Abstract: Steel-steel composite metal foams (S-S CMFs) and Aluminum-steel composite metal foams (Al-S CMFs) with various sphere sizes and matrix materials were manufactured and investigated for nuclear and radiation environments applications. 316 L stainless steel, high-speed T15 steel and aluminum materials were used as the matrix material together with 2, 4 and 5.2 mm steel hollow spheres to manufacture various types of composite metal foams (CMFs).

High-speed T15 steel is selected due to its high tungsten and vanadium concentration (both high-Z elements) to further improve the shielding efficiency of CMFs. This new type of S-S CMF is called High-Z steel-steel composite metal foam (HZ S-S CMF). Radiation shielding efficiency of all types of CMFs was explored for the attenuation of X-ray, gamma ray and neutron.

The experimental results were compared with pure lead and Aluminum A356, and verified theoretically through XCOM and Monte Carlo Z-particle Transport Code (MCNP). It was observed that the radiation shielding effectiveness of CMFs is relatively independent of sphere sizes as long as the ratio of sphere-wall thickness to its outer-diameter stays constant.

However, the smaller spheres seem to be more efficient in general due to the fine fluctuation in the gray value profile of their 2D Micro-CT images. S-S CMFs and Al-S CMFs are respectively 275{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} and 145{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} more effective for X-ray attenuation than Aluminum A356. Compared to pure lead, CMFs show adequate attenuation with additional advantages of being lightweight and more environmentally friendly.

The mechanical performance of HZ S-S CMFs under quasi-static compression was compared to that of other classes of S-S CMF. It is observed that the addition of high-Z elements to the matrix of CMFs improved their shielding against X-rays, low energy gamma rays and neutrons, while maintained their low density, high mechanical properties and high-energy absorption capability.

Research from North Carolina State University shows that lightweight composite metal foams are effective at blocking X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation, and are capable of absorbing the energy of high impact collisions. The finding means the metal foams hold promise for use in nuclear safety, space exploration and medical technology applications.

“This work means there’s an opportunity to use composite metal foam to develop safer systems for transporting nuclear waste, more efficient designs for spacecraft and nuclear structures, and new shielding for use in CT scanners,” says Afsaneh Rabiei, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State and corresponding author of a paper on the work.

Newly released research, primarily from NASA and the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences, indicates that melting of selective Greenland Glaciers is related to geologically induced heat flow, and not manmade atmospheric global warming.

Previous articles posted here and here have documented the effect of geologically induced geothermal heat flow on the West Antarctic continent and Arctic Ocean Ice Sheets. In both cases relatively recent research was used to show natural variations in climate, climate-related events, and warmed from geothermal heat. You can learn more about plate climatology and global warming here.

A summary of the very extensive NASA Greenland Ice Sheet Study shows that Greenland Glacier dynamics are very complex. Certain glaciers are retreating, others are unchanged, and still others are expanding. Additionally, individual glacier dynamics change with time, e.g., advancing for years, then suddenly retreating. In some cases the retreating rates are astounding.

This paper found evidence of a MWP in Antarctica during the period 1050AD to 1200AD .The glaciers had melted even more than they have now.

The LIA returned starting around 1350AD and continued until around 1700AD.

The MWP rate of glacial retreat was faster than the present. They think more snow fell in the present slowing the retreat.

Here, we present evidence for glacial retreat corresponding to the MWP and a subsequent LIA advance at Rothera Point (67°34′S; 68°07′W) in Marguerite Bay, western Antarctic Peninsula. Deglaciation started at ca. 961–800 cal. yr BP or before, reaching a position similar to or even more withdrawn than the current state, with the subsequent period of glacial advance commencing between 671 and 558 cal. yr BP and continuing at least until 490–317 cal. yr BP. Based on new radiocarbon dates, during the MWP, the rate of glacier retreat was 1.6 m yr⁻¹, which is comparable with recently observed rates (~0.6 m yr⁻¹between 1993 and 2011 and 1.4 m yr⁻¹ between 2005 and 2011). Moreover, despite the recent air warming rate being higher, the glacial retreat rate during the MWP was similar to the present, suggesting that increased snow accumulation in recent decades may have counterbalanced the higher warming rate.

Read more at sunshinehours.net

Decades of space missions have provided us with clues about atmospheres around planets within our own solar system, and now they’re starting to reveal more about planets that don’t orbit our sun.

Using data from the Nasa Kepler space telescope, astrophysicists have discovered a class of exoplanets whose atmospheres have been stripped away by their host stars. 

Dubbed hot super-Earths, these planets are losing their layers of gas because of blasts of intense radiation that ‘cooks’ the large stellar bodies.  

A newly-discovered antibiotic-resistant gene is threatening to open a new front in the war against superbugs by rendering a last-resort drug impotent, experts warn.

