The US space agency’s Dawn satellite continues to return remarkable images from the dwarf planet Ceres.

Now just 385km above the surface (lower than the space station is above Earth), the probe has revealed new features inside the mini-world’s Occator Crater.

This is the 92km-wide depression that has multiple bright spots of what arethought to be exposed salts.

The new imagery reveals a dome in a smooth-walled pit in the centre-most bright area of the crater.

With a resolution now of 35m per pixel, Dawn can make out numerous fractures that cut across the top and down the flanks of this dome.

European scientists are worried they could soon lose a vital tool for monitoring Earth’s ice fields.

The Cryosat-2 radar spacecraft has transformed studies of the Arctic, the Antarctic and Greenland, but is now operating beyond its design lifetime.

A group of 179 researchers is concerned the ageing mission could die in orbit at any time.

They have urged the European Commission (EC) and the European Space Agency (Esa) to start planning a replacement.

“The mission is now central to international efforts to monitor the state of the cryosphere,” they write in a letter to top officials at the EC and Esa.

The Moon used to spin on a different axis and show a slightly different face to the Earth, a new study suggests.

Using data collected by Nasa’s Lunar Prospector mission in the late 1990s, scientists spotted two hydrogen-rich regions near the Moon’s poles, probably indicating the presence of water ice.

The icy patches are opposite each other – the line between them passes through the middle of the Moon – so it appears that this used to be its spin axis.

The work appears in the journal Nature.

It describes a gradual wobble, or “true polar wander”, adding up to about a six-degree shift altogether.

In recent times, some new political movements have arisen in Germany. For example the political party “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD), founded just three years ago, has won several seats in German State parliaments at the most recent election, a few days ago.

In Dresden (a city in the German State of Saxony), thousands of people go regularly on quiet “walkabouts” on Mondays, without any disturbance, unless provoked by others.

What’s their “Beef?” 

Among their various complaints is one specific and rather novel term: “Die Lügenpresse,” a term that means “liar’s press.”  What the people mean by that term simply is purposely false or misleading information propagated by a large segment of the media, from newspapers to television reportages and – as much of that information is frequently “fed” to them by government sources and, by extension, also such governments.

Climate change activist James Hansen has released a peer-reviewed study yesterday that claims an increase in temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius is imminent and would be catastrophic. He originally released a preview of his paper last July and it came under heavy fire for conflicting with established climate science. Now that the final version has been released, it warns that humanity could face an abrupt climate shift in a few decades, as illustrated in the implausible movie ‘The Day after Tomorrow.’

Even climate scientist Michael E. Mann from Pennsylvania State University said that “some of the points highlighted in Hansen’s study conflict with what is generally known about climate change, so much so that they require a high standard of proof.” Hansen’s proof is based on interpretations of the historical record from 120,000 years ago. He says it was about 1 degrees Celsius warmer than it is today and that this period had much more powerful storms, even though his proof is largely theoretical. One item is a giant boulder in the Bahamas that Hansen contends was moved by a super storm.

Part of Hansen’s problematic study is that his reputation as being the godfather of global warming has been tarnished by his climate activism. He has been arrested numerous times, gone after museums that get donations from fossil fuel companies, and has joined in frivolous lawsuits against the government for not doing more to prevent global warming. As Tech Times noted, “This may have turned Hansen into an inspiration to advocates of climate change prevention, but it has also caused some colleagues to doubt whether his findings have been skewed to suit his political goals.”

“One is disturbed each day by verifiably untrue statements touted as incontrovertible facts about hot-button issues.”
— Richard S. Lindzen

“CO₂ absorbs in the infrared and reradiates heat downward, thus heating the earth.”
— Richard S. Lindzen

Okay then, let’s examine that particular “incontrovertible fact.” You know how a solar oven works.

 

Scientists have unveiled a see-through wrist cuff that measures the level of glucose in the bloodstream of diabetic patients and administers a drug to lower that level if needed. It’s not yet a full-blown treatment—for one thing, the experimental version can’t provide enough of the drug to do the trick—but it should be of great use in monitoring patients.

