The latest episode of Point of Inquiry has just gone up. My guest this week is Naomi Oreskes, science historian and author (with Eric Conway) of the new book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. You can stream the eposide here, and download/subscribe here. Here's part of the write up: Through extensive archival research, Oreskes and Conway have managed to connect the dots between a large number of seemingly separate anti-science campaigns that have unfolded over the years. It all began with Big Tobacco, and the famous internal memo declaring, “Doubt is our Product.”
Then came the attacks on the science of acid rain and ozone depletion, and the flimsy defenses of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program. And the same strategies have continued up to the present, with the battle over climate change.
Throughout this saga, several key scientific actors appear repeatedly—leaping across issues, fighting against the facts again and again. Now, Oreskes and Conway have given us a new and unprecedented glimpse behind the anti-science curtain. Once again, you can stream the eposide here, download/subscribe here--and order Merchants of Doubt here.
Software for Reading Web Pages
This may be of interest for users with sight problems
http://www.southstaffordshirepct.nhs.uk/listen.asp
http://www.browsealoud.com/page.asp?pg_id=80004&os=windows
and its free from the uk National Health Service
World Science Festival: The 4 Ways to Find E.T. | Discoblog
How do you hunt for extraterrestrial life? You visit other planets, you find new planets, you study our own planet, or you listen.
All four methods came together last night at the World Science Festival when four speakers took part in a conversation called, simply, “The Search for Life in the Universe.” When you put four lively scientists with four different ways of thinking on a stage together, consensus isn’t the first thing to emerge. But the panel could agree on one thing: If you yearn to know whether we’re alone in the universe, it’s a hell of a time to be alive.
1. Mars
Steve Squyres of Cornell University is one of the project leads on the Mars rovers, those endurance robots Spirit and Opportunity that continue sending back Martian data. Spirit may be stuck, but in this week’s edition of the journal Science, Squyres’ team has published a new study based on information the rover found at a rock outcropping called Comanche about four years ago.
Spirit found evidence of carbonates that would have formed in the presence of water. The rover had done that before, but what’s exciting now, Squyres says, is that the chemistry of these new carbonate finds show they formed in water of a more neutral pH, rather than the more acidic circumstances that would have formed prior carbonate finds.
That water no longer flows on the martian surface, but “this points to more life-friendly conditions” billions of years ago, he said.
2. A Second Earth?
Humans have long imagined faraway planets around other stars, Harvard astronomer David Charbonneau said. “We are all alive at this magical moment when we have the technical ability to find those planets.”
The count of known exoplanets now stands at greater than 400, and astronomers have found most of those by one of two methods. There’s the wobble, in which astronomers spy a star jostled ever so slightly by its planet’s gravity. It’s like watching a dance, Charbonneau said, “it’s just that one of the dance partners is 1,000 times heavier than the other.” Secondly, there’s the transit method, in which a planet passes in front of its star and dims the star slightly, giving away its presence.
Charbonneau is also a member of the Kepler Space Telescope team. It launched last year with the express purpose of exoplanet hunting, and at the World Science Festival he predicted it would find a truly Earth-like world in two to three more years (he’s gotten close already). Plus, in 2014, exoplanet hunters will get another assist from this bad boy, the James Webb Space Telescope, a full-scale replica of which is currently on display in Battery Park.
3. Science Staycation
“This is my favorite planet, I have to say.”
Michael J. Russell is the most Earth-focused of the four panelists who spoke last night. And he might be the most convinced that Earth is not alone in harboring life. As someone who studies the emergence of life on our homeworld, especially the possibility that it emerged in the pressure cooker of deep-sea vents, Russell is impressed by the reach and expansion of life here. And that’s a good sign for life elsewhere in the universe.
What can Earth tell us about life on distant worlds? Life, Russell says, leaves evidence of itself in the waste it leaves behind. It accelerates chemical reactions—through photosynthesis, for example. Says Russell: “The question isn’t, ‘What is life?’ What we should ask is, ‘What does life do?’”
4. SETI
Zeta rays. Zeta rays are the key.