The gene’s resistance to colistin, a life-saving medication which has been around for 60 years, is the latest frustration for physicians battling disease with a shrinking arsenal of antibiotics to treat a wide variety of ailments, many once easily curable.

Dubbed mcr-1, the resistance-conferring gene easily transfers between bacteria, benign or otherwise, found in humans, animals or the environment.

First identified in China last November, the gene has since been discovered in livestock, water, meat and vegetables for human consumption in several countries, and in humans infected with E.coli — one of the disease-causing bacteria it targets.

For the first time, mcr-1 has now also been found living in the gut of healthy humans, a conference of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) heard in Amsterdam this weekend.

Extraordinary new evidence of Britain’s first human inhabitants has been discovered in Norfolk. Around 50 footprints, made by members by an early species of prehistoric humans almost a million years ago, have been revealed by coastal erosion near the village of Happisburgh, in Norfolk, 17 miles north-east of Norwich.

The discovery – made by a team of experts from the British Museum, the Natural History Museum and Queen Mary University of London – is one of the most important archaeological discoveries ever made in Britain and is of great international significance, as the footprints are the first of such great age ever found outside Africa. Indeed even there, only a few other examples have ever come to light – all in Kenya and Tanzania.

In Britain, the oldest footprint discoveries prior to the Norfolk finds, had dated from just 7,500 years ago, a tiny fraction of the age of the newly revealed examples.

The Happisburgh prints appear to have been made by a small group, perhaps a family, of early humans, probably belonging to the long-extinct Hominid species Homo antecessor (‘Pioneer Man’). Archaeologists are now analysing detailed 3D images of the prints to try to work out the approximate composition of the group. Of the 50 or so examples recorded, only around a dozen were reasonably complete – and only two showed the toes in detail. Tragically, although a full photogrammetric and photographic record has been made, all but one of the prints were rapidly destroyed by incoming tides before they could be physically lifted.

In their “hottest year ever” press briefing, NOAA included this graph, which stated that they have a 58 year long radiosonde temperature record. But they only showed the last 37 years in the graph.

Here is why they are hiding the rest of the data. The earlier data showed as much pre-1979 cooling as the post-1979 warming.

It has long been known by scientists that Iceland has gotten much colder since the Medieval Warm period, and that there was a spike in warming from 1900 to 1940, followed by a sharp drop back to the previous low.

26 Feb 1974, Page 29 – at Newspapers.com

As of 2012, NASA showed Iceland temperatures accurately.

Cassini orbit normal, NASA insists

NASA has been obliged to clarify that if the hypothetical Planet 9 exists, it is not responsible for “unexplained deviations” in the orbit of the Cassini spacecraft around Saturn.

Back in January, CalTech boffins Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown claimed to have found evidence for a mysterious body, around 10 times the mass of Earth, “travelling 200 times further from the Sun than our orbit”, as we put it at the time. The proof of its existence was its effect on Kuiper Belt objects, the scientists claimed.

I was invited to speak at the Liberal Democrats Conference in Sydney last Sunday.   I began by explaining that while the delegates may have though homogenization was a term used exclusively for milk, that homogenization is also a technical term used in climate science, but with an altogether different meaning. It allows scientists to remodel historical temperature data so it’s closer to the heart’s desire.

These few words – closer to the heart’s desire – have been borrowed from that famous poem the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The stanza reads:

Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire!
Would not we shatter it to bits-and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!

Omar used the word “remould”, climate scientists say they are improving the data.

The end result is the same: something has been changed.

The scientific revolution rejected unnatural causes to explain natural phenomena, rejected appeals to authority, and rejected revelation, in favor of empirical evidence. Today, the biggest threat to science is from the sophisticated remodeling of data, known in climate science as homogenization.

An analogy can be made between the remodeling of scientific data, which is now common in a variety of disciplines from conservation biology to climate science, and “fitting up” people the police know to be guilty, but for whom they can’t muster enough forensic evidence for a conviction. This is also a form of “noble cause corruption”.

Why is it a form of corruption? Because we expect the criminal justice system to be fair, to be based on legitimate evidence. Science should also be about facts, and evidence.

Let’s consider a real world example of homogenization, specifically the maximum temperature record for Darwin.

There are very few continuous, surface temperature recording from northern Australia that extend beyond 60 years. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Hadley Centre (UK Met Office), Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA GISS), and other institutions concerned with the calculation of global temperature trends, join temperatures recorded at the Darwin post office from 1882 until January 1942 with temperatures from the Darwin airport recorded from February 1941 to the present, and then make adjustments. There is no temperature record at the post office after 1942 because the Darwin post office was bombed in Japanese air raids.

Temperatures were recorded at the Darwin post office from 1882, but are only shown in Figure 1 from 1895, which is the first full year of recordings in a Stevenson screen.

