Britain smells the Germans.

It seems that a pungent odor has permeated southern England… yes, almost all of southern England.

The so-called “Euro-whiff” has been described as reminding one of “manure or sulphur”, and the predominant theory points to one origin: the Germans.

One fish, two fish…

Fish probably aren’t the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of mathematics, but, amazingly, new research suggests that fish may be able to count… at least, to four.

Global Warming: Why Should We Care?

By Katie, Cosmic Irony http://lunawolf.wordpress.com

Note: This post is Chapter Six of an eight chapter work by a guest author.

Chapter Six: Why Should We Care?

Although there have been many different models and predictions about the future effects of global warming, scientists agree that the temperature is going to rise if nothing is done to curb emissions. The effects of this rise will be dolorous. The models have changed over the years and some have been reduced from over-exaggerated numbers, but this can be attributed to the development of better technologies. With these better technologies, it has been predicted that the earth’s temperature will rise between 2-4° F over the next hundred years. Fresh water stored in glaciers will no longer be available if the glaciers melt. Unpredictable weather will destroy agriculture all over the world. As part of a delicate ecosystem, animals will disappear from the globe forever.

Want to save energy? Turn Google black.

According to this site, a white web page requires 74 watts for the monitor to display it, and a black one takes 59. This led Mark Ontkush of “Ecoiron” to do some calculations.

From Ecoiron:

Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let’s assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that’s $75,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.

Google (www.google.com) changing it’s background to black may seem far fetched, but don’t speak to soon: it does exist.

Earthquake in Japan kills nine.

The Japanese city of Kashiwazaki was rocked by a magnitude 6.8 earthquake that killed nine, according to a report by the BBC. (Image Credit: BBC)

A Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Company) nuclear power plant in the city was also damaged in the quake. This plant is one of the largest in the world.

UC Davis: Diamonds and Fuel Cells a match made in heaven.

Alright. Cubic Zirconia are not real diamonds. But for most, their close enough.

Current fuel cell designs run extremely hot, at temperatures of up to 1000 degrees celsius, making them cumbersome and somewhat unstable.

A new design, invented at UC Davis, may mean that fuel cells could run much cooler (only about 100 degrees celsius), thereby making them more practical.

Scientists turn sugar into fuel.

There has been another light added at the end of the Global-Warming-Fossil-Fuel-End-Of-The-World tunnel, and it’s called… sugar.

A common form of sugar, fructose, can now be converted into an efficient fuel that may rival gasoline, American scientists say.

Global Warming is fact, not belief.

This posting on Slashdot linked to this article got my attention.

The article is written by a mister Vaclav Klaus, the current President of the Czech Republic, and deals with Global Warming supposedly being nothing more than belief-driven propaganda, not fact.

First of all, it is worth noting that Mr. Klaus is not a scientist. He, like myself, has had little or no scientific training and therefore must accrue his information from scientific sources outside of his field, as must I (and, I suspect, most people engaging in Global Warming debate). Similarly, most if not all of the commenters on Slashdot have little or no scientific training, and, based on Slashdot’s user base, most likely get most of their information from Internet sources. A quick search on the Internet will find that it is fairly neutral ground for Global Warming supporters as well as “non-believers.” However, as is a common problem with the Internet, there are very little annotated sources, and most commentary comes from sites like Slashdot, postings created by laymen.

Internet weaknesses aside, there are a good number of books on the subject. A trip to a local library will surely yield results, and, as many of you will find, most of those results support human-originated Global Warming.

For the fact-starved reader, and especially those who disagree: read on.

Über-Earth.

Fifteen years ago, astronomers discovered the first known planet to exist outside of our solar system, known as an exoplanet. UFO and alien fanatics rejoiced, but alas, it was a gas giant. And the next. And the next. They’d make Jupiter proud, but they’d be lousy mothers.

But now, it seems, we’ve discovered an exoplanet that isn’t too different from our own home, scientists say. From der Spiegel:

“Researchers working with Stéphane Udry and Michel Mayor from the Geneva Observatory discovered the planet in the orbit of the star Gliese 581. There are even indications that Gliese 581 — one of the 100 stars closest to Earth, at a distance of only 20.5 light years — has a system of at least three planets.”

Very nice. But does it look like us?

“The newly discovered planet, says the research team, is about 50 percent larger than the Earth and about five times as heavy. “We have estimated that the mean temperature of this super-Earth lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius (32 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit), and water would thus be liquid,” says Udry. “Models predict that the planet should be either rocky — like our Earth — or covered with oceans,” he adds.”

Only up to 104?! I’d love to move there and be rid of these seemingly-130-degree summers. Of course, a couple thousand years of human occupation and I’m sure it would be much warmer there.

“Udry and his colleagues used the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity for Planetary Search) spectrograph, developed specifically for hunting planets, will peering through the 3.6 meter telescope of the European Southern Observatory in La Silla, Chile. The Earth-like planet drew attention to itself by the slight wobbling motion it imposes on its host star — an effect roughly comparable to the whirligig movement of a hammer thrower rotating around his own axis. The researchers will soon present their discovery in the professional journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.”

…and therein lies a problem. Our technology.

Speaking with my peers in a college Astronomy course a few years ago, the point was made that most, if not all of the planets that had been discovered outside of the solar system up to that point were gas giants, the likes of Jupiter or Neptune. A gas giant cannot sustain any form of life, as far as we know, partly because of their extreme gravity, but mostly due to the lack of water. “So,” my classmate had said, “obviously we are alone in the cosmos with a bunch of giant balls.”

Au contraire, Monsieur Classmate, but you may be very sorely mistaken. Our technology allows us to detect new planets only by indirect means. We cannot simply point a telescope into the cosmos and expect to find a planet. We must use alternate methods, like, for example, the aforementioned “wobble” method.

It requires only the most basic logic to understand that something larger is easier to detect. Consider, for example, that you are staring at distant mountains through a pair of cheap binoculars. Through the binoculars you can easily see the snow capped peaks, but smaller features, such as rocks, trees, and animals, are invisible to you. Perhaps in the future you will be able to afford a better, more powerful pair of binoculars in order to see more detail.

But we, as a society, are not there yet. And so we use the wobble method. And so far, we have only found big gas giants, not because they are the only thing there, but because it is all that our infant technologies will allow us to detect.

All the more reason that, if confirmed, this could be a very important discovery.

“[The exoplanet] orbits its host star in just 13 Earth-days; its average distance from Gliese 581 is one fourteenth of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. “The reason temperatures on the planet are not much hotter than on the Earth is that Gliese 581 is substantially smaller and colder than our Sun,” Forveille explains.”

To my knowledge, a red dwarf (such as Gliese 581) is a dying star of former glory. Does this not mean that it was far hotter in the past than now? It begs the question: can a former Mercury-esque entity sustain life after baking for millions or billions of years?

“[...] “We still don’t know with final certainty whether liquid water actually exists on the planet,” Forveille says. “While H2O is a molecule that is found very frequently in space, final certainty can be achieved only through direct observation.””

And that is a luxury mankind will not have for some time. At least until we can afford a new pair of binoculars.

[posted with ecto]