Encouraging, kind of

New generation of nuclear reactors could consume radioactive waste as fuel | Environment | The Guardian: A new generation of "fast" nuclear reactors could consume Britain's radioactive waste stockpile as fuel, providing enough low-carbon electricity to power the country for more than 500 years, according to figures confirmed by the chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc)....

The engineering firm GE Hitachi has submitted an alternative proposal based on their Prism fast reactor, which could consume the plutonium as fuel while generating electricity.

However, the Prism design is a sodium cooled reactor, said to have passive safety. I've always felt that liquid sodium doesn't sound all that safe. But what do I know? (Then again, what do engineers know? They build reactors besides the sea in earthquake zones.)

Trouble making moss

First plants caused ice ages: research: New research reveals how the arrival of the first plants 470 million years ago triggered a series of ice ages.

Land plants came along that late? I need to memorise evolution time lines better. Anyhow, back to the report:

Among the first plants to grow on land were the ancestors of mosses that grow today. This study shows that they extracted minerals such as calcium, magnesium, phosphorus and iron from rocks in order to grow. In so doing, they caused chemical weathering of the Earth's surface. This had a dramatic impact on the global carbon cycle and subsequently on the climate. It could also have led to a mass extinction of marine life.

The research suggests that the first plants caused the weathering of calcium and magnesium ions from silicate rocks, such as granite, in a process that removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, forming new carbonate rocks in the ocean. This cooled global temperatures by around five degrees Celsius.

In addition, by weathering the nutrients phosphorus and iron from rocks, the first plants increased the quantities of both these nutrients going into the oceans, fuelling productivity there and causing organic carbon burial. This removed yet more carbon from the atmosphere, further cooling the climate by another two to three degrees Celsius. It could also have had a devastating impact on marine life, leading to a mass extinction that has puzzled scientists.

All your "bear in the woods" questions answered

Snoring dormouse video: Do hibernating animals wake up to go to the bathroom? - Slate Magazine

Well, there's a lot of information here about bears and their winter toilet habits (they really don't go for the entire winter, and have some odd metabolic abilities to achieve it) that I never knew.

(The dormouse video is cute too.)

Rupert Post - The Second

I can't find a link to it right now, but I am sure that I have heard someone, probably former Murdoch editor Bruce Guthrie, explain that Rupert Murdoch's editorial control was not overtly a matter of directing editors what he wants them to run; it is more a matter of Rupert expressing his general feel on an issue, and then newspaper editors doing a "pre-emptive fold" to slant coverage to the way they think Murdoch might approve.

This has been on my mind ever since Rupert took to Twitter, and very early on in the piece, praised Matt Ridley's book The Rational Optimist, which has been most noted for its "meh, climate change probably isn't that big an issue after all" attitude.

I've been waiting for the "pre-emptive fold" ever since, and I take the Wall Street Journal's publishing of a letter by 16 prominent skeptics part of this. (Not that the WSJ ever needed much prompting to run with climate change skepticism.)

Today, I see that The Australia re-prints the letter, just in case people here haven't already heard about it.

Fold, fold away, opinion editors.

And perhaps let someone note that the article is outrageously dishonest in one key section, at the very least:

Nordhaus:

The piece completely misrepresented my work. My work has long taken the view that policies to slow global warming would have net economic benefits, in the trillion of dollars of present value. This is true going back to work in the early 1990s (MIT Press, Yale Press, Science, PNAS, among others). I have advocated a carbon tax for many years as the best way to attack the issue. I can only assume they either completely ignorant of the economics on the issue or are willfully misstating my findings.

UPDATE: for a very detailed take down of the letter, have a look at the Skeptical Science post about it.

UPDATE 2: Andy Revkin, who first publicised Nordhaus' complaint about how the letter misrepresented his views, has another post about the letter, and the rebuttal, which takes a very soft line on the scientists involved. He seems strangely un-inclined to note the lack of expertise in the area under discussion, just noting that "most of the authors in both camps are scientists."

