Ask a science teacher: What creates the wind?

Wind is caused by a difference in pressure from one area to another area on the surface of the Earth. Air naturally moves from high to low pressure, and when it does so, it is called wind.

Generally, we can say that the cause of the wind is the uneven heating of the Earth’s surface by the Sun. The Earth’s surface is made of different land and water areas, and these varying surfaces absorb and reflect the Sun’s rays unevenly. Warm air rising yields a lower pressure on the Earth, because the air is not pressing down on the Earth’s surface, while descending cooler air produces a higher pressure.

But there are many other factors affecting wind direction. For example, the Earth is spinning, so air in the Northern Hemisphere is deflected to the right by what is known as the Coriolis force. This causes the air, or wind, to flow clockwise around a high-pressure system and counter-clockwise around a low-pressure system.

The closer these low- and high-pressure systems are together, the stronger the “pressure gradient,” and the stronger the winds. Vegetation also plays a role in how much sunlight is reflected or absorbed by the surface of the Earth. Furthermore, snow cover reflects a large amount of radiation back into space. As the air cools, it sinks and causes a pressure increase.

And wind can get even more complex. Some parts of the Earth, near the equator, receive direct sunlight all year long and have a consistently warmer climate. Other parts of the Earth, near the polar regions, receive indirect rays, so the climate is colder.

As the warm air from the tropics rises, colder air moves in to take the place of the rising warmer air. This movement of air also causes the wind to blow. It’s a dynamic, complex mechanism, which is why weather forecasting is not quite a precise science.

Today we see windmills, used to make electricity, in operation in all parts of the United States, but especially along our coasts. Coastal regions tend to have fairly strong winds blowing in from ocean to land during the day and out from land to ocean during the night. The cause of this phenomenon is that land heats up and cools down faster than water, again creating a pressure gradient.

From the book, "Ask a Science Teacher: 250 Answers to Questions You’ve Always Had About How Everyday Stuff Really Works"; Copyright © Larry Scheckel, 2013. Publishes December 17; available wherever books are sold.

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Can new clues solve mystery of Roanoke's Lost Colony?

It's the coldest case in American history.

The settlers who inhabited the 16th century North Carolina colony of Roanoke mysteriously disappeared centuries ago, leaving behind only two clues: the words "Croatoan" and "Cro" carved into a fort's gatepost and a nearby tree.

Many conspiracy theories have been concocted as to what happened in 1590, a mere three years after the colonists arrived in North America, but none have proven fruitful. Until now. Technological advances and the discovery of a cover-up on an ancient map have let researchers unearth new clues that may help bring an end to the mystery of America's lost colony.

Researchers began reinvestigating the mysterious disappearance after they noticed two strange patches on a long-forgotten map of the area called "La Virginea Pars" drawn by the colony's governor John White. Researchers at the First Colony Foundation in Durham, N.C., believed the two patches might be covering up something revealing. 

The map was analyzed by scientists at the British Museum, who discovered a small red-and-blue symbol.

"Our best idea is that parts of [Sir Walter] Raleigh's exploration in North America were a state secret, and the map 'cover-up' was an effort to keep information from the public and from foreign agents," historian and principal investigator Eric Klingelhofer of Mercer University in Macon, Ga., told National Geographic, which partially funded the effort.

we get the oldest maps we can find—so we can get a historic sense of what was there and what's there now—and orient them,"

- Malcolm LeCompte, research associate at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina

Historians believe that the symbol may have been the location of a fort the settlers fled to, running from violence or disease.

"It's obvious that that's the only way they could have survived. No single Indian tribe or village could have supported them ... They were over a hundred people," Klingelhofer said.

The current theory is that the colonists fled 50 miles south to Hatteras Island, then known as Croatoan Island. Klingelhofer suggests they may have gone in a different direction.

He believes the settlers traveled west via the Albermarle Sound to the Chowan River where there might have been a protected inlet occupied by a friendly tribe.

"It's a very strategic place, right at the end of Albemarle Sound," he said. "You can go north up the Chowan River to Virginia or west to the Blue Ridge Mountains. They were big trading partners with other Native American tribes."

Once the researchers uncovered the secrets of the "La Virginea Pars" map, they scheduled a trip to visit the area along with the help of magnetometers and ground-penetrating radar (GPR).

"What we do is we get the oldest maps we can find—so we can get a historic sense of what was there and what's there now—and orient them," said research associate Malcolm LeCompte at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina, who was responsible for the GPR.

He looked for similarities between the old map and the current topography. The researchers than used GPR, which sends radio waves into the ground and measures the echo of the signals that bounce off of objects underground.

LeCompte and his team found a previously undiscovered pattern that indicated the possibility of multiple wooden structures approximately 3 feet underground.

"I don't know if it's one or a group [of structures]," he said, adding that they "could be joined or they could be close together."

The mere presence of the buried structure indicates that there was a colonial presence in the area. However, while the new information has begun to give archaeologists a clearer view as to what might have happened to the Roanoke colony, there are still pieces to the puzzle that remain unfound. What's the next step in solving this age-old mystery? 

"We have to go in and dig some holes, I guess," Swindell said.

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Mars One unveils first stage of plan to colonize Red Planet

All components of Mars One's settlement are slated to reach their destination by 2021. The hardware includes two living units, two life-support units, a second supply unit and two rovers.Bryan Versteeg/Mars One

An artist's depiction of the private Mars One lander for a unmanned mission to Mars slated to launch in 2018. The design is based on NASA's Phoenix Mars lander.Mars One Foundation

An ambitious project that aims to send volunteers on a one-way trip to Mars unveiled plans for the first private unmanned mission to the Red Planet Tuesday, a robotic vanguard to human colonization that will launch in 2018.

The non-profit Mars One foundation has inked deals with Lockheed Martin Space Systems and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL) to draw up mission concept studies for the private robotic flight to Mars. Under the plan, Lockheed Martin will build the Mars One lander, and SSTL will build a communications satellite, the companies' representatives announced at a news conference here today.

"We're very excited to have contracted Lockheed Martin and SSTL for our first mission to Mars," Mars One co-founder and CEO Bas Lansdorp said in a statement. "These will be the first private spacecraft to Mars and their successful arrival and operation will be a historic accomplishment." [Photos: How Mars One Wants to Colonize the Red Planet]

Lockheed Martin designed, built and operated the lander for NASA's 2007 Phoenix Mars lander mission to look for water ice beneath the surface of the Martian arctic, and the Mars One Lander will be based on the design of Phoenix.

"This is an ambitious project and we're already working on the mission concept study, starting with the proven design of Phoenix," Ed Sedivy, civil space chief engineer at Lockheed Martin, said in a statement.

The Mars One lander will have a robotic arm capable of scooping up soil, just like the Phoenix lander; an experiment to extract water from the soil; a power experiment to demonstrate the use of thin-film solar panels on the planet's surface; and a camera for continuous video recording.

The lander will also carry aboard the winner of a worldwide university challenge that Mars One plans to launch in 2014, as well as several Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education challenge winners.

The satellite, to be built by SSTL, will be in synchronous orbit around Mars and will provide a high-bandwidth link to relay data and live video from the lander back to Earth.

"This study gives us an unprecedented opportunity to take our tried and tested approach and apply it to Mars One's imaginative and exhilarating challenge of sending humans to Mars through private investment," Sir Martin Sweeting, executive chairman of SSTL, said in a statement.

Mars One invited anyone over age 18 to apply to be an astronaut. About 165,000 people answered the first call for applications, which closed at the end of August. There will be four rounds of selection before the finalists are chosen.

Mars One estimates it will cost $6 billion to get the first four people to Mars, and $4 billion for each subsequent trip. The funding will come from sponsorships and exclusive partnerships, and the company recently announced a reality TV show to pay for the project. The foundation is also launching a crowd-funding campaign through the website Indiegogo. Contributors will earn the right to vote on several mission decisions, including the winners of STEM and university challenges, Mars One says.

"Our 2018 mission will change the way people view space exploration as they will have the opportunity to participate," Lansdorp said. "They will not only be spectators, but also participants."

Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Moon walk or Death Star? China’s lunar plans a mystery

An artist's conception of China's Chang'e 3 robot on the moon.ESA

A Chinese satellite has entered lunar orbit and should drop a robotic probe on the moon as early as Friday -- the first such moon landing in nearly four decades. But China's ultimate plans are unclear, whether simply scientific or the first steps toward a military base on the moon.

The Chang’e 3 satellite was launched from southwest China on Dec. 2 and entered orbit around the moon on Dec. 6. It will deposit a robotic rover on the moon as early as Dec. 14. China’s long range goals are murky, according to Thomas Reiter, director for human spaceflight and operations with the European Space Agency (ESA). Yet militarizing the moon would be a shame, he said.

“I could not imagine that human exploration is getting … pushed by military consideration,” Reiter told FoxNews.com. “It would really be a pity.”

'It could indicate interest in the next decade in bringing humans to the lunar surface.'

