Artist's impression of a black widow pulsar: a rapidly spinning stellar remant that strips matter off a companion star and evaporates it by intense radiation.
NASA/ESA/M.J. Jee and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University)/Hubble Field), AEI/Milde Marketing Science Communication
Pulsars are the dense, rapidly spinning remains of stars much more massive than the Sun. To really get a pulsar revolving quickly, it needs a companion star: matter stripped from the partner falls onto the pulsar, speeding it up until it can rotate hundreds of times every second. Astronomers discovered these millisecond pulsars by their radio emissions, but many of them are also very strong gamma ray sources.
Astronomers have now used the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope to identify a "black widow" pulsar that's stripping mass off a close companion star while simultaneously evaporating it by emitting intense radiation. It's having these dramatic effects because the pulsar and its companion orbit each other so closely that they complete an orbit once every 93 minutes, making this the tightest black widow binary yet discovered.
Sunday's Dilbert especially: a sad case of art imitating recent disturbing revelations in life. And in light of recent events, we could use something that make us...
Pedantic: 2. : narrowly, stodgily, and often ostentatiously learned. 3. : unimaginative, pedestrian.
Semantics: 1.The branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning.
2.The meaning of a word, phrase, sentence, or text: "such quibbling over semantics may seem petty stuff".
"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not."
Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
How prescient his advice was in what's deemed a simple children's story. Doc was deep.
As members of humanity, we have the same opposing thumbs as apes.
Yet, we can think, reason, dream, drive, design dresses and microchips, plan, raise families and skyscrapers, go to the moon, build space stations, launch probes on Mars, manufacture clothing, baby carriages, semiconductors, atomic bombs and massively affect the climate.
Ironically, the similar one thing between both the three presidential and vice presidential debates is neither of them discussed climate change or what either party would do about what has now asserted itself in the current disaster.
Octavia Butler advocated for space travel in her dystopian novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. It took her characters a long time - two novels - to get to that point. The main character was the female Moses that didn't see the promised land beyond earth.
Sadly, we currently have only one starship: terra firma beneath our feet and an atmosphere steadily warming in our greenhouse life support system. We also have a dysfunctional political system that won't allow us to address real problems, only red herrings to "fire up the base."
In an interview I read at the conclusion of "Sower," Butler used the term "smooth dinosaurs" referring to humanity and the possibility of it becoming extinct. Her apocalyptic world was post climate change resulting in violent weather patterns, rising tides, eroded coastlines, societal stratification, human migration, hyper inflation, a small and dwindling middle class (just not in the sense we currently esteem it), the haves in walled-off cities with their own private armies; for the rest of us: privatized police, fire and emergency services (no money; no service) and...cannibalism as means of survival for the "have-nots." There seemed to be some religiousity, primarily used by the haves to control the shrinking middle class that had banned together in their own walled cities and posted themselves as sentries from cannibals and bandits.
I hate putting things in such graphic detail. However, I fear we're reaching or maybe have already reached the "tipping point," at which time the Texas colloquialism of "hunkering down" will become a lifestyle...as mole men underground. The date of the link from The Guardian provided in this paragraph: 9 November 2011, predicting then we had five years to make drastic changes. We now have four. Just enough to begin healing the earth, or for deregulation to push us all towards the inevitable.
Unless...
I've found something on Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors. It's an old idea in nuclear reactors, but since its byproducts have less of a half-life than Uranium or Plutonium (and one can't make bombs from it, my guess) it's not as well known or promoted.
I was taught this outline at North Carolina A & T and still use it to set up problems.
I actually do it before I've read any chapter. It's almost a mental prep: I assume the problems are solvable, then I tackle them.
Some problems are almost unbearable: I opted not to go to our homecoming due the impending Hurricane Sandy, which from previous experience with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita I could tell from Weather.com was going to be formidable.
I was concerned with my fraternity brother (our alumni chapter Polemarch) who was stalled in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania coming back from GHOE due to Sandy's wrath. He eventually made it to New York.
Stevens University is in Hoboken, NJ. It's where I'm taking my online class in Microelectronics and Photonics. I am attempting to contact the other registrants -- my "classmates" and the instructor. We're all professionals, working at full time jobs pursuing a Masters of Science degree. None of us imagined experiencing science - or, the ignorance thereof - in such harsh, graphic violence.
GIVEN: The most significant display of climate change and its dangers to date
I will get nothing from this, NOTHING, and canned goods are logistically impossible. As John Donne is often quoted, "I am involved with mankind." It is my hope as reader of this blog, you are too.
Hopefully, all my classmates will check in. As soon as it is safe and clear, I will visit the campus; we will meet face-to-face, students and professor.
