Zark's

Using Bacteria to Break Down Toxic Substances

Bubble of seawater containing bacteria and other contaminants
Image Credit: Department of Energy

It was one of my junior high school science projects - to discover a bacteria that could eat up oil spills.  I had little pans of used motor oil everywhere, which sorely vexed my dad.  Alas, I was not successful.

Bacteria Breaks Down Oil, Cleans Gulf of Mexico tells that nature had already produced such creatures.  Alcanivorax is a voracious, oil-eating bacteria.  At the New Horizon oil spill last year, researchers found sixteen varieties of bacteria within the oil plume.  Not all of the chemicals within the plume could be digested by the bacteria - only the hydrocarbons.  How bacteria are able to break down hydrocarbons and other toxic substances has been a mystery.

How Bacteria Can Break Down Hazardous Environmental Pollutants tells that bacteria can also break down phosphoric acids, detergents, and other chemicals such as herbicides.  Again, the how was unknown.  Professor David Zechel and his team have identified proteins produced by the bacteria which break the strong chemical bonds of these harmful substances.  Phosphoric compounds, similar to hydrocarbons have been particularly difficult to break down with other methods, but agriculture fertilizer runoff is wreaking havoc in our oceans and lakes. 

This breakthrough will make it possible to develop more scalable techniques for containing pollution.  Similar to photosynthesis, living organisms can perform very complex chemical reactions.  The problem of course, is scalability - we either need lots of algae-produced synthetic petroleum, or lots of petroleum eaten away at the scene of an oil spill.  While life is persistent, if not overwhelming, it takes time. 

 

More Details About Dark Matter

The distorted shapes in the cluster are distant galaxies from which the light is bent by the gravitational pull of an invisible material called dark matter within the cluster of galaxies.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Postman (STScI), and the CLASH Tea

It is called 'dark' matter because we cannot see it.  Yet scientists think it exists because of images on the left.  Something undetectable has incredible mass and is bending the light as it passes these massive, unseen objects.

Of all the 'stuff' in the universe, only 4 percent is ordinary matter, about 23 percent is dark matter, and the rest is dark energy.  Scientists know even less about dark energy than dark matter. 

Many physicists believe that when two dark matter particles collide, they will produce energy and ordinary matter particles.  (This seems a bit bizarre to me, but I'm not a subatomic particle phsycicist.)  Signal of Destroyed Dark Matter Seen in Space Telescope's Data tells that Stanford Scientists Stefan Funk and Justin Vandenbroucke decided to search the sky for positrons.  They discovered a spike in positrons about 200 billion electron volts.  They think this is because of dark matter collisions (and deaths).  If so, this energy level suggests the mass of a dark matter particle, called a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) is about 100 times greater than an ordinary proton.

Another proposal discussed in Physicists Set Strongest Limit on Mass of Dark Matter tells that data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is that the mass of the WIMP is 40 giga electron volts. They argue that if antimatter had less energy, or equivalently, weighed less, then the universe could not be expanding as astronomers have observed.

 

Puzzling Data on Global Temperature Sensitivity to CO2

Satellites show sources and sinks of atmospheric carbon dioxide across Earth, measured here in 2003. High concentrations are shown in red and lower concentrations are shown in blue.
Image Credit: NASA

The simplest form of energy was known to cavemen.  Chemists describe it as oxidation, combining something with oxygen.  We know it more commonly as fire.

Of course, oxidation of most substances results in heat energy and carbon dioxide.  This greenhouse gas can remain in the the atmosphere for a long time. NASA Study Illustrates How Global Peak Oil Could Impact Climate tells that a dangerous level of global warming will occur if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeds a concentration of about 450 parts per million. That's equivalent to about a 61 percent increase from the pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million, but only 17 percent more than the current level of 385 parts per million.  That resulting temperature rise could begin melting sea ice and creating a positive feedback cycle for the environment in which higher temperatures create even higher temperatures.

