A slightly optimistic story

Advanced Reactor Gets Closer to Reality� - Technology Review:

"Terrapower, a startup funded in part by Nathan Myhrvold and Bill Gates, is moving closer to building a new type of nuclear reactor called a traveling wave reactor that runs on an abundant form of uranium. The company sees it as a possible alternative to fusion reactors, which are also valued for their potential to produce power from a nearly inexhaustible source of fuel.

Work on Terrapower's reactor design began in 2006. Since then, the company has changed its original design to make the reactor look more like a conventional one. The changes would make the reactor easier to engineer and build. The company has also calculated precise dimensions and performance parameters for the reactor. Terrapower expects to begin construction of a 500-megawatt demonstration plant in 2016 and start it up in 2020. It's working with a consortium of national labs, universities, and corporations to overcome the primary technical challenge of the new reactor: developing new materials that can withstand use in the reactor core for decades at a time. It has yet to secure a site for an experimental plant—or the funding to build it."

Economics of GM

GM crops and foods: promises, profits and politics - On Line Opinion - 1/8/2011

I don't follow the GM food issue closely, and I don't know anything about Bob Phelps as an anti GM advocate.

However, I thought that at the least the economics argument, about how Australian non GM canola has a big market and is sold at a premium, was interesting.

He sounds a relatively sensible person in his opposition to GM, but I could be wrong...

Why large amounts of methane may be even worse than thought

Large methane releases lead to strong aerosol forcing and reduced cloudiness

This paper can be available in full via that link, and it sounds pretty important for long term climate change issues.

As it explains at the start:

Among the various worst-case scenarios for catastrophic climate change suggested over the past decades, the so-called clathrate-gun hypothesis (Kennett et al., 2000) is one of the
most dramatic. In this scenario, a rise in temperatures leads to the destabilization and subsequent release of methane clathrates in the Arctic permafrost and seabed into the atmosphere, vastly amplifying the initial warming. This type
of mechanism has been suggested as a possible reason for millennial-scale warming during the last ice age, as well as the Paleocene – Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM; see e.g. Kennett et al., 2000), though the evidence so far is inconclusive (Clark et al., 2008; Sowers, 2006). One criticism of the hypothesis is that the amount of methane estimated to have been released during the PETM is not sufficient to explain the observed warming, at least if only the longwave radiative forcings of CH4 and its oxidation product CO2 are accounted for.

They go on to note that, although most consider the large scale release of methane from clathrate reservoirs under the oceans during this century is improbable, it's important to look at what would happen if we did get a surprise.

The result would be, they think, less clouds, and therefore:

Together, the indirect CH₄-O₃ and CH₄-OH-aerosol forcings could more than double the warming effect of large methane increases. Our findings may help explain the anomalously large temperature changes associated with historic methane releases.

To which Andrew Bolt will say - but Tim Flannery bought a house on the water.

Also good for the classroom

Tiny shocks help schizophrenics (Science Alert)

In a recent study using a technique called transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS), scientists from Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) have shown that brain function in people with schizophrenia can improve after applying the stimulation for just 20 minutes.

“We found that this type of brain stimulation boosted learning from feedback which is important in everyday life, for example in learning to act on cues from other people in social situations,” says lead researcher, Dr Tom Weickert.

“There are very few new treatment options for people with schizophrenia, so finding a different treatment that is promising and also has little in the way of side effects is very exciting,” he says.

tDCS transmits a very mild electrical current to the brain through electrodes on the scalp. This technique has previously been shown to improve brain function in healthy people, as well as people with depression.

Another strange story for a Monday

The Local - Clairvoyant finds peeing soldier's smart stick

A strange story for Monday

The princess who swallowed a glass piano � Mind Hacks

The programme was created by writer and poet Deborah Levy who “considers the true story of Princess Alexandra Amelie of Bavaria, 1826-1875 who at the age of 23 was observed awkwardly walking sideways down the corridors of her family palace. When questioned by her worried royal parents, she announced that she had swallowed a grand glass piano.”

As we’ve discussed previously, glass delusions were quite regularly reported by physicians in the 19th century but are now seemingly extinct in a curious cultural shift in madness.

Catfish noodling

I had not heard of catfish noodling before, but Hamish and Andy enlightened me last night:



I suspect this Youtube extract won't last, so watch it while you can.

I don't think he liked it

'Transformers: Dark of the Moon' | The Japan Times Online

This reviewer really, really hated the latest Transformers movie, and I like many of his lines:

Given enough money, almost any filmmaker could deliver a big, loud, silly popcorn movie about giant alien robots beating the living crap out of each other, but it takes the special talent of director Michael Bay to make such a movie totally repellent. ...

Perhaps you'd like to know about the story? So would I...

Perpetual dweeb Sam Witwicky (LaBeouf) inexplicably has an even hotter girlfriend than before, Carly (Huntington-Whiteley), despite being unemployed and constantly whining about how having alien robot friends doesn't land him a cushy Homeland Security desk job, and sending abusive-boyfriend signals every time Carly talks about her cool boss (Patrick Dempsey). But then again, Sam's mom jokes about her son's penis size (seriously), so you can forgive the poor boy for having "issues."