- Thomas Reiter, director of human spaceflight and operations at the ESA

The ESA is helping China to the moon, a landing that will be the first controlled descent since Russia’s Luna-24 landed in 1976. The space agency’s worldwide network of satellites are tracking the science mission while expert teams on the ground are lending technical assistance. But not even the ESA knows exactly what China has planned.

“The strategic long-term goals of China in human exploration … are not very clear yet,” Reiter said. China’s goals could include landing men on the moon, a feat only the United States has managed to do, the last time 41 years ago, he said.

“I believe they are taking a clear path with some first steps, and I could imagine yes, this could be interest in the next decade in bringing humans to the lunar surface.”

Russia also has shown interest in the moon, Reiter said. Yet the ESA, like NASA, has no concrete plans to do more than help when it comes to lunar exploration.

“NASA is not going to the moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime,” NASA administrator Charles Bolden said at an April panel in Washington. NASA spokesman David Weaver echoed that sentiment, telling FoxNews.com that it is working with international partners to plan missions to the moon and elsewhere.

“We are deeply involved in lunar science, with two satellites currently orbiting the moon,” he said. “The global community is committed to working together on a unified deep-space exploration strategic plan, with robotic and human missions to destinations that include near-Earth asteroids, the moon and Mars. 

Reiter also put the moon on a short list, including low-Earth orbit and Mars. But due to budgetary restrictions, the ESA has no plans of its own to visit the moon.

“For the moment, we do not have a dedicated lunar exploration program,” he told FoxNews.com. At a recent conference in Naples, the space agency proposed a program for a European lunar landing mission to the south pole.

“Due to the overall economic situation of the member states, this could not be approved,” Reiter said. “We are looking into a cooperative mission with the Russian partners.”

Yet Reiter said the agency remains focused on the moon, despite a decades-long dry spell in lunar landings.

“I believe the moon is still a very important destination,” he said. “If we really intend to take a human mission to Mars … in two decades or maybe a little more, this way leads by the moon.”

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How many people heard the Sermon on the Mount? Or the Gettysburg Address?

Have you ever wondered how many people in the audience actually heard the Gettysburg Address? How about the Sermon on the Mount or Moses at Sinai?

The answer to those questions, according to two New York University researchers, is more than you think.

People gave famous speeches for millennia without amplification. But how many people in the crowd could understand what was being said? In Monty Python's film, "Life of Brian," a large crowd shows up to hear Jesus' sermon, but by the time Jesus' words made it to the fringes of the crowd some clarity was lost. ("Blessed are the cheese-makers.")

The two researchers, Braxton Boren and Agnieszka Roginska at NYU's Music and Audio Research Lab, replicated a famous experiment by Benjamin Franklin using modern scientific techniques, and reported their findings at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Francisco last week.

The story begins in the late 1730s. A preacher, George Whitefield, was drawing immense crowds at his outdoor sermons in London. At one sermon, held in Mayfair, Whitefield claimed to have addressed 80,000 people, all of whom he presumed could understand him. Franklin didn't believe it and took an opportunity to test the claim in 1739 when Whitefield spoke in Philadelphia.

"I had the curiosity to learn how far he could be heard," Franklin wrote.

Whitefield was described as handsome, slim, and slightly cross-eyed, with a voice "like a lion," according to contemporary reports. He was one of the founders of Methodism in America and was among the most famous preachers of his time.

In Philadelphia, he spoke to an audience of perhaps 6,000 people stretched between Front Street and the Delaware River, a good crowd considering that Philadelphia's population at the time was only about 13,000. Franklin couldn't resist. He walked from the front of the crowd toward the river, listening for the point at which the preacher was no longer intelligible.

Then, he went home and did the calculations.

According to Boren, Franklin ran two numbers, the area over which Whitefield's voice was intelligible, and a guess at how many people could fit in that area. The area, he decided, was about 23,000 square meters.

Using modern modeling technology and archeological records of what Market Street looked like then, the NYU researchers thought Franklin nailed it.

Franklin also estimated each person took up 2 square feet, or about 0.2 square yards. His conclusion then was that Whitefield could have been heard by as many as 125,000 people under perfect conditions, but, Boren said, being a modest New Englander, Franklin concluded that figure was wildly off and settled on "more than 30,000," Boren said.

"There were certain things he didn't account for and certain things he over-accounted for, but by the end his estimate was a pretty good estimate," Boren said.

The original calculation was off, Boren said, because the kind of density Franklin was using is what modern acoustical researchers call "mosh-pit conditions." The crowd more likely was "solid," which is about half a square meter per person, little more than half a square yard, and much less dense.

Using those calculations Boren and Roginska concluded Whitefield could be heard by 20,000-30,000 people on a good day, a perfectly still crowd, no wind or carriages clattering by, just as Franklin said.

Still, how could someone be heard that far? Whitefield was speaking in an area of dense construction and the buildings and streets probably acted as sound reflectors.

But, it was probably more than just the acoustics of his environment.

The NYU computer models, based on Franklin's description, give one answer: Whitefield was very loud. They estimate that if you stood three yards in front of him, his voice would have registered 90 decibels, matching the loudest average sound levels from voices ever measured in a modern lab.

"The international standard for loud speech is 74 decibels," Boren said.

According to Jack Randorff, an acoustical consultant and engineer from Ransom Canyon, Texas, the NYU model assumed people could hear about 30 percent of what was being said. Since the audience knew the context of his material, their minds filled in the rest.

Additionally, the style of public speaking was different in the past. Randorff said the speakers stood up straight and might have raised and stretched their arms so their diaphragms were extended.

Speeches of the past also had an entirely different cadence. Orators often spoke in bursts of four or five words with considerable emphasis instead of long phrases. Lincoln might have said, "Four score...and seven years ago….our fathers...brought forth..." It also allowed them to take deep breaths so they could keep going.

The buildings around Whitefield would have added six decibels to his voice, which would have doubled the effective area his voice would have carried, Randorff said.

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Ancient estate and garden fountain unearthed in Israel

The remains of a wealthy estate, a mosaic fountain and a system of pipes connected to a large cistern dating back to the late 10th and early 11th centuries have been unearthed in Ramla in central Israel, archaeologists report.Assaf Peretz; courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The remains of a wealthy estate, with a mosaic fountain in its garden, dating to between the late 10th and early 11th centuries have been unearthed in Ramla in central Israel.

The estate was discovered during excavations at a site where a bridge is slated for construction as part of the new Highway 44.

"It seems that a private building belonging to a wealthy family was located there and that the fountain was used for ornamentation," Hagit Torg, excavation director on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said in a statement. "This is the first time that a fountain has been discovered outside the known, more affluent quarters of Old Ramla."

Fountains from the Fatimid period were mostly found around the center of the Old City of Ramla called White Mosque, Torg added. [Photos: Roadside Dig Reveals 10,000-Year-Old House in Israel]

Researchers found two residential rooms within the estate along with a nearby fountain made of mosaic and covered with plaster and stone slabs; A network of pipes, some made of terra cotta and connected with stone jars, led to the fountain. Next to the estate, archaeologists also found a large cistern and a system of pipes and channels used to transport water.

Other discoveries at the site included oil lamps, parts of dolls made of bones and a baby rattle.

"This is the first time that the fountain's plumbing was discovered completely intact. The pipes of other fountains did not survive the earthquakes that struck the country in 1033 and 1068 CE," Torg said in a statement.

Ramla was founded in the eighth century by the ruler Suleiman Ibn 'Abd al-Malik. Its strategic location on the road from Cairo to Damascus and from Yafo to Jerusalem made Ramla an important economic center.

The entire area seems to have been abandoned in the mid-11th century, likely in the wake of an earthquake, according to the IAA.

Once the excavation is complete, the fountain will be displayed in the city's Pool of Arches compound.

Due to Israel's long history, construction projects often yield archaeological discoveries. For example, a "cultic" temple and traces of a 10,000-year-old house were discovered at Eshtaol west of Jerusalem in preparation for the widening of a road. And during recent expansions of the main road connecting Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, called Highway 1, excavators found a carving of a phallus from the Stone Age, a ritual building from the First Temple era and animal figurines dating back 9,500 years.

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European Space Agency sets tentative date for 1st comet landing Nov. 11

An artist's impression of the Rosetta orbiter deploying the Philae lander to comet 67P/ChuryumovGerasimenko. After an extensive mapping phase by the orbiter in AugustSeptember 2014, a landing site will be selected for Philae to conduct in situ measurements in November 2014.ESAC. Carreau/ATG medialab

BERLIN –  The European Space Agency has set a tentative date for the first landing of a spacecraft on a comet.

ESA says its Rosetta probe will wake up from hibernation Jan. 20 before chasing down comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

If all goes according to plan, Rosetta will launch a lander onto the surface of the comet on Nov. 11, 2014.

The mission is different from NASA's Deep Impact probe that fired a projectile into comet Tempel 1 in 2005 to let scientists study the plume of matter it hurled into space.

ESA's director of science, Mark McCaughrean, said Tuesday that the lander Philae will dig up samples of the comet and analyze them using on-board instruments.