However, CO₂ climate sensitivity 'overestimated ' suggests the consequences of higher CO2 levels are not as dire as many scientists have been warning.  Previously, researchers used the last 150 years of collected weather data to extrapolate the impact of elevated CO₂ levels.  Andreas Schmitter of Oregon State University and his international team examined paleoclimatic data.  With their methodology, a doubling of CO₂ levels from 1850 levels would result in a 2.4 degrees Celsius rise instead of the 10 degrees predicted by other researchers.

So which model is correct?  More study and analysis is required.

 

 

2011-2012 Flu Season Starting Mild

Image Credit: CDC

The CDC tells that only 1.4 percent of the specimens tested for influenza last week were confirmed as positive.  Although the actual flu sample numbers are small, H3N2 was the most common, followed by an influenza B variant.  The good news is that both of these are in the 2011-2012 influenza vaccine for the Northern Hemisphere.  Also, the virus strains are susceptible to the antiviral drugs oseltamivir and zanamivir, which is also good news.

Wikipedia explains that H3N2 originated as avian influenza, but has transitioned to swine populations, particularly in China.  The variant evolved from H2N2 and was responsible for the Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968. 

Curiously Influenza B viruses only infect humans and seals.  Because of the smaller infection base, this flu mutates much slower than the Influenza A types such as H3N2 or H1N1. 

The CDC's Flu.gov website explains that vaccination is the best protection against contracting the flu.  If like me, you are afraid of shots, you can get nasal spray instead of a flu shot.  (The nasal spray is recommended for those between 2 and 49.)  There is also a Fluzone High-Dose that contains four times the amount of antigen as the regular flu shot.  It is recommended for people 65 years and older, because their immune systems have become weaker with age.

 

 

Is Instant Replay Improving Our Lives?

Wikipedia explains that instant replay is responsible for making American football popular.  "Viewers struggled to disseminate the action from a wide shot of the field, on a small black and white television screen. However, with replay technology, 'brutal collisions became ballets, and end runs and forward passes became miracles of human coordination.' "  We simply didn't see all of this going on without instant replay.

As American readers also know, instant replay is being used in both college and professional games to review officiating decisions.  Instant replay brings scrutiny to NL officials explains that officials frequently have decisions overturned, but the humans are making decisions in real-time, at full speed, whereas instant replay shows a specific play much, much, slower, and without other distractions.  But we have become used to decisions being overturned.

All week the news channels have covering the pepper-spraying at the University of California.  A video of the police pepper-spraying demonstrators has provoked considerable criticism and comment.  Some have even demanded that the chancellor of the campus be fired.  What I'm wondering is whether the instant replay from sports as infiltrated our culture and whether that is a good thing.

There were some poignant photographs during the Vietnam War that evoked the emotions of a nation, and left deep scars.  Recall the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of naked Phan Thi Kim Phuc running from a village mistakenly bombed with napalm.  Or the photograph of Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Viet Cong soldier, Nguyen Van Lem.

In retrospect, those images corrected wrongs, perhaps like the pepper spraying at UC-Davis.  Suppose there had been a video running on the BP oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico when things turned horribly wrong last spring and resulted in the oil spill.  Would a public video have improved corporate responsibility and behavior?  Probably yes, right?

If we were machines without emotion, without a future, and if we were measured by similar machines without emotion, then constant video surveillance would probably yield a more efficient world.  But we are not, and images or surveillance only captures what is occurring in front of the lens, not the whole context.  Would any of us assume any risk if we knew our attempt was being captured for instant replay?

Could the founding fathers of the USA have produced the constitution if there had been instant replay? 

 

Literally Burning Up Energy

Image Credit: EIA

I have blogged about the Bakken Field before - How Big is North Dakota?  Some experienced oil veterans believe the field, stretching from Montana, North Dakota, and Saskatchewan could contain as much as 24 billion barrels of oil. 