It’s also an actual application for a newfangled material in sore need of one: graphene, a superthin form of carbon with interesting electronic properties. By itself, graphene can’t sense glucose, but if you dope 2-D carbon properly, it can become quite a useful elecrochemistry set. The inventors—working in South Korea, Massachusetts and Texas—doped the graphene with minute quantities of gold to get the effect they wanted. They describe their work in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

Hubble has probed a clutch of monster stars about 170,000 light-years away on the edge of our Milky Way Galaxy.

Some two dozen behemoths were identified, all with masses in excess of a hundred times that of the Sun.
Four were known previously, including the remarkable colossus catalogued as R136a1, which is 250 times as massive as our home star.

But the new survey finds many more of the super-objects in a tight patch of sky within the Large Magellanic Cloud.

“In just a tiny bit of this satellite galaxy, we see perhaps a couple of dozen stars with more than a 100 solar masses, of which nine are in a tight core just a few light-years across,” explained Prof Paul Crowther from Sheffield University, UK.

A moment with Google will reveal all kinds of cranks offering “free” energy from quantum “zero-point” phenomena, but it’s a real thing with real effects.

At the tiniest scales, quanta vibrate, even at their lowest energy. If all motion ceased, an observer would be able to breach uncertainty theory. 

Now, National Institute for Science an Technology (NIST) boffins reckons zero-point motion could help do for temperature what silicon spheres will do for weight: tie a measurement to a fundamental property of the universe.

So far, NIST says it’s only carried out a demonstration of the technique, and currently it’s only accurate to a few percentage points.

But you have to start somewhere, and here’s where NIST has started: the researchers used a laser to observe a nanoscale beam of silicon nitride.

To see these picometre vibrations, the beam has a reflective cavity; the vibrations cause small changes in colour of the reflected light.

The brilliant flash of an exploding star’s shockwave—what astronomers call the “shock breakout”—has been captured for the first time in the optical wavelength or visible light by NASA’s planet-hunter, the Kepler space telescope.

An international science team led by Peter Garnavich, an astrophysics professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, analyzed light captured by Kepler every 30 minutes over a three-year period from 500 distant galaxies, searching some 50 trillion stars. They were hunting for signs of massive stellar death explosions known as supernovae. 

In 2011, two of these massive stars, called red supergiants, exploded while in Kepler’s view. The first behemoth, KSN 2011a, is nearly 300 times the size of our sun and a mere 700 million light years from Earth. The second, KSN 2011d, is roughly 500 times the size of our sun and around 1.2 billion light years away.

“To put their size into perspective, Earth’s orbit about our sun would fit comfortably within these colossal stars,” said Garnavich.

The day that heart transplant patients no longer need to wait for a donor match just got a little closer. Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital have successfully grown functional heart tissue from stem cells created from skin cells. Their paper has been published in the journal Circulation Research.

The team’s technique potentially allows heart tissue to be built with the patient’s own cellular material, which reduces the need for an exact donor match, and also vastly lowers the chance of immunorejection.

It’s not possible to simply grow an entire heart from cells. Organs require a scaffold to give the cells a shape. In the normal course of things, this scaffold, known as an extracellular matrix, is created from proteins secreted by the cells. 

“Generating functional cardiac tissue involves meeting several challenges,” lead author Jacques Guyette said in a statement.

“These include providing a structural scaffold that is able to support cardiac function, a supply of specialised cardiac cells, and a supportive environment in which cells can repopulate the scaffold to form mature tissue capable of handling complex cardiac functions.”

It is generally reported by ecologists and the climate science camp that there has been a dangerous decline in the species of krill known as Euphausia Superba over the past few decades and the cause is the melting ice of Antarctica by global warming.  The Krill sometimes feed on the underside of ice. A simple picture, less sea ice from the predicted global warming and there is less Krill.

The story took hold and the media focus on ice loss in West Antarctica on the tip of the Peninsula as evidence of disruption of their habitat. This area has apparently seen some warming but it is only a small percentage of Antarctica.  

So is the overall pattern the same? If a decrease in sea ice disturbs their habitat and feeding leading to a decline then it follows that an increase in sea ice will improve their habitat and feeding regime and mitigate any decline, possibly even increasing their biomass.