One objective is to learn whether the water on Earth could have come from comets.

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Ancient Mars lake could have supported life, Curiosity rover shows

NASA's Curiosity rover has found evidence of an ancient Martian lake that could have supported life as we know it for long stretches — perhaps millions of years.

This long and skinny freshwater lake likely existed about 3.7 billion years ago, researchers said, suggesting that habitable environments were present on Mars more recently than previously thought.

"Quite honestly, it just looks very Earth-like," said Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. [Ancient Mars Could Have Supported Life (Photos)]

"You've got an alluvial fan, which is being fed by streams that originate in mountains, that accumulates a body of water," Grotzinger told SPACE.com. "That probably was not unlike what happened during the last glacial maximum in the Western U.S."

Habitable Mars
The lake once covered a small portion of the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater, which the 1-ton Curiosity rover has been exploring since touching down on the Red Planet in August 2012.

'Quite honestly, it just looks very Earth-like.'

- Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena

The main task of Curiosity's $2.5 billion mission is to determine whether Gale Crater could ever have supported microbial life. The rover team achieved that goal months ago, announcing in March that a spot near Curiosity's landing site called Yellowknife Bay was indeed habitable billions of years ago.

The new results, which are reported Monday, Dec. 9, in six separate papers in the journal Science, confirm and extend Curiosity's landmark discovery, painting a more complete picture of the Yellowknife Bay area long ago.

This picture emerged from Curiosity's analysis of fine-grained sedimentary rocks called mudstones, which generally form in calm, still water. The rover obtained powdered samples of these rocks by drilling into Yellowknife Bay outcrops.

The mudstones contain clay minerals that formed in the sediments of an ancient freshwater lake, researchers said. Curiosity also spotted some of the key chemical ingredients for life in the samples, including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon.

The lake could have potentially supported a class of microbes called chemolithoautotrophs, which obtain energy by breaking down rocks and minerals. Here on Earth, chemolithoautotrophs are commonly found in habitats beyond the reach of sunlight, such as caves and hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.

"It is exciting to think that billions of years ago, ancient microbial life may have existed in the lake's calm waters, converting a rich array of elements into energy," Sanjeev Gupta of Imperial College London, co-author of one of the new papers, said in a statement.

An icy Martian lake?
The shallow ancient lake may have been about 30 miles long by 3 miles wide, Grotzinger said. Based on the thickness of the sedimentary deposits, the research team estimates that the lake existed for at least tens of thousands of years — and perhaps much longer, albeit on a possibly on-and-off basis.

Taking into account the broader geological context, "you could wind up with an assemblage of rocks that represent streams, lakes and ancient groundwater systems — so for times when the lake might have been dry, the groundwater's still there. This could have gone on for millions or tens of millions of years," Grotzinger said.

The lack of weathering on Gale Crater's rim suggests that the area was cold when the lake existed, he added, raising the possibility that a layer of ice covered the lake on a permanent or occasional basis. But such conditions wouldn't be much of a deterrent to hardy microbes.

"These are entirely viable habitable environments for chemolithoautotrophs," Grotzinger said.

Researchers still don't know if the Gale Crater lake hosted organisms of any kind; Curiosity was not designed to hunt for signs of life on Mars. But if chemolithoautotrophs did indeed dominate the lake, it would put an alien twist on a superficially familiar environment.

"You can imagine that, if life evolved on Mars and never got beyond the point of chemolithoautotrophy, then in the absence of competition from other types of microbes, these systems might have been dominated by that type of metabolic pathway," Grotzinger said. "And that's an un-Earth-like situation."

Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Antarctica sets low temperature record of -135.8 degrees

FILE: In this image provided by the National Snow and Ice Data Center, sastrugi stick out from the snow surface in this photo near Plateau Station in East Antarctica. A new look at NASA satellite data revealed that Earth set a new record for coldest temperature recorded in East Antarctica. It happened in August 2010 when it hit -135.8 degrees. Then on July 31 of this year, it came close again: -135.3 degrees.NSIDC/AP

WASHINGTON –  Feeling chilly? Here's cold comfort: You could be in East Antarctica which new data says set a record for "soul-crushing" cold.

Try 135.8 degrees Fahrenheit below zero; that's 93.2 degrees below zero Celsius, which sounds only slightly toastier. Better yet, don't try it. That's so cold scientists say it hurts to breathe.

A new look at NASA satellite data revealed that Earth set a new record for coldest temperature recorded. It happened in August 2010 when it hit -135.8 degrees. Then on July 31 of this year, it came close again: -135.3 degrees.

The old record had been -128.6 degrees, which is -89.2 degrees Celsius.

Ice scientist Ted Scambos at the National Snow and Ice Data Center said the new record is "50 degrees colder than anything that has ever been seen in Alaska or Siberia or certainly North Dakota."

"It's more like you'd see on Mars on a nice summer day in the poles," Scambos said, from the American Geophysical Union scientific meeting in San Francisco Monday, where he announced the data. "I'm confident that these pockets are the coldest places on Earth."

However, it won't be in the Guinness Book of World Records because these were satellite measured, not from thermometers, Scambos said.

"Thank God, I don't know how exactly it feels," Scambos said. But he said scientists do routinely make naked 100 degree below zero dashes outside in the South Pole, so people can survive that temperature for about three minutes.

Most of the time researchers need to breathe through a snorkel that brings air into the coat through a sleeve and warms it up "so you don't inhale by accident" the cold air, Scambos said.

On Monday, the coldest U.S. temperature was a relatively balmy 27 degrees below zero Fahrenheit in Yellowstone, Wyo., said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of the private firm Weather Underground.

"If you want soul-crushing cold, you really have to go overseas," Scambos said in a phone interview. "It's just a whole other level of cold because on that cold plateau, conditions are perfect."

Scambos said the air is dry, the ground chilly, the skies cloudless and cold air swoops down off a dome and gets trapped in a chilly lower spot "hugging the surface and sliding around."

Just because one spot on Earth has set records for cold that has little to do with global warming because it is one spot in one place, said Waleed Abdalati, an ice scientist at the University of Colorado and NASA's former chief scientist. Both Abdalati, who wasn't part of the measurement team, and Scambos said this is likely an unusual random reading in a place that hasn't been measured much before and could have been colder or hotter in the past and we wouldn't know.

"It does speak to the range of conditions on this Earth, some of which we haven't been able to observe," Abdalati said.

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Genomics firm 23andMe patents ‘designer baby' system, promises not to use it

The homepage for 23andMe, a company that offers to test your DNA to scan for heritable diseases.23andMe

An illustration from 23andMe's patent application for a "designer baby" system.23andMe

A personal genetics firm was recently granted a patent on a system that lets you predict the traits of a baby -- but the company promises not to use.

The Mountain View, Calif., company 23andMe just announced the patent for a system that would let parents to be chose traits they’d like to pass on or suppress in their children, from hair and eye color to susceptibility to diseases.

"Taken out of 'patentese,' what 23andMe is claiming is a method by which prospective donors of ova and/or sperm may be selected so as to increase the likelihood of producing a human baby with characteristics desired by the prospective parents," explained Sigrid Sterckx, a bioethicist at Ghent University in Belgium, in an essay published Thursday on Nature.

'We’ve never pursued the idea, and have no plans to do so.'

- Catherine Afarian, a 23andMe spokeswoman

"What is claimed is not a cast-iron, fool-proof method guaranteeing that the eventual child will have all the phenotypic traits on the parents’ shopping list, an impossible task, but merely a method of improving the chances that the baby has the right' characteristics," she wrote.

An image of the system associated with the patent shows a simple, pull-down menu to design your offspring: “I prefer a child with a low risk of colorectal cancer,” for example, or “I prefer a child with a high probability of blue eyes.”

But rest assured, the company told Wired it promises not to use the technology.

“When we originally introduced the tool and filed the patent there was some thinking the feature could have applications for fertility clinics,” said Catherine Afarian, a 23andMe spokeswoman. “But we’ve never pursued the idea, and have no plans to do so.”

Filed in December 2008, the patent was meant to cover the technology that supports a service the company currently offers, called Family Traits Inheritance Calculator. That service allows parents to scan their own personal genome and highlight the risk of passing certain diseases or susceptibility to them along to their offspring.

But the language of the patent extends beyond the Calculator, the company said. It offered details on the system in the blog post to be very clear about the technology and the company’s intentions.

A design-a-baby service isn’t in the works, but the services the company does offer are still of use to parents.

“Individuals use our service to get personalized information about their health and ancestry. This information empowers them to be more involved in managing their own health. It also offers them more insight into themselves, their traits and their family’s ancestry,” the company wrote.

Still, Sterckx was concerned that such a broad, potentially disturbing patent was approved.

"it is clear that selecting children in ways such as those patented by 23andMe is hugely ethically controversial," she wrote.

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The long, dark search for E.T. (and for ourselves)

Is there anybody out there?basheertome / flickr

There’s nothing quite as simultaneously awe-inspiring and humbling as gazing at the starry sky and coming to terms with your own fleeting role in the cosmos.

