Turkmenistan Starts Building New Desert Sea: Glorious Deed or Disaster Waiting to Happen?

Stranded boats on the dried-up Aral Sea. Photo by giladr via Flickr.

The Aral Sea, Central Asia’s most (in)famous body of water, has become a global symbol of environmental mismanagement. But at least one government in the region doesn’t seem to have learned much from that eco-catastrophe: Last week, President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov of Turkmenistan broke ground on the creation of a new inland sea, one that the BBC reports “will be filled with drainage water from the country’s cotton fields.” Sounds great already, right?

Seemingly following in the grandiose footprints of the late President for Life Saparmurat Niyazov, who commissioned a gold-plated, rotating statue of himself that always faces the sun in the country’s capital, Berdymukhamedov said the start of the costly initiative had “brought new life to these once-lifeless sands. I am convinced that our great deeds will be recalled with glory.”

Channeling water from cotton fields
The $20 billion project aims to channel runoff water from the country’s cotton fields across the massive Karakum Desert to create the large Golden Age Lake. According to Berdymukhamedov, the move shows that “Turkmenistan is making huge efforts to contribute to common work on preserving nature and improving the environment” because the new body of water will attract migratory birds and other wildlife, create more arable land, and relieve water shortages. But not everyone is buying that argument.

“Environmentalists say a lot of the water will simply disappear into the desert’s permeable soil,” the BBC reports. “Large amounts, they say, will also evaporate in the high temperatures, leaving the soil extremely salty.”

Aral Sea has shrunk by 90 percent
The Aral Sea tragedy itself was the result of a water-diversion project that redirected its two major feeder rivers, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, to use to irrigate new cotton fields. The loss of water initiated a downward spiral of evaporation, increased pollution and salinity, and climate change, shrinking what was once the world’s fourth-largest lake by 90 percent.

Critics of the new project fear that the runoff from those same cotton fields will not be sufficiently cleansed of the harmful insecticides and fertilizers that fueled decades of intensive agriculture. Though it is not part of any announced plan, they also worry that the beleaguered Amu Darya, on the border with Uzbekistan, will be tapped once again to help fill the lake, further fueling water conflicts between the two countries

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/07/turkmenistan-new-desert-sea-glorious-deed-or-disaster.php.

A New Branch of Architecture: Grow Your Own Building

Architecture is not a profession for those with short attention spans, but German architect Ferdinand Ludwig is creating a whole new branch of architecture: he grows buildings.

Philip Bethge writes in Spiegel Online :

Ludwig and fellow architects, Oliver Storz and Hannes Schwertfeger, call their new specialty “building botany.” As part of this the three men are building structures made from plants as well as studying the elasticity of plane trees and examining how effectively willows can grow around steel pipes at the University of Stuttgart’s Institute of Basics in Modern Architectural Design.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/07/grow-your-own-building.php

Mystery blob leaves scientists puzzled

A huge mat of oily goo caught everyone by surprise when it showed up off the shore of Wainwright, Alaska nearly two weeks ago. Since then, the mysteries have only deepened.

Preliminary testing showed that the goo was made of algae, even though it looked like an oil spill.

Yet, scientists still don’t know what type of algae it is or where it came from. They don’t know if it’s dangerous to fish or other underwater life, nor do they know what chances are of something like this happening again anytime soon.

The list of mysteries is loaded with questions about whether the incident is related to climate change, pollution or simply a result of natural processes.

“We’re still at the formative stages of looking at this and the practical issues, like what is it and what caused it,” said Raymond RaLonde, an aquaculture specialist at the Alaska Sea Grant Marine Advisory Program at the University of Alaska in Anchorage.

The first news of the incident came from indigenous subsistence hunters on the morning of July 10, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Terry Hasenauer.

“Initial reports indicated that it was a substance that resembled heavy oil, crude oil or intermediate fuel oil,” Hasenauer told Discovery News.

