A single smartphone can DoS federal wiretaps

The official protocol for providing US law enforcement with the ability to monitor and record calls in the digital era was a product of compromise and, according to new research, it shows: an enterprising hacker could have a wealth of tools to interfere with the monitoring.

By John Timmer

As the telecommunications world went wireless and digital, the tried-and-true method law enforcement agencies used for wiretaps—splicing into the local loop—was in danger of becoming an anachronism. In 1994, Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which required telecommunications switches to incorporate a capacity for government monitoring of phone calls and other communications. That requirement ultimately produced an ANSI standard, J-STD-025, that dictated the capabilities of the hardware interface used by law enforcement agencies. A team of academic researchers has now put that standard to the test, and found that it’s vulnerable to various forms of denial and obfuscation attacks.

As the authors note, the monitoring of domestic communications has been a source of controversy in recent years; others have questioned whether having a standard capacity built into every piece of communication hardware leaves the US communications infrastructure at risk of external attack. They avoid these issues, however, and focus on a simpler question: how well does the J-standard actually work?

The answer, it appears, is that it’s trivial to defeat it and interfere with wiretaps. The big caveat to this work is that the authors didn’t have access to any of the actual hardware used by law enforcement agencies; they simply tested whether hardware that follows the J-standard could hold up to a variety of attacks. It’s possible that hardware makers have exceeded the standards with more recent equipment, and obviated some of the problems.

Still, there are two reasons to think that at least some wiretaps would be vulnerable. The first is that the hardware that’s actually deployed is probably from a variety of generations and manufacturers, making it likely that some of it does the bare minimum needed to comply. The second is that the authors demonstrate multiple vulnerabilities, making it unlikely that even the best equipment handles all of them.

Part of the problem is that there are two classes of phone monitoring available to law enforcement: simple call logging, which is relatively easy to obtain, and full call recording, which is typically more challenging. The two are handled separately within the protocol, and the capacity granted for the logging was based on typical usage patterns at the time: a single, 64kbps ISDN line. The authors go on to show that it’s relatively simple to exceed this bandwidth with a single computer or smartphone, creating a denial of service situation.

Part of the problem is that there’s an asymmetry between the basic information that needs to be sent down a phone line—there’s a connection waiting—and all the information that law enforcement needs, such as the source, a datestamp, a case identifier, etc. This asymmetry ensures that even a simple unconnected call produces significant data that has to be stuffed down the 64kbps pipe.

The other part of the problem is that modern telephony creates a variety of methods of sending a lot of traffic to an individual phone line with minimal effort. So, for example, the authors use an ISDN phone to send commands to voicemail boxes at a rate of 94 calls a second. Forty-two text messages a second would also work, as would repeated call/hangups using IP telephony. A rate of 20 hangups a second would do the trick, and the researchers were easily able to exceed that from a residential broadband connection.

Since the J protocol doesn’t allow for queueing or buffering, once the bandwidth is exceeded, any information that can’t be stuffed down the pipes is lost. So, once these levels are exceeded, law enforcement call logging becomes unreliable. The protocol is less clear about the capacity allocated to content monitoring, but the authors’ analysis suggests that this would be even easier to saturate.

More sophisticated attacks are also possible. For example, the J protocol calls for a termination of call recording once a tone is registered. However, communications hardware will only register the tone if it originates from specific hardware. As a result, a person being monitored could send the tone over their phone; the monitoring equipment should hang up, while the call would continue.

The authors were also able to craft a variety of IP packets that would interfere with monitoring. These include false datestamp information—which would inject irrelevant packets into the middle of a conversation—and eliminating the directionality information used by packets in some CDMA cellular systems. They also built packets that would be routed part of the way to the end user, but never reach them; these would be seen by the tap, but not interfere with the phone conversation.

All told, the authors come up with six attack scenarios that they consider practical, in that they could be carried out with readily available equipment. In fact, they tested a number of them using a laptop tethered to a CDMA phone (in one case, causing Sprint to throttle back their bandwidth).

