September 24, 2006, 9:56 PM CT

Carbon Capture And Water Filtration

It's time to create a comprehensive accounting system for natural capital to recognize the full value of ecosystem services provided by boreal forests, an ecological economist will urge delegates to Canada's 10th National Forest Congress Sept. 25-27.

The forests' huge value as sinks and reservoirs of atmospheric carbon, for example, is unaccounted for today but needs to be recognized in future, as per Mark Anielski of Edmonton, who will make a presentation to Canadian and international forest officials, and experts from native peoples communities, the energy, farming and tourism sectors and other stakeholders assembling for the Congress at Lac Leamy, Gatineau-Ottawa.

Anielski and research colleagues estimate that environmental services from the boreal from climate regulation via carbon capture and storage, water filtration and waste therapy, to biodiversity maintenance, pest control by birds, etc. are worth about $160 per hectare, or $93 billion per year in Canada.

Globally, the estimates produce a rough value of ecosystem services rendered by boreal forests (almost 10 million northern square km spanning Canada, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Alaska) of US $250 billion per year, a huge figure unrecognized in national income accounts or measures such as Gross Domestic Product.........

Posted by: Sarah      Permalink         Source

September 20, 2006, 9:44 PM CT

The Point Of Icicles

Contemplating some of nature's cool creations is always fun. Now a team of researchers from The University of Arizona in Tucson has figured out the physics of how drips of icy water can swell into the skinny spikes known as icicles.

Deciphering patterns in nature is a specialty of UA scientists Martin B. Short, James C. Baygents and Raymond E. Goldstein. In 2005, the team figured out that stalactites, the formations that hang from the ceilings of caves, have a unique underlying shape described by a strikingly simple mathematical equation.

However, stalactites aren't the only natural formations that look like elongated carrots. Once the scientists had found a mathematical representation of the stalactite's shape, they began to wonder if the solution applied to other similarly shaped natural formations caused by dripping water.

So the team decided to investigate icicles. Eventhough other researchers have studied how icicles grow, they had not found a formula to describe their shape.

Surprisingly, the team observed that the same mathematical formula that describes the shape of stalactites also describes the shape of icicles.

"Everyone knows what an icicle is and what it looks like, so this research is very accessible. I think it is amazing that science and math can explain something like this so well. It really highlights the beauty of nature," Short said.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

September 20, 2006, 8:07 PM CT

Infant hominid

The fossilised remains of the child, estimated to have died at the age of three and who was probably a female, shed light on a hotly disputed branch of the human tree known as Australopithecus afarensis.

The best-known A. afarensis is the famous fossil Lucy, recovered in Ethiopia in 1974 and who, for more than 20 years, was the earliest known member of the hominid family.

Hominids are primates who split from apes between five and seven million years ago.

They are considered the forerunners of anatomically modern humans, who appeared on the scene about 200,0000 years ago.

Still unclear, though, is the exact line of geneaology from these small, rather ape-like creatures to the rise of the powerfully-brained H. sapiens.

Once thought by some to be our ancestor, A. afarensis is now widely considered to be a failed branch of the human tree, for a number of experts suspect the hominid was anatomically far closer to apes than humans.........

Posted by: Tyler      Permalink         Source

September 20, 2006, 8:03 PM CT

Droids in the Desert

Image above: In one scenario of the Desert Research and Technology Studies in the Arizona desert, a test subject returns to a mock way station. Credit: NASA
Arizona tourists may think they've stumbled upon a science fiction movie set if they find themselves near the state's famed Meteor Crater in early September.

Though they won't get a glimpse of R2D2 or C3PO, they will see robots, rovers and space suited subjects with the latest interplanetary gear trekking over some of the state's harshest topography.

For two weeks a year, the stark Arizona landscape becomes a surrogate planet for NASA scientists. Why? Well, you can only do so much in a laboratory and it's a long way to Mars.

The temperature extremes, gusty winds and grit and dust of Arizona's high desert make it an ideal location to field test and evaluate prototype planetary exploration gear.