UPDATE 3: I still can't work out where I got "pre-emptive fold" from (maybe a radio interview), but here is Guthrie writing about Murdoch in the context of News Ltd paper's coverage of the Labor government here:

Either way, it certainly wouldn't have been a direction. That's not Murdoch's style. It would more likely have been an observation expressed by him or a lieutenant during or after dinner or at a coffee break between sessions. His editors, better than most at reading the wind, would have noted the boss's latest leanings and applied this knowledge at the first opportunity - many of them would have arrived back in Australia the morning of the budget lock-up. Of course, it would be open to an editor to ignore the boss's preferences, but as I discovered, that can sometimes come at a cost.

Rupert Post - The First

I came across this while looking for something for my next post, but it struck me as very noteworthy in light of the arrest of four Sun journalists last week for (allegedly) making payments to police. Here is Bruce Guthrie, former Murdoch employee, writing last year when the News of the World scandal was on:

IN 1988, while attending a conference of News Corporation editors in Aspen, Colorado, I made the mistake of raising the thorny issue of journalistic ethics. The proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, was not amused.

In short order, Murdoch, who was hosting the session, turned red, then purple, as I repeatedly asked a senior executive from his London paper The Sun whether the publication had any ethical framework. It didn't, the paper's news editor finally admitted. In most media companies that admission might have earned the executive a rebuke. But instead, I copped it, with Murdoch later dismissing me as a ''Fairfax wanker''. (For the record, I wasn't at that point; I became one 12 months later.)...

I left that conference in Colorado more than 20 years ago concerned that Murdoch saw ethics or, at least, the discussion of them, as an inconvenience that got in the way of the newspaper business.

To Murdoch's (waaaaay too late) credit, it is being reported that these arrests have arisen from information News Ltd itself has provided to police. Huh: a boss who telegraphs that ethics is for sooks, then later facilitates arrests for breaching them.

What a man.

Church and the pill revisited

It's hard for people who live in other parts of the world to understand completely the kerfuffle in the US about the Obama administration mandating that US Catholic institutions, such as their hospitals, have to offer employees contraception as part of their work benefits health insurance.

One would imagine that this would not be a problem with Catholics in the US at all - everyone knows that all but a couple of percent of them have ignored the Church's teaching on contraception for the last 40 years. And one of the first commentaries I read on it, a post on a Commonweal blog, strongly supported the decision, emphasising the fact that non Catholic employees of Catholic hospitals should not be limited in their health insurance by what their "boss" considers unethical. It also makes the obvious point that for Catholics themselves, the coverage doesn't mean they are forced to use it. The Bishops of America, with good reason I suppose, have no faith that the laity will follow their teaching.

Yet, since then, what seems remarkable is the number of liberal Catholics commentators who have come out against the decision on the grounds that it is the State forcing the Church to act against its "conscience". It's an interference with religious freedom, according to this view.

First Things notes this with pleasure, and I have to say that I was very surprised to see The Tablet also come out against it.

Look, I see the Church being worried about having to provided certain forms of contraception, such as IUDs which (as far as I know) work by interfering after fertilization. Was it possible for the ruling to have allowed the Catholic institutions to not provide cover for certain kinds of contraception only? The problem is, I guess, when your theology is such that there is debate over whether a pinprick in a condom can make its use "legitimate" in certain settings, you can't expect a lot of compromise over a teaching which has such arcane and counter-intuitive results.

Yet, hang on a minute, is this true (from a comment to a New York opinion piece):

I think it's relevant that it is _already_ required in New York (and several other states) that health insurance coverage include contraceptives (with the same limited church exception provided by the Obama administration), and of course Catholic institutions comply. In particular, the hyperbolic objections of Archbishop Dolan of New York to the Obama administration ruling seem particularly inappropriate, since it appears that institutions under his oversight are already in compliance.

I'm not sure that this is right, given the explanation given in a Washington Post column explaining the sort of compromises the States have come up with:

Under Hawaii law, religious employers that decline to cover contraceptives must provide written notification to enrollees disclosing that fact and describing alternate ways for enrollees to access coverage for contraceptive services. Hawaii law also requires health insurers to allow enrollees in a health plan of an objecting religious employer to purchase coverage of contraceptive services directly and to do so at a cost that does not exceed “the enrollee’s pro rata share of the price the group purchaser would have paid for such coverage had the group plan not invoked a religious exemption.” A New York law has similar provisions.