Science journalist Lee Billings sets the stage for his first book, “Five Billion Years of Solitude,” with this very thought, describing how he, and many of the scientists he interviews, first fell in love with the heavens. But it is a love letter to a place we may never reach. As our telescopes become ever more powerful, Billings writes, the universe appears to be receding before humanity’s outstretched hands, while the pressing problems of life on Earth draw our gaze, and our ambitions, down from the skies.

“Solitude” is a “meditation on humanity’s uncertain legacy,” as the 20th century’s space race and boom years have given way to manmade terrestrial crises that have not only hampered space exploration, but made clear how the only life we know hangs fragilely in the balance. Billings literally brings the stars down to earth, as he connects the dots between geology, biology, astrophysics, engineering, and economics. Fracking, it turns out, has an awful lot to do with searching for E.T. with radio telescopes. Single-pixel measurements of the chemical “color” of alien planets’ atmospheres can tell us a lot about their ability to harbor life, and can also inform us about where our own planet came from – and where it’s going.

Much of the discussion in the book centers on habitability – what makes Earth unique in the solar system and (so far) the galaxy, how planetary conditions have changed, how it will all end billions of years from now (cooked alive by an engorged Sun, followed by darkness and nothingness), and how we can predict the number of other civilizations there might be out there using what is known as the Drake Equation.

The equation’s many terms, Billings explains, can be boiled down to just one: L, or a civilization’s longevity. Possible outcomes seem to be one of two extremes: a (cosmically) relatively short-lived civilization that may succumb to self-annihilation, or a civilization that transcends its squabbles, its planet, and itself, harvesting the energy of entire stars as it travels through the universe, near-immortal.

It is no accident that Billings here carefully dwells on the orchids raised by Frank Drake, a giant in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. Tended correctly, these flowers can live in perpetuity, yet each individual bloom is short-lived, much like the radio frequency visibility window of our planet, which is now largely closed thanks to the adoption of digital communications and fiber optics.

The radio telescope-based search for extraterrestrials, once fueled by the optimism of Drake and the late Carl Sagan among others, has given way to the current en vogue field of exoplanetology, which seems poised to discover habitable Earth-like worlds any day now. That is, says Billings, if it weren’t for infighting, shifting organizational and funding priorities, and other failings that make us human. The dust jacket description and introduction hype this fraught narrative, which the rest of the book doesn’t quite fully deliver. The cutting-edge climate science, optics, and chemical detection techniques being used by the exoplanet hunters, however, are described in thorough and clear detail.

Billings oscillates between character-driven chapters – the personal histories, egos, and rivalries of prominent scientists – and longer narratives on the geologic history of earth and the cosmos. At times “Solitude” reads like a eulogy for the SETI titans of the 1960s and 1970s, while expressing tentative hope for both the current exoplanet boom, and our collective will to keep searching. Space dreams are continually brought back to their roots in earth science; a fairly large chunk of the book is devoted to fostering an appreciation for the “interactions of air, water, rock and sunlight” that created the thermodynamic sweet spot of Earth.

In “Solitude,” Billings uses deft descriptions and dazzling wordplay, though at times the language can appear dense. One chapter in particular is littered with a few too many acronyms to keep track of: a seemingly endless list of ambitious, bloated, and consequently shuttered projects that suffered from the downturn of the early 2000s. The glories of the Space Age are briefly revisited, and those familiar with SETI history will recognize seminal events in the field – the Green Bank conference, the Arecibo message – but will also note the absence of some of its most well-known figures, like former SETI Institute director Jill Tarter.

The timing of “Solitude’s” October 3 release couldn’t be better. Not only does there appear to be renewed public interest in space, with the success of the Curiosity rover, the confirmation of the Voyager 1 probe’s solar system exit, and the impending launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, but one of the book’s protagonists, MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager, just last week received a MacArthur “genius grant.” Seager is introduced relatively late in the book, and in describing her path from canoeing the barren lands of Canada to the study of the barren cosmos, Billings indulges in a triumphalist crescendo that rounds out the book.

The big question – what’s next, not just in space but here on Earth – is, of necessity, left unanswered, as it is unknown to scientist, author, and reader alike. Rather than rousing spirits and making a grand call for renewed vigor in space exploration, “Solitude” succumbs to a denouement similar to that of the shuttle program it laments. The descriptions of setbacks, ignorance, and death are not gratuitous, though. Billings knows that it is only through meditating on these that we can seize this singular moment in human history and become “momentarily eternal.”

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NASA's next Mars probe ready for Nov. launch, despite gov't slimdown

This artist's conception shows the NASA's MAVEN spacecraft orbiting Mars. The mission will launch in late 2013.LASP

NASA's next Mars probe should get off the ground on time, no matter how long the government shutdown lasts.

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution orbiter, or Maven, got back on track for a Nov. 18 launch on Thursday (Oct. 3), just two days after the government shutdown froze liftoff preparations and put a scare into planetary scientists around the world.

"We have already restarted spacecraft processing at Kennedy Space Center, working toward being ready to launch on Nov. 18," Maven principal investigator Bruce Jakosky, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, wrote in a mission status update Thursday. "We will continue to work over the next couple of days to identify any changes in our schedule or plans that are necessary to stay on track." [How the Government Shutdown Will Influence Science and Health]

'Launching Maven in 2013 protects the existing assets that are at Mars today.'

- Maven principal investigator Bruce Jakosky

The shutdown — which went into effect at midnight EDT Tuesday, Oct. 1, when the Senate and House of Representatives failed to agree on an emergency spending bill — forced NASA to furlough 97 percent of its employees and cease most of its operations, including work on missions such as Maven that have yet to leave the ground.

So the $650 million Maven mission went into a worrisome limbo in the home stretch of its long march toward launch. A lengthy shutdown could have caused Maven to miss its liftoff window, which officially runs through Dec. 7 (though the spacecraft could actually launch as late as Dec. 15 or so, Jakosky said).

That would be a big deal, because the next opportunity for Maven to get off the ground won't come until early 2016, when Earth and Mars are once again properly aligned.

But those concerns have now evaporated. NASA has determined that Maven qualifies for an emergency exception because of its importance as a communications link between Earth and robots on the Red Planet's surface, Jakosky wrote.

"Maven is required as a communications relay in order to be assured of continued communications with the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers," he said. "The rovers are presently supported by Mars Odyssey launched in 2001 and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launched in 2005. Launching Maven in 2013 protects the existing assets that are at Mars today."

NASA has no Red Planet relay orbiters planned beyond Maven, he added.

Maven was designed to help scientists learn how Mars' thin, carbon-dioxide-dominated atmosphere has changed over time, and what those changes may have meant for the Red Planet's ability to support life.

The probe will arrive in Mars orbit in September 2014. It will then use eight scientific instruments to study the Red Planet's upper atmosphere for one Earth year, which is about half of a Mars year.

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Hippo vs. elephant: Animal giants face off

It was a battle of the giants when a hippo had a tetchy face-off with an elephant.Nicole Cambre/Rex Features/NationalGeographic

A hippopotamus left no room for his message to get lost in translation when he ferociously defended his territory from an African elephant.

"There is an island on the middle of the Chobe River to which this elephant had crossed," photographer Nicole Cambre who captured the scene while visiting Botswana told National Geographic. "The hippo was not happy about it and was apparently defending its territory."

Cambre watched the scene unfold as the hippopotamus swam towards the elephant near the shoreline. The hippo approached the elephant and gave him an up close view of his massive teeth.

When the hippo came face to face with the largest land animal on Earth, he did not back down. He only reconsidered once the elephants' posse arrived.

"When more elephants crossed the river to the island, the hippo backed off and went back into the river," Cambre said.

While hippopotamus' are often called the most dangerous animal in Africa, the elephants were confident that their sheer size would be enough to ward off the hippo.

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New photos of Pakistan's 'Earthquake Island'

An aerial photo from Pakistan's National Institute of Oceanography suggests the new island is 60 to 70 feet (15 to 20 meters) tall.Pakistan's National Institute of Oceanography/NASA Earth Observatory

The Earth performed the ultimate magic trick last week, making an island appear out of nowhere. The new island is a remarkable side effect of the deadly Sept. 24 earthquake in Pakistan that killed more than 500 people.

A series of satellite images snapped a few days after the earthquake-triggered island emerged offshore of the town of Gwadar reveals the strange structure is round and relatively flat, with cracks and fissures like a child's dried-up mud pie.

The French Pleiades satellite mapped the muddy hill's dimensions, which measure 576.4 feet long by 524.9 feet wide. Aerial photos from Pakistan's National Institute of Oceanography suggest the gray-colored mound is about 60 to 70 feet tall. [Gallery: Amazing Images of Pakistan's Earthquake Island]

Geologists think the new island is made of erupted mud, spewed from the seafloor when trapped gases escaped.

Gwadar is about 230 miles from the earthquake's epicenter. The magnitude-7.7 earthquake was likely centered on the Chaman Fault, Shuhab Khan, a geoscientist at the University of Houston told LiveScience last week..

