Science Odds and Ends

On March 11, the seafloor 130 kilometers off Japan's eastern coast slipped more than 20 meters beneath the crust that makes up the Pacific plate, pulling the island nation as much as 4.3 meters closer to California and its coast 66 centimeters down. In fact, the first geologic sensors on the seafloor, which happen to lie near the center of the Tohoku-oki quake, as it is now formally called based on the closest regions of the island nation to the quake's epicenter offshore, registered a shift of some 24 meters east-southeast and an uplift of three meters at that point.

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have found an apparent correlation between religious practices and changes in the brains of older adults.

Yarrow, it's called, this flowering plant also known as "little feather" for the shape of its leaves. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and University of Minnesota-Twin Cities conducted an 11-year experiment with 13 plant species common in U.S. Midwestern states.

The scientists added extra carbon dioxide (CO2) to the plants' environment to discover how--in the higher carbon dioxide world of global warming--the plants would respond. The results suggest that plants' capacity to absorb extra carbon from the atmosphere as CO2 levels rise may be less than expected.

The findings are published in the current issue of the journal Global Change Biology.

Heavy rains, deep snowfalls, monster floods and killing droughts are signs of a "new normal" of extreme U.S. weather events fueled by climate change, scientists and government planners said on Wednesday.

"It's a new normal and I really do think that global weirding is the best way to describe what we're seeing," climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University told reporters.

Is it possible that solar energy - clean, renewable, virtually infinite - could have a downside? As it's being pursued on our public lands, yes.

In the name of greening America, the Obama administration is about to open up as much as 21.5 million acres of mostly undisturbed, fragile desert land for potential industrial-scale solar energy development. That means huge swaths of public land in the West could be developed, degraded and effectively privatized.

But such degradation isn't necessary. We can have solar energy while keeping the desert wild and public lands truly public. The government has lower-impact options, such as putting solar developments on already degraded public and private land. It could also pursue the more efficient and far less damaging tactic of deploying solar panels across vast acreages of rooftops and parking lots.

Grand Lake covers 13,500 acres (5,500 ha) in Mercer and Auglaize counties. Grand Lake is the largest inland lake in Ohio in terms of land area, but is extremely shallow, with an average depth of only 5 to 7 feet (1.5 to 2.1 m).[4]

Grand Lake St. Marys was constructed in the early 19th century as a reservoir for the Miami and Erie Canal, which connected the Ohio River with Lake Erie. At one time the lake was the world's largest man-made lake.[2]

In-car health monitoring might be coming to a vehicle near you. For the ultimate driving –multitasking—experience, at least one automaker is looking to include new health tracking technology http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... works-mban in their cars.

And that could be a good thing. With Americans spending more than a hundred hours a year driving to and from work, some of that time could be spent: keeping tabs on health risks—with personalized allergy warnings—or managing chronic conditions—such as diabetes.

Ford is partnering with companies that make instruments to measure blood glucose levels http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... se-monitor and software to help diabetic patients track their diet and medications.

It is expected that within the next month officials at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will declare that all cars must have an event data recorder inside the vehicle.

Women find happy guys significantly less sexually attractive than swaggering or brooding men, according to a new University of British Columbia study that helps to explain the enduring allure of "bad boys" and other iconic gender types.

Scientists at Imperial College London have made the most accurate measurement yet of the shape of the humble electron, finding that it is almost a perfect sphere, in a study published in the journal Nature today. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 10104.html

The experiment, which spanned more than a decade, suggests that the electron differs from being perfectly round by less than 0.000000000000000000000000001 cm. This means that if the electron was magnified to the size of the solar system, it would still appear spherical to within the width of a human hair.

One helpful action anyone can take in response to global warming is to plant trees and preserve forests. Trees and plants capture carbon dioxide during photosynthesis, thereby removing the most abundant greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and storing some of it in their woody tissue.

Yet global warming may affect the capacity of trees to store carbon by altering forest nitrogen cycling, concludes a study led by Jerry Melillo, Distinguished Scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) Ecosystems Center, and published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/19/1018189108

The paper summarizes the results of a 7-year study at Harvard Forest in central Massachusetts, in which a section of the forest (about one-quarter of an acre) was artificially warmed about 9oF above ambient, to simulate the amount of climate warming that might be observed by the end of the century without aggressive actions to control greenhouse gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning and deforestation.