Talk about your fine lines. The Church doesn't have to directly provide the contraceptive cover, but has an obligation to tell the employee how to get it at the same cost that the Church could have provided under their policy (if I am reading that right.)

Isn't this the same as (for example) a law requiring Catholic hospitals that will not provide abortion to refer pregnant women to where they can get it done? (Speaking of which, what happened about the Victorian law in 2008 which did require exactly that? The Archbishop said Catholic hospitals would not obey it, so what has been the outcome?)

Anyway, this is all part and parcel of the extremely complicated situation with health care funding and insurance in the US. Isn't there a way of separating the health insurance from the employment benefits, and Catholic hospitals can just compensate employees for whatever health insurance package they want?

The Australian system has much to recommend it.

Strange polling

So, all of the new year polls show Labor and the coalition pretty much where they were at the end of last year, with a two party preferred vote of 46 to 54 respectively. Given that you normally expect incumbent governments to pick up a bit during an election campaign, and that you only need to shave 4 percent off the Coalition lead to get back to where we were at the last election, Labor is a difficult but not absolutely impossible position, but of course you wouldn't know that from some of the media coverage.

But the strangest thing about politics at the moment is the standing of both leaders. There is no doubt that Julia Gillard seems incredibly unpopular, particularly amongst anyone over the age of 50. There is also no doubt that there has been widespread acclaim in media commentary since the last election for Tony Abbott as having been successful beyond expectation for the Coalition.

So why is it that in polling, they are both equally disliked, with large net dissatisfaction ratings? This has been the case since November on the Newspolls. Since then, Gillard has also been running as preferred PM by a narrow margin.

I don't think I have heard anyone in the media explaining this. Gillard had her high profile visits late last year, but I would have thought any benefit from those would not last long. Tony Abbott has been "Mr No" on the boat arrival issue very firmly since then, and I suspect that people think he is playing politics on what is too sensitive an issue for games, but I could be wrong.

It's all very curious.

Whales and worms

Where there's a worm there's a whale: First distribution model of marine parasites provides revealing insights

Apart from not finding it particularly flavoursome, I've always been a bit leery of raw fish because of the small risk of getting infected with a nematode.

According to this article above:

Eating infected fish and fish-based products can lead to so-called anisakiasis. This illness often occurs in regions in which raw or semi-cooked fish is traditionally consumed. Symptoms include severe stomach pains, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting and fever, or even severe allergic reactions. Around 20,000 people are affected throughout the world each year, with a growing tendency. Hotspots include the coastal regions of Europe, the USA, as well as Japan and developing countries, in which fish and seafood are an important source of protein.

Interestingly, the nematode can pass through several species, but ends up breeding via those big, loveable whales:

The marine parasites have a complex lifecycle, in which they frequently change host. The final hosts for each species are Baleen and toothed whales (so-called cetacea), which absorb the parasite with their food and act as its host until sexual maturity...

On the way to the whale, fish, cephalopods and crabs act as intermediate hosts for the parasites.

Until we live in a world where whales are given giant worming tablets, like our pet dogs and cats, I'll stick to cooked fish, thanksg

Rain, rain

The weather bureau seems to have predicted levels of rain in Queensland pretty well for the last two summers. Last year, based on high sea temperatures and the strong La Nina, they predicted a very wet summer, and were right. This year, they predicted a pretty-wet-but-almost-certainly-not-as-wet-as-last-summer summer, and it seems to be coming true.

Certain parts of the state are getting some record falls, though:

Senior hydrologist Jim Stewart says records going back to 1884 for the Paroo River have been broken, with extraordinary rainfall totals over the weekend....

THE Gold Coast is smashing January weather records after the big downpour in the Hinterland and the border.

Coolangatta yesterday set a record for January rainfall of 479.6mm, up from 392.8 in 2006.
Springbrook on the wet and wild Wednesday received 291mm, easily breaking the 2008 daily record for January of 265mm.

And I see that over in New Zealand, it's been a particularly wet summer, in parts:

Hardest-hit were Nelson and Takaka, where flooding plagued the region for most of the month causing slips, road closures and evacuations.

Nelson was soaked with six times its normal rainfall, while Takaka had eight times its usual.

