July 20, 2008, 2:52 PM CT

Massive greenhouse gases may be released as destruction

Leading world researchers convene in Brazil July 21-25 amid growing concern that evaporation and ongoing destruction of world wetlands, which hold a volume of carbon similar to that in the atmosphere today, could cause them to exhale billows of greenhouse gases.

Meeting in the city of Cuiaba on the edge of South America's vast Pantanal, the largest wetland of its kind, some 700 experts from 28 nations at the 8th INTECOL International Wetlands Conference will prescribe measures urgently needed to better understand and manage these vibrant ecosystems, ranked among the planet's most threatened, and slow their decline and loss.

Warming world temperatures are speeding both rates of decomposition of trapped organic material and evaporation, while threatening critical sources of wetlands recharge by melting glaciers and reducing precipitation.

Covering just 6% of Earth's land surface, wetlands (including marshes, peat bogs, swamps, river deltas, mangroves, tundra, lagoons and river floodplains) store 10-20% of its terrestrial carbon. Wetlands slow the decay of organic material trapped and locked away over the ages in low oxygen conditions.

These waterlogged (either seasonally or year-round) areas contain an estimated 771 gigatonnes (771 billion tonnes) of greenhouse gases both CO₂ and more potent methane an amount in CO₂ equivalent comparable to the carbon content of today's atmosphere......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

July 19, 2008, 10:13 AM CT

A Colorful Approach to Solar Energy

Revisiting a once-abandoned technique, engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have successfully created a sophisticated, yet affordable, method to turn ordinary glass into a high-tech solar concentrator.

The technology, which uses dye-coated glass to collect and channel photons otherwise lost from a solar panel's surface, could eventually enable an office building to draw energy from its tinted windows as well as its roof.

Electrical engineer Marc Baldo, his graduate students Michael Currie, Jon Mapel and Timothy Heidel, and postdoctoral associate Shalom Goffri, announced their findings in the July 11 issue of Science.

"We think this is a practical technology for reducing the cost of solar power," said Baldo.

The scientists coated glass panels with layers of two or more light-capturing dyes. The dyes absorbed incoming light and then re-emitted the energy into the glass, which served as a conduit to channel the light to solar cells along the panels' edges. The dyes can vary from bright colors to chemicals that are mostly transparent to visible light.

Because the edges of the glass panels are so thin, far less semiconductor material is needed to collect the light energy and convert that energy into electricity......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

July 19, 2008, 10:11 AM CT

Antarctica and North America Were Once Connected?

A lone granite boulder found against all odds high atop a glacier in Antarctica may provide additional key evidence to support a theory that parts of the southernmost continent once were connected to North America hundreds of millions of years ago.

Writing in the July 11 edition of the journal Science, an international team of U.S. and Australian researchers describe their findings, which were made in the Transantarctic Mountains, and their significance to the problem of piecing together what an ancient supercontinent, called Rodinia, looked like. The U.S. researchers were funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Prior lines of scientific evidence led scientists to theorise that about 600-800 million years ago a portion of Rodinia broke away from what is now the southwestern United States and eventually drifted southward to become eastern Antarctica and Australia.

The team's find, they argue, provides physical evidence that confirms the so-called southwestern United States and East Antarctica (SWEAT) hypothesis.

"What this paper does is say that we have three main new lines of evidence that basically confirm the SWEAT idea," said John Goodge, an NSF-funded researcher with the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Minnesota-Duluth......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

July 16, 2008, 7:22 PM CT

Virtual world is sign of future

Purdue University is operating a virtual environment that enables researchers and engineers to interpret raw data collected with powerful instruments called dynamic atomic force microscopes.

The online tools, thought to bethe first of their kind for the instruments, represent a research trend, with tools for other applications also being developed, said Arvind Raman, a Purdue professor of mechanical engineering.

"We will see more and more of this sort of thing for a number of other types of instruments that are being used around the world," he said. "This allows scientists to spend more time doing research and less time and money developing simulations".

More than 300 scientists from around the world have used the "virtual environment for dynamic atomic force microscopy," or VEDA, since it went online about a year ago.

The virtual environment is described in a research article featured as a cover story in the recent issue of the journal Review of Scientific Instruments, published by the American Institute of Physics. The article focuses on two simulation tools needed for atomic force microscopes.

"This is a hardware-based journal and they put a virtual instrument on the cover, which should tell you that people regard this as a practical tool," Raman said. "I think it shows that even in that community there is a feeling that the cyberinfrastructure can really be used in beneficial ways for the experimental scientific community"......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

July 15, 2008, 10:12 PM CT

On Energy-efficient Lighting

The latest bright idea in energy-efficient lighting for homes and offices uses big science in nano-small packages to dim the future Edison's light bulb.

In the recent issue of Nature Photonics, available online, researchers at the University of Michigan and Princeton University announce a discovery that pushes more appealing white light from organic light-emitting devices.

More white light is the holy grail of the next generation of lighting. The innovation in the paper "Enhanced Light Out-Coupling of Organic Light-Emitting Devices Using Embedded Low-Index Grids" describes a way to deliver significantly more bright light from a watt than incandescent bulbs.