The study confirmed, as others have, that a warmer climate causes more rapid decomposition of the organic matter in soil, leading to an increase in carbon dioxide being released to the atmosphere. But the study also showed, for the first time in a field experiment, that warmer temperatures stimulate the gain of carbon stored in trees as woody tissue, partially offsetting the soil carbon loss to the atmosphere.

A team of scientists led by researchers from Caltech report in this week's issue of the journal Nature http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/va ... 10096.html that the rocks on which much of a theory on how the "Snowball Earth" ice age ended was based were formed millions of years after the ice age ended, and were formed at temperatures so high there could have been no living creatures associated with them.

The MiniPak won’t be widely available until later this year, but we got a sneak preview. The charger is essentially a mini-version of the hydrogen fuel cells that automakers (and goofy tinkerers) have been experimenting with for years, with a couple advantages: It fits in the palm of your hand, and it can charge anything with a USB port, from digital cameras to smart phones to all kinds of other gadgets. Oh, and unlike fuel cells that rely on compressed hydrogen, it doesn't run the risk of exploding--and when things are supposed to explode, we generally prefer they don't.

The MiniPak acts as a miniature power plant, converting hydrogen into electricity and charging consumer electronics in real time. It pulls in oxygen from the ambient air through vents and releases stored hydrogen into the fuel cell at the same time. That electrochemical reaction produces an electric charge, as well as a small amount of water, which is released as vapor.

What’s Good
Reliable Power:

Better than Batteries: The HydroSTIK is more environmentally friendly and packs more power than conventional alkaline batteries. One HydroSTIK can replace about 10 AA alkaline batteries.

What’s Bad
Limited Positions: While the MiniPak is easy to transport, its charging position doesn’t allow for a whole lot of mobility. The charger must be kept upright on a relatively level surface the entire time it’s hooked up to devices, making on-the-go charging virtually impossible.

It’s Really Expensive: The charger itself comes at a pretty reasonable price of $99. Each HydroSTIK, however, costs $9.99, is not currently refillable by the user, and one cartridge will only charge a smart phone about two times before it runs out of juice.

Thursday

The Dark Side of the Universe
7:45PM — 9:30 PM | Watch Live »
For all we understand about the universe, 96% of what’s out there still has us in the dark. More
Live webcast commentary: Scientific American’s Philip Yam, accompanied by WSF’s Greg Boustead and Michael J Kennelly
Friday

The Illusion of Certainty: Risk, Probability, and Chance
4:45 PM — 6:30 PM | Watch Live »
Risk, probability, chance, coincidence—they play a significant role in how we make decisions about health, education, relationships, and money. But where does this data come from and what does it really mean? More
Live webcast commentary: Boing Boing’s science editor Maggie Koerth-Baker , accompanied by WSF’s Maki Naro and Michael J Kennelly

The Mind after Midnight: Where Do You Go When You Go to Sleep?
7:45 PM — 9:30 PM | Watch Live »
We spend a third of our lives asleep. Every organism on Earth—from rats to dolphins to fruit flies to microorganisms—relies on sleep for its survival, yet science is still wrestling with a fundamental question: Why does sleep exist? More
Live webcast commentary: Scientific American’s Robin Lloyd, accompanied by WSF’s Greg Boustead and Maki Naro

Saturday

Cool Jobs
1:45 PM — 3:30 PM | Watch Live »
Imagine hanging out with some of the world’s kookiest critters in the jungle’s tallest trees, building a robot that does stand-up comedy, inventing a device that propels you into the air like Batman, or traveling back in a DNA time machine to study ancient animals! Meet the scientists who make it possible. More
Live webcast commentary: Scientific American’s Anna Kuchment, accompanied by WSF’s Maki Naro

By transforming cells from human skin into working nerve cells, researchers may have come up with a model for nervous-system diseases and perhaps even regenerative therapies based on cell transplants.

The achievement, reported online today in Nature1, is the latest in a fast-moving field called transdifferentiation, in which cells are forced to adopt new identities. In the past year, researchers have converted connective tissue cells found in skin into heart cells2, blood cells3 and liver cells4.

At the University of Montreal, researchers have found a drug that seems able to decrease a person's recall of a bad memory. Metyrapone decreases the levels of cortisol, which is a steroid hormone produced by the adrenal gland in response to stress. These early trials suggest that by messing around with the levels of cortisol in a person's body at the time of a stressful event, memories of that event might be impaired--possibly permanently.

While these tests are certainly in the very early stages, the research shows serious promise, especially as they might provide the ability to treat post-traumatic stress syndrome--though with metyrapone no longer being manufactured, it may be tricky to continue the research.