They also suggest a number of stopgap measures that could be used to help avert some of their own scenarios, such as providing law enforcement with greater bandwidth. Still, it’s clear that they think the J standard is due for a complete rewrite, as they suggest it was the product of compromise among law enforcement, hardware makers, and telcos, and a product of simpler telecommunications times.

http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2009/11/a-single-smartphone-can-dos-federal-wiretaps.ars

MESSENGER Spacecraft Reveals More Hidden Territory On Mercury

This enhanced-color view was created with a statistical technique that highlights subtle color variations seen in the 11 filters of MESSENGER’s wide-angle camera that are often related to composition. Merged with images from the higher-resolution narrow-angle camera, the two sets of observations tell the story of the geology of the area and the compositional differences of the features observed. This region, viewed in detail for the first time during the third flyby, appears to have experienced a high level of volcanic activity. (Credit: Image courtesy of NASA)

A NASA spacecraft gliding over the battered surface of Mercury for the second time this year has revealed more previously unseen real estate on the innermost planet. The probe also has produced several science firsts and is returning hundreds of new photos and measurements of the planet’s surface, atmosphere and magnetic field.

The MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging, or MESSENGER, spacecraft flew by Mercury shortly after 4:40 a.m. EDT, on Oct. 6. It completed a critical gravity assist to keep it on course to orbit Mercury in 2011 and unveiled 30 percent of Mercury’s surface never before seen by a spacecraft.

“The region of Mercury’s surface that we viewed at close range for the first time this month is bigger than the land area of South America,” said Sean Solomon, principal investigator and director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “When combined with data from our first flyby and from Mariner 10, our latest coverage means that we have now seen about 95 percent of the planet.”

The spacecraft’s science instruments operated throughout the flyby. Cameras snapped more than 1,200 pictures of the surface, while topography beneath the spacecraft was profiled with a laser altimeter. The comparison of magnetosphere observations from the spacecraft’s first flyby in January with data from the probe’s second pass has provided key new insight into the nature of Mercury’s internal magnetic field and revealed new features of its magnetosphere. The magnetosphere is the volume surrounding Mercury that is controlled by the planet’s magnetic field.

“The previous flybys by MESSENGER and Mariner 10 provided data only about Mercury’s eastern hemisphere,” explains Brian Anderson of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, known as APL, in Laurel, Md. “The most recent flyby gave us our first measurements on Mercury’s western hemisphere, and with them we discovered that the planet’s magnetic field is highly symmetric.”

The probe’s Mercury Laser Altimeter, or MLA, measured the planet’s topography, allowing scientists, for the first time, to correlate high-resolution topography measurements with high-resolution images.

“The MLA collected altimetry in regions where images from MESSENGER and Mariner 10 data are available, and new images were obtained of the region sampled by the altimeter in January,” said Maria Zuber, co-investigator and head of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “These topographic measurements now improve considerably the ability to interpret surface geology.”

The Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer observed Mercury’s thin atmosphere, known as an exosphere. The instrument searched for emissions from sodium, calcium, magnesium, and hydrogen atoms. Observations of magnesium are the first detection of this chemical in Mercury’s exosphere. Preliminary analysis suggests that the spatial distributions of sodium, calcium, and magnesium are different. Simultaneous observations of these spatial distributions, also a first for the spacecraft, have opened an unprecedented window into the interaction of Mercury’s surface and exosphere.

Spacecraft images also are revealing for the first time vast geologic differences on the surface.

“Now that MESSENGER’s cameras have imaged more than 80 percent of Mercury, it is clear that, unlike the moon and Mars, Mercury’s surface is more homogeneously ancient and heavily cratered, with large extents of younger volcanic plains lying within and between giant impact basins,” said co-investigator Mark Robinson of Arizona State University in Tempe.

The project is the seventh in NASA’s Discovery Program of lower-cost, scientifically focused missions. APL designed, built and operates the spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Science instruments were built by APL; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and the University of Colorado, Boulder. GenCorp Aerojet of Sacramento, Calif., and Composite Optics Inc. of San Diego, provided the propulsion system and composite structure.

For more information about the Mercury mission, visit: www.nasa.gov/messenger

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Adapted from materials provided by NASA.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091108215449.htm

Ice Cream Researchers Making Sweet Strides With ‘Functional Foods’

Laura Ortinau (left), a graduate student in food sciences at the University of Missouri helps Rick Linhardt, coordinator of research operations and manager of Buck’s Ice Cream store, and Jessica Roland, a junior in food science and nutrition, make a batch of Tiger Stripe Ice Cream. MU researchers are working on ways to make ice cream not only tastier, but healthier as well. (Credit: Pinar Istek/University of Missouri)

A comfort food, a tasty treat, an indulgence — ice cream conjures feelings of happiness and satisfaction for millions. Ice cream researchers at the University of Missouri have discovered ways to make ice cream tastier and healthier and have contributed to ice cream development and manufacturing for more than a century. Today, MU researchers are working to make ice cream into a functional food, adding nutrients such as fiber, antioxidants and pro-biotics to premium ice cream.

