voluntaryXchange

Birds "See" the Earth's Magnetic Field

Cool science: they're in the process of establishing that birds migrate by seeing the magnetic field of the Earth.

This would go a long way towards figuring out how they navigate over such long distances with limited memory capacities.

Less important, but still intriguing, is that it would explain why most bird migration stays in the same  longitude - since the magnetic field lines of the Earth parallel longitude.

This isn't that far-fetched: the light we see is called electromagnetic radiation because they are all related. We have chemicals in our eyes that respond differently to changes in light, and birds have chemicals in their eyes that respond to changes in magnetic fields.

Technorati Tags: bird,see,magnetic,field

Nobel Prizes All Around

Scientists have found memristors at nanoscale.

All of our electronics are built around combinations of 3 items: resistors (that reduce current by converting it into heat), capacitors (that can stop, store, and discharge potential), and inductors (that convert electricity into magnetism and back again).

In 1971 the memristor was posited as a 4th item that should already exist, if only someone could find it. This weeks' Nature News announced that titanium dioxide acts as a memristor at nanoscale.

Why should you care? This is easy: if they built all this stuff around us out of 3 items, how much could they build out of four?

But wait ... guess what capability that 4th item adds?

What's neat about this is that a memristor is that it "remembers" the amount of voltage that was applied to it and for how long it was applied. This is a physical property that doesn't require power. So, your computer or cellphone could shut itself on and off as often as it liked - even millions of times per second without rebooting.

This would solve a huge part of the problem with batteries: limited storage, frequent recharging, disposal because we wear them out so fast, and so on.

This is will be so good for the environment that it shouldn't take environmentalists long to come out against memristors. ;)

Technorati Tags: memristor

The Element from the Island of Stability - Hiding In Plain Sight?

How's that for a movie title?

Here's the skinny: Israeli scientists found a new element. A really heavy one.

Finding elements was a big deal prior to the 20th century. Interest tapered off because of nuclear fission: once elements get too heavy they break apart quickly on their own.

Work has continued on this because new elements might have interesting new chemical properties. But, they've been creating them the hard way - with expensive labs and materials.

Enter the island of stability. It has been hypothesized for quite some time that the nuclear instability of elements past around 90 might end when we got up around element 120.

The thing is, how do we find such an element?

Cheap science is often elegant science, and in this case the Israeli led team decided to take stability at face value: if the island of stability really exists, atoms of those stable elements should be sitting around already, just waiting to be found.

So they took some thorium (element 90, and still pretty common) and weighed every single nucleus. They found lots of thorium, lots of other trace contaminants, and several nuclei consistent with either element 122 or 124.

Extrapolation shows that a pound or so of thorium appears to contain literally billions of these super-heavy nuclei.

The working name for the stuff they found is ununbibium.

T-Rex = Chicken

New protein evidence confirms the suspicion that Tyrannosaurus Rex was more closely related to modern birds than to lizards or crocodilians (see here, non-gated versions are not yet available).

This soft tissue evidence should get everyone to stop saying the dinosaurs died out. They're still here - in fact, they're doing the nasty outside my office window as I write this.

This also explains how terror birds became the top predator immediately after the K-T extinction event that killed most of the dinosaurs - a few small theropods survived and grew in size to fill the niche left by the extinction of larger carnivorous dinosaur species.

P.S. A more precise dating of the K-T boundary came out this week too: 65.95 million years ago, plus or minus about 150,000 years.

Technorati Tags: dinosaur,tyrannosaurus,rex,chicken,ostrich,k-temperature,boundary,event,extinction

Messy Climate Data

Patrick Michaels notes this about the revisions to our temperature numbers:

There have been six major revisions in the warming figures in recent years, all in the same direction. So it's like flipping a coin six times and getting tails each time. The chance of that occurring is 0.016, or less than one in 50. That doesn't mean that these revisions are all hooey, but the probability that they would all go in one direction on the merits is pretty darned small. [emphasis added]

I'd go a bit further: the null hypothesis that revisions to temperature data are neutral can be rejected.

Then there's those ice sheets in Greenland:

...Greenland's last decade was no warmer than several decades in the early and mid-20th century. In fact, the period from 1970-1995 was the coldest one since the late 19th century, meaning that Greenland's ice anomalously expanded right about the time climate change scientists decided to look at it.

Is it any surprise its been getting smaller when serious observation started from a local maximum?

Then there's that newly uncovered island off Greenland:

... A year ago, radio and television were ablaze with the discovery of "Warming Island," a piece of land thought to be part of Greenland. But when the ice receded in the last few years, it turned out that there was open water ...

... Chip Knappenberger found an inconvenient book, "Arctic Riviera," published in 1957 (near the end of the previous warm period) by aerial photographer Ernst Hofer. Hofer did reconnaissance for expeditions and was surprised by how pleasant the summers had become. There's a map in his book: It shows Warming Island.

Gosh, I just don't remember those hysterical reports in the legacy media about the new island being retracted. Do you?

Technorati Tags: anthropogenic,global,warming,temperature

WIMPs Confirmed?

Space blog from New Scientist is reporting rumors that WIMPs have been confirmed by scientists in Italy.

WIMPs are one of the explanations for dark matter - the assertion that the movement that we see in the universe is way too fast unless something like 80% of the matter is stuff we haven't seen yet.

WIMPs are big fat particles that move slowly and don't interact with much - subatomic manatees, if you will.

Normally I wouldn't post about something this obscure. What got my attention was the basic science and relatively cheap method used by the Italian team: what they asserted, looked for, and have now found, is a seasonal fluctuation that only WIMPs should follow - with a peak in late May.

FWIW: this is actually a 10 year old result, but there were many initial complaints that there were other causes of the seasonal fluctuations - which they are confident have now been eliminated.