Geologists think the new island, named Zalzala Koh, is made of erupted mud, spewed from the seafloor when either trapped gases escaped or subsurface water was violently expelled.

The new island could be a mud volcano. Mud volcanoes form when hot water underground mixes with sediments and gases such as methane and carbon dioxide. If the noxious slurry finds a release valve, such as a crack opened by earthquake shaking, a mud volcano erupts, said James Hein, a senior scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Santa Cruz, Calif, said in an earlier interview. Geologists from the Pakistan Navy report that Zalzala Koh is releasing flammable gas. But seafloor sediments commonly hold methane-producing bacteria, so the possible methane coming from the island isn't a clincher to its identity.

Shaking from the powerful Sept. 24 earthquake could have also loosened the seafloor sediments offshore of Pakistan, jiggling them like jelly. The great rivers coming down from the Himalayas dump tons of water-saturated sediment into the Arabian Sea every year. The new island could be a gigantic example of a liquefaction blow, when seismic shaking makes saturated sediments act like liquid and trapped water suddenly escapes, Michael Manga, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, told LiveScience last week.

Similar islands have appeared offshore of Pakistan after strong earthquakes in the region in 2001 and 1945. If the earlier examples hold, the soft mud island won't last a year, disappearing under the erosive power of the pounding of waves from monsoon storms.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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'Gravity': Science vs. fiction

Warner Bros. Pictures

1 How Real Is This Orbital Blockbuster? Warner Bros. Pictures

2 Orbital Debris Causes … Complications Warner Bros. Pictures

3 Houston ... We Have a Good One For You Warner Bros. Pictures

4 Can You Steal a Space Capsule? Warner Bros. Pictures

5 Correct Use of Jargon is Critical Warner Bros. Pictures

6 Remember to Use Sunscreen (SPF 900) Warner Bros. Pictures

Warner Bros. Pictures

8 When The Comsat Grid Goes Down, Try Ham Radio Warner Bros. Pictures

Warner Bros. Pictures

Director Alfonso Cuarón's visually stunning film "Gravity," in theaters today, is already being heralded as one of the year's best movies. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney star as astronauts whose mission goes spectacularly wrong when a cloud of orbital debris shreds their shuttle, cuts off communication and leaves them stranded in space.

These details have already been revealed in the film's trailers, but what the previews can't convey is the impressive sense of authenticity and verisimilitude that director Cuarón brings to the big screen. Thanks to a brilliant visual design and strategic use of 3-D effects, the movie feels like being in space.

That sense of authenticity also applies to the film's depiction of the specifics of an actual NASA space mission. It's clear that the filmmakers did their homework. The movie is careful to stay within the realm of plausibility demanded by the genre of hard science fiction.

But just to be sure, we asked former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao -- a veteran of three shuttle missions, four space walks and a six-month stint on the International Space Station -- to help us separate the science from the fiction.

Warning: Several significant plot spoilers dead ahead

Warner Bros. Pictures

The crisis in the film is precipitated when the Russians blow up one of their own satellites, triggering a chain reaction that sends a cloud of lethal debris toward our heroes at around, oh, 17,000 mph. Chiao says the dangers of such a scenario are quite real and have been studied extensively.

"Just in recent history, the Chinese conducted an anti-weapons satellite test," Chiao says. "They blew up one of their old weather satellites, which created a bunch of debris."

Could such an incident really set off a chain-reaction that wipes out everything in orbit?

"It's not implausible, but it's unlikely," Chiao says. "Of course, if you have orbital debris, it can damage satellites or other spacecraft and potentially cause them to break up in turn. But the thing is, satellites are actually spaced pretty far apart. To get a cascade or chain reaction is pretty unlikely."

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Warner Bros. Pictures

Before everything goes haywire in orbit, the spacewalking astronauts Ryan Stone (Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (Clooney) keep it loose by casually chatting, joking with ground control in Houston and even listening to music. Is it really that casual up in space?

"Yeah, during spacewalks we're tied in with Houston and tied in with the crew inside (the shuttle), of course," Chiao says. "We have some light-hearted moments and we joke around a bit."

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Warner Bros. Pictures

When the debris cloud destroys the astronauts' ride back home -- that is to say, the space shuttle -- Stone is forced to improvise by breaking into an old Soyuz spacecraft docked at the International Space Station. Chiao says such orbital grand theft is quite possible, but pretty tricky.

"In order to open the outer door of the airlock you have to have the inner hatch closed and the air evacuated in between," Chaio says. "On the American airlock, you could open the pressure equalization valves, and there's a handle outside so you could definitely open the outer hatch. But the trick is, on the inside, the crew would have to have already closed that inner hatch. Otherwise you let all the air out of the station. If the crew configured it that way before they abandoned ship, then yes that could happen. It's physically possible."

The Science and Fiction of ‘Oblivion’

Warner Bros. Pictures

After the orbital debris cascade knocks out communication satellites, Stone and Kowalski lose contact with ground control. They keep transmitting, though, in hopes that someone is listening. Each message begins with the rather haunting phrase, "Transmitting in the blind..."

"Yeah, that's real phraseology and that's used in aircraft operations also," Chiao says. "You call 'in the blind' if you're not receiving them, but you think they might be receiving you. You're basically letting them know that you're not able to hear them."

Warner Bros. Pictures

In one rather pretty scene, astronaut Stone ditches the spacesuit and catches her breath in a pressurized space vehicle, as sunlight streams in through a nearby porthole. But without a spacesuit or, say, the ozone layer, isn't dangerous to be exposed to direct sunlight in orbit?

"It depends on the window, but most windows are treated with UV protection," Chiao says. "For example, on the shuttle, all the windows had UV protection coatings on them. On the station, in the Russian segment, the small windows generally did not have UV protection, so they would be more optically pure. You'd get a pretty severe sunburn if you were in direct sunlight through one of those windows."

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Warner Bros. Pictures

In fact, Stone uses the porthole sunlight to do a little light reading. Improvising inside Russian and Chinese spacecraft, she's able to get systems working by, apparently, reading the user manuals handily stored nearby. Really? You can fire up a spacecraft by reading the manual?

Surprisingly, Chiao says this is fairly accurate: "There are definitely paper procedures and books, certainly in the Soyuz and, I imagine, the Chinese spacecraft as well," Chiao says. "On the shuttle we had paper books. The problem would be, having not been trained, she may not know how to follow the instructions. She might not even know the language. But the books are there, and they're definitely used."

Chiao, by the way, would be prepared in such a situation: He speaks both Chinese and Russian.

Astronaut Gave 'Gravity' Advice To Sandra Bullock

Warner Bros. Pictures

A fairly relentless thriller, "Gravity" is short on light moments, but one of them occurs when Stone tries to raise ground control on a complex communications matrix … and gets a giddy Chinese farmer on ham radio. According to Chiao, that absolutely could happen, and has.

"On both the shuttle and ISS, we're normally going through satellites, but we have backup ways of communicating that are more direct-line," Chiao says. "We have a UHF radio that could go direct to the ground sites. The normal S-band radios can also go to ground sites. Just because you lose the satellites doesn't mean you lose comm."

And ham radio?

"Sure, on board the station we do have a ham radio and that's one way we organize conference sessions with schools and students," Chiao says. "As we fly from horizon to horizon, line-of-sight, we're able to answer questions for about 10 minutes or so. In fact, I remember hearing truck drivers talking to each other while we were over rural China. I tried calling down to them but they couldn't hear me."

VIDEO: What It's Like To Be An Astronaut

Warner Bros. Pictures

As the film's beginning title cards read, there's no oxygen in space, no air pressure, no sound. Life in space is impossible. The spacewalking sequences, in particular, underline just how vulnerable astronauts are.

Chiao says the trick is not to think about it too much. "You know, I've wanted to do this since I was a little kid, so getting into orbit and looking out that window for the first time was just such an emotional moment."

"Doing a spacewalk is a little different," Chiao says. "You're acutely aware that you're at higher risk. You're not protected by a pressure vessel and a spacecraft hull. If something goes wrong, your buddies inside, there's very little they can do to help you. It's a heightened sense of awareness. You're very careful and deliberate. You're always checking the tethers because the worst thing that could happen is you get unattached...."

Science vs. Fiction: 'Elysium'

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Thousands of turtles killed by longline fishing in Costa Rica

Sea turtles were the second most common catch on Costa Rican fishermen’s longlines during the past decade. Sharks also suffered on the hooks.

A team of Americans and Costa Ricans estimated that longlines hooked more than 699,000 olive ridley sea turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea) and 23,000 green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) between 1999 and 2010. Female olive ridleys made up 92,300 of the total. This represents a serious blow to the reproductive potential of the species, which the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists as vulnerable. The IUCN lists green turtles as endangered.

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Approximately 20 percent or 144,400 of the hooked turtles died. People freed the rest from the curved steel spikes and released them back into the sea. However no one knows if the ordeal seriously injured the animals.