Investigations, however, revealed that there hadn’t been any large ships in the area for more than a week, and there were no wrecks nearby. Still, the Coast Guard responded as they normally do to oil spills: by sending out two pollution investigators to fly over the blob and to approach it by boat.

Dispelling rumors that the substance was 30 miles long, the Coast Guard estimated its size as 13 miles by a quarter of a mile. It was floating about half a mile offshore. The blob was amorphous, Hasenauer added, broken up into globules and sections, and constantly changing shape.

The Coast Guard gathered samples and brought them back to Anchorage. When scientists observed the samples through a microscope, they immediately concluded that the goo was made of algae, not fuel.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32086346/ns/technology_and_science-science/

100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About

There are some things in this world that will never be forgotten, this week’s 40th anniversary of the Moon landing for one, but Moore’s Law and our ever-increasing quest for simpler, smaller, faster, and better Widgets and Thingamabobs will always ensure that some of the technology we grew up with will not be passed down the line to the next generation of geeks. That is, of course, unless we tell them all about the good old days of modems and typerwriters, slide rules and encyclopedias

(Some list High Lights)

Audio Visual Entertainment

1. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something
2. Playing music on a audio tape using a personal stereo – see what happens when you give a Walkman to todays teenager
3. The number of TV channels being a single digit – I remember it being a massive event when the UK got its 4th channel
4. CRT TVs filling up half your living room
5. TVs with no remote control
6. 8 Track cartridges
7. Vinyl records – even todays DJs are going laptop or CD
8. Betamax tapes
9. MiniDisc
10. Laserdisc – The LP of DVD
11. Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations (digital tuners + HD Radio bork this concept)
12. Shortwave radio
13. 3D movies with red/green glasses
14. That there was a time before ‘Reality TV’

Computers and Video Gaming

1. The scream of a modem connecting
2. The buzz of a dot matrix printer
3. 5 and 3 inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage
4. Using Jumpers to set IRQs
5. DOS
6. Terminals accessing the mainframe
7. Screens being just green (or orange) on black
8. Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID
9. Counting in Kilobytes
10. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time
11. Joysticks
12. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive
13. Booting your computer off of a floppy disk
14. Recording a song in a studio

The Internet

1. NCSA Mosaic
2. Finding out information from an Encyclopedia
3. Only shopping during the day, Monday to Saturday
4. Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it
5. Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment
6. Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind
7. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet
8. Privacy
9. The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them
10. Correct spelling of phrases, rather than TLAs
11. Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something
12. The time before PC networks
13. When Spam was just a meat product (or even a Monty Python sketch)

Gadgets

1. Typewriters
2. Putting film in your camera – 35mm may have some life still but what about APS or Disk?
3. Sending that film away to be processed
4. Having physical prints of photographs come back to you
5. CB radios
6. Rotary dial telephones
7. Answering machines
8. Fax machines
9. Vacuum cleaners with bags in them

Everything else

1. Remembering someone’s phone number
2. Not knowing who was calling you on the phone
3. Actually going down to a Blockbuster store to rent a movie
4. Toys actually being suitable for the under-3s
5. LEGO just being square blocks of various sizes, with the old wheel, window or door
6. Waiting for the television network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theatre
7. Neat handwriting
8. The days before the Nanny State
9. Starbuck being a man
10. Han shoots first
11. “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father” – but they’ve already seen episode III, so it’s no big surprise
12. Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC
13. Trig Tables and Log Tables
14. “Don’t know what a Slide Rule is for…”
15. Finding books in a card catalog at the library
16. Hershey bars in silver wrappers
17. Having to manually unlock a car door
18. Writing a check
19. Looking out the window during a long drive
20. Roller skates, as opposed to blades
21. Cash
22. Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the Internet
23. Spending your entire allowance at the arcade in the mall
24. A physical dictionary (either or spelling or definitions)
25. When a ‘Geek’ and a ‘Nerd’ were one and the same

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/07/100-things-your-kids-may-never-know-about/

