Science News
Iron in Earth's Core Weakens Before Melting
University College London
Oct. 10, 2013 — The iron in the Earth's inner core weakens dramatically before it melts, explaining the unusual properties that exist in the moon-sized solid centre of our planet that have, up until now, been difficult to understand.
Scientists use seismic waves -- pulses of energy generated during earthquakes -- to measure what is happening in the Earth's inner core, which at 6000 km beneath our feet is completely inaccessible.
Problematically for researchers, the results of seismic measurements consistently show that these waves move through the Earth's solid inner core at much slower speeds than predicted by experiments and simulations.
Specifically, a type of seismic wave called a 'shear wave' moves particularly slowly through the Earth's core relative to the speed expected for the material -- mainly iron -- from which the core is made. Shear waves move through the body of the object in a transverse motion -- like waves in a rope, as opposed to waves moving through a slinky spring.
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The 63rd Annual Lindau Meeting: Industry's Rare Resources
Nature Video presents five short films on this summer's Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, which brought early-career chemists together with Nobel Prize–winners
Scientific American
At this summer’s Lindau Nobel Laureates meeting in Germany, participating laureates and young researchers came from all over the world to discuss chemistry. The Nature Video team filmed three discussions on issues that matter to the current generation of chemists, including the world's pressing problems and how chemistry can help us to solve them.
Some of the dialogue focused on the role of catalysts. Almost all industrial processes rely on catalysts, which increase the rate of chemical reactions. Many catalysts are made from rare metals—and the young researchers in this film are worried about them running out. They put the problem to Nobel laureates Robert Grubbs and Gerhard Ertl. The group discusses how dwindling supplies of rare metals could affect industry, energy production and society. But the laureates raise a more fundamental problem: in many cases, we don't fully understand how catalysts actually work.
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Technology News
NIST closed, all measurements invalid
Martin Rowe
The current deadlock in Washington over the Federal budget has shut down most of the U.S. Government. That includes NIST, which houses the national standards for many physical quantities–voltage and current–and provides calibration services. With the house at the top of the measurement chain closed, all measurements made in the U.S. are hereby invalid. If you take measurements or perform calibrations, then you might as well take the rest of the day off.
All joking aside, what if your lab's calibration standard is at NIST awaiting calibration? Clearly, the calibration will be delayed. Should that delay cause your calibration to go out of date, will that affect your work? You may have test equipment that that's calibrated based on those standards you send to NIST. If the delay causes your other equipment's calibration to expire, can you still use it? Will measurements made using equipment with out-of-date calibrations be acceptable? It could be a problem, especially if you’re in a regulated industry such as medical or pharmaceutical.
On the other hand, the agencies that regulate industry are also closed. That means there's nobody to enforce the regulations for measurements, or anything else.
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Slideshow: Koenigsegg's $1.46M 'Hypercar' Goes From 0-62 in 2.9 Seconds Flat
Charles Murray, Senior Technical Editor, Electronics & Test
If you have some spare cash on hand and are hunting for a vehicle with a little pop in the accelerator, then Koenigsegg Automotive AB may have the car for you.
The Swedish automaker’s 2014 Agera S “hypercar” will take you from 0 to 62 mph in a scant 2.9 seconds and will hit a top speed of 260 mph if you have a long straightaway in your backyard. It also offers a V-8 engine that peaks at 1,030 hp and 811 lb-ft of torque, a max lateral acceleration of 1.6 g’s, and a braking package that enables it to decelerate from 62 mph down to zero in just 100 ft. All for a starting price of $1.46 million.
As dazzling as those numbers are, however, the Agera’s most amazing stat may be the size of its engineering staff. “We have between 15 and 20 engineers at any given time, and all of them have to do more than one thing,” Jens Sverdrup, regional director for Koenigsegg Automotive AB, told Design News. “Our software engineers do hardware. We have one engineer who designs our carbon wheels and our electronics. You can’t be a one-trick pony around here.”
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Environmental News
The Minamata Mercury Convention: 12 Things It Does and Doesn't Do
The Minamata Convention, a United Nations pact launched Thursday, is designed to limit mercury use and emissions internationally
By Brian Bienkowski and Environmental Health News
The Minamata Convention, a United Nations pact launched Thursday, is designed to limit mercury use and emissions internationally. Finalized after four years of negotiations and signed by delegates of about 140 nations, the treaty includes many exemptions. (See below for news about the U.S. delegation.)
Here is what the treaty does – and doesn’t do.
1. Coal-fired plants, boilers and smelters
Nations must require best available emission-control technologies on new power plants, boilers and smelters, but they do not have to require them on older plants. Instead, they can take other steps for existing plants, such as emissions targets.
2. Light bulbs
Compact fluorescent bulbs of 30 watts or less will be banned by 2020 if they exceed 5 milligrams of mercury. Certain other halophosphate and fluorescent lamps also will be banned by 2020.
3. Mercury mining
Primary mining for mercury will be banned. Mercury mines already in operation can continue for 15 years and then will be banned.
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Beeing There: The Search for Pesticides’ Effect on Declining Bee Colonies Moves to the Fields
Scientists are gaining a more sophisticated understanding of the role of toxins in worldwide bee declines as lab studies of single insects are superseded by research on hives in the field
By Francie Diep
A honeybee's brain is hardly bigger than the tip of a dog's whisker, yet you can train a bee just as Pavlov got his pups to drool on hearing their dinner bell. Using a sugar solution as a reward, you can teach the insect to extend its little mouthparts in response to different scents.