OK, I don’t know what zeta rays are, and neither does Jill Tarter, longtime member of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The point is that we’re using technologies and weird physics that we didn’t know about a half-century ago when SETI was founded. Given our location in the galaxy, she says, any civilization that might like to contact us probably has had more time to mature. “We can be fairly confident that we are the youngest,” she said.
Thus, we use the methods we know—like optical and radio signals—to search for alien intelligences. But they might be trying to reach us with zeta rays, or some other crazy thing we haven’t discovered yet. That, plus the great vastness of the galaxy, tells Tarter that 50 years of nothing but silence doesn’t mean SETI is a failure. It means they’re just getting started.
[Read more about SETI's first 50 years in the feature "Call Waiting" in the July/August issue of DISCOVER, on newsstands soon.]
So what if it’s out there?
“First of all, I’m going to take a drink of champagne,” Tarter said.
In case you were worried, SETI does have a plan in place for its response to an alien signal. Tarter says the scientists won’t attempt to respond themselves, but would rather tell the world and try to reach a global consensus for our planet’s next move.
Right… “global consensus.” Tarter concedes that this sounds great on paper and is probably impossible to achieve. But in a socially connected world, maybe we can just take a vote on whether or not we want to tell E.T. we’re here.
That plan, of course, would apply only if we found intelligent life. But if we detected even “pond scum,” Squyers said, the achievement would be monumental. He’s willing to accept that habitable environments proliferate throughout the galaxy. Even in our own solar system, promising locales for life like the moons Europa and Titan lie outside what we would call the “Goldilocks Zone.” But finding that life independently arose twice just in our own tiny solar system would mean to him that the universe is “teeming with life.”
I hope it is.
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80beats: Kepler Sends Postcards Home: It’s Beautiful Out Here
80beats: New Super-Earth: Hot, Watery & Nearby
80beats: Stephen Hawking, For One, Does Not Welcome Our Potential Alien Overlords
Documentary Film Review: Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders
A portrait of doctors doing the best they can in hellish circumstances that shows them as more human and heroic than ever.
Marketing CP Violation | Cosmic Variance
A couple of weeks ago we heard news that the Tevatron at Fermilab, soon to be superseded by the LHC at CERN as the world’s cutting-edge high-energy particle accelerator, might not be completely out of surprises just yet. The D0 experiment released results that seemed to indicate an asymmetry between the properties of matter and antimatter, at a level just a smidgen above what you need to claim a statistically significant result. Blogs started chattering right away, of course, but this was big enough news to be splashed across the front page of the New York Times.
The measurement concerns the decay of B mesons — particles consisting of one bottom (b) quark and one lighter antiquark, or vice-versa. If the other quark is a down, the corresponding meson Bd is electrically neutral, as is its antiparticle. They can therefore practically indistinguishable, and can oscillate back and forth between each other. The one difference is that the meson and anti-meson decay a little bit differently; this has been studied in great detail at B-factories, with results that have been very useful in determining values of parameters in the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
The new D0 results use a different kind of particle — the Bs meson, in which a strange quark rather than a down quark is stuck to the bottom quark. They measured the relative rate of decay of the Bs and its antiparticle, and found a discrepancy that appears inconsistent — barely — with the Standard Model. In particular, they looked at decays that produced muons or anti-muons.
You would expect that a single collision would produce one Bs and one anti-Bs, and that one would decay into a muon and the other into an anti-muon. But because the neutral B mesons can oscillate into their own antiparticles, sometimes you will get decays into the same kind of particle — both muons, or both anti-muons. If matter and antimatter were completely symmetric, each possibility should happen equally often; 50% of the time you’d get two muons, and 50% of the time you’d get two anti-muons. But you don’t; D0 reports that they see muons more often than anti-muons. That breaks the symmetry between matter and antimatter, and in a way that doesn’t seem compatible with the Standard Model. If the only thing going on was ordinary Standard Model interactions, the discrepancy should be too small to be observed by the experiment. That’s what all the excitement is about.
Like most just-barely-significant results, this one is very likely to ultimately go away once more data are obtained. Indeed, the competing CDF experiment at Fermilab has already indicated that they don’t see the effect. But you never know.