802.11n should go final by September, just when it’s starting to feel slow

It’s been a long, long… long time coming, folks. Since 2004, the world at large has been waiting for 802.11n to finally go legit, and while we’ve been getting along just fine with Draft-N devices, the IEEE is inching closer to completion of the final specification. According to Bob Heile, the chairman of the IEEE 802.15 working group on Personal Area Networks, “802.11 [has been] granted unconditional approval to forward 11n to RevCom,” which is currently scheduled to take place on September 11th in New Jersey. He continued by uttering the understatement of the year with “this was an extremely complex project.” We won’t even bother retracing all the time line slips that we’ve seen over the years, but we can’t help but chuckle at the notion of an ever faster 802.11 protocol to be discussed at the very same meeting. So, let’s see here — 802.11n finally gets its certificate of authenticity after parading around for half a decade as an unfinished draft, and CES 2010 brings about devices based on the even faster 802.11ac. Marvelous.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/21/802-11n-should-go-final-by-september-just-when-its-starting-to/

Neural Stem Cells May Rescue Memory In Advanced Alzheimer’s, Mouse Study Suggests

Frank LaFerla, left, Mathew Blurton-Jones and colleagues found that neural stem cells could be a potential treatment for advanced Alzheimer’s disease. (Credit: Daniel A. Anderson / University Communications)

UC Irvine scientists have shown for the first time that neural stem cells can rescue memory in mice with advanced Alzheimer’s disease, raising hopes of a potential treatment for the leading cause of elderly dementia that afflicts 5.3 million people in the U.S.

Mice genetically engineered to have Alzheimer’s performed markedly better on memory tests a month after mouse neural stem cells were injected into their brains. The stem cells secreted a protein that created more neural connections, improving cognitive function.

“Essentially, the cells were producing fertilizer for the brain,” said Frank LaFerla, director of UCI’s Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders, or UCI MIND, and co-author of the study, which appears online the week of July 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090720190726.htm

New Blue Light Nanocrystals Could Help Mitigate Global Warming

Molecular Foundry post-doctoral scholar Hoi Ri Moon, staff scientist Jeff Urban and Facility Director Delia Milliron demonstrate magnesium oxide nanocrystals that could be a bright candidate for solid-state lighting. (Credit: Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab Public Affairs)

Berkeley Lab researchers have produced non-toxic magnesium oxide nanocrystals that efficiently emit blue light and could also play a role in long-term storage of carbon dioxide, a potential means of tempering the effects of global warming.

In its bulk form, magnesium oxide is a cheap, white mineral used in applications ranging from insulating cables and crucibles to preventing sweaty-palmed rock climbers from losing their grip.  Using an organometallic chemical synthesis route, scientists at the Molecular Foundry have created nanocrystals of magnesium oxide whose size can be adjusted within just a few nanometers. And unlike their bulk counterpart, the nanocrystals glow blue when exposed to ultraviolet light.

Current routes for generating these alkaline earth metal oxide nanocrystals require processing at high temperatures, which causes uncontrolled growth or fusing of particles to one another-not a desirable outcome when the properties you seek are size-dependent. On the other hand, vapor phase techniques, which provide size precision, are time and cost intensive, and leave the nanocrystals attached to a substrate.

“We’ve discovered a fundamentally new, unconventional mechanism for nicely controlling the size of these nanocrystals, and realized we had an intriguing and surprising candidate for optical applications,” said Delia Milliron, Facility Director of the Inorganic Nanostructures Facility at Berkeley Lab’s nanoscience research center, the Molecular Foundry. “This efficient, bright blue luminescence could be an inexpensive, attractive alternative in applications such as bio-imaging or solid-state lighting.”

Unlike conventional incandescent or fluorescent bulbs, solid-state lighting makes use of light-emitting semiconductor materials-in general, red, green and blue emitting materials are combined to create white light. However, efficient blue light emitters are difficult to produce, suggesting these magnesium oxide nanocrystals could be a bright candidate for lighting that consumes less energy and has a longer lifespan.

