Oceans: Now With 18% More Water Flow!

Oceans: Now With 18% More Water Flow!: "

In a first-of-its-kind study, scientists have been able to use NASA satellites to measure the volume of water flowing from continents into the oceans, and they've found something remarkable. Turns out 18% more water flowed into the oceans from rivers and ice sheets in 2006 than did in 1994.
That's an observable fact. What it means, on the other hand, is complicated. Here are your FAQs.
Why haven't we drowned?
Well, first of all, it's not just the ocean influx that has increased; ocean evaporation has also increased. What we appear to be seeing is an acceleration of the water cycle (evaporation, precipitation, evaporation, etc.) that we all learned about in elementary school.
An accelerated water cyle? Is that necessarily a bad thing?
For many communities, the acceleration of the water cycle could be dangerous. A faster moving water cycle translates into thicker clouds and nastier storms. Monsoon season could do more damage than before. 'Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of people live in semiarid regions,' said study author Jay Famiglietti, of UC Irvine, 'and those are drying up.”
You're going to tell me this has to do with that global warming thing I've been hearing about, aren't you?
Well, probably. The data certainly fits the predictions made by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, which told us to expect increased rainfall in the tropics and Arctic Circle, with more dangerous storms. So it certainly fits climate change models. Imputing the cause to climate change is a larger project. And in fact, 13 years of data really isn't enough to draw robust long-term trends, since there can be a lot of fluctuation in climate phenomena over a period that short. The researchers plan to study the matter further.
So what's the bottom line here?
Scientists have used satellite records in an important new way, directly observing a phenomenon rather than simply modeling it on computers. More study is needed to get a firmer read on this apparent acceleration of the water cycle. But the technique is here to stay: 'What we've shown here is that we now have the tools to see global climate change as it occurs,' said NASA's Josh Willis, 'not just the warming, but changes in the hydrological cycle as well.'

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ATO Tax Receipt shows where your Tax Dollars are Spent

This good idea is being promoted by some Democrat Party supporters in the USA. Can it be applied to benefit Australian tax payers? Give taxpayers a receipt. Something like this:

That would be for someone with the 2009 U.S. median income of $34,140, who paid $5,400 in federal assessments, and it comes from this report [PDF] presenting the idea. The authors, David Kendall and Jim Kessler, believe that the receipt is not only something taxpayers should see for reasons of basic transparency, but also because highlighting the actual costs of public programs could benefit progressives:

Progressives might have a better chance of winning greater funding levels for programs that invest in children, education, energy, environment, transportation, innovation, foreign aid, humanitarian assistance, and housing if taxpaying citizens had a better idea of how their money is spent. Most of these items represent a pittance of government spending as compared to other items in the budget. At the same time, Americans might encourage Congress to be more fiscally responsible if they saw how much of their actual taxes went for things like interest on the national debt.

If I were a Democrat running for Congress in today's political climate, I would make this part of my platform -- it could be a responsible way to appeal to the folks who are suspicious of government and taxes, as opposed to the crazy demagoguery that attracts them now. Of course, I'm not sure even this could penetrate the haze of anger around that chunk of the electorate.

-- Tim Fernholz

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Scotland Aiming for 100 Percent Clean Energy by 2025

While the U.S. may aim for a 15 percent Renewable 

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• By EcoLocalizer at EcoLocalizer

Fri Oct 1, 2010 10:30am EDT

by Zachary Shahan

Energy Standard by 2021, and Northern Ireland has just confirmed a much stronger target of 40 percent renewable energy by 2020, Scotland is aiming a bit higher. It announced today that it plans to get "at least" 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2025. Wow.

"Scotland has unrivalled green energy resources and our new national target to generate 80 percent of electricity needs from renewables by 2020 will be exceeded by delivering current plans for wind, wave and tidal generation," First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond said this week.

"I'm confident that by 2025 we will produce at least 100 percent of our electricity needs from renewables alone, and together with other sources it will enable us to become a net exporter of clean, green energy."

Similar to Northern Ireland, Scotland is looking to get a lot of its power from offshore wind, as well as onshore wind power. The country has also been a leader in wave and tidal energy, recently launching the world's largest tidal turbine, launching a couple of other wave energy devices in the past year, and leading in this alternative energy sector for years.

This announcement comes about one week after Scotland announced that it was aiming to hit 80 percent renewable energy by 2020.