My son has seen it, he went with a friend and his Mum, so I didn't see it. Just lucky I guess.

Melting Arctic feedbacks

BBC News - Huge Arctic fire hints at new climate cue

When the tundra gets warm and dry, it burns. It burnt a lot in 2007. Seeing the ice melt this year is close to the 2007 level, I wonder if it will happen again this year?

When the permafrost melts, it releases more carbon dioxide.

That's about it, in short form.

Getting paranoid

China cracks down on wi-fi in public spaces

China has ordered public spaces offering wi-fi web access to install costly software to enable police to identify people using the service, state media said Thursday.

The software, which also gives police a list of all websites visited by an online user, costs between 20,000 yuan ($3,100) and 60,000 yuan, the China Business News said.

As a result, many establishments such as bars, restaurants, cafes and bookstores have decided to stop providing wireless Internet to their customers despite its popularity, to avoid paying the money, the report said.

In Beijing, cafe and restaurant owners have been told they face a minimum fine of 5,000 yuan if they continue to offer wireless without installing the software, it said.

"In serious cases," offenders could see their Internet cut off for up to six months, the report said.

Hard to visit?

Trojan asteroid dances ahead of the Earth as it orbits of the sun | Science | guardian.co.uk

I wonder how difficult it is for a rocket to get to an object that is more or less in the same orbit as Earth.

That rare?

Woman has healthy baby at 50

Not that I know anything about this topic, apart from a dim memory from a sitcom in the 1970's, but I didn't think this was so rare:

A 50-year-old Queensland woman has made history as the oldest Australian woman to fall pregnant naturally and give birth to a healthy first child.

The sitcom I refer to was Maude, which had a controversial story in which the title character fell pregnant at an advanced age and decided to have an abortion. I thought she may have been in her 50's in the episode, but I see through the wonders of Wikipedia, that she was meant to be 47. Here's the summary:

Maude had an abortion in November 1972, two months before the Roe v. Wade decision made abortion legal nationwide, and the episodes that dealt with the situation are probably the series' most famous and most controversial. Maude, at age 47, was dismayed to find herself unexpectedly pregnant. Her daughter Carol brought to her attention that abortion was now legal in New York State. After some soul-searching (and discussions with Walter, who agreed that raising a baby at their stage of life was not what they wanted to do), Maude tearfully decided at the end of the two-parter that abortion was probably the best choice for their lives and their marriage. Noticing the controversy around the episode, CBS decided to rerun the episodes in August 1973, and members of the country's clergy reacted strongly to the decision.

TV was indeed controversial in those days. I was never a fan of the Norman Lear sitcoms, but for some reason I remember seeing at least a bit of this episode. I must have only been a young teenager myself at the time; I'm surprised I was interested enough in the controversy at that age.

In important squirrel research news

Scientists make squirrels hibernate

The non-hibernating squirrels were tested three times during one year. They were tested during the summer when they were not hibernating, again early in their hibernation season and a third time mid-way through the hibernation season. If animals were hibernating before the test Jinka woke them up to see if the substance would cause them to go back into hibernation.

The thing I'm most interested in is: how drowsy looking is a hibernating squirrel when you wake it up.

(Actually, how much do hibernating animals dream, I wonder. I'm sure someone has done some research on it, but I don't have time to look just now.)

Arguing under the clouds

Why the UK must choose renewables over nuclear: an answer to Monbiot | Jonathon Porritt | Environment | guardian.co.uk

There appears to be an argument underway between Monbiot and Jonathon Porritt about that latter's claim that it's a question of nuclear or renewables. Monbiot argues instead that it shouldn't be an "either/or" issue.

Porritt goes into a lot of detail about true cost of nuclear, and claims big things for the coming lower costs of solar power in particular.

There are many links that look interesting.

But - the overwhelming thing I keep thinking about in terms of this is - solar power for England? - it's under cloud for about 8/10 of the year, isn't it?

Three science stories

* There's been a bit of media attention given to hints from data from the LHC that it might have found the Higgs boson. Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong has a good summary of what the LHC has achieved, and it appears to be quite a lot in a very short time. (Wouldn't it be kind of embarrassing if it makes all of its discoveries in the first couple of years, though?) Anyway, here's PW's summary:

The bottom line is much stronger results ruling out supersymmetry, extra dimensions, black holes and other exotica, restriction of the possible mass range of the Higgs to about 114-150 GeV, and a tantalizingly small and not yet statistically significant excess of possible Higgs events in the mass range 120-145 GeV.

The big surprise here is that the experiments have done a fantastic job of getting these analyses of the data done at record speed. Before the LHC turn-on, estimates based on experience at the Tevatron tended to be that it would be 2012 before we saw completed analyses of a significant amount of the 2011 data. A lot of people have been working long hours and going without a summer vacation… The bottom line though is not a surprise, but rather pretty much what many people (including myself) expected. The unconvincing popular theoretical models of the last few decades have finally been confronted with experiment, which is falsifying them, to the extent that they can be falsified. It’s an inspiring example of the scientific method working as it should. The remaining mass range for the Higgs is the expected one, and, as expected, this is the hardest place to separate the Higgs from the background. If it’s really there, the data collected during the rest of this year should be enough to give a statistically significant signal. So, within a few months we should finally have an answer to the question that has been plaguing the subject for decades: “Higgs or something else?”. This is very exciting.

