National Lab Day

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National Lab Day, NSF

"National Lab Day is a volunteer initiative to form local communities of support around science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) teachers and to connect them with STEM professionals who will share their expertise as well as their excitement and passion for their disciplines."

National Lab Day Teams With the White House for National Launch

"Today, National Lab Day (NLD) joined with Obama Administration officials to participate in hands-on discovery activities at schools throughout the Washington Metropolitan area. As a part of National Lab Day's official launch, today's events highlight the wide range of projects and matches between K-12 classes and experts achieved through the NLD website."

Holdren Makes Impact (Craters) on National Lab Day, OSTP

Photo: "Following the Q&A, Dr. Holdren joined the students in literally getting their hands dirty in an educational activity set up by NASA. Students created a simulated asteroid surface using a mixture of soil, flour, and other ingredients. Then, using golf balls and a protractor, they observed how changes in the angle of a projectile's impact affected the area and volume of the resulting craters."

NASA Targeting Educators in National Lab Day Webcasts

"Though slated for May 12, 2010, National Lab Day is more than just a day. It's a nationwide initiative that gets volunteers, university students, scientists and engineers to work together with educators to bring discovery-based science experiments to students in grades K-12."

Keith's note: Oddly enough, when I go to NASA's main education webpage I see absolutely no mention of this event. One would think that with all the serious media exposure given to this event by the White House that this would prompt NASA to pay a little more attention to it. Guess not.

This Fish Has Seen the Enemy, and It Is Him | Discoblog

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Male cichlid fish apparently don't like what they see in the mirror--in fact, they dislike their own reflections even more than enemy fish, according to new research published in Biology Letters. Wired writes:
"[The] fish readily attack other males as well as mirror images of themselves, posturing and lunging with the same aggression... the reflection-fighting males show heightened activity in [the amygdala] a part of the brain associated with fear and other negative reactions in vertebrates, [Stanford University researchers] have found. Tangling with a real male doesn’t stir up that response."
The researchers emphasized that the study doesn't mean fish recognize themselves in the mirror. And although the fishes' reactions to their reflections are negative, they are not necessarily "fearful" in the human sense of the word. Still, the research could change the way studies are constructed, in which mirrors are used to investigate psychological phenomena separate from self-recognition.
"Researchers may want to show a fish or other creature another of the same size and species, for example. If animals are sensing that something is off about the mirror, “I think mirrors need to be used with caution,” [lead author Julie K.] Desjardin says."
Image: Wikimedia Commons Tangling with a real male doesn’t stir up that ...


Need a Flange Engineered

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Well really it's a steam turbine casing. I got a special order for this. How much would a consulting firm charge? I need to know wall thickness, and bolting, and if it needs a gasket. Built with 17-4PH stainless steel, the turbine should operate on 400-500C steam. I will hire an engineer from this f

Scientists Trick Mice’s Fat Into Burning Calories; Weight Drops 20% | 80beats

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brownfatLast spring, researchers confirmed that brown fat—the kind that burns energy rather than storing it and is especially prevalent in newborns—can be found in small pockets in adults, too, and slimmer adults have more of it. This spring, a team says it might have found one of the first steps in activating that fat-burning fat in adults. Their study comes out in Science this week.

Brown fat is packed with energy-producing mitochondria, and babies have a lot of it because it helps them keep warm. Once humans begin to regulate their own body temperature they don’t need as much brown fat anymore, so it gets replaced by energy-storing white fat, which helps store energy but leads to expanded waistlines in this age of affluence.

Testing on mice, the team led by Stephan Herzig upped the use of an enzyme called cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2). While the enzyme plays a role in many physiological functions, the researchers found that pushing it in mice could induce their white fat to act more like energy-burning brown fat, and their weight dropped by around 20 percent.

“There has been a lot of excitement around brown fat, but … there wasn’t any clear indication that turning up brown fat would make animals lose weight,” says Chad Cowan, a professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard Medical School who studies fat cell development. “What this paper does is make a good link to something that might be clinically beneficial [TIME].