And after that lengthy introduction, what I actually wanted to say is: I find the way that exciting results about matter/antimatter asymmetry are marketed to be somewhat annoying. (I know you are fascinated to hear about my pet peeves.)
In technical jargon, what’s actually being measured is CP violation. Built into the framework of quantum field theory, which is the basis for all of modern particle physics, are three different “reflection” symmetries — transformations with the property that, if you do them twice, you come back to where you started. One is time reversal, labeled T; one is parity or mirror symmetry, labeled P; and one is “charge conjugation”, or matter-antimatter exchange, labeled C. Every one of them was originally believed to be a symmetry, i.e. that the behavior of matter stayed the same under these transformations; in every case, we were wrong and Nature chooses to violate them. We still believe that the combination of all three, labeled CPT, is a good symmetry, but by now we’re a bit more open-minded.
Charge conjugation C is violated pretty blatantly in the standard model. Fermions — “matter” particles like quarks and leptons, in contrast to bosons that are “force” particles like photons and gluons — come in right-handed and left-handed varieties. These are related by parity; if you have a right-handed particle and you do a P transformation, you get a left-handed particle. The weak interactions of particle physics, as it turns out, only involve left-handed fermions and right-handed antifermions; the right-handed fermions and left-handed antifermions simply don’t feel the weak interactions at all. Charge conjugation would change a left-handed electron, which does feel the weak interactions, into a left-handed positron, which does not. That’s a pretty easy difference to detect, so C is dramatically violated in the Standard Model.
But the combination CP changes a left-handed electron into a right-handed positron, both of which do feel the weak interactions. So this is a good symmetry — almost. It turns out that much more subtle effects do violate CP (including the decays of B mesons). Nobel Prizes were handed out for the experimental discovery in 1980, and for the theoretical background in 2008.
So CP violation is interesting — it’s a deep feature of particle physics, representing a breakdown of a fundamental symmetry, for which Nobel Prizes are handed out on multiple occasions. But that’s doesn’t seem juicy enough to some people. Whenever a new result concerning CP violation is announced, it’s never enough to give the kind of explanation I just did. It’s always couched in terms of “Why are we here?”
The point is that CP violation plays a crucial role in baryogenesis, the mysterious process that accounts for the excess of matter over antimatter in our actual universe. Long ago Andrei Sakharov showed that you couldn’t generate such an imbalance unless you violated CP. And baryogenesis is very important — we wouldn’t be here, blogging, if there were equal numbers of particles and antiparticles in the universe.
So in some general terms, the subject of CP violation and the subject of “Why are we here?” are intertwined. But not that much. The logic seems to be something like this:
- CP violation has something to do with baryogenesis.
- This experiment has something to do with CP violation.
- Therefore, this experiment has something to do with baryogenesis.
I’ll leave it to the trained philosophers in the audience to find the logical flaw in that argument. Try substituting “George Washington” and “cherry trees” for “CP violation” and “baryogenesis.”
The point is that the conclusion doesn’t hold — not everything about CP violation is necessarily related to baryogenesis. We don’t know how baryogenesis actually happened — there are many theories on the market, and any of them or none of them may be right. Therefore, there’s no way of knowing whether any particular manifestation of CP violation is in any way related to baryogenesis. There could be lots of different ways in which CP is violated. In particular, there’s no compelling theoretical reason why the CP violation being studied in the decays of B mesons has anything at all to do with baryogenesis. It’s possible — lots of things are possible. But what’s being studied isn’t baryogenesis; it’s CP violation.
So why isn’t that enough? The answer is obvious — explaining why we are here seems to be something that a wider audience can get excited by more directly than studying the details of a slightly-broken symmetry. The only problem is that it’s not true; these experiments aren’t really studying why we are here.
We can’t blame journalists for this one; here is a case where they are just reporting what the scientists tell them, and the scientists are quite willing to be shameless. I understand the motivation for being shameless — it’s hard to explain the details, and the results are legitimately interesting. But ultimately I don’t think it’s right to say untrue things in the name of getting people excited about true things.