By now, virtually everyone has heard that “97{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of scientists agree:  Climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” Even if you weren’t one of his 31 million followers who received this tweet from President Obama, you most assuredly have seen it repeated everywhere as scientific fact.

The correct representation is “yes,” “some,” and “no.” Yes, climate change is real. There has never been a period in Earth’s history when the climate has not changed somewhere, in one way or another. 

People can and do have some influence on our climate. For example, downtown areas are warmer than the surrounding countryside, and large-scale human development can affect air and moisture flow. But humans are by no means the only source of climate change. The Pleistocene ice ages, Little Ice Age and monster hurricanes throughout history underscore our trivial influence compared to natural forces.

The latest government crackdown on climate dissent, exemplified by last week’s subpoena of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, comes amid a surge of scientific research that pokes holes in the catastrophic climate change consensus.

Even as Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude E. Walker demanded the free market think tank’s climate research and communications, a rising tide of evidence has challenged the narrative that increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are driving floods, drought and other disasters.

As of March 27, researchers had published 133 “consensus-skeptical” papers this year, bringing to 660 the number of such studies appearing since January 2014, blogger Kenneth Richard wrote on the skeptics website NoTricksZone.

“There has been quite an uptick in papers that question the consensus this year,” said Anthony Watts, who runs the influential WattsUpWithThat? website.

Studies published on his website and others include in the past few weeks include those that say:

• An exhaustive study published April 7 in Nature by University of Stockholm researchers examining hydrological patterns going back 1,200 years found that climate models cannot accurately predict extreme rainfall and drought.

In response to me linking to my latest blog post on Twitter, BBC weatherman and meteorologist Simon King pointed me to this graph of UK annual rainfall  since 1910 which shows a significant increase in trend since 1980 – a point which he made when being interviewed on BBC FiveLive apparently.

Aside from the fact that the UK series is very much shorter than the EWP which goes back to 1766, there is indeed a marked positive trend in UK annual rainfall, starting around 1973, and exceeding that of 1910. Here is the corresponding graph for England:

I recently had the privilege of speaking with Professor Sydney Brenner, a professor of Genetic medicine at the University of Cambridge and Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine in 2002. My original intention was to ask him about Professor Frederick Sanger, the two-time Nobel Prize winner famous for his discovery of the structure of proteins and his development of DNA sequencing methods, who passed away in November.

I wanted to do the classic tribute by exploring his scientific contributions and getting a first hand account of what it was like to work with him at Cambridge’s Medical Research Council’s (MRC) Laboratory for Molecular Biology (LMB) and at King’s College where they were both fellows. What transpired instead was a fascinating account of the LMB’s quest to unlock the genetic code and a critical commentary on why our current scientific research environment makes this kind of breakthrough unlikely today.

It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of Professor Brenner and his colleagues’ contributions to biology. Brenner won the Nobel Prize for establishing Caenorhabditis elegans, a type of roundworm, as the model organism for cellular and developmental biological research, which led to discoveries in organ development and programmed cell death. He made his breakthroughs at the LMB, where beginning in the 1950s, an extraordinary number of successive innovations elucidated our understanding of the genetic code. This code is the process by which cells in our body translate information stored in our DNA into proteins, vital molecules important to the structure and functioning of cells. It was here that James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double-helical structure of DNA. Brenner was one of the first scientists to see this ground-breaking model, driving from Oxford, where he was working at the time in the Department of Chemistry, to Cambridge to witness this breakthrough. This young group of scientists, considered renegades at the time, made a series of successive revolutionary discoveries that ultimately led to the creation of a new field called molecular biology.

NASA claims that the blade of the hockey stick is settled science, which four different independent agencies (NASA, NOAA, CRU and JMA) agree upon very closely. The agreement is claimed to be within a few hundredths of a degree.

The graph above is utter nonsense. NASA temperature data doesn’t even agree with NASA temperature data from 15 years ago.

NASA has altered their own data by 0.5C since 2001, yet claims that everyone agrees within about 0.05C.

The relentless war on carbon is justified by the false assumption that global temperature is controlled by human production of two carbon-bearing “Greenhouse Gases”. The scary forecasts of runaway heating are based on complex and circumscribed, carbon-centric, computerised Global Circulation Models built for the UN IPCC. These models omit many significant climate factors and rely heavily on dodgy temperature records and unproven assumptions about two natural trace gases in the atmosphere. 

The models fail to explain Earth’s long history of changing climate and ignore the powerful role of interacting cycles in the solar system which determine how much solar energy is absorbed and reflected by Earth’s atmosphere, clouds and surface. Several ancient societies and some modern mavericks, without help from million dollar computers, recognised that the sun, moon and major planets produce cyclic changes in Earth’s climate.

The IPCC models misread the positive and negative temperature feedbacks from water vapour (the main ‘greenhouse gas’) and their accounting for natural processes in the carbon cycle is based on very incomplete knowledge and numerous unproven assumptions.