AP - A thumbnail-sized clam blamed for clouding the azure bays of Lake Tahoe high in the Sierra Nevada has now turned up in a mountain-ringed Adirondack lake renowned for its limpid, spring-fed waters.

AP - Pushed by an ill-timed trough of low pressure, Hurricane Earl is heading uncomfortably close to an area relatively few hurricanes tend to go: the Northeast coastline.

AP - Icelike crystals had formed Saturday on the 300-ton blowout preventer that failed to stop oil from spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, forcing BP crews to wait before they could safely hoist the device to the surface.

AFP - The Macondo well, which spilled an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, has been secured and no longer constitutes "a threat," a senior US official said Saturday.

Wind turbines function best in wide-open spaces where they can capture airflow unobstructed by buildings or mountains. Unfortunately, these same conditions are also optimal for aircraft takeoffs and landings, creating tension between wind energy utilities and airports in a number of locations worldwide. Utility-scale wind turbines, many of which stand more than 100 meters tall, can interfere with the radar used to safely guide aircraft. [More]



Wind turbine - Wind power - Energy - Wind - Business

Helicopter-mounted lasers that can dazzle and defend against heat-seeking missiles are now under development, researchers reveal. [More]



Laser - Missile - Infrared homing - Helicopter - Business

Using a revolutionary new microscope, scientists can now peer into embryos and watch, in one of the world's smallest 3-D movies, as brains, eyes and other organs form. A team at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, watched zebra fish and fruit fly embryos develop under the scope for as long as 58 hours, charting the location of every cell as it danced around the embryo. This experiment would have been impossible a mere two years ago before a recent spate of innovations advanced microscopy years into the future.

When it comes to watching the inner workings of cells , fluorescence microscopy is second to none. In this technique, scientists attach fluorescent tags to cellular proteins and, by shining a laser on the cells, cause them to light up.

The ancient scourge smallpox was relegated to biowaste bin of history more than 30 years ago, the result of the world's first and only successful disease eradication programs. Since then, however, cases of monkeypox--a serious, although less severe smallpoxlike illness--have substantially increased in central Africa, according to a study published August 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . The authors stress that better surveillance and a thorough assessment of the public health threat posed by this once-rare viral infection are needed.

"I'm concerned about monkeypox," says Don Burke director of the Center for Vaccine Research at the University of Pittsburgh, who wasn't involved in the study. "It isn't going to emerge as pandemic tomorrow, but could at any time start to increase its transmission. It's worrisome. This is the type of warning siren we need to take very seriously."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report from the group working on global warming's impacts contained at least one error. "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate," the report notes. [More]



Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - Climate change - Global warming - Environment - Climate Change: The Ipcc Response Strategies

Nature certainly has a way of one-upping the fruits of human ingenuity. Extreme astrophysical objects have long been known to accelerate the particles that make up cosmic rays to whopping energies that make the Large Hadron Collider look like a child's slingshot. The mammoth collider near Geneva, Switzerland, which resumed service in 2009 after an aborted start-up the year before, will ultimately boost protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts. Cosmic-ray protons, in comparison, have been clocked striking Earth with tens of million times as much energy; a single proton can pack as much punch as a baseball hurled at 60 miles per hour. (For the technically inclined, some cosmic rays have energies exceeding 10 20 electron volts.) [More]



Large Hadron Collider - Geneva - Switzerland - Cosmic ray - Physics

This week in the future on PopSci:

Technological Tracking of Free-Range Felons Could Make Incarceration Obsolete

Development of Tiny Thorium Reactors Could Wean the World Off Oil In Just Five Years

Video: Yale's Grab Lab Demonstrates an Unmanned Helicopter With a Grabbing Hand

Climate Villain Bjørn Lomborg Does U-Turn, Says Global Warming is a $100 Billion Problem

You can win this illustration on a t-shirt. Leave a comment to put your name in the pile; we'll randomly choose and announce our winner right here. And, if you just can't wait that long, you can buy the shirt for yourself here. Good luck!

Until next time, enjoy our past weekly illustrated roundups here.

Led by a University of California-San Francisco scientist, a consortium of about 10 different research teams unveiled a new artificial kidney prototype this week, saying a room-sized version has already shown promise for the sickest patients. Fabrication processes used to make silicon chips could conceivably be used to make coffee-cup-sized devices, which could take thousands of people off dialysis machines or kidney-donor waiting lists.

The multi-institutional team, led by UCSF professor Shuvo Roy, formerly of the Cleveland Clinic, is the first to demonstrate technology that could be feasibly downsized into a transplant device.

It?s a two-stage system involving thousands of nanoscale filters placed in a ?BioCartridge,? which would remove toxins from the blood. A "HemoCartridge" bioreactor made of engineered renal tubule cells would mimic the metabolic and water-balancing roles of a real kidney. The system uses a patient?s blood pressure to perform filtration without the use of pumps, according to a UCSF news release.

Currently, transplants and dialysis are the only ways to treat kidney failure. An implantable device would obviously be preferable, but so far, scientists have not been able to come up with a system that mimics everything the kidney can do.

The new system relies on the latest advances in nanotechnology and tissue generation, Roy said. He hopes to use silicon-fabrication technology to make the device small enough for transplant.

?This could dramatically reduce the burden of renal failure for millions of people worldwide, while also reducing one of the largest costs in U.S. healthcare,? he said.