Don’t get too excited just yet. This is a test on mice, not people, and there’s another problem: This transformation in the animals, white fat acting like brown fat, happened only when Herzig and his colleagues tricked the mice’s bodies into thinking they were at a colder temperature than they actually were:

That caveat is important because the COX-2 enzyme is present in a wide range of body tissues, and revving up its activity may lead to some serious side effects such as clotting problems, increased sensitivity to pain and even muscle abnormalities. Herzig found that manipulating the COX-2 pathway switched white fat to brown fat in the mice only when he simulated cold temperatures through metabolic tweaks — dilating small blood vessels and increasing the pumping of the heart — and made the rodents act as if they were shivering [TIME].

So Herzig’s team has only just started to figure out how humans might take advantage of our tiny brown fat deposits to battle our ever-growing white fat deposits. But, he says, if we find a way to do it that doesn’t involve the weird side effects, it might not take much brown fat to make a difference.

Scientists estimate that as little as 50 grams of brown adipose tissue in a normal adult human would be enough to increase energy consumption by 20 percent.”That’s not a lot of brown fat, but a big increase in energy burn,” said Herzig. “And this type of transplantation idea has been tried out with other types of animals and other types of cells, so in principle it works” [Reuters].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: The Fat That Can Make You Thin
DISCOVER: Killer Fat
80beats: A New Potential Weight-Loss Remedy: Fat-Burning Fat
80beats: “Baby Fat” In Adults Burns Regular Fat, May Help Prevent Diabetes

Image: Colorado State University


One Last Flight for Atlantis

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Counting Down to Atlantis' Last Blast Off

"The Historic Countdown has officially begun for the last planned blast off of Space Shuttle Atlantis. The clocks at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) began ticking down at 4 PM EDT today (Tuesday) from the T minus 43 hour mark towards a launch at 2:20 PM on Friday May 14. KSC launch controllers reported to their consoles at 3:30 PM for the formal "call-to-stations" at the Launch Control Center to initiate preparations for liftoff of the STS 132 mission on Atlantis 32rd journey to the high frontier."

The Burial Habits of Penguins

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This is just for Roger P.....

Did you ever wonder why you never see dead penguins on the ice in Antarctica ?

Ever wonder where they go? Wonder no more.

It is a known fact that the penguin is a very ritualistic bird which lives an extremely ordered and complex life.

The pen

TWO SPEED 10 HP MOTOR

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looking for 2 speed 10 hp motor at 208 volts, 3phase for a make up air unit -supplying 12875/4900CFM.

Will appreciate help in finding, Model no of the motor, starter size and wiring diagram.

Thanks

Corexit 9500

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Does anybody have a Joe-6 pack explanation of what this Corexit 9500, does to the oil and what happens after it "interacts" with the oil .

The American Biology Teacher Reviews The Tangled Bank: “Truly Unique” | The Loom

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zimmercover220.jpgI was delighted to discover this morning that the journal The American Biology Teacher gives thumbs-up to The Tangled Bank. From the review:

“For students of evolution or scholars who want to know the specifics about particular evolutionary processes, this is an excellent read. The fact that it is understandable to beginners and fascinating to scientists makes this book truly unique and valuable.”



Voltage Drop and Cable Size

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Hi

I want to connect the 10hp submersible water pump in the lake.

For this I have to take electrical supply 415volt from 300 meter away electrical panel board and connection is star delta so 3core 2cable will go up to 300meter by under ground up to 2feet down

My question i

The American Power Act

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You can do better than this. Try again.

UPDATE: Here is the bill’s website where you can download summaries and the entire bill.

The new energy/climate bill, called The American Power Act,  is now live on Senator Kerry’s website. Don’t get excited, it’s not going to stop climate change. But it might pass and if so, it might set up a structure to get a much-needed price on carbon. Here is the scoop earlier today from the Huffington Post, via the Wonk Room, via the AP . . . .

“We obtained this document from Think Progress’ The Wonk Room.

The AP has summarized some of the key points to the bill:

The legislation aims to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and more than 80 percent by 2050.

For the first time it would set a price on carbon emissions for large polluters such as coal-fired power plants. Rates initially would range from $12 per ton of carbon emissions to $25 per ton, depending on market prices. Restrictions would not take effect until 2013 for power plants and transportation fuels, and 2016 for manufacturers.