I would therefore like to see particle physicists take a slightly more honest tack about the importance of CP violation. It’s perfectly okay to say that it gives us insight into the difference between matter and antimatter — that’s true. And that should be enough! It’s not okay to say that it gives us insight into the imbalance between matter and antimatter in our observable universe; it’s completely possible (even likely) that such a statement is simply false. If we get people excited about what we’re doing by causing them to misunderstand what that actually is, we’re ultimately not winning.
How Do You Like Your Vodka Molecules: Shaken or Stirred? | Discoblog
Stolichnaya or Grey Goose, martinis shaken or stirred: Everybody’s got a preference. Vodka may not taste like much—in industry terms, it’s neutral—but any bartender can tell you about the fierce partisanship its different types inspire. This division among drinkers, a new study suggests, could be a result of slight differences in the vodkas’ molecular structure.
Vodka is about 60 percent water by volume, and 40 percent ethanol, an alcohol. The water and ethanol naturally mingle in such close quarters, and some of the molecules stick together in interesting ways.
Researchers at the University of Cincinnati and Moscow State University compared the chemical composition of five common brands—Belvedere, Grey Goose, Oval, Skyy, and Stolichnaya—to see if those water-ethanol groupings always happen the same way. They found that two of the vodkas had a higher concentration a certain cage-like chemical structure, in which five or so molecules of water surround each ethanol molecule. This difference, the researchers say, might explain our preferences for one brand over another. It’s even possible that the act of shaking a vodka martini breaks up those cage structures.
It’s not clear if such a subtle change in molecular make-up could affect taste, or even that those cage-like structures hold together long enough to have much of an impact at all. So for now, it may be wise to take this explanation with a grain of salt—and, while you’re at it, maybe a few olives.
– by Valerie Ross
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Image: flickr / paPisc
Report Urges More Education About Online Safety
From Wash Post Technology:
An online safety committee created by Congress will recommend on Friday that educators and government leaders focus on teaching children and parents about safe Internet practices while recognizing the limits of filtering technology in protecting young peo
Today: The First Test Launch of the SpaceX Astronaut Taxi | 80beats
The scene is set at Cape Canaveral: Atop the two-stage Falcon 9 rocket sits a dummy of the Dragon Spacecraft capsule that could one day taxi cargo and astronauts to and from the International Space Station. This will be the first launch of the the rocket, built by the privately-owned company SpaceX and funded in part by a $1.6 billion contract with NASA. The Falcon 9 should take off between 11 this morning and 3 in the afternoon (eastern daylight time), though the company has reserved a second launch window for tomorrow. Currently, a live feed of the launch pad shows the rocket primed to go, but announces a launch delay of unknown duration.
SpaceX’s ultimate goals for this test, as described on the company’s website: “launch and separate from Falcon 9, orbit Earth, transmit telemetry, receive commands, demonstrate orbital maneuvering and thermal control, re-enter atmosphere, and recover Dragon spacecraft.” This is a pretty big wish list, since many first launches have failed, including several of SpaceX’s own early attempts with the Falcon 9’s predecessor, the smaller Falcon 1 rocket. So SpaceX company founder Elon Musk hedged his bets when asked what he expected from the Falcon 9’s debut launch.
Historically, the maiden flights of rockets have a notoriously high failure rate. Some two-thirds of the rockets introduced in the past 20 years have had an unsuccessful first outing. “A 100% success would be reaching orbit,” Mr Musk told reporters on the eve of the launch, “but I think given this is a test flight, even if we prove out just that the first stage works correctly – that will have been a good day. And it will be a great day if both stages work correctly.” [BBC]
The Dragon’s voyage to orbit will last about 10 minutes. If successful, the capsule, capable of carrying 13,000 pounds, will later provide supplies to the ISS and also carry satellites into orbit. SpaceX has kept human spaceflight in mind as they designed the capsule, but fitting it for humans (the company says seven passengers could fit inside) would require an estimated three years and a contract with the International Space Station. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, the company has developed this system at a fraction of the cost that big name competitors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin needed to design the current generation of rockets, and the indefatigable company hasn’t given in to early criticism from the likes of the U.S. Air Force.