These minute materials do more than glow, however. Along with their promising optical behavior, these magnesium oxide nanocrystals will be a subject of study in an entirely different field of research: Berkeley Labs’ Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) for Nanoscale Control of Geologic CO2, designed to “establish the scientific foundations for the geological storage of carbon dioxide.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090721172417.htm

Scramjets promise space travel for all

Gallery: Spaceplanes and scramjets: A 50-year history

ON A bright autumn morning five years ago, the space-flight community was turned on its head by a little teardrop-shaped spacecraft built in a small workshop in California’s Mojave desert. The successful flight of SpaceShipOne on 29 September 2004, the first of two flights en route to winning the $10 million Ansari X prize, seemed to usher in a new era of space travel – one in which space flight would be affordable, frequent and, perhaps most importantly, accessible to all.

SpaceShipOne was the first crewed spacecraft to be developed privately. Designed, built and flown on a budget of roughly $25 million, it was much cheaper than the multibillion-dollar US government-backed space shuttle. In its climb to just over 111 kilometres above the Earth, SpaceShipOne broke the world altitude record for a winged vehicle, set more than 40 years earlier by NASA’s X-15 rocket plane. It was also fully reusable, a feature long seen as an essential milestone on the path to a more accessible spacefaring future.

And yet, five years on, it is easy to regard SpaceShipOne as more anomaly than herald. After making two sub-orbital flights in two weeks, it never flew again: the craft now hangs in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. The Spaceship Company, a partnership between SpaceShipOne creator Burt Rutan and airline tycoon Richard Branson has yet to unveil the larger, passenger-ready SpaceShipTwo, although the company has revealed the carrier aircraft needed to launch it on its way to space. Most other commercial space-flight projects remain on the ground.

“I think Burt Rutan did a great thing with SpaceShipOne,” says Elon Musk, CEO and chief designer at commercial space company SpaceX. “However, it is important to appreciate that it is only a Mach 3 [three times the speed of sound] terminal velocity vehicle. You need Mach 25 to reach low Earth orbit, and the energy required scales with the square of the velocity.”

Whatever its limitations as a spacecraft, SpaceShipOne has galvanised attempts to break the “space access” problem. There are arguably more spacecraft development efforts under way now than at any point in the brief history of space flight. So which idea, or set of ideas, will produce the breakthrough vehicle? “To achieve a true revolution in cost and reliability, we have to make a truly reusable system,” Musk says. “That’s one of the biggest technical challenges known to man.”

This challenge is gradually yielding to human ingenuity. SpaceX has successfully flown its Falcon rocket, after several aborted attempts, and other companies are doing ever more advanced tests on new engines, systems and designs. And one long-awaited test flight later this year may herald a major technological breakthrough in air-breathing engines that could power a winged vehicle from runway to orbit, ultimately fulfilling the dream that SpaceShipOne has rekindled.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327181.300-scramjets-promise-space-travel-for-all.html

A Magical Total Eclipse? Chinese Team to Test If Eclipse Can Bend Gravity

Millions of people in Asia see the longest total solar eclipse this century today. As swaths of India and China are plunged into darkness, Chinese researchers will be conducting conduct a once-in-a-century experiment to test a controversial theory: the possibility that gravity drops slightly during a total eclipse. As well as proving that you can give people as many gravitometers as you like, it doesn’t mean they have the first notion of what gravity is.  Civilizations have assigned incredible (and unbelievable) properties to one rock happening to line up with another for millenia, and it seems that a lab coat doesn’t make you immune to the idiocy.

 Geophysicists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences are preparing an unprecedented array of highly sensitive instruments at six sites across the country from observatories on the Tibetan plateau to a cave in a Shanghai suburb to take gravity readings during the total eclipse due to pass over southern China today. The results, the team believes which will be analyzed in the coming months, could confirm once and for all that anomalous fluctuations observed during past eclipses are real.

The first sign that gravity fluctuates during an eclipse was in 1954 when Maurice Allais noticed erratic behavior in a swinging pendulum when an eclipse passed over Paris.