Allowances would be granted to local electricity companies, which would be required to use them to help rate payers. In addition, a separate consumer relief provision would provide rebates to eligible families.

Kerry and Lieberman said the bill would exempt farms and most small and medium-sized businesses, concentrating efforts on the largest polluters.”

Read the full AP summary here.

The AP also notes that the bill contains a provision that will allow neighboring states to veto offshore drilling leases.

Oh come on, that’s not enough. There are going to be parts of this bill that most people will hate, and other parts that I like that others will not. I don’t like encouraging the use of natural gas,  and I like the money for nuclear power.    But this part of it should be universally hated, in my opinion:

“Ensuring Coal’s Future

* We empower the U.S. to lead the world in the deployment of clean coal technologies through annual incentives of $2 billion per year for researching and developing effective carbon capture and sequestration methods and devices.
* We also provide significant incentives for the commercial deployment of 72 GW of carbon capture and sequestration.”

Horrifying!!  This bill needs to be totally re-thought.  What is the purpose here, to keep using all fossil fuels until they are gone? To spend all our money on doing that rather than the obvious turn towards the future, towards solar and wind power?

Let’s be blunt:  These old men in the Senate are taking us backwards yet again, by slapping new technology onto old.   Finding new ways to do something dangerous and damaging to lessen the impact a little does not work.  [...]

DC Step Down

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Hi friends, I'm doing one project, for that I need to step down or step up the dc voltage that I generated, is there anything to do this, other than buck or boost converter.

If there is nothing other than these two, give me some information about these two, whether they are available in t

Rampaging cannonball star is rampaging | Bad Astronomy

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Need a refill on your cup of awesome today?

As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about astronomy and the weird stuff that happens on a daily basis in space, I see a lot of amazing things. You’d think I’d get used to the awesomeness of astronomy, but the opposite is true: I’m always spellbound by what I find.

Still, it takes a lot to seriously impress me, to really make me say Holy Frak.

Well, astronomers have just announced that they have found a massive star that has been flung out of the cluster in which it was born. The star is huge — 90 times the mass of the Sun — and is screaming away from its nursery at 400,000 kilometers per hour.

Holy Frak.

This incredible image is from the ESO’s 2.2 meter telescope in Chile. It shows an overview of the sprawling 30 Doradus star-forming cloud, located about 180,000 light years away in the satellite galaxy to the Milky Way called the Large Magellanic Cloud (or the LMC to those in the know). In the center of 30 Dor sits a vast cluster of stars called R136. The total combined mass of all the stars in R136 is unclear, but it has several that tip the cosmic scale at 100 times the mass of the Sun, which is the upper limit of how big a star can get without tearing itself apart.

The inset image is from Hubble, and shows the runaway star, named 30 Dor 016. It’s been suspected for some time of being a cannonball blasting its way across space away from the cluster, but new observations have pretty much clinched it. They’ve also pinned the mass of this star to that whopping amount of 90 times the mass of the Sun. If you don’t think that’s a big deal, I’ll note that this equals 180 octillion tons — that’s 180,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons, for those of you who have stock in the ASCII character for "0".

Yeah. Holy Frak.

The new observations, using Hubble’s new ultraviolet camera called the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, confirm that this is a single star (and not, say, a binary with two members each with 45 solar masses), making it one of the most massive stars ever seen. This kind of star is extremely rare!

The UV observations also confirm that the star is plowing through the gas that lies in interstellar space in the LMC. You can get a good idea of what’s going on in this closeup of the star:

hst_runawaystar_zoom

It’s moving to the upper right in this image. You can see it’s near the edge of a curved bubble of gas, with a sharp edge delineated to the right of the star. That edge is a bow shock, a vast supersonic shock wave formed when the fierce wind of subatomic particles emitted by the star — a super solar wind – slams into the gas around it. If the star were just sitting there this bubble would be spherical with the star at the center. But you can see the bubble is actually elongated, and the star is near the edge. That’s a sure sign we’re looking at a star on the move.

Amazingly, it appears that the star is 375 light years from the cluster! A star this massive can’t live very long, a few million years at most. At 400,000 kph, it takes about a million years to travel that distance, so that fits.