I have given, I'd appreciate those of you who read my postings give what you feel led to give. Thank you.
We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Carl Sagan
We've received a lot of calls: my sister and best friend from NC; my mother-in-law; my oldest son and my daughter-in-law from Oklahoma and Texas respectively. I've answered more than my share of thoughtful and appreciated Facebook updates. We're OK.
My youngest son called at 3:15 EST, which prompted me to ask why he was UP (2:15 CST). The news disturbed him and he was concerned about his parents. A price he has already paid, and now I pay as his concerns kept me awake.
As I blog this, 7.1 million people are without power on the east coast, 2.2 million in New Jersey. An explosion and fire at ConEdison has left downtown Manhattan dark. Sixteen people have lost their lives. Schools are closed all over NY state. The NYU Medical Center is being evacuated after backup generators failed. The Metro Transit Authority is saying this is the worst disaster in the 108 year history of the New York City subway system. Seven tunnels are flooded and the New York Stock Exchange remains closed for a second day.
We must be cunning, discerning on our choice in one week of Head of State. I have my opinion and my vote already decided. It has not been decided by dogma, prejudice or melanin: I self-identify politically as a logician, a proud member of the reality-based community.
The Venn diagram intersecting set between prophecy and predictive modeling is both are warnings: given for the listeners to take heed and change their course of action before probable disaster becomes all the more real and credible.
However, denial of reality has an associated cost as I've listed above. We cannot long afford this cost. We cannot on the one hand want to compete toe-to-toe with countries that don't have our internal struggles, our inane politics, our sound bite attention spans; dogma and sloganeering, and expect in the end to be successful for very long. Empires after all, have lifespans.
Science, to further quote Carl Sagan "is a way of thinking," and so is believing the earth is 9,000 years old while holding a position in the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. One works towards a solution to real-world problems; the other an associated, ever-inflating cost.
Whatever your choice next Tuesday, we'll all live in the real aftermath (and price) of that choice.
"What's past is prologue." Tempest, Act 2, Scene I
In Austin, Texas I witnessed the caravans from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita: Interstates 10 and 45 packed headed towards Austin and Dallas respectively.
Houston received the first wave of fleeing masses of humanity from Louisiana. Churches and shelters in the three cities put up cots and sleeping bags as fast as they could; clothing and canned foods were donated; homes opened. We were brothers, sisters, cousins, friends: suddenly any differences were rendered utterly meaningless: "Vanity of vanities" said Solomon. I became used to life in "tornado alley," and the Texas colloquial phrase of "hunkering down," but nothing like shelves emptied at the grocery stores; sudden influxes of students from 9th Ward NOLA.
Moving from Texas to New York last year, my wife and I experienced Hurricane Irene, which was described at the time a once-in-a-lifetime event as far as its power (hurricanes and tropical storms have affected NY before). Sandy has now proven that comforting logic wrong, coupling winds, flooding, rain, and possibly tornadoes and snowstorms. Last year, the one and only snowstorm happened on Halloween, downing powerlines made heavy by wet snow caught on autumn leaves and tree branches that snapped under the great unexpected weight, leaving families without lights; heat. We took in friends that lived in Hyde Park due to that: their children had an increased commute to school when it started again. In Irene's aftermath: Insect populations flourished that in times past should have passed on in seasonal death. Our power blinked in and out before it settled then, but I'm not so sure we'll be as lucky. I hope we are.
WE WILL HAVE TO DEAL WITH THIS: soberly using critial thinking skills, (which, as a nation we show ourselves remarkably bereft), not sound bites and slogans. We have lawyers as administrators of the republic: lawyers argue. Eight of the top nine government posts in China are held by engineers and scientists according to Forbes. Accordingly, they will move to economic prominence, no dominence in 2016, or at least by the 2020s. Narry a tax exempt creation museum on the Sino land mass.
"… [it] is shown how, within the framework of general relativity and without the introduction of wormholes, it is possible to modify a spacetime in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large speed. By a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it, motion faster than the speed of light as seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible. The resulting distortion is reminiscent of the ‘warp drive’ of science fiction." (Alcubierre paper abstract)
By placing a spheroid object between two regions of space-time — one expanding, the other contracting — Alcubierre theorized you could create a “warp bubble” that moves space-time around the object, effectively re-positioning it. In essence, you’d have the end result of faster-than-light travel without the object itself having to move (with respect to its local frame of reference) at light-speed or faster.
The only catch: Alcubierre says that, “just as happens with wormholes,” you’d need “exotic matter” (matter with “strange properties”) to distort space-time. And the amount of energy necessary to power that would be on par with — wait for it — the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter.
So we’re back to “fuhgeddaboudit,” right?