The idea is that during a solar eclipse gravity is affected, causing pendulums to swing differently during the period of darkness.  Let us just repeat that (in case you’ve been trained in science and shut it out to protect yourself): people say that when light from the sun is blocked by the moon, an orbiting rock which is ALWAYS around the Earth, there’s suddenly a magical gravity-bending field which can only be observed by very pendulum experiments.  These people are given money.

What are they saying: that gravity is powered by sunshine?  That the Moon gets nervous with all the attention and starts some extremely-specific sorcery to distract us?  That maybe, just maybe, humankind has engaged in everything from panic to human sacrifice every time the sun seems to go out and this is the latest (and hopefully last) incarnation before science education wipes it out?

The effect was first “observed” as we mentioned above in the fifties by Monsieur Maurice Allaise, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics.  Yes, economics.  Somehow similar experiments which didn’t see these effects, conducted in the nineties with better equipment and by full time scientist Dr Kuusela, never seem to get as much press.  And once people start talking about inaccurate observations, thermal effects, observer bias and pure wishful thinking, well, proponents of the magic moonbending tend to cover their ears and declare the results “controversial.”  As opposed to “utterly disproven, you idiots.”

The biggest warning sign in reports of the occurrence is a direct correspondence with the visible eclipse.  We’re talking “vertical lines on the reported graph” correspondence – not curves, not increases, vertical jumps in the data as soon as the eclipse starts.  Even if there were an unexplained gravitational effect, for it to so directly correspond doesn’t just beggar belief: it beggars trigonometry and the laws of physics.  Take the size of the moon, the sun, the distances between them and work out the angles between “eclipsing” and “not eclipsing” – they make fun of any kind spatial relationship.  If there’s a physical law that works like that, it’s been biding it’s time rather than generating incredible spikes in every structure and machine on Earth every time the Moon passed by.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/gravity-bending-magic-eclipsea-continent-wide-experiment-later-this-week-will-test-whether-total-eclipses-can-affect-gravity.html

GeoHacking – What are the Dangers of Reconfiguring the Planet’s Ecology

Presidential Science Adviser John Holdren recently outlined options for geohacking, forcibly reconfiguring parts of the planet’s ecology.  Since this is a country where you can’t set up a wind farm without someone opposing it, this set off a storm of protest.  But the most vocal cry was “We shouldn’t study it because we don’t know how it would work”, indicating that the those opponents don’t understand what some of their own words mean.

It’s important to note that Holdren was advising the study of scientific options, kind of like you’d expect a science adviser to do.  The plan (that of pumping the atmosphere full aerosols) certainly has a couple of potentially-planet-pulverizing problems, but that’s exactly his point – it needs study.  He’s a scientist, you see, where admitting you don’t know something is a vital step towards finding a solution.  Unfortunately he’s talking to politicians and the media.

One the one hand you’ve got the ultra-Luddite response, that of any scientific change of anything being bad.  The sort of people who’d be running everywhere and tutting loudly when one of those fancy “wheelamajigged” things came along if they’d been born earlier.  Given their opposition not just to doing something, but even learning about how it might work, we can only assume they learned speech by accident or before they came up with their “Don’t learn what I don’t already know” viewpoint.

On the other hand, uncontrolled geohacking could be the closest thing to real life Bond villainy we’ll ever really see.  Even if the government has no interest in altering Earth’s environment, they need to understand exactly what they don’t like about it – and where the dangers are – to prevent others from doing the same.  Corporations won’t think twice about altering the environment if it benefits them in even the shortest term, and technology will soon bring ecotinkering from the national to the corporate budget level.

Geohacking needs to be studied as a scientific problem: we don’t know how it works, and we want to, so let’ learn.  That’s how science works.  We’ve been altering Earth since we first worked out that things burned – ecogineering isn’t some blasphemous defilement of Gaia’s green glory, it’s humanity saying “Let’s see if we can actually fix things on purpose instead of breaking them all the time.”

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/geohacking-what-are-the-dangers-of-reconfiguring-the-planets-ecology.html