How the heck can you kick a star up to such incredible speeds? There are two ways we can think of: have it tossed around by the gravity of other stars in the cluster, or have it ejected when (if it’s a binary star) its companion explodes as a supernova.

For the latter supernova scenario, it’s not the explosion that accelerates the star, it’s the slingshot effect. The two stars orbit each other at high speed, and when one blows up it loses so much mass it can’t hold onto the other star. Like an athlete spinning around for the hammer toss and then letting go, the star gets shot away at high speed. The thing is, the cluster itself is too young to have seen such a supernova a million years ago, when the star must have begun its flight. Plus, there’s no indication of the type of a mess left by such an explosion.

So the star must have been ejected when it reacted gravitationally to other stars. If you take three stars, say, and let them interact, the least massive one will get flung away. Take a few dozen and you get a beehive of activity, with several stars tossed out, some with very high speed. The thing is, this star has 90 times the Sun’s mass! That means the stars left behind are even more massive… and we do see several stars in the cluster with masses as high as 100 – 120 times that of the Sun.

Yeah again. Holy Frak.

So let me explain… no, there is too much. Let me sum up.

We have a stellar cluster with thousands of times the Sun’s mass embedded in a nebula furiously cranking out newborn stars. A lot of them are near the physical upper limit of how big a star can get. The whole thing is only a couple of million years old, a fraction of the galaxy’s lifespan. One beefy star with 90 times the Sun’s mass got too close to some other stars, which summarily flung it out of the cluster at high speed, fast enough to cross the distance from the Earth to the Moon in an hour (it took Apollo three days). The star is barreling through the flotsam in that galaxy, its violent stellar wind carving out a bubble of gas that points right back to the scene of the crime, nearly 4 quadrillion kilometers and a million years behind it.

Hmmm.

Y’know, there are days I have a hard time getting out of bed. The humdrum routine of the day yawns ahead of me… but every now and again, as I lie there mustering up the courage to throw off the blanket and face the world, I get a glimmer that maybe today the Universe will once again refill my tank, make me look above and outside me, and remind me that truly, the place is full of awesome.

Today was such a day.

Image credit: Hubble: NASA, ESA, J. Walsh (ST-ECF) Acknowledgment: Z. Levay (STScI). ESO image: ESO Acknowledgments: J. Alves (Calar Alto, Spain), B. Vandame, and Y. Beletski (ESO), processing by B. Fosbury (ST-ECF).


Steam Turbine Rotor Needs to be Rebladed

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The new blades are going to be manufactured using reengineering approach. In this case the grooves measurement is important, to do it the grooves should be cleaned to get rid of a scale ( I am not sure if "scale" is a proper word). A method we using to get the grooves cleaned is aluminiun oxide blas

The post-Columbian panmictic “natural experiment” | Gene Expression

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Economists in the last few years have been shifting toward testing their theoretical models, whether through the experiments of behavioral economics, or, “natural experiments.” The reason economists have had issues with testing their models is that experimentation on humans has some natural constraints. Macroeconomists have an even greater problem, as experimentation on whole societies not only presents ethical conundrums, but there’s no way to fund or implement experiments on this scale. Macroeconomists turn out to be the paleontologists of economics.

Of course economists aren’t the only ones who’ve had this sort of problem with humans. The reason that geneticists focused on organisms such as flies, mice and fish is partly that these taxa breed fast and are easy to maintain in laboratories. But obviously there are things you can do, such as mutagenesis, with model organisms which you can not do with humans. Human genetics has traditionally relied on “natural experiments” of a sort, inbred lineages, recurrent recessive diseases, etc. Genetics has been a supplementary handmaid to medicine by and large. But sometimes history can load the die in genetics’ favor as well.

624px-Zoe_Saldana_at_2010_ODuring the “Columbian Exchange” the New and Old World engaged in a massive transfer of ideas and individuals. The Old World received potatoes, maize, and tomatoes (to name a few). The New World…well, the New World received black people and white people. As documented in works such as 1491 the indigenous populations of the New World collapsed with the introduction of Old World diseases. Native peoples disappeared from the Caribbean, and were marginalized on the mainland excepting ecologically remote (e.g., the Guatemalan highlands) or forbidding (e.g., the Peruvian highlands) regions. But of course despite the obliteration of indigenous cultural self-consciousness and identity, the native populations did not totally disappear, they persisted genetically in the numerically dominant mestizo populations of much of Latin America. You don’t need genetics to understand what happened, books like Mestizaje in Ibero-America outline in detail using conventional historical archives how Spanish men arrived in New World and entered into relationships with indigenous women. Often several at a time, in contravention of the Catholic Church’s requirement of monogamy.