“The idea of putting a functional ingredient into a food instead of just using the nutrients found in the food naturally takes a multi-functional approach,” said Ingolf Gruen, MU professor of food chemistry and ice cream researcher in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources. “Food provides calories and comfort — people want to indulge. We’re working on making ice cream satisfying and healthy.”

Adding nutrients such as pro-biotics, which are already found in some dairy products, and fiber to ice cream can improve digestive health. Many diseases are caused by inflammation that starts in the intestines, Gruen said. Improving digestive health with functional foods might reduce that inflammation. Although functional foods have health benefits, there are many challenges to adding nutrients to ice cream.

“Our major challenges are texture, flavor and psychological acceptance,” Gruen said. “The nutrients we add often have bitter tastes and affect the texture of ice cream that we have to mask. Flavors like chocolate are easier to work with because the flavor is so strong that it can overcome other flavors from the nutrients. Another challenge is determining whether people would be upset that we’re ‘tampering’ with a comfort food. We need to know if they would be more willing to pay for ice cream with added nutritional benefits.”

Gruen and his research team are looking at using the açai berry and remnants from grapes in wine-making to add nutrients to ice cream. They hope to have a prototype ready for tasting in the next six months.

This new research on ice cream as a functional food coincides with the 20th anniversary of Buck’s Ice Cream Parlor, an ice cream shop and research facility at MU. In 1989, Wendall and Ruth Arbuckle contributed about $160,000 to ice cream research at MU and were the namesake for Buck’s Ice Cream Parlor, previously Eckles Hall Ice Cream Shop from the 1920s to 1972. Buck’s might be best known for the invention of Tiger Stripe ice cream, a popular MU frozen treat made with French Vanilla ice cream and dark chocolate stripes, that is sent to people around the world.

MU has a long history of ice cream research that dates back to the 1920s. William Henry Eddie Reid, professor emeritus of dairy manufacturing, and graduate student Wendell Arbuckle, started the program by studying the texture of ice cream. In the 1960s, Robert Marshall, professor emeritus of the Department of Food Science and Nutrition, began studying ways to make ice cream meet the nutritional needs of consumers. This work led to pioneering research of low-fat ice cream. Researchers found that replacing milk fat with ingredients made from carbohydrates and proteins created low-fat frozen desserts that were similar to high-fat desserts. The ice cream industry adapted those formulas to produce the ice cream consumed today.

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Adapted from materials provided by University of Missouri-Columbia, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091109194745.htm

LaserMotive finally wins NASA’s Elevator:2010 Beam Power Challenge, climbs at 3.9 meters/second

by Tim Stevens

NASA has been trying to find someone that could meet its rigorous Space Elevator demands since 2005 and, after some notable failures, we finally have a winner. A company called LaserMotive has won the Beam Power Challenge, tasked with creating a laser-powered robot able to lift a weight on a cable at a speed of greater than two meters per second. LaserMotive’s bot nearly doubled that, managing 3.9 meters per second in one test. It was the only competitor to beat the requirement, meaning it gets the full $900,000 prize, and if anyone ever gets around to winning the Tether Challenge we might just be able to get somewhere. Nausea-inducing test video is embedded below.

[Via NewScientist]

Follow the link for a video - http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/09/lasermotive-finally-wins-nasas-elevator-2010-beam-power-challen/

Can scientists make a space elevator?

This concept image from NASA shows what a space elevator and transfer station could look like.

By Doug Gross, CNN

“The question Artsutanov asked himself had the childlike brilliance of true genius. A merely clever man could never have thought of it — or would have dismissed it instantly as absurd. If the laws of celestial mechanics make it possible for an object to stay fixed in the sky, might it not be possible to lower a cable down to the surface, and so to establish an elevator system linking earth to space?” — Arthur C. Clarke, 1979, “The Fountains of Paradise”

(CNN) — It sounds like science fiction. And it was.