Both recorded their highest December totals since records began in 1941 and 1976 respectively, with 446mm of water hitting Nelson and 1103mm pouring down on Takaka.

Takaka also recorded its highest ever one-day rainfall, on December 14, with 392mm flooding the town - beating its previous record of 259 mm recorded in November 1990.

Yet other parts of the country had little rain:

Conversely, the winds caused the southwest to be warm, dry and sunny. Rainfall there was well below normal, Niwa said.

A bit reminiscent of the unusual situation in the US last with Texas in severe drought, but the Mississippi having record floods.

So, it's interesting to note that a recent report on climate change in England predicts that:

Flooding is the greatest threat to the UK posed by climate change, with up to 3.6 million people at risk by the middle of the century, according to a report published on Thursday by the environment department.
The first comprehensive climate change risk assessment for the UK identifies hundreds of ways rising global temperatures will have an impact if no action is taken. They include the financial damage caused by flooding, which would increase to £2bn-£10bn a year by 2080, more deaths in heatwaves, and large-scale water shortages by mid-century.

Note again that the forecast is for more problem flooding, but also water shortages. It's all to do with intensification of the hydrological cycle, a concept the climate change skeptics have trouble acknowledging as having been predicted years ago as part of AGW. Funny how the newspapers seem to provide evidence for it, though.*

* OK, OK, just reading about the odd record being broken in rainfall here and there doesn't prove anything scientifically. No doubt proper analysis needs to be done, and rainfall statistics can be cut and sliced many ways, as can temperature records, so that some "record breaking" figures may not seem so impressive on closer analysis. On the other hand, I am struck by the way some records are being broken by very large margins indeed, and that in particular is what makes me suspect that later analysis is going to prove the intensification of the hydrological cycle, as predicted by climate scientists.

Mini black holes still unclear

It appears that the question of whether the LHC will create mini black holes is still open, with a recent paper at arXiv about what signals a remnant particle from black hole decay might look like.  The paper contains this paragraph in the introduction:

It is important to recall that the end-stage of the BH evaporation remains an open issue (see,e.g., Refs. [14, 15, 16]), because we do not yet have a con rmed theory of quantum gravity. In fact, the semiclassical Hawking temperature grows without bound, as the BH mass decreases, which can be viewed as a sign of the lack of predictability of perturbative approaches. This is an important issue also on a purely experimental side, since deviations from the Hawking law for small BH mass(near the fundamental scale MG ) could actually lead to detectable signatures.

An optimistic kind of story...

In the Developing World, Solar Is Cheaper than Fossil Fuels - Technology Review

No great surprise

Morgellons disease: the CDC study that debunks the skin ailment.

Slate notes:

...now the CDC’s report is out, and Morgellons activists are horrified: The study, carried out in Northern California, found no environmental or infectious cause, nor evidence of real parasites. The fibers, which many Morgellons patients have insisted were of composed of a substance that was unidentifiable by any lab, were mostly just pieces of fabric and skin fragments from repeated scratching. (You can read the full study on the Public Library of Science.) In conclusion, the CDC writes on its “Unexplained Dermopathy” page,

This comprehensive study of an unexplained apparent dermopathy demonstrated no infectious cause and no evidence of an environmental link. There was no indication that it would be helpful to perform additional testing for infectious diseases as a potential cause. Future efforts should focus on helping patients reduce their symptoms through careful attention to treatment of co-existing medical, including psychiatric conditions, that might be contributing to their symptoms.

I still have this itchy left shoulder blade, though...

High hopes

Is there anything we need on the moon? | FP Passport

Newt Gingrich seems to be reviled by a considerable number of people who have worked with him in the past, so one has to doubt that he really has any chance of being the Republican candidate for President. (On the other hand, this didn't stop Kevin Rudd - but Newt doesn't have a regular slot on a high rating breakfast show in which to appear all smiley and blandly "safe".)

Anyhow, about the only thing about him which should appeal to me (his grandiose plan to get a permanent colony on the Moon in a very short time) has been much ridiculed as ridiculous and pointless.