But in the post-genomic era we have more to go on than impressions, we can quantitize the extent and nature of the admixture, something of importance when considering medical research. A new paper in PNAS adds some more to the growing body of results on Latin American genomics by including populations which have traditionally been overlooked, and also putting a spotlight on the long term impact of sex-biased admixture. Genome-wide patterns of population structure and admixture among Hispanic/Latino populations:

Hispanic/Latino populations possess a complex genetic structure that reflects recent admixture among and potentially ancient substructure within Native American, European, and West African source populations. Here, we quantify genome-wide patterns of SNP and haplotype variation among 100 individuals with ancestry from Ecuador, Colombia, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic genotyped on the Illumina 610-Quad arrays and 112 Mexicans genotyped on Affymetrix 500K platform. Intersecting these data with previously collected high-density SNP data from 4,305 individuals, we use principal component analysis and clustering methods FRAPPE and STRUCTURE to investigate genome-wide patterns of African, European, and Native American population structure within and among Hispanic/Latino populations. Comparing autosomal, X and Y chromosome, and mtDNA variation, we find evidence of a significant sex bias in admixture proportions consistent with disproportionate contribution of European male and Native American female ancestry to present-day populations. We also find that patterns of linkage-disequilibria in admixed Hispanic/Latino populations are largely affected by the admixture dynamics of the populations, with faster decay of LD in populations of higher African ancestry. Finally, using the locus-specific ancestry inference method LAMP, we reconstruct fine-scale chromosomal patterns of admixture. We document moderate power to differentiate among potential subcontinental source populations within the Native American, European, and African segments of the admixed Hispanic/Latino genomes. Our results suggest future genome-wide association scans in Hispanic/Latino populations may require correction for local genomic ancestry at a subcontinental scale when associating differences in the genome with disease risk, progression, and drug efficacy, as well as for admixture mapping.

The issue here is that “Hispanic” and/or “Latino” is not a race. In fact, as American readers may be aware the category emerged in 1970 as a way of organizing ethnic and racial identity for the Census. Despite a real pan-American consciousness there is obviously a great deal of cultural and genetic variation in Latin America. Caribbean nations which a large African component have a different identity from Mexico, where the non-Spanish segment is indigenous. Conversely, Argentina has a self conception as a white nation, despite some ambiguity in genetics.

In this paper they focused on 100 individuals from Mexico, Columbia, Ecuador, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. This gives them a good coverage of different regions of Latin America, and also looks into populations which are not often included in these studies, such as Dominicans. A series of figures highlights the primary results.

I’ve rotated this figure to maintain its resolution. It’s a Frappe analysis of the ancestry of individuals within various populations assuming K ancestral populations. With Latin Americans the idea of ancestral populations makes a bit more sense, since we know what the ancestral populations are! They use the HGDP populations as a reference for points of comparison.

F1.large

Since we’re focused on native, Africa and white ancestry, K = 3 is probably more important. No surprise that the Latin America populations exhibit variation in ancestral quanta within them. Some Mexicans look like Europeans. Some Mexicans look like Native Americans. And some Mexicans look mixed. I assume that most readers are aware of this, assuming that they encounter Mexicans at all in their daily life.

Of course the ancestry came in through different avenues. The sexual exploitation of black females by white males in the United States is well known, but it does seem that the same dynamic, at least in terms of the genetic combination, existed in Latin America for much of its history, with black females being complemented by indigenous females. Figure 5 illustrates this well. You see the various Latin American populations (the abbreviations should be obvious). The boxes span the 1st to 3rd quartile in ancestry within each subpopulation from each respective ancestral group (the whiskers represent the ranges). Note the differences between the X chromosome, which spends 2/3 of its time in females, and the autosome, which is not sex biased.