Now, 30 years after “2001″ author Arthur C. Clarke wrote about an elevator that rises into outer space, serious research is happening all over the world in an effort to make the far-fetched-sounding idea a reality.

The benefits of a fully realized elevator would make carrying people and goods into space cheaper, easier and safer than with rocket launches, proponents say, opening up a host of possibilities.

Restaurants and hotels for space tourists. Wind turbines that provide energy by spinning 24 hours a day. A cheaper, easier and more environmentally friendly way to launch rockets.

Scientists envision all of the above — possibly within our lifetimes.

“Space elevator-related research is valid, but there are hurdles to overcome,” said David Smitherman, a space architect at NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center.

This week in the Mojave Desert, three teams of engineers are competing for $2 million offered up by NASA for anyone who can build a prototype of an elevator able to crawl up a kilometer-high tether while hauling a heavy payload.

“We haven’t had any winners yet, but we truly do expect to have at least one winner, probably more [this year],” said Ted Semon, spokesman for The Spaceward Foundation, which has run the competition for the past several years.

Most models for an elevator into space involve attaching a cable from a satellite, space station or other counterweight to a base on Earth’s surface.

Scientists say inertia would keep the cable tight enough to allow an elevator to climb it.

The inspiration for researchers to pursue a space elevator started, as many scientific advances have, in the fantastical world of science fiction.

In Clarke’s 1979 novel “The Fountains of Paradise,” he writes about a scientist battling technological, political and ethical difficulties involved in creating a space elevator.

In the years that followed, Clarke, who died last year, remained an outspoken advocate for researching and funding the elevator.

Others are now carrying the torch.

“Space elevator research is important because it is a way to build a bridge to space instead of ferrying everything by rocket,” said Smitherman, who has conducted research and published findings on the effort.

“Look at the cost and efficiency of a bridge versus a ferry on Earth and then look at the cost and inefficiency of the rocket ferries we use today and you will see why so many people are looking for a ‘bridge’ solution like the space elevator.”

Microsoft is among the sponsors an annual space elevator conference, and teams in Japan and Russia are among those working to turn the theory into reality — even if they all admit they have a long way to go.

Even the most avid proponents of the research admit there are big hurdles that need to be overcome.

The first, scientists say, is that there’s currently not a viable material strong enough to make the cables that will support heavy loads of passengers or cargo into orbit. According to NASA research, the space elevator cable would need to be about 22,000 miles long. That’s how far away a satellite must be to maintain orbit above a fixed spot on the Earth’s equator.

“Right now, if you use the strongest material in the world, the weight of the tether would be so much that it would actually snap,” said Semon, a retired software engineer. He said the super-light material would probably need to be about 25 times stronger than what’s now commercially available.

In a separate competition, his group offers a prize to any team that can build a tether that’s at least twice as strong as what’s currently on the market.

Another issue, scientists say, is how to keep the cable, or the elevator itself, from getting clobbered by meteorites or space junk floating around in space. Some suggest a massive cleanup of Earth’s near orbit would be required.

And then there’s the cost. Estimates are as high as $20 billion for a working system that would stretch into orbit.

Many think it would be private enterprise, not a government, that would spring for the earliest versions of the elevator.

Professor Brendan Quine and his team at York University in Toronto, Canada, think they have the answers to at least some of those problems.

They’ve built a three-story high prototype of an elevator tower that would rise roughly 13 miles (20 kilometers) — high enough to escape most of the earth’s atmosphere.

“At 20 kilometers, you still have gravity; you’re not in orbit,” Quine said. “But for a tourist, you can see basically the same things an astronaut sees — the blackness of space, the horizon of the Earth.”

In the stratosphere, the tower also could potentially be used to launch rockets, he said. The most expensive and energy-sucking part of any space launch now is blasting from the ground out of the atmosphere.

Constructed from Kevlar, the free-standing structure would use pneumatically inflated sections pressurized with a lightweight gas, such as hydrogen or helium, to actively stabilize itself and allow for flexibility. A series of platforms or pods, supported by the elevator, would be used to launch payloads into Earth’s orbit.

Quine acknowledged that the prototype is just a first step toward realizing the elevator and that several more prototypes are needed to fine-tune details.