In a 2006 research paper “Antarctic Temperature and Sea Ice Trends over the past Century: An assessment of Antarctic Climate Data” by George Taylor, the results are that sea ice has been increasing and the temperature falling. 

Scientists believe they are now a step closer to an answer after the discovery of a series of underwater craters at the bottom of the Barents Sea, off the coast of Norway.

While it’s not close to the Bermuda Triangle, which stretches from Florida to Puerto Rico and the mid-Atlantic island of Bermuda, it’s hoped the craters are the key to finally explaining the baffling phenomenon.

The craters, which measure up to 800m wide and 45m deep, are believed to have been created by methane building up in sediments on the sea-floor of the gas-rich Norway coast. They then leak, “popping” through the sea bed and into the water above.

Top scientists at Roche Holding AG and AstraZeneca Plc are sizing up potential allies in the fight against cancer: the trillions of bacteria that live in the human body.

“Five years ago, if you had asked me about bacteria in your gut playing an important role in your systemic immune response, I probably would have laughed it off,” Daniel Chen, head of cancer immunotherapy research at Roche’s Genentech division, said in a phone interview. “Most of us immunologists now believe that there really is an important interaction there.” 

Two recent studies published in the journal Science have intrigued Chen and others who are developing medicines called immunotherapies that stimulate the body’s ability to fight tumors.

In November, University of Chicago researchers wrote that giving mice Bifidobacterium, which normally resides in the gastrointestinal tract, was as effective as an immunotherapy in controlling the growth of skin cancer. Combining the two practically eliminated tumor growth. In the second study, scientists in France found that some bacterial species activated a response to immunotherapy, which didn’t occur without the microbes.

Human Microbiome

That’s increased drugmakers’ interest in the human microbiome — the universe of roughly 100 trillion good and bad bacteria, fungi and viruses that live on and inside the body. Roche is already undertaking basic research in the field and plans to investigate the microbiome’s potential for cancer treatment, Chen said.

“Certainly, we are already scanning the space for interesting opportunities as the science continues to emerge,” he said. “We are very interested in testing these in a controlled setting.”

Silicon photonics is one of the industry’s hottest research fields, because it holds out the promise of accelerating on-chip communications without the extra heat that faster copper-based comms generate.

One of the big challenges is fabrication, and that’s the subject of research announced by University College London, Cardiff University, the University of Sheffield and the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). 

The group reckons they’ve cracked one of the big fabrication challenges: growing a 1,300-nanometre quantum dot laser directly on a silicon substrate.

The key characteristics of the device, according to this UCL press release, are that it can stand high temperatures (operating at up to 120°C (248°F)) but works with a low threshold current.

When will the governments (and their all too numerous “useful idiots” of the media) state the unadulterated truth to the people?

Carbon (like in wood, coal, oil, natural gas) is an energy source—not a “pollutant”

Presumably, any government has the right to levy a tax on anything they want. In that sense, a tax on “carbon” or any energy source would be no different than a tax on food or clothing; it’s all coming out of your pocket. However, the right to levy taxes does not give government a right to call “carbon” (by their interpretation really meaning “carbon dioxide”) as a form of “pollution.”

NO, carbon dioxide is NOT pollution, none whatsoever!

YES, carbon dioxide is a VITAL constituent of the atmosphere!

Carbon Tax

Whether Canada’s recently elected Prime Minister or any of the country’s provincial premiers think that a “carbon tax” is a good thing or not is all irrelevant. Governments always have the option to place levies and taxes on anything they choose. Whether the people they claim to represent and work for will find such charges acceptable or not can be gauged on the outcome of the next general election.

One thing that I cannot excuse, however, is for any government that claims to live by common standards of communication and honesty, to fail in providing facts and truthful information to its citizenry. And, quite frankly, IMHO, the previous government of this great country of Canada had seven years’ time to set the record straight but missed the opportunity. They had all the resources necessary to educate the citizenry to respect the country’s reliance on natural resources and feel good about our “carbon.”

Yes, dear government, you have the right to tax the hell out of us poor schmucks but you do not-I repeat, you do not – have the right to tell us lies, neither about “carbon pollution” nor anything else!

Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser — Bio and Archives