from the galaxy. Sounds cool, but they’re also known as “exiled stars”, so maybe not so much. They achieve velocity through gravity assist; by getting too close to something of high mass (like a supermassive black hole), and getting a sling-shot out of the galaxy. The star maintains its shape and life cycle, but any planets that were around it would’ve been lost by the sling. These are incredible forces you’re dealing with. There is nothing gentle about the process.
Chandra image of Sgr A*, NASA/CXC/MIT/F. Baganoff, et al
We use the same process when we sling our spacecraft around planets to give them a speed-boost. It works VERY well.
How common is such an event we don’t know. We’ve found 16 so far. The original companion planets of the stars may be on their way out of the galaxy, also, but since they aren’t shiny we don’t see them. They aren’t still circling their star, that’s for certain. They all may eventually be captured, but it won’t be in this galaxy. They’re outta here.
Theorized in 1988 and discovered in 2005, not much yet is known about HVS. So far, the theory runs that there may be as many as 1,000 of them in the Milky Way Galaxy. Considering there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, that’s not a whole lot. Still, they sure aren’t hanging around waiting for us to take their picture. We could be getting new ones all the time.
Some scientists think our HVS could be stars our galaxy originally captured from an orbiting dwarf galaxy which got too close. Some neutron stars are inferred to be at high velocity, but that’s the result of an asymmetrical supernova. Not only did it supernova, it supernovaed messily. An example of that would be the neutron star RX J0822-4300, which moves at 0.5% of light speed, or about 1500 km/s. That speed doesn’t grab you? The 125X1400mm shell fired out of a tank travels at about 1700 m/s. Or about 6120 km/h. Hmmm, that’s kilometers per second vs kilometers per hour. These puppies aren’t wasting time.
The first HVS discovered is SDSS J090744.99+024506.8. Its “other” name is The Outcast Star. I don’t know which is worse. One thing is for sure; there are a lot of strange, strange things in the universe. Some of them in our own back yard.
This week brings the annual return of the Perseids, one of the most stunning meteor showers of the year, visible from just about anywhere.
WHAT: The height of the Perseid shower comes every August, because that’s the time our planet passes through a certain debris path.
The Perseids are created by the tiny remnants left behind by comet Swift-Tuttle. The Earth passes through this material once a year, creating a spectacular show as the cometary particles burn up in the atmosphere [Discovery News].
WHERE: Like the Orionid meteors, which come around in October, the Perseids are so named because of the constellation from which they appear to originate.
If you trace the Perseid meteor trails backward, they meet within the constellation Perseus the Hero; this is how the shower got its name [Astronomy].
WHEN: Tonight (Wednesday) through Friday night we’ll see the height of Perseid visibility once the sky reaches full darkness, from 11 p.m. to midnight wherever you might be until the first light of dawn. On Friday night the crescent moon will set before twilight ends, giving stargazers a dark sky to gaze at.
Swift-Tuttle’s debris zone is so wide, Earth spends weeks inside it. Indeed, we are in the outskirts now, and sky watchers are already reporting a trickle of late-night Perseids. The trickle could turn into a torrent between August 11th and 13th when Earth passes through the heart of the debris trail [NASA Science News].
Indeed, the opening shot of the Perseids appeared as a bright fireball over Alabama on August 3.
WHAT YOU NEED: Your two eyes, and a place away from the city lights. For more cool Perseid details, check out Astronomy’s coverage.
Related Content:
80beats: Found on a Martian Field: A Whomping Big Meteorite
80beats: Study: 20-Million-Year Meteorite Shower Turned Earth Warm & Wet
80beats: Scientists Pick Up the Pieces (Literally) of an Asteroid Spotted Last October
80beats: Perseid Meteor Shower Should Dazzle Despite a Bright Moon (2009 edition)
Image: flickr / aresauburn
Rapper Dr. Dre is planning on an instrumental album based on the planets! From Vibe magazine:
You mentioned a hip-hop album without rapping. Will we ever hear a Dr. Dre instrumental album?
Oh yeah, that’s in the works. An instrumental album is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I have the ideas for it. I want to call it The Planets. I don’t even know if I should be saying this, but [bleep] it. [Laughs.] It’s just my interpretation of what each planet sounds like. I’m gonna go off on that. Just all instrumental. I’ve been studying the planets and learning the personalities of each planet. I’ve been doing this for about two years now just in my spare time so to speak. I wanna do it in surround sound. It’ll have to be in surround sound for Saturn to work.
Hmmm, interesting. This sounds pretty cool, though I’m a little concerned with what he means by "the personalities of each planet". In today’s culture that could mean anything… but then, Gustav Holst wrote a classical suite using the same idea, and it is to this day one of the most deservedly popular pieces of music ever written. I’m usually willing to cut musicians a little slack, since it’s art and open to interpretation. And if it brings more people into the astronomical fold, then more power to him. I’ll be curious to hear it when it comes out!
Tip o’ the conductor’s baton to Ryan Gagne.
Study: Foreign-trained doctors as good as those trained in USA USA Today The study included more than 6100 doctors, including about 4600 US medical school graduates and 1500 international medical school graduates. ... Study points to gap in US medical educationBoston Globe |