Interesting.

* Was the Universe born spinning? From Physics World:

The universe was born spinning and continues to do so around a preferred axis – that is the bold conclusion of physicists in the US who have studied the rotation of more than 15,000 galaxies. While most cosmological theories have suggested that – on a large scale – the universe is the same in every direction, these recent findings suggest that the early universe was born spinning about a specific axis. If correct, this also means that the universe does not possess mirror symmetry, but rather has a preferred right or left "handedness". ...

Longo and a team of five undergraduate students catalogued the rotation direction of 15,158 spiral galaxies with data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. They found that galaxies have a preferred direction of rotation – there was an excess of left-handed, or counter-clockwise, rotating spiral galaxies in the part of the sky toward the north pole of the Milky Way. The effect extended beyond 600 million light-years away.

The excess is small, about 7%, and Longo says that the chance that it could be a cosmic accident is something like one in a million.

I don't quite get the next bit, though, in that I didn't think it made sense to talk of subatomic spin as if it were, well, actual spin:

What impact would this have on the Big Bang and how the universe was born? Observers in our universe could never see outside of it, so we cannot directly tell if the universe is spinning, in principle, explains Longo. "But if we could show that our universe still retains the initial angular momentum within its galaxies, it would be evidence that our universe exists within some larger space and it was born spinning relative to other universes," he told physicsworld.com. "I picture the Big Bang as being born with spin, just like a proton or electron has spin. As the universe expanded, the initial angular momentum would be spread the bits of matter that we call galaxies, so that the galaxies now tend to spin in a preferred direction," he explained.

Others are not convinced he's got a valid conclusion on his hands. Still...interesting.

* Andy Revkin, in a column about underwater volcanoes, notes an incident I don't recall hearing about before:

Substantial gaps persist in basic oceanographic knowledge. One such gap was closed in January, 2005, when an American nuclear submarine making 33 knots 500 feet beneath the surface crashed headlong into an uncharted seamount 360 miles southeast of Guam.

Here's Andy's link to the New York Times 2005 story of the accident, and it makes for fascinating reading. It opens with this:

Blood was everywhere. Sailors lay sprawled across the deck, several of them unconscious, others simply dazed.

Even the captain was asking, "What just happened?" All anyone knew for sure was that the nuclear-powered attack submarine had slammed into something solid and very large, and that it had to get to the surface, fast.

Did I read something about it before, and have forgotten? I don't think so.

Anyway, no wonder the Navy has trouble getting personnel for its submarines.

When "I'm really, really sorry" doesn't cut it

Majority want Murdoch to be forced out of BSkyB altogether - The Independent

Two out of three people believe Rupert Murdoch's News Corp should have to dispose of its entire stake in BSkyB. According to a new survey for The Independent by ComRes, 65 per cent agree that the phone-hacking scandal shows News Corp is not a "fit and proper" organisation to own any part of BSkyB, while 26 per cent disagree.

For those who think Murdoch is a victim of left wing hysteria led by the likes of The Guardian, I'll use his "Daily Telegraph" defence, which comes in handy when running front page campaigns against incumbent governments: The Guardian is not running a campaign, it is merely reflecting public opinion.

Good for us, at least

More Aussie beef in pipeline amid cesium fears | The Japan Times Online

Domestic demand for Australian beef may increase after radiation was found in meat here and amid concern that cesium leaks from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant may spread farther, according to Australian Agricultural Co. Ltd.

"We're expecting to see better demand out of Japan as they move away from their own herds," Chief Executive Officer David Farley said on a conference call Monday. That follows a boost in demand for beef after radiation was detected in domestic seafood in March, he said.

Sorry, I still find you obnoxious

Death prompts bike groups to push for tougher laws

Look, I guess I'm OK with people who use cycling as a normal commuting choice. I'm even happy for them to do that sedately on a footpath, as they do in Japan and (no doubt) other asian countries.

But put them in lycra and trying to do 40 kph on a normal city road, or even on a shared bike/pedestrian path - no, just go away and do your speed stuff on a track.

Tour de France wins do not make anyone feel different about that.

Right wing in Europe

Norwegian massacre is wrong, not far right

Peter Hartcher's take on right wing politics in Europe made for interesting reading, I thought. It's not a topic that is easy to keep a track of from afar.

(He also makes the point that terrorist acts do not usually work the way their instigators think they will - a lesson that terrorists seem very slow to learn.)

Oakeshott talks

Yes, of course Rob Oakeshott make a hugely self-indulgent and embarrassing spectacle of himself when he and Tony Windsor announced they would support a Gillard led government.

But listen to him this morning on Radio National, talking about his support for the government's carbon tax, and his view that MP's are elected to spend the time looking at the detail of an issue and then make a decision that is in the long term interests of the country, and he comes across as principled and reasonable.