“The effect of the rusty hooks may be to give the turtles a good dose of disease,” said James Spotila, an environmental scientist at Drexel University and co-author of the study published in the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, in a press release. “No one knows because no one holds the turtle to see if it gets sick.”

Approximately 20 percent or 144,400 of the hooked turtles died.

Longline fishing involves a single long cable with many side lines coming off of it. Each side line holds a baited hook. Spotila and his teammates used data collected by observers aboard longline ships to calculate the totals of the various species caught.

7 Insects You’ll Be Eating in the Future

The research team also observed that many young silky (Carcharhinus falciformis) and blacktip (Carcharhinus limbatus) sharks ended up on the lines. Less than 15 percent of the captured silky sharks had reached maturity. An abundance of adolescents may mean the adults have been wiped out.

Longline fisherman caught more mahi mahi than any other fish. Mahi mahi attracted fishmermen’s attention because they command a good price in the market.

However, sharks and turtles have no legal commercial value in Costa Rica, because of protections under national law. One study author criticized the Costa Rican fisheries agency INCOPESCA for failing to enforce protections of the sharks and turtles.

“INCOPESCA has failed to adequately study and regulate the fishery in Costa Rica for many years,” said Randall Arauz, president of Pretoma, a Costa Rican conservation organization, in a press release. “It does not even enforce national laws. Board members have serious conflicts of interest because they are commercial fishermen. Until INCOPESCA is reformed in such a way that the Board of Directors is eliminated and its mission is to defend the public interest, neither the fish nor the turtles will be safe.”

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Scientist to Congress: Partial shutdown a 'deep hardship'

The United States Capitol building.Architect of the Capitol

During her time as head of the U.S. Geological Survey, Marcia McNutt had to prep for many government shutdowns but never had to temporarily lay off any employees, as is happening under the current shutdown.

Now, she's the editor of Science, one of the world's top science journals, and has the freedom to let Congress know what she thinks about the current budget impasse.

"The entire scientific community will suffer if the shutdown is allowed to endure for any substantial length of time," McNutt wrote in an editorial published Thursday 3 in the journal Science.

'The entire scientific community will suffer.'

- Marcia McNutt, editor of Science magazine

"The government rules for a shutdown are so strict that many scientists are not allowed to continue their work, even as unpaid volunteers. They have no access to their facilities or their government-issued computers. Experiments are interrupted, time series are broken, continuity is destroyed and momentum is lost."

The government shutdown has a direct economic hit on the 800,000 federal workers who are not allowed to work, with no guarantee of back pay. "Many federal agencies are already furloughing employees for part of the year to cope with the recent budget sequester," McNutt wrote. "Adding the shutdown to any furlough is a deep hardship for families just making ends meet." [6 Ways the Government Shut Will Impact Science, Health]

The science impact is also widespread, McNutt noted.

"The science mission agencies have been responsible for much of the applied science done in the public interest; with the shutdown, they will no longer be able to track flu outbreaks, update real-time information on water quality and quantity, improve weather forecasts, develop advanced defense systems to keep us safe and serve many more immediate needs," she wrote.

The cascading effects of the shutdown are already spreading outside the federal science world. Here are just a few examples: Researchers at universities can't get data locked behind shuttered federal websites. Scientists planning Antarctic expeditions later this month are grounded, and their entire campaign may be called off if the prep work isn't completed in time. Field workers studying seasonal habits of animals, plants and insects may miss their research window due to a lack of grants. The delay could also push the planned Nov. 18 launch of NASA's next Mars mission, called MAVEN, to 2016.

"I urge the research community to take stock of real economic hardships, opportunities lost and damage done, so as to more effectively argue for congressional action on the federal budget," McNutt said.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Scientists's; mistake uncovers 'impossible material': - USA TODAY

Sometimes screwing up a science experiment isn't such a bad thing. Case in point: Researchers in Sweden accidentally left their equipment running on an experiment over a weekend, and ended up creating something awesome — Upsalite, the world's most efficient water absorber, reports The Independent.

This substance, prohibitively expensive and difficult to produce until now, can potentially do everything from controlling moisture on a hockey rink to cleaning up toxic waste and oil spills, reports Science Blog.

This "is expected to pave the way for new sustainable products in a number of industrial applications," says nanotechnology professor Maria Stromme.

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Scientists have been trying — and failing — to cheaply create a dry, powdered form of magnesium carbonate since the early 1900s, earning it the nickname the "impossible material."

Turns out, all they needed to do was use the same process they've been attempting for more than 100 years, but at three times the atmospheric pressure.

When the scientists at the University of Uppsala inadvertently did this, they returned to the lab Monday morning to find a gel had formed.

When heated to more than 158 degrees, that gel "solidifies and collapses into a white and coarse powder," they report, per Phys.org. "It became clear that we had indeed synthesized the material that previously had been claimed impossible to make," Stromme says.

Find more amazing discoveries at Newser, a USA TODAY content partner providing general news, commentary and coverage from around the Web. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.

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The cultural challenge to climate science writing - PLoS Blogs (blog)

Credit: woodleywonderworks, via Flickr (CC-BY)

My previous posts on the inevitable politics of climate science, I was flattered to see, figured into a terrific article this week by David Roberts of Grist about the futility of “just the facts” approaches to explaining that science to the public. Read his whole post for the thoughtfully developed argument, but these paragraphs offer the gist of it:

… [A] democratic public does not want bare facts. It wants meaning. It wants to know why climate science matters and what can be done about it. More fundamentally, it’s not just that people want meaning, it’s that they only absorb facts through meaning. Our identities are how we make sense of information. This is the whole point of cultural cognition research: We seek out information that reinforces our identities.

Scientists, at their best, avoid this kind of blinkered, identity-reinforcing cognition, at least when they’re engaged in scientific work. They struggle to unearth their own assumptions and subject them to testing, to render them falsifiable. It’s a kind of mental self-discipline that requires considerable training. Scientists should not imagine that members of the general public do or could or should share that same self-discipline. If they want the information they convey to be understood and absorbed, they will have to speak as humans speak, from within a cultural identity and a set of values, not hovering above such mortal concerns.

Roberts notes my “morose conclusion” that scientists should advocate for whatever they want because nobody seems to care what they think, then makes the case that by building bridges to cultural groups with whom they can find real affinities, scientists can become more persuasive. (He cites climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe as a success at this.)

He and I are actually not far apart in our optimism. My remark was perhaps a little too flip: I was only trying to say that I think the potential harm from scientists discussing policy intelligently can get overstated. The kind of engagement that Hayhoe has managed seems like a wonderful example for at least some others to follow, and it should be an inspiration to anyone who wants to help build the democratic consensus that real progress on climate policy will need.

Cultural cognition—people’s universal tendency to screen their perception and acceptance of facts through cultural attitudes—gets a lot of attention from science writers these days, as it should. Walk into a meeting of science writers and talk about the need to better educate climate deniers and a fluttery squawk of scolding about “information deficit models” will erupt from every corner. I mostly agree with this, but will also confess to being frustrated for two reasons at how unproductive the recognition of cultural cognition typically becomes.

My first, lesser reason is that on the face of it, cultural cognition often seems to explain too much. It seems like such a potent force in shaping attitudes that I’m left wondering how anyone ever gets persuaded of ideas at odds with their social groups’ values, even though this clearly must happen all the time. Plenty of Americans haven’t been culturally comfortable with fighting wars, accepting tax hikes, abiding by environmental regulations, or accepting legalized abortions and gay marriages, and yet somehow those things happened through a political process anyway. No doubt the lesson is that in those cases, ways of making those propositions culturally tolerable were found, which makes sense—but it also suggests that instances of cultural cognition only get defined by failure in retrospect, which makes me suspicious.

My other, bigger reason is that in practice, people often treat cultural cognition as a showstopper, and a justification for haughtily criticizing certain communication efforts without offering meaningful alternatives. It’s easy to chide science writers for pointlessly throwing more scary climate facts at a public that doesn’t want to hear them, or for tut-tutting that some climate news will sound like the same old doom-saying hysterics unless it’s been watered down to pabulum. But what exactly are the bridges to those people’s realities we should be using instead? And what do we do if the value frameworks within which they define the world don’t allow meaningful policy responses and their intransigence carries consequences for everyone else?

(Here I should also acknowledge a third reason, which is more of a bias: I’m all for reaching out to others’ cultures with understanding and respect, but if somebody’s culture shows a deep, committed refusal to at least acknowledge empirical physical reality, then it’s hard for me personally to maintain that respect.)

Yet I could be very wrong on these points, which is why I’m glad that some people in science communications are trying to engage with the significance of cultural cognition more meaningfully. It’s why I’ve always been impressed by something that Dan Kahan, cultural cognition’s most prominent investigator, posted this past February, which I’ve called the most edifying and useful thing I’ve read about cultural cognition because it carries a clear message for communicators. Rather than deploring how some unscientific ideas come to be bound up within certain cultural sets, Kahan writes, science journalists need to be more attentive to how these mistaken notions become rallying cries in the first place.