He estimated that the cost of the basic tower would be about $2 billion — the equivalent of a massive skyscraper in places like New York — and that the technology to build it could be ready in less than 10 years.

He said a more advanced — and expensive — elevator tower could be built to go higher into the stratosphere.

But for the purposes of actually ferrying everyday people into space, 20 kilometers makes the most sense, Quine said.

“The tower might be economically viable if you’re able to transport 1,000 people a day to the to of it for about $1,000 a ticket,” he said. “At the top, you’d probably want amenities — hotels, restaurants. It could be a very pleasant experience, in contrast to zero gravity, which makes many people sick.”

For now, advocates of making the elevator a reality say they’ll keep at it. They’ll continue reminding themselves that they wouldn’t be the first to turn what started as an outlandish idea into good science.

“Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction,” Clarke once said. “They may be summed up by the phrases: One, it’s completely impossible. Two, it’s possible, but it’s not worth doing. Three, I said it was a good idea all along.”

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/11/05/space.elevator/

Black Hole Engine That Could Power Spaceships

Artificially generated black holes could provide us with the power to make inter-solar travel a possibility. New research shows how strapping a black hole to your starship might just give you the juice to get to Alpha Centauri.

Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland of Kansas State University propose a way to use black holes as fuel that is entirely within the bounds of physics and technology as we know them, but would take phenomenal amount of engineering.

The crux of their idea involves using using a laser to form a micro black hole, which could be used as an energy source. This would be a Schwarzschild, or non-rotating, black hole which outputs Hawking Radiation, and the smaller the black hole, the more energetic.

Of course, making a black hole isn’t the world’s most easy undertaking. It takes a huge amount of power to build one in the first place. To make one of these mini black holes, Crane and Westmoreland propose a 370km2 solar panel, at an orbit one million km from the surface of the sun, which, if perfectly efficient, would gather enough energy per year to make one black hole. This power would be fed to a spherically converging gamma laser, with a lasing mass of around 10^9 tonnes. However, after you make a few black holes, you can use them as a power source to make more.

According to the authors, a black hole to be used in space travel needs to meet five criteria:

1. has a long enough lifespan to be useful,
2. is powerful enough to accelerate itself up to a reasonable fraction of the speed of light in a reasonable amount of time,
3. is small enough that we can access the energy to make it,
4. is large enough that we can focus the energy to make it,
5. has mass comparable to a starship.

Fortunately, black holes have a sweet spot in terms of size, power and lifespan which is almost ideal. If you take a trip to Alpha Centauri, with an acceleration of 1g to the half way point, and then decelerate at 1g for the remainder of the journey, the trip takes a relativistic 3.5 years. A black hole that would survive the entire trip would have a radius of 0.9 attometers, would have a mass of 606,000 tonnes, and a power output of 160 petawatts. The lifespan of the black hole could be extended by feeding it mass, too.

For longer trips, you could use larger but weaker holes, and smaller and more powerful ones for short trips.

Getting the black hole to act as a power source also requires a bit of work. One potential method involves placing the hole at the focal point of a parabolic reflector attached to the ship, creating forward thrust. A slightly easier, but less efficient method would involve simply absorbing all the gamma radiation heading towards the fore of the ship, and let the rest shoot out the back to push you onwards.

Of course, there are potential problems with Crane and Westmoreland’s ideas. According to Govind Menon, Professor of Physics at Troy University, most views on extracting energy from black holes involve using ones that rotate. “With non-rotating black holes, this is a very difficult thing…we typically look for energy almost exclusively from rotating black holes. Schwarzschild black holes do not radiate in an astrophysical, gamma ray burst point of view. It is not clear if Hawking radiation alone can power starships.” Menon adds that extracting energy from black holes is highly problematic. “Given [this type] of black hole, it is not clear to me how someone would go about extracting energy.”

Another issue is what to do with the black hole when it reaches the end of its life span, as they tend to explode. “Such an explosion is powerful by terrestrial standards, but not by astronomical standards”, say Crane and Westmoreland, so it’s merely a matter of dropping the black hole around 1 AU away from anything too important, and letting it detonate.

With a set of four machines: black hole generator, black hole drive, power plant, and a self perpetuating black hole powered black hole generator, the potential is enormous. As Crane and Westmoreland say:

A civilization equipped with our four machine tool set would be almost unimaginably energy rich. It could settle the galaxy at will.