As I have said before, I am keen on a permanent Moon base as being at least a sort of 'life raft" for life and knowledge from the Earth, but people want more immediate and profitable reasons for going there. Lunar mining is one thing that doesn't get discussed much, but the Foreign Policy article linked above has some suggestions about what's there and what might eventually be worthwhile mining in future.

I just wish the more gradual, and realistic, Bush program for a lunar return had not been dumped by Obama.

More reason to like rodents

Courting male mice sing like birds

What a charming story:

Male house mice sing like birds to serenade their mates, a study has found.
But don't expect to catch a performance in your kitchen - their high-pitched soprano voices are beyond the range of human hearing.
Austrian scientists made the discovery after slowing down the ultrasonic courtship calls of mice to study them. They found that mouse music bore a "striking" similarity to birdsong.
The vocalisations were complex and personalised, containing "signatures" that differed from one tiny crooner to another. Until recently, it was assumed the sounds made by male mice were no more than high-pitched squeaks.
Previous studies by the same group confirmed that male house mice sing when they pick up a female's scent, and that females are attracted to their songs. Females were able to distinguish between their own brothers' songs and those of unrelated males, even when hearing their siblings sing for the first time.

To the other side

How Neutrons Might Escape Into Another Universe - Technology Review

Can't say I've heard this before, but it seems the suggestion has been made that neutrons might just be able to do a leap to another brane. That is, another universe.

OK, we don't just need it to be neutrons; we need it to be information. The future of intelligence could thus be guaranteed, no matter the fate of the particular universe it finds itself in. (Well, I'm being optimistic in a science fiction-y way, here.)

Salmon cakes for future reference

As this blog has come to serve as a sort of on line diary/journal for things I don't want to lose, like recipes, I'll note a salmon fish cake recipe here so I don't forget the quantities again:

Boil or steam 500 g of potatoes.  Finely dice about one stick of celery, maybe half a big salad onion, and finely grate some carrot.  Drain potatoes very well and mash then up a bit.  Add the other vegetables, some salt and pepper, and a drained 415 g can of salmon.  Let it all cool down a bit, and add one egg.  Mix it all up well, and use another beaten egg and breadcrumbs to make patties from the mix (makes about 8).   The mix is a bit soft - it needs to be left in the fridge to firm up a bit.   Fry in about a centimetre of olive oil.  Nice.  I think if serving for adults, a bit of chilli would not go astray too.

A bit too close for comfort

BBC News - Asteroid to make near-miss fly-by

An asteroid will pass by the Earth on Friday in something of a cosmic near-miss, making its closest approach at about 1600 GMT.

The asteroid, estimated to be about 11m (36ft) in diameter, was first detected on Wednesday.
At its closest, the space rock - named 2012 BX34 - will pass within about 60,000km of Earth - less than a fifth of the distance to the Moon.....

Earlier estimates put the asteroid's closest distance at as little as 20,000km, near the distance at which geostationary satellites reside, but observations by observatories overnight showed it will pass at a more comfortable distance.

Just goes to show what I noted in 2010 - small, city killing asteroids may turn up suddenly and there isn't much we can do about it.

Update:  from a 2008 Scientific American article:

Improved telescopes would identify an estimated one million near-Earth objects over the next decade to 15 years, and 8,000 to 10,000 of them will have some probability of hitting the planet, Schweickart says. A hit by even one of the smaller rocks, say the size of a convenience store, would have the impact of 400,000 Hiroshima nuclear bombs exploding at once, he says.

Isn't it odd how little publicity such a close passing potential disaster attracts in the media?

Tents and aborigines

Tim Blair summaries the Australia Day incident with the PM accurately, although with more light heartedness than I might have expected.   Andrew Bolt takes the more serious route, but I personally think his previous deliberate snideness in dealing with the difficult issue of who can or should claim aboriginality has forever weakened his credibility as a public commentator on the issue.  (Of course, the relatively pale skin of many involved yesterday will be taken by many as vindication of his criticisms.  The point is, however, that Bolt could have made the criticism without any legal trouble if he had been more careful and didn't throw in attempts at personal ridicule.) 

In any event, there is no doubt at all that, by my reckoning, 95% of the population will rightly see it as a disgraceful incident and it will harden a huge number against any further symbolic or legal steps towards greater recognition of aborigines. 