The entanglement of facts that admit of scientific investigation—e.g., “carbon emissions are heating the planet”; “deep geologic isolation of nuclear wastes is safe”—with antagonistic meanings occurs by a mixture of influences, including strategic behavior, poor institutional design, and sheer misadventure. In no such case was the problem inevitable; indeed, in most, such entanglement could easily have been avoided.

These antagonistic meanings, then, are a kind of pollution in the science communication environment.  They disable the normal and normally reliable faculties of rational discernment by which ordinary individuals recognize what is collectively known.

One of the central missions of the science of science communication in a liberal democratic state is to protect the science communication environment from such contamination, and to develop means for detoxifying that environment when preventive or protective measures fail.

Granted, that advice doesn’t do much to help unpollute the existing atmosphere for climate discussions, but it points to ways of preventing the situation from getting still worse. And that may be a second step toward improvement, falling right after the sympathetic outreach efforts of scientists like Hayhoe.

It’s also great that science communicators as a profession may be starting to take a more scientific approach to overcoming these cultural blocks to understanding, as John Timmer of Ars Technica reviewed splendidly back at the beginning of August. And although I’m not attending the ScienceOnline Climate conference now in progress, the feed of tweets emerging from it testifies to the value of the discussion. The program is also giving lots of attention to exactly these kinds of communications issues, such as the plenaries on “Testing Climate Communications Hypotheses” and “Credibility, Trust, Goodwill, and Persuasion,” as well as sessions on “Lamenting Eden-Climate Change Discussions Across Ideologies,” on “Problem solving, democracy, and handling climate change,” and on “Engagement Strategies—The CCTI & Beyond.” Follow along on #scioClimate and let’s see what we can all learn.

The The cultural challenge to climate science writing by Retort, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

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NJ medical marijuana bill: What does science say? - Fox News

Today, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie made a decision to sign a bill that will make medical marijuana easily accessible for children.

"As I have repeatedly noted, I believe that parents, and not government regulators, are best suited to decide how to care for their children," said Governor Christie in his conditional approval of the bill. "Protection of our children remains my utmost concern, and my heart goes out to those children and their families who are suffering with serious illnesses. Today, I am making commonsense recommendations to this legislation to ensure sick children receive the treatment their parents prefer, while maintaining appropriate safeguards. I am calling on the legislature to reconvene quickly and address these issues so that children in need can get the treatment they need."

The decision will have huge implications for 2-year-old Vivian Wilson who suffers from severe form of epilepsy called Dravet Syndrome, which causes her to have multiple seizures a day.  Vivian’s parents have said that ingestible extracts of certain strains of marijuana have helped children with their daughter’s condition.

But what does the science say? Dr. Arnold Fried, chairman of the Neuroscience Institute at Hackensack University Medical Center in N.J., spoke with Fox News Health of what is known about medical marijuana and how it could be used to potentially help Vivian.

What does the science show in regards to using medical marijuana to treat neurological diseases?

"The data is very poor in terms of its efficacy.  With that said, there are anecdotal reports that show it helps, but there are not big studies.  For it to be a good study, you would have to design it so that the (the marijuana) could be given in a way where they would also have a control sample. So the person doesn’t know if they got the drug or a placebo.

"However, in these anecdotal stories where they say it helps, there may be something else that is explaining what happens.  That’s the problem with anecdotal evidence; it doesn’t control for bias, and it doesn’t control for other variables.  You’d have to control for those, then see if it’s really effective.  But sometimes we do make decisions based on anecdotal data, so if that’s applicable here, it may be worth a try."

In theory, how would medical marijuana help neurological issues?

"From what I know about the science, doctors prepare an edible form of an extract of marijuana.  It’s not the chemical that makes you high, it’s the one that acts on the brain cells.  Basically it suppresses electrical activity.  A seizure is where you have an abnormal electrical signal in the brain that starts in one place or multiple places simultaneously and then spreads throughout the brain.  It’s an abnormal electrical wave that causes the person to have movements or shake.  So the drug would work by suppressing that wave."

Could medical marijuana potentially treat other neurological disorders?

"It’s sometimes used to treat multiple sclerosis in order to suppress some abnormal neurologic function, whether it’s pain or an unpleasant feeling in the extremity – what we call a dysesthesia.  These are some uses that are talked about.  And some people say the overall function for MS is approved.  They’re more mobile."

What is your particular stance on medical marijuana?

"My feeling about this case is that it should not be a political question or a social question.  It should be a medical question.  Has this girl exhausted a more proven way of dealing with her seizures?  I don’t know if a panel of physicians has really looked it over.  If they have, that’s great, but if they haven’t, they need to decided: Has she availed herself of surgery or nerve stimulation, which sometimes help dramatically.  

"If she truly has exhausted all the medical and surgical modalities for dealing with this epilepsy, I'm for it."

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Math and science initiatives become mainstream - Danbury News Times

It's not just the increase in jobs that's led area schools to increase the focus on teaching skills related to the STEM fields -- science, technology, engineering and math.

However, it is a powerful motivator, since over the past 10 years, growth in STEM jobs was three times as fast as growth in non-STEM jobs, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Traditionally, states and districts have kept these subjects separate in both instruction and assessment, but increasingly they recognize the value of the discipline and way of thinking the STEM approach provides students across all disciplines.

"It's more problem solving and problem finding," Bethel High School technology teacher John Ryan said. "It transcends passive learning when a teacher stood in front the classroom. The more actively engaged students are, the more it improves the way kids retain their learning."

Critical thinking, problem solving, being scientifically literate and being able to collaborate are skills that scientists have used for ages in their work, and area districts are adopting a STEM approach in a variety of ways.

Danbury Public Schools has a middle school STEM academy for 300 students that incorporates the model into all the curriculum.

Bethel has an Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences Program, a four-year program in which students receive a cross-discipline approach to academics, design, and innovation skills that are integrated with digital media and science and technology topics.

It's part of the 21st Century Skills Initiative started at Education Connection with money from a nationally competitive federal government grant.

New Fairfield and New Milford high schools also have aligned programs with the 21st Century Skills Initiative, which provides original curricula, training, and support for innovative courses in science, technology, and math.

Other area programs include Danbury schools middle school STEM program academy, which has 300 students, a summer science camp in collaboration with Western Connecticut State University and growing collaborations among department heads at the high school.

Danbury's K-12 STEM curriculum administrator Harry Rosvally said he hears about new STEM programs starting around the state each year.

"STEM's become elevated in everybody's view. More people are aware of the need to support STEM," Rosvally said. The thriving corporations in the area, like Praxair and Boehringer Ingelheim, underscore its value.

At Danbury High, teachers are collaborating in various ways with STEM subject areas, he said.

"We realize it's the right way to do things," he said. "We realize that if the kids have use of a 3D printer it's so engaging that now they have the hunger to know the physics and math that goes with it."

Brookfield started its own 21st Century Skills class at the high school and now it's been added to the middle school, where fifth- through seventh-graders take it as part of their special class rotations and eighth graders can take it as an elective.

Brookfield also has a middle school technology/engineering education course that teaches math, science and technology principles. Students can take it as a rotating course in fifth, sixth, and seventh grade and then as an elective in eighth grade.

"We have a very active science, math and technology program where department heads work very closely together planning and collaborating," Brookfield Assistant Superintendent Genie Slone said.

The goal is for educators to teach students logical, analytical, creative and critical thinking skills, said Frank LaBlanca, who leads the 21st Century Skills Initiative for Education Connection.

"A STEM approach helps certain students learn these skills better than in other ways though there is no one solution for all students," he said.

eileenf@newstimes.com; 203-731-3333

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Elsewhere in Science, 16 August 2013 - Science Careers Blog (blog)

Elsewhere in Science, 16 August 2013By Donisha Adams Jim Austin August 16, 2013

Every week, Science publishes a few articles likely to be of interest to career-minded readers. But because those articles aren't featured on Science Careers, our readers could easily overlook them.

To remedy that, every Friday we're pointing readers toward articles appearing in Science—the print magazine as well as the other Science-family publications (ScienceInsider, ScienceNow, Science Translational Medicine (Sci. TM), and Science Signaling—that hold some relevance or nuggets of advice for readers interested in furthering their careers in science. (Please note that while articles appearing in ScienceInsider and ScienceNow may be read by anyone, articles appearing in Sci. TM and Science may require AAAS membership/Science subscription or a site license.)

• Since 1948, researchers with the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) have been monitoring a group of men and women from Framingham, Massachusetts for cardiovascular disease risks. In the News and Analysis section of Science this week, Jocelyn Kaiser writes about the budget cuts faced by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute-sponsored program.

What's the connection to science careers? For one thing, a few people will lose jobs: "In response to this year's cut, FHS plans to lay off 19 of 90 staffers as well as scale back clinical exams and laboratory work," Kaiser writes. But the really important connection to careers is that the cuts threaten to compromise a study that has been going strong for 65 years and has delivered many important insights into cardiovascular disease. For scientists to do their work well, they need steady, adequate funding. When they don't get it, the cost can be high.