“There are a lot of critics out there we wouldn’t convince under any circumstances,” Mr. Musk said in an interview earlier this year. “There is zero chance of [NASA] affording another Apollo program” and funding it with tax dollars, he said. “If we want to do great things on that scale again, it’s going to be for a much smaller budget.” One that relies on commercial entities providing and operating spacecraft at discounted prices. “The best thing that NASA can do is define the goal, but not define the path.” [Wall Street Journal]
Others at SpaceX echo Musk’s definition of success, noting that even if the ship fails to meet today’s goals that is could provide information to make later launch attempts.
“If the vehicle lifts off the pad, no matter what the outcome is, we’re going to learn something that’s going to make the second flight more likely and the third flight and the fourth flight,” added Ken Bowersox, a SpaceX vice president and former NASA astronaut.[Reuters]
If successful, next steps will include first an ISS fly-by and later a docking with the station.
Related content:
Bad Astronomy:Space X to launch Falcon 9 at 15:00 UT today
Bad Astronomy: Falcon 9 getting ready for maiden voyage
Bad Astronomy: Space X tests re-entry material
80beats: Fired Up: SpaceX Successfully Tests Rocket Engines; Plans for an April Launch
80beats: Internet Millionaire’s Privately Funded Rocket Reaches Orbit
80beats: Millionaire’s Private Rocket Fails to Reach Orbit on Third Try
Cosmic Variance: SpaceX Launches a Satellite
Image: SpaceX
Followup: Jupiter impact video, and a color picture! | Bad Astronomy
Anthony Wesley, who discovered the impact event on Jupiter yesterday, has posted a lovely color image of the flash:
Wow. He was only taking greyscale video, but put together a three-color composite and added in the data from the flash. So this image is not precisely real, but on the other hand is no less real than other astronomical images. He has also posted a greyscale video of the flash which is pretty tremendous, too. It’s also up on YouTube:
Note the ring of light just around the flash itself, just barely visible around the central point. That’s probably not a physical halo; it’s an artifact of how telescopes and detectors see bright point sources — the way the light spreads out in an optical system is called the point spread function. Many Hubble images of stars, for example, show the same ring.
By coincidence, the impact point appears to be near the edge of where the South Equatorial Belt on Jupiter is. That’s the belt that disappeared recently. That’s guaranteed to be a coincidence; the belt vanished many weeks ago. And I expect some folks will ask if the impact may affect the belt. My gut says no. You have to appreciate the scale of what you’re seeing here: Jupiter is 140,000 km (86,000 miles) across — 11 times the diameter of the Earth! In this picture, the Earth wouldn’t even stretch across the North Equatorial Belt, the dark red band above Jupiter’s equator.
So even though this explosion may have been the equivalent of thousands of nuclear weapons all blowing up at once, it probably will only have a passing and unnoticeable effect on Jupiter’s weather. But note: I’m guessing. Jupiter is a complex and weird planet.
Also, a lot of people are asking how this can be an impact if Jupiter isn’t solid. After all, what’s getting hit?
Again, remember the scale. What you’re seeing on Jupiter is the tops of its clouds, which are tens of thousands of kilometers deep. When a large rock enters at high speed — and with Jupiter’s gravity, those speeds can reach 80 km/sec (50 miles/sec) or more — it slams into the air and feels a huge amount of pressure. Moving at hypersonic speeds, it compresses the gas violently, and the gas heats up. The rocks slows, converting its enormous energy of motion into heat. It also starts to break up due to stress, creating many smaller chunks. These each slam the gas and heat it, and also get stressed. They fall apart, creating smaller chunks… and at some moment, usually just seconds after everything starts, the pieces are so small they burn up completely due to the heat, dumping all their energy all at once into the atmosphere. This happens so suddenly, and the energy release so vast, it’s by any definition an explosion.
The bigger the rock, and the faster it moves, the more explosive energy it releases. A rock 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) across moving at 80 km/sec will explode with the energy of almost <Dr. Evil>one million one-megaton bombs</Dr. Evil>.
So that’s why you don’t need to hit anything solid to make a big boom.