Anyone on the Left who tries to argue it was all the police fault, or even Tony Abbott's fault, deserve ridicule.

A serve of chips, please

BBC News - Fried food 'fine for heart' if cooked with olive oil

Eating fried food may not be bad for the heart, as long as you use olive or sunflower oil to make it, experts say.

They found no heightened risk of heart disease or premature death linked to food that had been cooked in this way....

In an accompanying editorial, Professor Michael Leitzmann from the University of Regensburg in Germany said: "Taken together, the myth that frying food is generally bad for the heart is not supported by available evidence.

"However, this does not mean that frequent meals of fish and chips will have no health consequences.

"The study suggests that specific aspects of frying food are relevant, such as the oil used, together with other aspects of the diet."

This is all well and good, but I still get a bit sick of chips being the universal accompaniment to most cheaper cafe/pub meals.

A trio of climate change

Three papers that caught my eye:

* Injecting sulfate particles into stratosphere won't fully offset climate change According to the study, injecting sulfate into the atmosphere may cool the tropics and keep them cooler, but it wouldn't have so much effect on the polar regions. Hence sea level rise continues, I suppose. But they also point out that there could well be "surprises" from the whole enterprise. The key point is that it is no panacea to climate change:

"There is no way to keep the climate the way it is now. Later this century, you would not be able to recreate present-day Earth just by adding sulfate aerosols to the atmosphere," McCusker said. 

*  Cosmic rays not looking convincing:    A decade long study of solar related galactic cosmic ray flux indicates no co-relation with clouds:

We identify no statistically significant correlations between cloud anomalies and TSI/GCR variations, and conclude that solar related variability is not a primary driver of monthly to annual MODIS cloud variability. We observe a net increase in cloud detected by MODIS over the past decade of ~0.58 %, arising from a combination of a reduction in high – middle level cloud (−0.31 %) and an increase in low level cloud (of 0.89%); these long term changes may be largely attributed to ENSO induced cloud variability.

Skeptics who dream about cosmic rays being the secret influence which hasn't yet been credited in climate change seem to be losing an argument, yet again.

*  "Missing energy" not really missing at all?    A new study indicates that there's enough uncertainty in ocean heat measurements that the energy that Trenberth said was "missing" may not be missing at all:

Here we present a revised analysis of net radiation at the top of the atmosphere from satellite data, and we estimate ocean heat content, based on three independent sources. We find that the difference between the heat balance at the top of the atmosphere and upper-ocean heat content change is not statistically significant when accounting for observational uncertainties in ocean measurements³, given transitions in instrumentation and sampling. Furthermore, variability in Earth’s energy imbalance relating to El Niño-Southern Oscillation is found to be consistent within observational uncertainties among the satellite measurements, a reanalysis model simulation and one of the ocean heat content records. We combine satellite data with ocean measurements to depths of 1,800 m, and show that between January 2001 and December 2010, Earth has been steadily accumulating energy at a rate of 0.50±0.43 Wm⁻² (uncertainties at the 90% confidence level). We conclude that energy storage is continuing to increase in the sub-surface ocean.

Judith Curry, the Uncertainty Queen of climate change scientists, thinks comments made by Trenberth about this are some sort of quasi vindication of her "ooh, it's all so uncertain we shouldn't be doing anything yet" stance, and there is a long thread that starts with her snark as follows:

If Kevin Trenberth is concerned about the uncertainties then he should stop ranting about deniers.

Exaggerating uncertainty to defend your own scientific papers from criticism, and then turning around to denigrate as a “denier” anyone who is uncertain and questions the IPCC’s overconfident assertions, is hypocritical IMO.

 And Chris Colose comments further down about Curry:

She doesn’t seem to be able to grasp that large uncertainties in some area do not preclude high confidence in others, or may not even be relevant to others. She continues on her philosophical rants about ‘uncertainty’ while not publishing a specific scientific example that has withstood criticism (e.g., Hegerl et al’s response to her “monster” paper). Nor does she seem to realize that just making stuff and saying “things are uncertain!” is not useful contribution, and coupled with many other scientific sins is the reason for the label “denier,” not the observations that science isn’t perfect. You can’t throw 100 darts against the wall, hope one sticks, and say “see, told you!”