"Our demonstration here shows that OLEDs are a very exciting technology for use in interior illumination," said Stephen Forrest, U-M professor of electrical engineering and physics and vice president for research. "We hope that white emitting OLEDs will play a major role in the world of energy conservation".

Forrest and co-author Yuri Sun, visiting U-M from Princeton University, have wrestled with a classic problem in the new generation of lighting called white organic light-emitting devices, or WOLED: Freeing the light generated, but mostly trapped, inside the device.

A lighting primer: Incandescent light bulbs give off light as a by-product of heat, The light is appealing, but inefficient, putting out 15 lumens of light for every watt or electricity......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

July 10, 2008, 9:30 PM CT

Sneak a peek under the veil of superconductivity

How does a magnet that cannot transport electricity transform into a superconductor that is a perfect conductor of electricity?

That question has baffled physics researchers for more than 20 years. Solving this mystery has become somewhat of a quest because the answer holds immense potential for power transmission with no energy loss, super-fast levitating trains, powerful supercomputers, and a host of other applications. Collaboration among scientists from England, Canada and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory is bringing scientists much closer to the answer. Their results are published in the July 10 issue of the peer-reviewed journal, Nature.

Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity with no resistance. Electricity comes from electrons traveling through wire conductors. Those electrons bumping into each other generate an enormous amount of heat. With superconductors, however, there is no jostling, therefore no heat. But there's a catch: "High-temperature" superconductors (a very relative term) only behave this way when they are cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures - between -346 degree F and -320.44 degree F.

Superconductivity can be thought of as "frictionless" electricity. In conventional electricity, heat is generated by friction as electrons (electric charge carriers) collide with atoms and impurities in the wire. This heating effect is good for appliances such as toasters or irons, but not so good for most other applications that use electricity. In superconductors, however, electrons glide unimpeded between atoms without friction. If scientists and engineers ever harness this phenomenon at or near room temperature in a practical way, untold billions could be saved on energy costs......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

July 8, 2008, 8:29 PM CT

Why musicians make us weep and computers don't

Music can soothe the savage breast much better if played by musicians rather than clever computers, as per a new University of Sussex-led study reported in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE

Neuroresearchers looked at the brain's response to piano sonatas played either by a computer or a musician and observed that, while the computerised music elicited an emotional response especially to unexpected chord changes - it was not as strong as listening to the same piece played by a professional pianist.

Senior research fellow in psychology Dr Stefan Koelsch, who carried out the study with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, played excerpts from classical piano sonatas to twenty non-musicians and recorded electric brain responses and skin conductance responses (which vary with sweat production as a result of an emotional response).

Eventhough the participants did not play instruments and considered themselves unmusical, their brains showed clear electric activity in response to musical changes (unexpected chords and changes in tonal key), which indicated that the brain was understanding the "musical grammar". This response was enhanced, however, when the sonatas were played by musicians rather than a computer......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:07:20 GMT

SimplyNoise

White noise is a random signal with a flat power spectral density. In other words, the signal''s power spectral density has equal power in any band, at any centre frequency, having a given bandwidth. White noise is considered analogous to white light which contains all frequencies.

At SimplyNoise you can use a slider to find a comfort zone and enjoy the auditory zen. The site claims you can use it for aid sleep, to block distractions, mask Tinnitus, configure audio equipment, and sooth migrains. Posted by: Gerard      Read more     Source

July 7, 2008, 10:10 PM CT

Smithsonian coral biodiversity survey of Panama's Pearl Islands

A comprehensive survey of coral biodiversity in Panama's Las Perlas Archipelago, reported in the journal Environmental Conservation by scientists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and their colleagues, has resulted in clear conservation recommendations for a new coastal management plan.

"To evaluate strategies for the protection of natural resources in the Las Perlas archipelago, we gathered basic information about coral species distributions. Our recommendations include large conservation units, "no take zones" and marine reserves, with an emphasis on the northern part of the archipelago, and extremely careful regulation of fishing, tourism and development," said Smithsonian staff scientist, Hector Guzman.

The Las Perlas Islands in the Gulf of Panama are one of two archipelagos in the Tropical Eastern Pacific. The other is the Galapagos. The Las Perlas Marine Special Management Zone, created under Panama's Law 18 in May 2007, is the most recent addition to a major regional marine conservation corridor extending from Costa Rica to Ecuador. The 1688-km2 management zone includes 250 mostly uninhabited rock islands and islets.

The authors conducted an extensive biodiversity inventory, determining coral distribution and species richness across the region. They counted a total of 57 coral species: 19 hard (scleractinian) corals and 38 soft corals (octocorals). For comparison, the species count for Panama's Pacific biodiversity hotspot in the Gulf of Chiriqui is 74, whereas near Cao Island Biological Reserve, Costa Rica's hot spot, there are 43 coral species......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:50:09 GMT

Mimulus aurantiacus

I''m at a conference this week, so I''m only posting abbreviated entries when I have the time!

Mimulus aurantiacus, or bush monkeyflower, is a native to the southwestern US. In yesterday''s field trip to the San Gabriel mountains, we noted that this species defied its harsh conditions (growing on rock walls) with prolific masses of blooms. Posted by: Daniel Mosquin      Read more     Source