A new theory developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) explains what happens just before the plasma disappears. The explanation could help engineers design better reactors. And that might help them increase the power output of a reactor, perhaps doubling the electricity they could produce, and making fusion reactors more economical.

According to the researchers' theory, islands develop within the plasma that cool off and cause the plasma to disappear. These islands—which are easily identified—could be selectively heated with microwaves, the researchers think, which could keep the plasma stable.

In a sense, Fred and Barney haven't quite left the cave in mythical Bedrock.

The predictions were amazingly precise. Each day was divided into three or more segments, each of which was given a rating lying somewhere in the range from very favourable to highly adverse.

One of the best preserved of these papyrus documents is called the Cairo Calendar. Although the papyrus is badly damaged in places, scholars have been able to extract a complete list of ratings for days throughout an entire year somewhere around 1200 BC.

An interesting question is how the scribes arrived at their ratings. So various groups have studied the patterns that crop up in the predictions. Today, Lauri Jetsu and buddies at the University of Helsinki in Finland reveal the results of their detailed statistical analysis of the Cairo Calendar. Their conclusion is extraordinary.

These guys arranged the data as a time series and crunched it with various statistical tools designed to reveal cycles within it. They found two significant periodicities. The first is 29.6 days--that's almost exactly the length of a lunar month, which modern astronomers put at 29.53059 days.

The second cycle is 2.85 days and this is much harder to explain. However, Jetsu and co make a convincing argument that this corresponds to the variability of Algol, a star visible to the naked eye in the constellation of Perseus.

Algol is interesting because every 2.867 days, it dims visibly for a few hours and then brightens up. This was first discovered John Goodricke in 1783, who used naked eye observations to measure the variability.

Astronomers later explained this variability by assuming that Algol is a binary star system. It dims when the dimmer star passes in front of the brighter one.

Nothing else in the visible night sky comes close to having a similar period so it's reasonable to think that the 2.85 and the 2.867 day periods must refer to the same object. "Everything indicated that the two best periods in [the data] were the real periods of the Moon and Algol," say Jetsu and co.

 
In an era of "sound-bite politics"; short-sighted goals more concerned with "team victory" than with governing, this documentary should be a part of the debate on education, energy, science and ultimately jobs in this country.

 
As we see the price of gasoline rise at the pump: the price of bringing food to suburbia also rises, as fuel prices rise for the grocers to ship food to their shelves - they transfer that cost to us, a de facto tax irrespective of political party.

 
My fondest childhood memories: my father's "victory garden" he loved to work in our backyard. Literally every vegetable we consumed was grown out back, we then purchased our meats at the grocery store. It saved us much money. Today, it would allow consumers to buy more range-fed poultry and cattle products, healthy as well as a kind of Noble savage protest. In the aftermath of 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina, we're no longer looking for the Cavalry.

 
We may in the end, all need victory gardens...

Rebecca Shaw of the Environmental Defense Fund in San Francisco, California and colleagues studied the Nature Conservancy's Mount Hamilton project, which spans 3200 km²of California. They focused on 11 species in the area with known climate tolerances.

They then combined the results of 16 climate models to estimate how the local climate within the project will change between now and 2100. That allowed them to determine how each species' habitat would move, grow or shrink – and thus how much more land would need to be acquired and maintained to preserve them.

The analysis suggests that the project will need an extra 2560 km² of land by 2050. The figure had risen to 3800 km² by 2100. Shaw estimates the extra cost at $1.73 billion by 2050, and $2.54 billion by 2100. That is slightly more than double the cost of maintaining the project in the absence of climate change.

"Mo' money, mo' problems." Biggie Smalls (released posthumously). I say that with some chagrin. Pay now, or pay a LOT later...

New Scientist: Climate change will make conservation even pricier

In the search for other Earths, the main goal is to find a planet the same size as ours that sits in the habitable zone – the region around a given star where planetary surface temperature would be similar to ours, allowing liquid water to exist.

But while an Earth-sized world in one of these habitable zones might have seas and rivers, it would look quite different bathed in blue-white or red light. That could affect the development of life. To exploit the available light, plant leaves could be yellow, orange or red, according to research in 2007 by the Virtual Planetary Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.