Article available on ArXiv
Found via Next Big Future

Send an email to Tim Barribeau, the author of this post, at tim@io9.com.

http://io9.com/5391989/a-black-hole-engine-that-could-power-spaceships?skyline=true&s=x

Researchers ask how best to engineer the planet

by Martin LaMonica

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–A group of academics on Friday considered the ultimate engineering challenge: building machines to stabilize the earth’s climate.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology convened a symposium here to discuss the potential benefits and pitfalls of geoengineering, also called climate engineering. Everything from shooting light-blocking particles into the atmosphere to “artificial trees” is being seriously studied, despite trepidation among researchers and opposition from others.

During talks Friday morning, academics said climate engineering techniques are not well understood and, because of the complexity of the global climate system, individual approaches are pockmarked with uncertainties.

Still, speakers at the event said it’s time to step up research in geoengineering to sort out which approaches are worth serious consideration. But they cautioned against expecting easy fixes or abandoning efforts to ratchet down the growth of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere.

“At this point the fear is that if we talk about this, people will stop cutting emissions, which is a rational fear. But the idea that we shouldn’t have a research program would be a real mistake,” said David Keith, the director of the ISEEE Energy and Environmental Systems Group at the University of Calgary during his talk the symposium, which was called Engineering a Cooler Planet.

Speakers said each climate engineering approach needs to be viewed with an associated cost and risk. For example, one relatively inexpensive idea is to shoot particles, called aerosols, into the air in order to block the amount of heat from the sun that reaches the earth’s surface.

The cooling effect from aerosols, such as sulfur dioxide, in the atmosphere is rapid–measured in days or years. But they also impact the planet’s water cycle. Early models show that large-scale efforts to inject aerosols in the atmosphere would likely make certain areas drier and affect the monsoons in India and Asia, said Joyce Penner, a professor of atmosopheric sciences at the University of Michigan.

Even with the risks and uncertainties of climate engineering, speakers said that there is risk with the so-called business-as-usual scenario where the concentration of greenhouse emissions continues to increase at its current pace.

These heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere are forecast to raise average global temperatures, speakers said. But there are a number of regional impacts from global warming, which will likely spur more research in planet-level engineering, said Thomas Karl, the director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.

For example, higher temperatures directly affect water and agriculture. The productivity and ability to reproduce of common crops goes down after certain temperature levels, Karl noted. Pests have a longer time to populate and weeds grow better with more carbon dioxide, too, he said. The west of the U.S. is already feeling the impact of droughts, which will continue if mountain snowpack decreases.

“It’s an important choice to make even if we don’t do a thing–that’s a choice itself,” said Karl. “The consequences of not studying this are enormous–understanding the physical, ecosystem, and societal impacts.”

Engineering for a cooler planet
There are two general approaches to engineering for a cooler planet: reflecting sunlight back into space or removing carbon dioxide from the air and storing it.

Injecting sulfur-based aerosols in the atmosphere have a known cooling effect observed in volcanic eruptions, including Mount Pinatubo in 1991. The approach is more practical than, say, placing mirrors in space. But there still isn’t suitable understanding of how the entire climate system would react, including potential changes to ocean circulation, ocean ecosystems, and land precipitation, said Penner.

Also, blocking sunlight from space does not address the problems caused by higher concentrations of carbon dioxide on earth, notably ocean acidification which makes it more difficult for marine animals with shells or corals to grow, speakers

noted.

(Credit: Philip Boyd, University of Otago in Dunedin.)

Other approaches for reflecting heat back into space include spraying sea salt from special-purpose boats to enhance the reflectivity of clouds or installing white roofs on buildings to bounce more sunlight back into space.

Land-based approaches to reducing greenhouse gas concentrations include growing algae-based fuels at massive scale, storing carbon dioxide in underground geological formations, and making charcoal with plants to create a soil amendment called biochar.

There have also been 12 tests to stimulate plankton growth by “fertilizing” the ocean with iron. The goal is to create a rapid “plankton bloom” which will remove carbon dioxide and sequester it in the ocean. But this technique is difficult to verify and risks transforming the existing ocean ecosystems, said Tim Lenton, professor of earth system science at the University of East Anglia.

Because of the risk and uncertainly, Lenton said he is not convinced that climate engineering proposals to block solar radiation makes sense. On the other hand, land-based approaches create competition with other uses of land, notably agriculture.