Maybe not. According to NASA physicist Harold White, the energy problem may actually be surmountable by simply tweaking the warp drive’s geometry.
White, who just shared his latest ideas at the 100 Year Starship 2012 Public Symposium, says that if you adjust the shape of the ring surrounding the object, from something that looks like a flat halo into something thicker and curvier, you could power Alcubierre’s warp drive with a mass roughly the size of NASA’s Voyager 1 probe.
In other words: reduction in energy requirements from a planet with a mass equivalent to over 300 Earths, down to an object that weighs just under 1,600 pounds.
One nanoelectronics approach studied by the NRI MIND center is nanomagnet logic (NML)--logic circuits that work by magnetic coupling between neighboring nanoscale magnets. Here, SEM (l) and magnetic force microscope (r) images show an NML circuit that adds binary numbers. Credit: Courtesy SRC-NRI Midwest Institute for Nanoelectronics Discovery (MIND)
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced today the selection of the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative (NRI), a collaboration of several key firms in the semiconductor industry, to support university-centered research for the development of after-the-next-generation “nanoelectronics” technology. NRI is made up of participants from the semiconductor industry, including GLOBALFOUNDRIES, IBM, Intel, Micron Technology and Texas Instruments.
“The NRI is a model for industry-driven consortia,” said NIST Director Patrick Gallagher. “It funds a highly leveraged, coordinated nanoelectronics research program centered at leading universities in partnership with federal and state government agencies. The innovation stemming from this NIST award will enable the United States to keep our current leadership in nanoelectronics that stimulates the economy and creates high-paying jobs.”
If you ease up on a pencil, does it slide more easily? Sure. But maybe not if the tip is sharpened down to nanoscale dimensions. A team of researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has discovered that if graphite (the material in pencil "lead") is sticky enough, as measured by a nanoscale probe, it actually becomes harder to slide a tip across the material's surface as you decrease pressure—the exact opposite of our everyday experience.
Technically, this leads to an effectively "negative coefficient of friction," something that has not been previously seen, according to team leader Rachel Cannara. Graphite, Cannara explains, is one of a special class of solids called "lamellar" materials, which are formed from stacks of two-dimensional sheets of atoms. The sheets are graphene, a single-atom-thick plane of carbon atoms that are arranged in a hexagonal pattern. Graphene has a number of exotic electrical and material properties that make it attractive for micro- and nanoelectromechanical systems with applications ranging from gas sensors and accelerometers to resonators and optical switches.
Roddenberry unwittingly unleashed a phenomenon in which Star Trek enthusiasts became a veritable cult, numbering physicists, aerospace engineers, housewives, senators, children, teachers and intellectuals among its devotees (affectionately known as "Trekkies," and later, "Trekkers"). The show went outside television to win science fiction's coveted Hugo Award and then spawned an animated spin-off, as well as a series of feature films.
While making Star Trek, Roddenberry's reputation as a futurist began to grow. His papers and lectures earned him high professional regard as a visionary. He spoke on the subject at NASA meetings, the Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress gatherings, and top universities.
Star Trek was so wildly popular that it has since become the first television series to have an episode preserved in the Smithsonian, where an 11-foot model of the U.S.S. Enterprise is also exhibited on the same floor as the Wright brother's original airplane and Lindbergh's "Spirit of St. Louis." In addition to the Smithsonian honors, NASA's first space shuttle was named Enterprise, in response to hundreds of thousands of letters from fans demanding that the shuttle be named after the beloved starship.
Contradiction in terms - (noun: logic) a statement that is necessarily false; "the statement `he is brave and he is not brave' is a contradiction." *
A post to confirm I'm not the only one saying this...
In general, we only become aware of a politician's position on scientific issues during the campaign season. And, with a few exceptions like energy and climate policy, they rarely become campaign issues for anyone other than presidential candidates. So for the most part, it's rare to have a good picture of what our elected representatives think about science and technology.
If only that were true this year.
Missouri's Todd Akin, a Representative running for Senator, made headlines through his bizarre misunderstanding of biology, specifically that of the female reproductive system. Overcome by his desire to believe that pregnancy (and thus abortion) shouldn't be an issue for rape victims, he infamously claimed that the female body could somehow block pregnancy in the case of "legitimate rape."
Aside from their political affiliations, what do Akin and Broun have in common? Membership on the House's Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. And they're in good company there. Take the Committee's chair, Texas' Ralph Hall. When asked about the evidence that humans were altering the climate, Hall replied, "I don't think we can control what God controls." When it was pointed out to him that the National Academies of Science disagreed with his position, Hall basically accused them of being in it for the money. "They each get $5,000 for every report like that they give out."