Several Pavlovian lab studies of individual worker honeybees, however, found that those fed small amounts of pesticides—especially a class called neonicotinoids—do not learn which scents lead to a sweet reward as quickly as their pesticide-free peers do. Yet, until recently, it wasn't clear what these and other lab studies meant for the health of entire bee colonies, which might have strategies to mitigate the overall impact of problems with particular hive members. "Just because you see the effect in the bee in the lab, strapped into this lab apparatus, [doesn’t mean you know] how does this translate into a colony in a field?" says Reed Johnson, an entomologist at The Ohio State University who studies pesticides' effects on honeybees.
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Medical News
New Antiviral Response Discovered in Mammals
ETH Zurich
Oct. 10, 2013 — Many viral infections are nipped in the bud by the innate immune response. This involves specific proteins within the infected cell that recognize the virus and trigger a signalling cascade -- the so-called interferon response. This activates a protective mechanism in neighbouring cells and often results in the death of the primarily infected cell.
In plants and invertebrates another mechanism is known to function in antiviral immune response: the so-called RNA interference (RNAi) pathway. RNAi uses an intermediate of the viral proliferation process to build a weapon against the virus. Although RNAi also exists in mammals, researchers have until now thought it to be involved in other cellular processes required for gene regulation but not in antiviral immunity. Evidence that RNAi does indeed contribute to mammalian antiviral defence is now published in Science by Olivier Voinnet, professor for RNA biology at ETH Zurich, and his colleagues.
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Our Skin's Sense Of Time Helps Protect Against UV Damage
by Maanvi Singh
We all feel the biological master clock, ticking deep within our brains, that tells us when to sleep and when to wake.
Well, it turns out that our skin cells have a of their own. Researchers have found that depending on the time of day, our skin's stem cells busy themselves with different types of tasks.
During the day, our epidermis works to defend itself against ultraviolet light from the sun. But at night, it focuses instead on regenerating cells that were damaged during the day. This built-in system helps protect us from premature ageing and skin cancer.
"The thing is, our skin is prepared to cope with the UV light at a certain time of day," says , one of the researchers at the in Barcelona responsible for the findings.
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Space News
Pulverized Asteroid around Distant Star Was Full of Water
The first discovery of a rocky, watery object beyond our solar system shows how planets might get their oceans
By Clara Moskowitz
A decimated planetary system around a distant star holds the relics of a giant asteroid that may have once been flooded with water. The finding offers intriguing clues as to how planets become habitable, and may also provide an unsettling peek at what our own solar system might be in for.
This system lies 170 light-years away and is centered on a star, GD 61, that is nearing the end of its life. It is a white dwarf—the dense hulk left over after a star has used up its fuel for nuclear fusion and cast off its outer gaseous layers into space. These stars start out roughly the size of the sun, and end up condensed into a sphere about the size of Earth.
Astronomers did a bit of planetary forensics on GD 61, which is surrounded by rubble—the remains of a large asteroid orbiting the star that seems to have been kicked into a close orbit, where the white dwarf’s strong gravity ripped it to shreds. Some of the asteroid’s remains are now scattered over the surface of the star, where they show up as chemical signatures in the light of the white dwarf.
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Astronaut Scott Carpenter, fourth American in space, dies at 88
By Keith Coffman
(Reuters) - Astronaut Scott Carpenter, who in 1962 became the fourth American in space and the second to orbit the Earth, died on Thursday in Colorado at age 88 of complications from a stroke, his wife Patty Carpenter said.
Carpenter, who lost radio contact with NASA controllers during his pioneering space flight and was found in the ocean 250 miles from the targeted splashdown site, went on to explore the ocean floor in later years. His wife said he died in a Denver hospice.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration chose Carpenter and six other pilots to be astronauts in 1959 for the Mercury space program as the United States entered its space race with the Soviet Union. The only surviving member of that Mercury 7 team is John Glenn, 92, now a retired U.S. Senator from Ohio. In 1962, Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, and Carpenter was his backup on that mission.
Later that year, Carpenter made his only spaceflight, taking the Aurora 7 spacecraft on three laps around Earth on May 24, a few weeks after his 37th birthday. The flight of less than five hours made him the second American to orbit Earth, and the experience stayed with him until the end of his life.
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Odd News
Kissing Helps Us Find the Right Partner – And Keep Them
Springer Science+Business Media
Oct. 10, 2013 — What's in a kiss? A study by Oxford University researchers suggests kissing helps us size up potential partners and, once in a relationship, may be a way of getting a partner to stick around.
'Kissing in human sexual relationships is incredibly prevalent in various forms across just about every society and culture,' says Rafael Wlodarski, the DPhil student who carried out the research in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. 'Kissing is seen in our closest primate relatives, chimps and bonobos, but it is much less intense and less commonly used.
'So here's a human courtship behavior which is incredibly widespread and common and, in extent, is quite unique. And we are still not exactly sure why it is so widespread or what purpose it serves.'
To understand more, Rafael Wlodarski and Professor Robin Dunbar set up an online questionnaire in which over 900 adults answered questions about the importance of kissing in both short-term and long-term relationships.
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