By the way, had this event happened here on Earth with the same energy release, it wouldn’t be an extinction level event like the dinosaur killer, but it would — not to get too technical or anything — suck mightily. Anything within hundreds of kilometers would be totaled and burning, global weather patterns would be affected, and even though it wouldn’t kill everybody, I expect there would be a global economic collapse that would cripple the planet. And I wonder if some governments might see this as an opportune time to attack any pesky neighbors… happily, on average an impact this large is extremely rare, like once every half million years or so.
It’s not clear how often Jupiter gets hit, and this is only the third confirmed impact we’ve seen (along with the Shoemaker Levy 9 comet impact in 1994, and last year’s asteroid impact also discovered by Wesley). But with amateurs getting more sophisticated in their technique and equipment, expect to see more of these. And they can monitor Jupiter far better and more completely than professional observatories can (which are usually pointed elsewhere; it’s a big sky), so not only will we see more of these, but they’ll be almost exclusively the domain of the amateur astronomer.
And my sincere and very hearty congratulations and thanks to Wesley and Christopher Go for their amazing images and footage of this incredible event!
Image and video credit: Anthony Wesley
Time to Vote For 3 Quarks Daily’s Science Prize | The Loom
Thanks to everyone who nominated posts from the Loom for 3 Quarks Daily’s Science Prize. Now it’s time to vote!
If you need some background information on the prize, go here. You can then peruse the list of nominated posts here. Great stuff abounds, so you won’t hurt my feelings if you decide someone else’s post is the best! When you’re ready, vote here. The deadline is June 7, 11:59 PM eastern time.
The top 20 vote-getting posts will then be judged by the folks at 3 Quarks Daily, who will then pass their top 6 to Richard Dawkins. Dawkins will then select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winner. Winners will be announced June 21, 2010.
Small Engine Hour Meter
I have a Briggs & Stratton #030210 Elite Series 13,500 Watt 15 HP Vanguard OHV Gas Powered Portable Generator With Electric Start.
I would like to add a surface mount hour meter for maintenance tracking. B&S does have a #5081H hour meter but the reviews I have read are mixed. One major
Survival wind speed meaning?
Dear Colleagues, I have to design 56m lattice tower about these parameters: Basic wind speed (3 sec gust)- 42m/s Survival wind speed 48,8m/s What is the meaning of these 48,8m/s how to use this data in my design? I would design the tower for 42m/s using the results from 1,2D+-1.6W combo. Will design
Let’s Put the Oil Spill Crisis to Good Use and Take Control
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Rahm Emanuel
Finally, Rahm and I agree on something! Unfortunately, we’re going to part ways on the solution to putting the Deepwater Horizon crisis to good use. The Obama administration and the left will argue that the Federal Government needs to interfere more in the operations [...]
“Top Cap” Installed on BP Oil Leak; Effectiveness Remains to Be Seen | 80beats
The top cap is in place. How much oil is it actually capturing, though? The Coast Guard says we won’t know until later in the day, but plenty is still leaking into the Gulf of Mexico.
After failing to cut through the riser with its fancy-sounding diamond-tipped saw, BP yesterday had to settle for cutting the broken riser pipes with what’s been described as a big pair of shears. That method, however, likely produced a rougher cut along the edge, which would hamper the effectiveness of the containment dome BP has now placed on top of its leak.
The government’s point man for the crisis, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, said the cap’s installation atop a severed pipe late Thursday was a positive development but it was too early to tell if will work. The funnel-like lid is designed to channel oil for pumping to a surface tanker. “Even if successful, this is only a temporary and partial fix and we must continue our aggressive response operations at the source, on the surface and along the Gulf’s precious coastline,” Allen said in a statement [AP].
This morning Allen offered the very rough estimate of the containment dome’s effectiveness, saying it might be capturing 1,000 barrels of oil per day. If that’s the right number, then it’s practically nothing: The government’s own estimate was increased last week to between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels per day, and BP warned that the flow would increase when it sheared off the pipe in preparation for installing the dome. According to the Christian Science Monitor, it does appear that a jagged cut has hurt the ability to capture oil:
That seemed to be the case early Friday morning, according to the BP “spillcam,” as a plume of oil and gas burst from the side of the top cap and a “dispersant ops” sub injected a kerosene dispersant into the plume via a long rod [Christian Science Monitor].