His evidence? "That's just my guess. I don't have any proof of that." *
These are the people who are helping to set our country's science policy. The committee is currently considering bills on nuclear energy, rare earth metals, biofuels, cybersecurity, and a response to the current drought. It's also responsible for the budgets of groups like NASA and the National Science Foundation. Recent hearings have focused on tech transfers from universities, as well as NASA's commercial crew efforts.
In short, the committee can play a key role in setting the science and technology agenda, and help inform the entire House about key technological issues.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: It is hard to know exactly when it became acceptable for U.S. politicians to be antiscience. For some two centuries science was a preeminent force in American politics, and scientific innovation has been the leading driver of U.S. economic growth since World War II. Kids in the 1960s gathered in school cafeterias to watch moon launches and landings on televisions wheeled in on carts. Breakthroughs in the 1970s and 1980s sparked the computer revolution and a new information economy. Advances in biology, based on evolutionary theory, created the biotech industry. New research in genetics is poised to transform the understanding of disease and the practice of medicine, agriculture and other fields.
The Founding Fathers were science enthusiasts. Thomas Jefferson, a lawyer and scientist, built the primary justification for the nation's independence on the thinking of Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon and John Locke—the creators of physics, inductive reasoning and empiricism. He called them his “trinity of three greatest men.” If anyone can discover the truth by using reason and science, Jefferson reasoned, then no one is naturally closer to the truth than anyone else. Consequently, those in positions of authority do not have the right to impose their beliefs on other people. The people themselves retain this inalienable right. Based on this foundation of science—of knowledge gained by systematic study and testing instead of by the assertions of ideology—the argument for a new, democratic form of government was self-evident.
I was one of those kids in the 1960s. To much credit, I still am "in spirit" (no longer chronologically). As I read this article, two quotes come to mind from Isaac Asimov:
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
We went from a nation of science enthusiasts hopeful for a bright future, to a neurotic herd anticipating (some gladly) the apocalypse. A generation later in the 21st Century, kids that love STEM are still nerds and outcasts. I hear the loudest, shrillest voices saying the most inane things about women's reproductive issues and pregnancy, a bubblegum so-called understanding of "scientific knowledge," evolution, the age of the earth and the universe, climate change, social issues. Debates are won not on facts, but "style points" like American Idol despite numerous fact-checked obfuscations. The President of the United States started his administration wanting to address school children, encouraging them to study and work hard for a successful school year - not a novel notion at all as history bears witness - yet we allowed whole school districts to ignore the message entirely, offer excuses for children to skip the speech in the lunchroom. Some called it "a socialist agenda."
"Magical thinking" rules the day when we cannot see the precipitous drop in of our once preeminence in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics and our own behaviors antithetical to its achievement.
CARBON CAPTURE: Fuel cell technology might be able to capture a power plant's carbon dioxide emissions while also generating more electricity. Image: Flickr/glasseyes view - back again
Armed with new Department of Energy money, a Connecticut company announced this week it is moving forward with a carbon capture project that it thinks could revolutionize the technology.
FuelCell Energyis one of a handful of companies investigating how to address one of the biggest barriers in trying to capture carbon dioxide from coal plants for later storage underground, an unproved concept. The problem is called parasitic load. It refers to the phenomenon that a typical carbon capture system requires a great deal of electricity and thus saps power from a power plant and can cause electricity costs to spike by 70 percent or more.
The Danbury company's potential solution for this problem is fuel cells. The company says that fuel cells have the potential to essentially reverse parasitic load and cause a carbon capture system to generate as much as 40 percent more electricity for a power plant, rather than take away power.
As they're devising new tools and techniques to make wires narrower than a particle of smoke, they're also creating ways to build them in flexible materials and package the electronics in waterproofing layers of durable plastics.
The team of engineers, who specialize in different fields, ultimately aims to build flexible electronics that bend with the realities of life: Health-monitoring sensors that can be worn on or under the skin and foldable electronic devices as thin as a sheet of plastic wrap. And, further down the road, implantable nerve-stimulating electrodes that enable patients to regain control from paralysis or master a prosthetic limb.
Thinking bigger, the team believes the technology could be used to crank out rolls of thin-film solar panels that stand up to decades in the elements. Current thin-film panels are plagued with short life spans due to seepage between layers.
While it takes just a few keystrokes and mouse clicks to post a tweet on Twitter or "friend" someone on Facebook, it may require thousands of lines of code to accomplish the task.
Dog, a new programming language, could make it easier and more intuitive to write all sorts of social applications—anything from peer-to-peer question-and-answer sites to online dating. And because Dog incorporates natural language, this may make it easier for newbies to learn to code, too.
MIT Media Lab professor Sep Kamvar, who developed Dog with the help of some graduate students, hopes to release the language in a private beta version in the next few months, and offer a public release of it in the spring.