Scotland is planning to export a lot of its clean energy to its neighbor to the south, England, which has lagged behind the rest of Europe on clean energy.

Salmond made these announcements today at the beginning of the Scottish Low Carbon Investment conference in Edinburgh.

As I said when writing about Northern Ireland's ambitious new target, at this point we can only dream of such high targets in the US, unfortunately.

If the atom were the size of a football field, the proton would be the size of an ant

Just How Small is the Proton?

By Davide Castelvecchi  October 1, 2010 10

Physicists have been scratching their heads since July, when a research team announced that the proton, the basic building block of matter, is 4 percent smaller than previously thought. The finding, published in Nature, clashes with theoretical predictions based on quantum electrodynamics, or QED, the fundamental theory of the electromagnetic force that had passed the most stringent tests in physics.

Randolf Pohl of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Op tics in Garching, Germany, and his collaborators used a laser to probe exotic, man-made hydrogen atoms in which elementary particles known as muons replaced the usual electrons orbiting the single-proton nuclei. Laser energy made the atoms fluoresce at char acteristic x-ray wavelengths. Those wavelengths reflected a number of subtle effects, including the little known fact that an orbiting particle—be it a muon or an electron—often flies straight through the proton. That is possible because protons are composed of smaller elementary particles (mainly three quarks), and most of the space inside a proton is actually empty.

By calculating the effects of the proton’s radius on such fly-through trajectories, the researchers were able to estimate the proton’s radius to be 0.84184 femtometer (one femtometer is one quadrillionth of a meter). This figure is smaller than all previous measurements made, which ranged between 0.8768 and 0.897 femtometer. (Either way, the proton is a lot smaller than even a hydrogen atom: if the atom were the size of a football field, the proton would be the size of an ant.)

In dealing with such tiny quantities, the possibility for error always exists. Yet after 12 years of painstaking efforts (“You need to be stubborn,” Pohl says), the team members are confident that some unforeseen subtlety in their apparatus hasn’t thrown off their measurement. Theorists have also double-checked the calculations involved in interpreting the muons’ behavior and predicting the size of the proton, which are relatively straightforward, says Ulrich D. Jen tschura, a theorist at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla.

Some physicists have suggested that the interaction between the muons and the proton could be complicated by unforeseen pairs of particles and their antiparticles, which might appear briefly from the vacuum in and around the nucleus. The most likely candidates, Jentschura says, are electron-antielectron pairs, which are not supposed to show up in the everyday physics of atoms, at least not according to the standard theory. “It could be the first indication that something is wrong with our picture” of QED, says Krzysztof Pachucki, a theorist at the University of Warsaw in Poland. The theory might need some tweaking, but likely not a complete overhaul, he says. Whatever the answer, physicists will most likely have plenty to keep scratching their heads about for years to come.

Systems biology and the development of prostate cancer

Posted on October 1, 2010 by Sitemaster

We still have little to no idea why one man gets aggressive prostate cancer, another gets indolent prostate cancer, and a third is at no risk for prostate cancer at all.

What we do know is that prostate cancer — even by the standards of cancer in general — is a complex disease. The Prostate Cancer Foundation now believe that there may be as many as (or perhaps more than) 24 different types of prostate cancer that are defined by things like gene mutations and modifications to immunological and biological systems in individual patients.

Bonnet et al. have outlined a possible new “model” for the development of prostate cancers  that is based on the principles of  a developing area of the biological sciences known as “systems biology.”

The basis of this new model is a “regulatory framework” in which aspects of gene expression, the expression of small controller molecules called microRNAs (micro-ribonucleic acids), and clinical parameters — all derived from patients with aggressive or non-aggressive forms of prostate cancer — are brought together to try and project the evolution of differing types of prostate cancer in specific individuals.

Their analysis has lead to some interesting findings:

• They were able to identify new genetic models and mechanisms that might be linked to prostate cancer.
• They found that nearly a third of the regulatory molecules predicted to control the expression levels of specific genes and gene complexes are microRNAs.
• They predict the existence of novel microRNAs that have yet to be associated with prostate cancer.
• They were able to link the expression of certain genes and gene complexes to the value of clinical parameters characterizing the aggressiveness of prostate cancer.