[ScienceDaily]

Professor Walter Trahanovsky was using a high-temperature chemistry process to see if he could obtain sugar derivatives from cellulose. It?s based on supercritical fluids, which are heated under pressure until their fluid and gas states merge. It is not quite as exotic as it sounds ? supercritical carbon dioxide is used to decaffeinate coffee.

Trahanovsky and his colleagues put cellulosic materials in alcohols and subjected them to high temperatures and pressures. They got the sugars they were looking for, but they also found something else: significant amounts of propylene glycol and ethylene glycol. This was totally unexpected, Trahanovsky said.

Anyone who has ever read a body-lotion bottle would recognize the name propylene glycol ? it?s a key moisturizing ingredient. It is used in a variety of products, including as a food additive. Ethylene glycol is most commonly used in antifreeze, polyester fabric and plastic bottles.

The supercritical fluid process could be a better way to obtain these materials from biomass instead of petroleum. Current biomass-refining processes require strong acids or other harmful or expensive reagents, and the processes also generate hazardous waste.

Trahanovsky said the process also produces sugar compounds that can be converted into glucose for ethanol production or other uses. The Iowa State University Research Foundation Inc. filed for a patent based on his technology.

[Iowa State University News]

NASA just announced five science experiments that will fly on the scorching probe, which will be protected by a carbon-fiber heat shield that can withstand temperatures of 2,500 degrees F.

When the probe is 4 million miles away, the solar disk will loom 23 times wider in the sky than it does on Earth.

The mission will help scientists better understand solar radiation. Improved solar storm forecasts could protect future long-distance space explorers who would not be protected by Earth?s magnetic field.

The SWEAP solar wind experiment will count the electrons, protons and helium ions in the solar wind and measure their properties. It will also catch some in a special cup for analysis.

Another science mission will use a wide-field camera to take 3-D pictures of the solar wind as the spacecraft flies through it. Another will take direct measurements of the sun?s magnetic fields, radio emissions and shock waves, and the one more will take an inventory of the sun?s contents.

?For the very first time, we'll be able to touch, taste and smell our sun,? said Lika Guhathakurta, Solar Probe Plus program scientist at NASA headquarters.

NASA?s goals are to figure out why the sun?s corona is several hundred times hotter than the surface and why it produces an accelerating solar wind. Scientists already have high-resolution images and data of the transition zone between the atmosphere and the surface, and the solar wind has been studied extensively ? but still, no one can answer some fundamental questions about the sun?s evolution. The only way to do it is to go to the source, NASA says. Here's hoping the spacecraft doesn't get burned.

[NASA]

Miss the good old days of daily oil disaster news? Worry not, for another oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded this morning, leaving all 13 crew members in the water but ? according to initial reports ? all are alive and only one is injured. The rig is owned by Mariner Energy (somewhere a BP exec is breathing again) and is not currently producing, according to the Coast Guard. Updated. Details are sketchy right now, but rescuers are en route to the site about 80 miles south of the central Louisiana coast. We'll update as this one develops.

Update: Reuters is reporting that the Coast Guard has spotted a one-nautical-mile by 100-foot oil sheen in the water at the site of the rig explosion. The fire has been contained, but the flames have not yet been completely extinguished.

Update: USA Today now reports that the initial claim of an oil sheen by Mariner Energy cannot be confirmed by the Coast Guard, and that an aerial flyover by Mariner personnel could not locate the oil sheen reported earlier. In other good news, the fire aboard the oil platform has now been extinguished.

[NYT]

The paper, recently submitted to Physical Review Letters and posted to the physics arXiv, suggests the fine structure constant is not actually constant at all. This could mean that if we were in a different place or time period, atoms would not stay together and nothing ? neither planets nor people ? could exist.

A team led by John Webb at the University of New South Wales, Australia, has been studying whether the fine structure constant, otherwise known as alpha, changes over time. Alpha is a special number that essentially describes the strength of the electromagnetic force. The famous physicist Richard Feynman called its value "one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics." If it is not 1/137.036, things fall apart.

If alpha was different in the past, the universe might have looked different, too, which could be determined by looking at distant interstellar gases and how they absorb light. Observations by Webb and others at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii suggest that this is exactly the case ? over time, alpha has changed ever so slightly.

Competing studies did not find the same result, however, so this is still a controversial idea. But it?s a fair bet Webb?s follow-up is even more tendentious: He says alpha also changes over space. According to his theory, we?re smack in the Goldilocks zone, where alpha is exactly the right value to make matter possible.

This paper happened because Webb and his team wanted to reexamine their Keck findings, which suggested alpha was a tiny bit smaller about 9 billion years in the past. They went to the Very Large Observatory in Chile to check it out, and were shocked by what they saw: the further they looked, the bigger alpha got. The discrepancy is even stranger given the two telescopes? positions: they are in two different hemispheres, so they look in two different directions.

So, to recap: in one direction, alpha was once smaller; in exactly the opposite direction, it was once bigger. This implies that alpha continuously varies throughout space. As Technology Review?s physics blog puts it, that's a mind-blowing result. If it?s true and can be verified, it could mean the universe is much larger than what we can see, and that the laws of physics vary within it.

It would not be possible for our type of life to exist in a place where alpha were any different. So here?s to here and now.

[The Economist]