North Dakota oil boom causes rents to soar, forces seniors to leave beloved longtime homes explains that rent has increased three-fold and hotels are booked for three months.  Because of all the high-paying oil field work, the region resembles the California gold rush. 

The field is not really profitable with $80 a barrel oil, but at $100, the two mile-deep wells are a bonanza.  But one of the troubling things is Over one-third of natural gas produced in North Dakota is flared or otherwise not marketed.  Because of the booming petroleum market, the oil producers want to pump out the oil as quickly as possible, and are willing to foresake usage of the natural gas that comes along with the petroleum.  They are flaring it off because there is not sufficient natural gas pipeline to ship the energy-laden hydrocarbons to market. 

The EIA says that North Dakota law permits producers to flare natural gas for a year, before they must pay taxes or royalties.  Even then, they can ask for an extension if they can demonstrate a hardship in connecting to a natural gas pipeline.

Sheesh.  Madness - creating greenhouse gases for no reason, and then wasting energy that could have been used. 

Book Review of Bill Clinton's Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy

Cover
Image Credit: Amazon

I have taken a couple of weeks to read and re-read Bill Clinton's Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy.  I wanted to pass along my perspective.

First a growl.  Why can I get a hardbound version of the text shipped in two days for $14.37, but the version I download to my Kindle is $11.99?  Amazon explains the price was set by the publisher.   My heartburn is with the publisher because it maximized profit rather than providing a fair price to the consumer.

The ex-President expends considerable pages in defending his administration's economic policies instead of launching into the discussion of how we got here and how we can extract ourselves from this sorry mess.  To be fair, he was the last President who achieved a balanced budget, but I confess I grew weary of the political discussions. I will also add that I believe he is honestly passionate about wanting to get America back to a strong economy.

He convincingly explains the political climate has changed.  Once we had idealists but today we have ideologues who are committed to a specific perspective even when the data changes. 

He also writes, "In the 1980s, Wall Street and many large corporations embraced what was then a new idea - that publicly traded companies' first and overwhelming obligation is to their shareholders.  Until that time, most people thought that a corporation, which receives limited liability and other privileges under the law, owed an obligation to all its stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers and the communities of which they are a part."

This change in perspective has resulted in fiscal quarter-by-quarter microscopic focus on profit, exorbitant executive compensation, and decreased research and development, not to mention, almost disregard for employees and their communities.

The former President meticulously reviews multiple metrics such as college enrollment, economic mobility, quality of life, etc, which indicate America has slipped from the 70s and 80s while other countries have improved. 

His prescription to economic health is rather complex and lengthy, but I would argue far more substantive than the complete austerity measures being deployed in Europe.  First, we need to resolve the mortgage crisis.  Somehow the government and the banks must share a write-down and get the housing market out of the tank.  Second, the banks need to be encouraged to lend.  He suggests that the banks be charged a parking fee for funds placed in the Federal Reserve.  Change corporate taxing and tax the shareholders appropriately so the companies have reason to bring international profits back into the USA instead of investing where the corporate rates are lower.  Fix our dependency upon foreign oil with green energy research.  There is a lot more - as I said, it is a complete list, and way too lengthy to pass through our political process.

So what do I think?  I think he could do it.  He did it before.  Since our current constitution forbids him to run for a third term, I think we need to somehow use his considerable intellect and experience to better national advantage. 

The book is not an easy read - but he has changed my perspective on some of his recommendations.  I recommend the book because America needs informed voices participating in the economic debates.  We must avoid the problems Europe is experiencing.

Landsat 5 in Jeopardy

Drawing of Landsat 5
Image Credit: NASA

It was built at the same time as Landsat 4, and launched on 1 March 1984.  Ronald Reagan was the U.S. President and the Bell Telephone monopoly had just been broken up.  The Apple Macintosh had just been introduced.  Landsat 5 was launched for a three year mission. 