So, now it is exam time for NASA's Desert Research and Technology Studies (RATS), a team of researchers and engineers who test futuristic equipment that may one day be used for explorations of the moon and Mars.

This is the ninth year for Desert RATS to test a variety of advanced prototype equipment and operational concept techniques. The two-week trials will be conducted Sept. 4 -16 on remote field sites near the crater.

"Field tests like these are much like a final exam," said Johnson Space Center's Joe Kosmo, who leads the team. "We know what works on paper or in the laboratory, but what works there may not work in the field, or it may work differently than expected. Field testing offers a hands-on experience base that is important as we strive to design and operate these emerging planetary surface technologies."........

Posted by: Tyler      Permalink         Source

September 19, 2006, 9:00 PM CT

Shocking Scenes From Antarctica

Satellite images acquired from 23 to 25 August 2006 have demonstrated for the first time dramatic openings - over a geographic extent larger than the size of the British Isles - in the Arctic's perennial sea ice pack north of Svalbard, and extending into the Russian Arctic all the way to the North Pole.

Observing data from Envisat's Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) instrument and the AMSR-E instrument aboard the EOS Aqua satellite, researchers were able to determine that around 5-10 percent of the Arctic's perennial sea ice, which had survived the summer melt season, has been fragmented by late summer storms. The area between Spitzbergen, the North Pole and Severnaya Zemlya is confirmed by AMSR-E to have had much lower ice concentrations than witnessed during earlier years.

Mark Drinkwater of ESA's Oceans/Ice Unit said: "This situation is unlike anything observed in prior record low ice seasons. It is highly imaginable that a ship could have passed from Spitzbergen or Northern Siberia through what is normally pack ice to reach the North Pole without difficulty.

"If this anomaly trend continues, the North-East Passage or 'Northern Sea Route' between Europe and Asia will be open over longer intervals of time, and it is conceivable we might see attempts at sailing around the world directly across the summer Arctic Ocean within the next 10-20 years." .........

Posted by: Tyler      Permalink         Source

September 19, 2006, 5:07 AM CT

Detect Coastal Ocean Pollution

Public health officials now may be able to know instantly when pollution has moved into the coastal ocean - a breakthrough that could enable authorities to post warnings or close beaches in minutes rather than days thanks to research by UC Irvine researchers.

The new technique analyzes temperature and salinity data collected by sensors located in the water along the Southern California coast. Scientists observed that fluctuations in the sensor data correlate with changes in water quality as soon as they occur. This type of analysis may lead to detection methods that are far faster than the current method of physically collecting water and testing it in a lab.

"Decisions to post a warning or close a beach are currently made one to three days after a sample is collected. This would be fine if you were testing water that sits in a tub, but ocean currents are highly dynamic, and water quality varies hour by hour and minute to minute," said Stanley B. Grant, professor of chemical engineering and materials science at UCI. "Our research shows that near real-time sensor data can be used to detect changes in the state of the coastal ocean - information that could, in concert with traditional monitoring data and new ocean observing systems, eventually result in the creation of an up-to-the-minute water-quality report accessible by the public on the Internet".........

Posted by: Tyler      Permalink         Source

September 18, 2006, 5:38 PM CT

Remote Island Provides Clues On Population Growth

Halfway between South America and New Zealand, in the remote South Pacific, is Rapa. This horseshoe-shaped, 13.5 square-mile island of volcanic origin, located essentially in the middle of nowhere, is "a microcosm of the world's situation," says a University of Oregon archaeologist.

Until only recently, little was known about the French Polynesian Island, where the current population is less than 500. Archaeological, linguistic and genetic data suggest that the island, like much of East Polynesia, was inhabited in a final pulse of colonization by seafaring travelers who originated from Island Southeast Asia. New research, led by the University of Oregon's Douglas Kennett, has shed fresh new light on Rapa, particularly on what life may have been like for as a number of as 1,500 to 2,000 people who lived there before the arrival of European explorers.