• Also in News and Analysis, Jeffrey Mervis writes about the National Science Foundation's (NSF's)  decision to cancel this year's round of funding for political science while keeping the program in place. NSF isn't saying much, but the move "appears to reflect an impasse between NSF's desire to preserve its highly regarded peer-review system and the need to abide by language in a government-wide funding bill that restricts NSF's ability to support research in the discipline," Mervis writes. An amendment to the 2013 spending bill passed in March limits NSF's political science funding to cases "when a project is deemed vital to national security or the country's economic interests."

"The casualties," Mervis writes, "include this year's edition of Duke University's long-running Ralph Bunche Summer Institute for promising minority students considering academic careers in political science. 'We were told this winter we had been recommended for renewal and were waiting for the paperwork when Coburn was passed,' says Paula McClain, a professor of political science and dean of the graduate school at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Then NSF put its $160,000-a-year contribution on hold. 'The students would have started in early June, and in late April I finally decided I couldn't keep people hanging on any longer.' "

• This week's juiciest career-related story is Yudhijit Bhattacharje's engaging look back at the discovery, by Marco Tavani's AGILE research team, of anomalous gamma radiation from the Crab nebula. "For decades, the three pulsars had emitted radiation so steadily that astronomers had come to rely on them as cosmic standards to calibrate their instruments—AGILE included," Bhattacharje writes. "Geminga, being closer, normally shines brighter than the Crab. But in the AGILE map, the Crab blazed brighter and larger than Geminga. The anomaly raised the troubling prospect of a flaw in the telescope's detectors. Tavani wanted to wish it away."

Tavani and his team eventually won awards for the discovery, but Tavani dismissed it when it first appeared in 2007—despite protestations from members of his team—because the observations seemed too weird. " 'For the moment, we put this week of observations in our drawer,' " Tavani told the group. " 'And we do not talk about this to anybody.' "

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Tornado Tech: How Drones Can Help With Twister Science - NPR

Tornado researchers want to use small drones, like this one called the Noctura, to study the storms.

Andy Arena/Oklahoma State University

Oklahoma was hit particularly hard by two massive outbreaks this year in what's been another deadly season of tornadoes in the U.S. Despite technology and forecasting improvements, scientists still have plenty to learn about how and why tornadoes form.

Currently, one of the best ways for researchers to understand how tornadoes form is to chase them. So off they go with mobile science laboratories, rushing toward storms armed with research equipment and weather-sensing probes.

It's dangerous work. Three chasers died in one of Oklahoma's May tornadoes because the storm unexpectedly changed directions. And there's also a lot left to chance — only 20 percent of supercell thunderstorms produce tornadoes.

"It's a loaded gun," says Jamey Jacob, an aerospace engineering professor at Oklahoma State University, of the big weather systems. "It's ready to go off, but when and where does it fire?"

One of the downsides of the current tornado research method is that it's passive, Jacob says. "You throw [probes] out there, [and] you hope something gets caught up [in the storm] somewhere," he says.

So he and dozens of other scientists and engineers are remaking tornado technology. They're looking to small drone aircraft loaded with sensors that can be launched from the trunk of a car, far from a potential tornado.

"With unmanned aircraft," Jacob says, "you fly it where you want it to go."

If you open up these drones, the contents could have come from a middle school science project. But the Kevlar shell and the tiny sensors are fit for a high-tech military plane.

Brian Argrow directs the research and engineering center for unmanned aerial vehicles at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

"Being able to sample the pressure, temperature, humidity, wind velocity — that you can't do remotely," he says. "Radar can only do so much at this point."

Scientists think these drones can help them increase warning time from the current 14-minute average to as much as an hour. Argrow says the technology exists, and the planes are ready to go, but many of them are stuck in university laboratories, frustrating researchers.

Drones can provide information about temperature, humidity and pressure that current radar systems can't provide. Above, the Talos drone, which has a 15.5-foot wingspan.

Jamey Jacob/Oklahoma State University

"It's often that technology gets ahead of policy, particularly in this country, and this is an instance where that essentially has happened," he says. "Some of the technology — the capability, anyway — has gotten ahead of what the current air traffic system is able to accommodate directly."

The Federal Aviation Administration declined to be interviewed for this story, but Argrow and his team started working with the agency in 2009 to integrate the new storm-chasing technology into the nation's airspace. They were able to fly into a few storms back then. But it's a very slow, bureaucratic process that doesn't mesh well with fast-developing thunderstorms.

Scientists think if new policies are put in place, these aerial chasers could be widely operational in five years, allowing meteorologists to make more accurate tornado warnings.

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Australia's One Nation under climate science denial - The Guardian

Link to video: Stephanie Banister: 'I don't oppose Islam as a country'

Oh, how the world laughed at Stephanie Banister – the extreme right wing Australian election candidate who told a TV interviewer that Islam was a country.

Wasn't it just side-splitting to hear the 27-year-old One Nation hopeful get her Qu-ran's mixed up with her harams?

What fun to hear her re-write the Jewish faithful as a congregation of Jesus-followers?  You could have knocked me down with a kippah.

The Queenslander claimed she was a victim of selective editing from the television network Channel Seven, which aired the interview. She's since pulled out of the election race.

But virtually every major news outlet in the developed world covered Banister's gaffs.

After twisting its satirical knife every which way, US television political comedy The Daily Show suggested Banister had set "a new low watermark for electoral ignorance".

But after reading her party's stance on climate change, I beg to differ.

One Nation appears to have gone shopping to the Climate Science Denial Mart and come back with the whole deli counter of debunked talking points.

"What's really behind all the global warming hoopla," One Nation's website asks.

"Power.  It's the same old Marxist/Communist/Fascist collectivist shtick, dressed up in new clothes. Global warming is all about a power grab by a wealthy elite and their collectivist sycophants — using the (United Nations) as a cover and tool."

Elsewhere, One Nation accuses the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO of engaging in the corruption of science.

Much of the material is near identical to that offered by the climate science denial organisation the Galileo Movement, whose patron – Sydney shock-jock Alan Jones – says human-caused climate change is a hoax and the science is "witchcraft".

One Nation New South Wales Senate candidate Pauline Hanson even cites the Galileo Movement's project leader Malcolm Roberts, asking readers to check out a document which Sydney Morning Herald environment editor Ben Cubby has described as a "pile of horse shit".

Now, while you probably wouldn't expect the Christian Democrats to jumble its religious lexicon, the party is as equally clueless as One Nation about the current state of climate science.

According to the Christian Democrats, there are "equally reputable scientists" who say that climate change "is not, and never was driven by CO2 levels".

This ignores a recent study, co-authored by fellow The Guardian environment blogger Dana Nuccitelli, about 97 per cent of scientific studies on climate change in the last 20 years all agree that global warming is caused by humans. It also ignores all the major science academies in the developed world.

The CDP says it is "agnostic" about human caused climate change, which is a bit like saying you're an agnostic about the laws of physics.

Definitely not an agnostic, but rather an all-out worshipper of anti-science, is the Christian fundamentalist Rise Up Australia Party, led by a Melbourne Pastor who thinks humans have only been on earth for 6,000 years. Rise Up Australia also drafted in UK Independence Party figure Lord Christopher Monckton earlier for a pre-election push.

Key minor parties in Queensland – Katter's Australia Party and Palmer United Party – have also chosen to put debunked fringe ideas above sound science.

Katter's Australia Party says: "The scientific case is not made out and nor is there empirical evidence connecting carbon emissions to global warming - the argument is simply not sustainable."

The Palmer United Party doesn't say anything about climate change aside from saying it wants a national commission to investigate the "carbon issue" but its leader, billionaire miner Clive Palmer, is a climate science sceptic.

Palmer tried to play-down the role of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by telling an ABC television audience that "97 per cent of carbon dioxide is from natural sources" – as if this was somehow relevant.

One Nation also does this sweet little climate denial two-step that tries to suggest that carbon dioxide is both inconsequential but also powerful enough to be the life force of the planet.

Pauline Hanson writes: "Carbon dioxide is Nature's invisible, tasteless, odourless trace gas essential to all life on Earth."

Perhaps she's been reading the same talking points as Opposition leader Tony Abbott, who earlier this year dog whistled to the climate denial crowd when he described emissions trading as "a so-called market, in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one."

Abbott has said in the past that he thinks climate science is "crap" but has also said he thinks it does contribute to climate change.

But Abbott's Liberal Party is riddled with representatives scornful of the risks of burning billions of tonnes of fossil fuels annually to load the atmosphere with that all-powerful (but also trace gas) carbon dioxide.

In Queensland, the state party's rank and file members voted last year in favour of a motion to ban the teaching of climate science in schools.

The motion was proposed by a party member who claims to have debunked the greenhouse theory using just two fish boxes and a roll of cling film in an experiment he cooked up in his kitchen.

Maybe it's time to quote some wise words from that former One Nation candidate and religious philosopher Stephanie Banister.

"Everyone in the world has a lot to learn about day to day stuff. Everything in life is just about learning."

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