In 1987 the satellite suffered its first failure, a Ku-band transmitter.  The multispectral scanner was turned off in August of 1995.  In November 2005, a solar array problem threatened the mission, but engineers devised a workaround, and operations continued on January 30, 2006.

Landsat 5 Mission in Jeopardy tells that the satellite has stopped transmitting images.  The USGS tells that an amplifier in the transmitting chain had been degrading over a ten day period and rather than risk burnout, engineers have turned off the transmitter, taking the Landsat 5 offline, for a minimum of 90 days.  They are going to evaluate possible options for restoring operations. 

Greater Chesapeake Bay Region - by Landsat 5, with images from July 15, 2009, July 14, 2011, and July 21, 2011.
Image Credit: NASA/USGS

Landsat 7 was launched in 1999, but it has been crippled by a failure and is limited in its imaging capability.  (Recently, Chinese hackers suspected of interfering with US Satellites tells that cyber attacks in 2007 and 2008 interfered with control of the satellites.)  The next observation satellite launch is Landsat 8, scheduled for January 2013. 

 

Higgs, Where Are You?

Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Detector at the Large Hadron Collider
Image Credit: CERN

Underneath the Swiss-France border near Geneva, the large hadron collider smashes groups of protons traveling close to the speed of light.  The idea is that when you smash matter together with this much energy, you will break things down to their elementary subatomic particles.

The Higgs boson of course, is what researchers are hoping to glimpse.  It is the only particle described in the Standard Model that has not been physically observed.  The theory is that the Higgs boson interacts with the Higgs field and gives some particles mass.  Particles such as the photon that do not have mass, do not have a Higgs boson. 

Higgs boson's moment of truth is fast approaching at the LHC explains that researchers have been systematically searching for the Higgs at different energy levels.  So far, nothing.  But it is running out of places to hide.  But maybe - it doesn't exist and physicists will have to propose a new theory. 

Also - some have wagged that the Higgs boson is altering the future (or our present so that it cannot be found.)  The many early failures at the Large Hadron Collider were evidence, according to this group, that the Higgs was manipulating the future. 

 

Researchers Still Believe Neutrinos Faster Than Light

NASA's X-43A Reaches Mach 10, or 7000 mph
Image Credit: Dryden Flight Research Center

Most likely none of us will ever travel as fast as the X-43A shown on the left.  But even the X-43A is pedestrian compared to the speed of light - 671 million miles per hour. 

Usually we think of light as being instantaneous, but in our lives today, we are frequently waiting because light does not travel instaneously.  High-end computers are limited by the time it takes for signals to travel down even a short wire.  The round-trip time delay for a telephone conversation through a geosynchronous satellite is almost a quarter of a second - something that is very noticeable if two type-A personalities are attempting to talk to each other.

A postulate proposed by Einstein, and embedded throughout modern physics is that light travels at a speed independent of the motion of the wave source and the inertial frame of the observer.  In other words, if you are on the X-43A and shine a flashlight, the photons will travel exactly the same speed as if you were standing absolutely still.  Further, Einstein postulated, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. 

Scientists testing light speed affirm Einstein may be wrong tells that researchers at CERN have repeated their experiment that first measured neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light by just a smidgen.  Their experiment fires neutrinos from CERN in Geneva to a laboratory in Italy.  As the USA Today article explains, the results are the same as the first time - neutrinos traveling faster than they should.

Mmm.  I'm still betting on Einstein.  The speed of neutrinos is being calculated by the time interval that is required for the neutrinos to travel the measured distance between Geneva and Gran Sasso. In my blog, Did CERN Scientists Discover an 'Undo' Button?, I speculated that if the timing is correct, another possibility is that the distance between Geneva and Gran Sasso is not what is believed.  At the most extreme, we could have some space-time warping, resulting in the computed speeds faster than the speed of light.

By the way, I'm reading Bill Clinton's Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy.  I have read through it once, but need second reading before I post on it, perhaps later this weekend.