Kennett's team, which included scientists from three institutions, published in the recent issue of the journal Antiquity that Polynesians arrived on the island around A.D. 1200, much later than long assumed. The settlers spread across the island, splintering from a shoreline-based society into competing groups that built and likely defended a growing number of spectacular fortifications carved from mountaintops in the years before English explorer George Vancouver sailed by in 1791, ushering in European contact.........

Posted by: Ashley      Permalink         Source

September 14, 2006, 8:43 PM CT

MIT Team Describes Unique Cloud Forest

Trees that live in an odd desert forest in Oman have found an unusual way to water themselves by extracting moisture from low-lying clouds, MIT researchers report.

In an area that is characterized mostly by desert, the trees have preserved an ecological niche because they exploit a wispy-thin source of water that only occurs seasonally, said Elfatih A.B. Eltahir, professor of civil and environmental engineering, and former MIT graduate student Anke Hildebrandt.

After studying the Oman site, they also expressed concern that the unusual forest could be driven into extinction if hungry camels continue eating too much of the foliage. As the greenery disappears it's possible the trees will lose the ability to pull water from the mist and recharge underground reservoirs.

A report on their research was published in a recent issue of Geophysical Research Letters. They are also advising the Omani government on handling the problem.

The forest is particularly unique, said Eltahir and Hildebrandt, because it "is a water-limited seasonal cloud forest" that is kept alive by water droplets gathered from passing clouds -- ground fog. The water dribbles into the ground and sustains the trees later when the weather is dry. The MIT work suggests the trees actually get more of their water through contact with clouds than via rainfall.........

Posted by: Tyler      Permalink         Source

September 14, 2006, 7:46 PM CT

Drought as the New Normal

Boulder, Colo. - Droughts are slow, tortuous emergencies that seem to sneak up on us. It doesn't have to be that way, say a climatologist and a political scientist who point to a better way.

It's perfectly possible to plan for droughts and minimize the losses they cause. In fact Australia has set in place policies that blaze a trail for the US follow to some extent, says Linda Botterill, a political scientist at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Botterill is presenting drought policy lessons learned in Australia at the Geological Society of America conference entitled Managing Drought and Water Scarcity in Vulnerable Environments: Creating a Roadmap for Change in the United States. The meeting takes place 18-20 September at the Radisson Hotel and Conference Center in Longmont, Colorado.

"In policy terms drought is no longer considered a disaster," said Botterill, of the fundamental change in perspective when Australia adopted a national drought policy in 1989. The shift made perfect sense because of Australia's climate, in which drought is always an issue.

"We have one of the most variable climates on Earth," said Botterill. "We really don't have a 'normal' climate." Therefore it's absurd to treat every drought as an emergency, she said. "It should be managed as any other risk. Farmers need to factor in that they are not always going to get needed rainfall".........

Posted by: Tyler      Permalink         Source

September 14, 2006, 4:35 AM CT

Einstein at least 99.95 percent right

An international research team led by Prof. Michael Kramer of the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory, UK, has used three years of observations of the "double pulsar", a unique pair of natural stellar clocks which they discovered in 2003, to prove that Einstein's theory of general relativity - the theory of gravity that displaced Newton's - is correct to within a staggering 0.05%. Their results are published on the14th September in the journal Science and are based on measurements of an effect called the Shapiro Delay.

The double pulsar system, PSR J0737-3039A and B, is 2000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Puppis. It consists of two massive, highly compact neutron stars, each weighing more than our own Sun but only about 20 km across, orbiting each other every 2.4 hours at speeds of a million kilometres per hour. Separated by a distance of just a million kilometres, both neutron stars emit lighthouse-like beams of radio waves that are seen as radio "pulses" every time the beams sweep past the Earth. It is the only known system of two detectable radio pulsars orbiting each other. Due to the large masses of the system, they provide an ideal opportunity to test aspects of General Relativity:

• Gravitational redshift: the time dilation causes the pulse rate from one pulsar to slow when near to the other, and vice versa.

........

Posted by: Jaison      Permalink         Source