Technorati Tags: wimp,dark,matter,dama

Oops - Global Warming Math Problems

Ummm ... remember back in differential equations that boundary values mattered? That's why the classic Boyce and DiPrima textbook in the field is called Differential Equations and Boundary Value Problems.

It turns out that climate scientists are using an 80 year-old solution technique for their differential equations which assumes a boundary value consistent with our atmosphere being infinitely thick.

That's right - no satellites because they'd all burn up from the friction. You'd think that would bug them. Apparently not.

Why use this approximation at all? Well, it works for some applications:

In stellar atmospheres ... this could be a reasonable assumption, and ... has great practical value in astrophysical applications.

Last I checked though, the prefix "astro" means out there, not down here. Oh ... and we don't live on the surface of a star.

Down here, that approximation leads to a little bit of mathematical goofiness that comes out of all the global warming models: the air temperature can be persistently higher than the ground temperature.

That's a problem because in reality they've got to balance out in the long-run where they touch.

In the models, they don't.

This is really convenient, because it allows the models to generate bigger increases in atmospheric temperatures than can be reconciled with ground temperatures. 

Yes, you are reading this correctly: global warming models suggest that you won't burn your hands if you hold them over a boiling kettle because your skin temperature doesn't have to reach the same temperature as the steam.  Like I said ... goofy.

But, in our world, satellites orbit freely because our atmosphere does end. What happens if you resolve the problem with a boundary consistent with a finite atmosphere?

Well, for one, without the infinite atmosphere (to mop up the excesses) the air temperature reaches the ground temperature at the surface.

Even better, this is caused by an additional feedback mechanism that isn't present in the simpler model (so this theory is general in that it contains the standard theory as a special case).

The effect of that feedback mechanism is to put a strong upper bound on the temperature increase associated with an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. And that bound isn't too far off where our temperatures are now.

The behavior of the model in response to shocks is interesting too: an increase in carbon dioxide causes temperatures to spike up quickly, followed by a gradual decline. Sound familiar? Especially given the news from last year that NASA was nudging up the temperature data from the past decade to make it looks like the temperature spike of the 80s and 90s was still going on.

It gets better. The research was published in a peer-reviewed journal by a 30 year veteran of NASA who resigned because he felt his views were being suppressed. Go read it for yourself - it's accessible for someone with some technical skills.

Via James Lewis and Newmark's Door.

Technorati Tags: global,warming,anthropogenic,atmosphere,depth

Declinism

Andrew Potter asserts that:

... Climate change is the ultimate declinist wet dream. Sure, there is a long tradition of declinist hobby horses, including overpopulation, the exhaustion of natural resources and the industrial poisoning of the land and the sea, but climate change is the rug that pulls the whole room together. ... Declinism transforms what is essentially an aesthetic preference for live entertainment over television, locally grown produce over fast food and the ability to walk to work instead of commuting in a car into a lifestyle choice of world-historical importance.

... The high priest of declinism, James Howard Kunstler ... can hardly wait ... he wrote recently, "let the gloating begin."

Via Newmark's Door.

Technorati Tags: declinism,global,warming

Epicycles and Global Warming

James Lewis makes an interesting point.

"Epicycles" are cycles on top of cycles.  When traditional astronomy began to collapse in the years before Copernicus, True Believers reacted by adding lots of little cycles on top of the great cycles of the planetary orbits, to protect their faith. Trouble is, they had to add so many cycles on top of cycles that eventually, the whole system became a laughingstock. Ultimately you could explain anything you wanted -- after the fact.

The Polish astronomer Nicholas Koepernick -- called Copernicus --  pointed out that a sun-centered planetary model could get rid of all those epicycles with elegant simplicity...

Today we see a spate of new computer models showing up in science journals, each one attempting to rescue some piece of the ecological goose that laid the golden egg. These are often not called "models." With utter dishonesty, they are labeled "new studies of the climate." But they are not empirical studies at all. They are little math models with new epicycles, but still based on the same gross oversimplifications. To reassure the True Believers, they always end with the same punch line: Yes, Virginia, there really is a global warming faerie, and all the doom-sayers are right.

I'm not iconoclastic about anthropogenic global warming yet, but I'm very concerned that this is what is now happening, and that it is just as problematic as the April snow falling outside my window.

Via Newmark's Door.

A Physiological Mechanism for the Shangri-La Diet

Reader Martin Stein pointed to this piece from ScienceNew Online.

It seems that researchers from Duke have bred mice that can't taste or smell. Then they gavaged them so they couldn't assess texture.

They found that calories set off the brain's reward centers in the absence of the other effects.

"The animals' reward processing systems were sensitive to changes in metabolism, not just flavor," explains Ivan E. de Araujo, who led the study while at Duke ... "This is a new system."

... De Araujo's team observed an apparent calorie effect on activity in the nucleus accumbens, a brain structure involved with reward delivery.

"It looks like caloric load itself can evolve hedonic behavior," Horvath says. The system originated before grocery stores did. When food was harder to find, he says, the brain evolved a mechanism to compel the body to gobble up energy-dense fare.

 

This dovetails nicely with the underlying theory and literature supporting Seth Roberts Shangri-La diet.

Roberts has argued that his book isn't a diet, but rather an engineering solution: tasteless and odorless calories tip off this system so that we aren't desperate for calories when an opportunity to gorge on them presents itself.

For my part, I still gorge once in a while.

I can still eat quite a lot.

But ... it remains as weird to me today as it did the day I started two years ago: I just don't feel like doing that most of the time.

Right now, I'm alone in an office with a bowl of chocolate, lifesavers, and See's lollipops. I haven't touched that bowl since I moved my office last summer.