Now we should be clear that this is only one possible and theoretical model of the way that prostate cancer may develop over time, but it may be a helpful model if it can be expanded to explain, with accuracy, how aggressive and non-aggressive forms of prostate cancer can evolve from specific gene mutations combined with other factors in specific individuals.

Systems biology is going to be at the heart of the future understanding of personalized medicine.

Around the Traps in Aboriginal Art...

So i've got a little bit to catch up on and I'll start with a thank you for the blog comments we've received recently. We appreciate you taking the time to let us know your thoughts.

Since our last entry Mbantua Galleryhas had many new paintings arrive including these three pieces:
Clockwise from right: 'Tyape (Grubs) at Aremela Rockhole' by Gary Bird,'Ntyemeny (Ruby Saltbush)' by Thelma Dixon and 'Bush Plum' by Tanya Bird 

Tanya has recently returned to painting and told us she had an idea for new paintings using just white, black and grey to convey her subject. She wanted to know if we'd be interested in letting her try some out for us. Of course and we love them!! A lot of men from Tanya's family have also been keenly painting so keep a look out on Mbantua's website for these more traditional works like Gary's above.

Aboriginal artists Lena Pwerle and Jeannie Mills Pwerl spent a month at our workshop in town in July working on some paintings and going shopping, and I enjoyed listening to their stories and photographing them in action. One of my favourite moments was when I had just sat down with them, completely exhausted after a long day, and Lena told me fascinating stories - particularly about giving birth in the bush. I'll point out that my sister Andrea, who had her first child in May this year, had just stopped in to say a quick hello and after she left I asked Lena what it was like with her many children! She told me there was no help from nurses then and no drugs, just the other ladies of her community who had experienced it before. There was always a camp fire burning nearby, so the hot sand would be put over her afterwards to help the pain, and soak up blood. Lena recalled how her youngest child, Paul, was born 'when the rain was coming' in a dry river bed. After he was born, she couldn't breast feed him so they fed him chewed up bush yams and goanna meet, and kangaroo blood to keep him growing. I was so captivated listening to her talk.

The gallery has some fantastic pieces of their work online right now so I recommend checking it out. Personally I love so many things about this new piece by Lena below, measuring 210x90cm and painted in umber, ash pink and white...the mixed colour combinations throughout the soakages, the way the paints have blended together, the depth and the simple earthy tones. I love it!

Mbantua recently had a stunning collection of the late Minnie Pwerle's works in an exhibition which ends tomorrow. The exhibition is the first of a series which will be raising money for The Mbantua Foundation, of which you can contact the Foundation's newly appointed Development Manager Miranda Daniels on (08) 89533 577 should you want to learn more about it. Since the exhibition will go offline tomorrow, I've posted pics of a few of the paintings featured in it: 

 

I also recently went to Utopia to collect paintings and Miranda joined me on the trip which was great. So I'll be posting some notes and photos of the trip here soon too!

New Technology That Captures "Exciton" Particles Could Replace Today's Solar Cells

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By Alasdair Wilkins on October 1, 2010 at 1:20 PM

Even the most efficient solar cell loses a lot of energy in the form of wasted heat. But the electron-like particles that photons emit as they enter the cells could be turned into electrical energy, solving the heat loss problem.

When photons, the particles of light, enter solar cells, they can create a quasiparticle known as an exciton. The exciton is a combination of an electron and an electron hole. What’s an electron hole? It’s basically the complete opposite of an electron, but it’s not an anti-electron. It’s not matter, it’s not antimatter, it’s not really anything at all – it’s just a place where an electron should be but isn’t.

That may not sound all that important, but it’s possible for an electron and a hole to attract each other and combine into an exciton. When that happens in solar cells, it’s responsible for the heat energy that current goes wasted. The trick to reducing the heat loss is to capture as many electrons as possible before they dissipate, because those electrons can then be diverted onto a current and used for electrical energy.

Now researchers at the University of Wyoming and Colorado State have managed to do just that. They coupled together light-absorbing lead sulfide particles with electrodes made from titanium dioxide. They found that the current produced in this system contained excitons, and they were able to collect several excitons from a single photon before the particles started to break down again into their constituent parts.

This offers a chance for solar cells to trap excitons in a similar way. As long as the cells are coupled with the appropriate electrodes, they too can capture these quasiparticles before they degrade, which means they would save most of the heat and hang onto it as useful energy. It would greatly improve the efficiency of solar cells, all without even having to do anything to the basic photon capture technology.