F5.large

Ah, but we can get more precise than that. They typed these individuals on their mtDNA, which is passed purely through women, and their Y chromosomes, which is passed purely through men. These loci do not recombine, and so are transmitted in such a manner that it is relatively easy to reconstruct their phylogenies. There has been a great deal of phylogeographic exploration of these two loci. In the next figure what you see are the position of the individuals in this study in terms of total genome content distance from the three ancestral populations, but, the color of their positions is dictated by the origin of their mtDNA and Y lineages.

F6.largeThe top panel are male lineages, and the bottom panel are female lineages. The preponderance of European ancestry, in relation to native and African ancestry, seems rather clear on the autosomal genome. There is admixture, but you have more people concentrating at the European vertex than at the other two. Most of the Y lineages, presumably men, are European. Some are African, and a few are native. Interestingly they note in the text that several lineages associated with North Africa and the Middle East are found in these populations. Why? The answer seems relatively simple: they were brought by the Muslim invaders, or were Jews, who later became Christian. There have been many phylogeographic analyses of Y lineage distributions, and believe it or not Iberia and North Africa are actually strongly differentiated. The Middle Eastern lineages I’m betting are from Sephardic Jews; most of the “Moors” who settled in Spain are likely to have had more Berber than Arab ancestry.

The maternal lineages show a really interesting pattern. There are a preponderance of native mtDNA lineages, and a significant number of African ones. But notice that most people of overwhelming European ancestry nevertheless retain a native maternal lineage! We saw this in Argentina, a population which identifies as white, seems to be highly admixed on the mtDNA. I suspect that what you’re seeing is the long reach of the first mothers, whose descendants intermarried with Spanish men who relocated to the New World. The Aztec and Inca nobility gave their daughters to the Spaniards who arrived, and I suspect that the predominantly European elites of Latin America still carry those lineages with them, despite their overwhelming limpieza de sangre. Another important point is that both Dominicans, and especially Puerto Ricans, carry signatures of these first mothers (as well as total genome content). 20 of 27 Puerto Ricans carry native mtDNA. This is somewhat shocking, as these Caribbean islands were reputed to have been nearly devoid of indigenous populations only a generation after First Contact, in large part due to disease.

Which brings me back to Neandertals. Non-African humans may carry somewhat less than 5% of their ancestry from this population. But to my knowledge there is no cultural continuity, and we do conceive of ourselves as fundamentally different from the Neander-kind. And yet genetically the Neandertals are highly successful through us The chaos, havoc, and population collapse wrecked by the Europeans when they encountered native New World populations may be somewhat analogous to what happened to archaic groups who had to face the oncoming demographic blast of African humans. And yet some of the genetic material of the locals was absorbed just before their extinction. The half-Taino children whose fathers were Spanish may have had the genetic defenses of European diseases which allowed them to survive the hardships of their lives. Granted, these children lost a genuine connection with their Taino ancestors, but the descent of those native peoples still persists onward. Interestingly, some readers of this weblog have had the same reaction to the idea that Neandertals persist in our own genome. Ultimately the reaction and response to this is not a scientific issue, but a normative one. Dare I even say, a spiritual one?

Citation: Bryc K, Velez C, Karafet T, Moreno-Estrada A, Reynolds A, Auton A, Hammer M, Bustamante CD, & Ostrer H (2010). In the Light of Evolution IV: The Human Condition Sackler Colloquium: Genome-wide patterns of population structure and admixture among Hispanic/Latino populations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 20445096

Image Credit: Cristiano Del Riccio

Testimony Highlights 3 Major Failures That Caused Gulf Spill | 80beats

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gulfspill511Like the CEOs of failing car companies and steroid-suspected baseball players before them, the leaders of BP, Transocean, and Halliburton had to trek up to Capitol Hill today to stand before Congress. The three company executives played circle-of-blame in front of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. To sum up their statements:

BP: It was Transocean’s fault.

Transocean: It was Halliburton’s fault.

Halliburton: It was BP’s fault.

Since we may not know the whole story about the Deepwater Horizon’s explosion and sinking that resulted in the current environmental disaster in the Gulf, let’s recap the technical failures.