One area that clearly needs further research is the life-cycle analysis of different climate engineering idea, Lenton said. For example, dumping iron into the ocean to grow plankton has an associated carbon footprint.

“You’ll find out when you do the full calculation, it’s very difficult to make it carbon negative,” he said. “Because of the emissions in simply deploying the technology, it will veto a number of options.”

The computational models to simulate the regional impact of climate changes need to be improved as well, said David Battisti, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. In research he presented on Friday, Battisti found that once models took into account ice and ocean effects from aerosol injection, there was a significant variation on the projected impact on temperatures and precipitation.

The symposium at MIT is not the first meeting of scientists to consider geoengineering–the idea has been discussed for decades. But some of the academics on Friday said the current trajectory of climate change argues in favor of at least doing research on climate engineering techniques, even if these projects are ultimately never launched.

There is also a uncertainty around climate policy and how effective policies will be at cutting emissions, noted Keith. “It doesn’t mean that we have to do it. But it means that you do need to have the capability to do it,” he said.

In the near term, research in the field should be focused on ranking different proposals, addressing both scientific and political issues, said Philip Boyd, a professor of ocean biochemistry from the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Boyd has created a model that ranks geoengineering schemes in terms of efficacy, affordability, safety, speed of implementation, and the ability to stop a project. Societal and political factors need to be considered because conflicts over use of land, water, and the ocean creates a “geopolitical mess.”

“We pump up the potential for conflict,” he said. “It’s just a minefield in terms of teasing these apart.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10387137-54.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

Magnetic Mixing Creates Quite A Stir

Kyle Solis, a graduate student intern in Nanomaterials Sciences, prepares a sample for mixing using a new approach called vortex field mixing. (Credit: Randy Montoya)

Sandia researchers have developed a process that can mix tiny volumes of liquid, even in complicated spaces.

Researchers currently use all types of processes to try and create mixing, with only “mixed” success. “In small devices,” says Sandia materials scientist Jim Martin “people have tried all kinds of pillars and mixing cells to initiate mixing, but these approaches don’t work well.” Researchers need simpler and more reliable ways to mix in tiny places such as micrometer-sized channels, Martin said.

“Mixing liquids in tiny volumes,” Martin said, “is surprisingly difficult.” When fluid is pushed down a big pipe, eddies are generated that create mixing. But if fluid is pushed down a small pipe no eddies are generated and mixing does not occur unless you subject the fluid to tremendous pressure, which isn’t usually easy or feasible, he said.

Martin’s discovery of how to mix tiny liquid volumes arose from LDRD-funded research directed at improving the sensitivity of the chemical sensors developed in his lab. That project, “Field-Structured Composite Studies,” was a joint effort with Rod Williamson (now retired). While their LDRD project did not lead to the expected results, Martin and Williamson were surprised by the wide variety of physical effects they discovered along the way, including magnetic mixing. These effects, Martin said, ended up being much more interesting and important than the original goal.

Since the project began, Department of Energy’s Division of Material Science and Engineering, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, has started a new project whose goal is to better understand the fundamental science of field-structured composites. So the program succeeded even as it failed, and eventually Martin and graduate student intern Doug Read developed better ways to increase sensor sensitivity.

In the new method of mixing, when one turns on a particular kind of magnetic field, the magnetic particles suspended in the fluid form chains like strings of pearls. The chains start swirling around and that’s what does the mixing. The particles are then removed magnetically, leaving a nice mixed-up liquid.

More technically, the new mixing method, which Jim calls vortex field mixing, subjects a suspension of microscopic, magnetizable particles to a magnetic field whose direction is constantly spinning in a motion similar to a spinning top as it is about to collapse on its side, but much faster. In this “vortex field” the particles assemble into countless microscopic chains that follow the field motion, stirring every nook and cranny of the fluid. The vortex field stirs the liquid vigorously, and surprising fluid effects are possible, such as a kind of washing machine agitation where the spinning direction alternates periodically.

Currently, Martin, Lauren Rohwer, and graduate intern Kyle Solis work with the vortex field mixing, among other projects. Their experimental report, recently appearing in the July issue of Physical Review, has generated interest, including a Physical Review Focus article and a Research Highlight in the September MRS Bulletin.