Back on shore, people are getting desperate. Oil has been found on about 100 miles of U.S. shoreline along the Gulf already, with more to come. In Louisiana, the government has entered “try anything” mode: Governor Bobby Jindal is going ahead with a plan to dredge massive amounts of sand to build 6-feet-tall sand berms that, in theory, could protect about 100 miles of Louisiana shores from the incoming oil.
The project would require dredging an estimated 68 million cubic meters of sand and cost at least $350 million—perhaps three times that figure. “I was stunned,” says Joseph Kelley, a coastal geophysicist at the University of Maine, Orono. “This is a big proposal and not well thought out” [ScienceNOW].
Nevertheless, the feds have now given the thumbs-up for Louisiana to build about half the proposed amount. Says Allen:
“There are a lot of doubts whether this is a valid oil spill–response technique. But we’re not averse to attempting this as a prototype” [ScienceNOW].
With BP’s plans ending consistently in failure, it’s time to consider all ideas on the table. For this one, though, many scientists are relieved that it will be half-sized, at least to start out with. Beyond the question of whether it will even work—given the timetable to build it and the likelihood of storms destroying it, it might not—there’s also the chance that it will harm the Louisiana wetlands even more than doing nothing. If sand is gathered from the marshes and then thrown asunder by storms, the area might lack the sand resource it needs to recover.
Previous posts on the BP oil spill:
80beats: Oil Spill Update: Saw Gets Stuck; Will Oil Still Be Leaking at Christmas?
80beats: With “Top Kill” a Failure, BP Goes Back to the Containment Dome Plan
80beats: This Hurricane Season Looks Rough, And What If One Hits the Oil Spill?
80beats: We Did the Math: BP Oil Spill Is Now Worse Than the Exxon Valdez
80beats: Scientists Say Gulf Spill Is Way Worse Than Estimated. How’d We Get It So Wrong?
Image: BP
Spiritual Quotation: Sacred Feminine, Water
God our Mother, Living Water . . .
Air Purifiers
I am looking to purchase an Oreck air purifier, but am concerned that they are way over priced and in all actuality have no benefit. Does anyone have experience with Oreck air purifiers and are they worth the price?
FDA Approval Is Not A Shield
From Chemical & Engineering News: Latest News:
Generic drug manufacturers are not shielded from lawsuits over the safety of their products despite FDA approval, a federal judge has ruled. On May 26, U.S. District Judge Berle M. Schiller refused to dismiss litigation brought by c
Harnessing a Star's Power for Clean Energy
From CNET News.com:
Think clean energy is a fantasy? What if the power of a star was applied to the problem? That's the approach being explored at the National Ignition Facility, a huge-scale experiment in laser fusion based at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory here. Sc
DIY Truck Bed Protection
In this episode, Motorz TV shows you how to perform three installs on two pickup trucks. First, you'll learn how to install a truck cap and a bedliner on a Ford F-250. Next, you'll learn how to install a BedRug BedTred, a truck bed liner with a textured appearance.
Watch th
Just How Much Sex Are We Talking About? | The Intersection
This is the last in a series of guest posts from Vanessa Woods, author of the new book, Bonobo Handshake. Vanessa is a Research Scientist in Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University and studies the cognition of chimpanzees and bonobos in Congo. So there is some doubt floating around like a bad smell, that bonobos don't even have that much sex. For a species that only 25% of people know is a great ape, and those that do know them only really know about their great sex life, taking the sex away from bonobos is like taking the mojo from Austin Powers. Don't let anyone tell you bonobos have equal or less sex than chimpanzees. Like this article in the New Yorker or scientists like Stanford 1998: “Female bonobos are frequently portrayed as hyper-sexual, but mating frequencies in the wild are actually quite comparable for the two species of Pan.” When I was at Lola, I did a study. I compared the infant bonobos in the Lola nursery to infant chimpanzees in a chimp sanctuary. The nursery groups are isolated from the adults, so they can’t learn their sexual behaviors from adults. And they are wild-born, some of them just arrived and they live ...