1. Blowout preventer

This piece of equipment, previously anonymous to most of the public, is now notorious for its failure to do its job—closing off the well automatically in response to a sudden emergency. Lamar McKay, president and chairman of BP America, used that fact to deflect blame:

Since Transocean owned the rig’s safety equipment, Mr. McKay said that Transocean was responsible; he added that there were “anomalous pressure test readings” before the explosion that “could have raised concerns” [The New York Times].

However, just after the accident, BP’s CEO Tony Heyward said that a blowout preventer’s failure was “unprecedented.” Not exactly, according to the AP’s investigation, which found many examples of accidents this decade in which failed blowout preventers played a role. Transocean knew about the issues, the AP says, but so did the federal government.

In the late 1990s, the industry appealed for fewer required pressure tests on these valves. The federal [Minerals Management Service] did two studies, each finding that failures were more common than the industry said. But the agency, known as MMS, then did its turnaround and required tests half as often. It estimated that the rule would yield an annual savings of up to $340,000 per rig. An industry executive praised the “flexibility” of regulators, long plagued with accusations that it has been too cozy with the industry it supervises [AP].

2. Cementing

OK, Transocean chief executive Steve Newman said, there was a blowout preventer failure, but that was not the root cause of the explosion or the leak.

“The one thing we know with certainty is that on the evening of April 20 there was a sudden, catastrophic failure of the cement, the casing, or both,” Newman said. The cementing job was done by Halliburton [The Washington Post].

In fact, Halliburton was still working on its cementing job 20 hours before the explosion.

There was already a pipe in the well for the oil to flow through, but no oil was supposed to flow yet. Cementing, one of the last steps in well construction, seals the crack between the pipe and the wall of rock. Crews pump the cement through the pipe, but it ends up on the outside of the pipe, in the space between the pipe and the rock wall. The cement also caps the bottom of the pipe [NPR].

Cementing could go bad if the material isn’t mixed to the correct consistency. If any oil and gas leaks out early, NPR reports, it can cause a pocket in the cement that doesn’t seal up. And if cement doesn’t set properly, oil and gas could escape the well and even explode.

3. Oversight, and response failures

While Transocean owned the rig and Halliburton poured the concrete, this was BP’s show. And, so, the other two companies also employed the “just following orders” defense.

Halliburton was “contractually bound,” to follow BP’s instructions, Tim Probert, president of global business lines for the Houston-based energy services company, will tell the panel.

“All offshore oil and gas production projects begin and end with the operator,” Stephen Newman, chief executive officer of Swiss drilling company Transocean said in his prepared remarks. BP, the London-based oil company, decided “where and how” its well was to be drilled, Newman said [BusinessWeek].

Whatever BP’s failures were in administering the the drilling operation and preventing an accident (and those will most likely continue to leak out, like oil into the Gulf), the company’s attempts to mitigate the spill have met with limited success. BP’s initial attempt to shut of the flow, using robot submersibles to close of the valves, has failed. After the company built its 100-ton containment dome to try to capture the flow and pump it to a tanker on the surface, icy buildup of methane and water at the depth of 5,000 feet prevented the dome from getting a seal.

The methane that caused the original explosion remains gaseous down to -161°C. The “ice” that’s forming is actually a solidified mixture of methane and water called a clathrate [Ars Technica].

Faced with dwindling options and still two months before a relief well could be completed, BP is even considering throwing garbage at the leak in the form of a “junk shot” in a last-ditch effort to stem the flow.

“They have horribly underestimated the likelihood of a spill and therefore horribly underestimated the consequences of something going wrong,” said Robert Bea, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies offshore drilling. “So what we have now is some equivalent of a fire drill with paper towels and buckets for cleanup” [Dallas Morning News].

Previous posts on the BP oil spill:
80beats: 5 Offshore Oil Hotspots Beyond the Gulf That Could Boom—Or Go Boom
80beats: Gulf Oil Spill: Do Chemical Dispersants Pose Their Own Environmental Risk?
80beats: Gulf Oil Spill: Fisheries Closed; Louisiana Wetlands Now in Jeopardy
80beats: Gulf Oil Spill Reaches U.S. Coast; New Orleans Reeks of “Pungent Fuel Smell”
80beats: Uh-Oh: Gulf Oil Spill May Be 5 Times Worse Than Previously Thought

Image: U.S. Coast Guard