This type of magnetic mixing with particles that assemble into micro-stir bars isn’t like the magnetic mixing done in high school chemistry class.

“In your high school chemistry class,” Martin says “when you mixed a beaker of water on a stir plate, underneath the plate was a permanent magnet spinning around to make the stir bar spin. If that hidden magnet suddenly became twice as strong, the magnetic field would double but you wouldn’t see any increase in the stirring at all.

“With our process,” Martin said “if we make the magnetic field twice as strong, the stirring becomes four times as strong because the stronger field makes the particle chains longer.”

With conventional stir-bar mixing you can increase the mixing torque by increasing the speed of the stir bar instead. It’s easy to feel this effect by simply holding the beaker slightly above the stir plate. In vortex field mixing increasing the speed of the wobbling doesn’t help, because the chains simply break into smaller pieces and the mixing torque doesn’t change at all.

Vortex field mixing stirs just as effectively with magnetic nanoparticles as with traditional micrometer-size powders. In fact, excellent mixing torques have been obtained using 100 nanometer particles. This means even the tiniest fluid volumes can be mixed, as well as the largest.

As strange as these effects are, they were initially predicted by Martin in a theory paper published in the January 2009 issue of Physical Review. This paper also explains why a simple rotating magnetic field doesn’t induce mixing, and predicts the optimal wobbling angle of the magnetic field.

Vortex field mixing requires only the modest magnetic fields provided by simple wire coils that can be scaled to the size of the fluid cavity. After mixing, a researcher can trap the particles with a permanent magnet, decant the mixed liquid and recycle the particles endlessly.

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Adapted from materials provided by DOE/Sandia National Laboratories.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091027132957.htm

Russia Proposes Nuclear Spaceship for Manned Mars Mission: Mimics 1960’s NASA Project Orion

Anatoly Perminov, Russia’s space chief, in a replay of the early 1960’s NASA Orion Project,  proposes building a nuclear-powered ship with a megawatt-class nuclear reactor at a government meeting Wednesday but didn’t explain its purpose. President Dmitry Medvedev backed the project and urged the government to find the money.

The 1960s Project Orion project was a nuclear-pulse rocket the size of the Empire State building fueled by atomic bombs with the power to destroy half of Planet Earth. The mission was to take us to Saturn in five years. The project lives today in limbo at NASA possibly to be activated should an asteroid arrive with our name on it.

The propulsion system advocated for the Orion spacecraft was based on an idea first put forward by Stanislaw Ulam and Cornelius Everett in a classified paper in 1955. Ulam and Everett suggested releasing atomic bombs behind a spacecraft, followed by disks made of solid propellant. The bombs would explode, vaporizing the material of the disks and converting it into hot plasma. As this plasma rushed out in all directions, some of it would catch up with the spacecraft, impinge upon a pusher plate, and so drive the vehicle forward.

Fast forward to Moscow, 2009: Perminov said the nuclear spaceship should be used for human flights to Mars and other planets. He said the project is challenging technologically, but could capitalize on the Soviet and Russian experience in the field, with a preliminary design ready by 2012.

“The project is aimed at implementing large-scale space exploration programs, including a manned mission to Mars, interplanetary travel, the creation and operation of planetary outposts,” Perminov’s Web statement said. Associated Press reports that “the ambitious plans contrast with Russia’s slow progress on building a replacement to its mainstay spacecraft – the Soyuz.

Russia is using Soyuz booster rockets and capsules, developed 40 years ago, to send crews to the International Space Station.”

Despite its continuing reliance on the old technology, Russia stands to take a greater role in space exploration in the coming years. NASA’s plan to retire its shuttle fleet next year will force the United States and other nations to rely on the Russian spacecraft to ferry their astronauts to and from the International Space Station until NASA’s new manned ship becomes available.

Igor Lisov, a Moscow-based expert on Russian space program, said the prospective ship would use a nuclear reactor to run an electric rocket engine. “It will be quite efficient for flight to Mars,” he told The Associated Press on Thursday. Lisov said Soviet work on a nuclear-powered electric rocket engine dates back to the 1960s when Soviet engineers began developing plans for a manned flight to Mars.

Stanley Borowski, a senior engineer at NASA specializing in nuclear rocket engines, said they have many advantages for deep space missions, such as to take astronauts and gear to Mars. In deep space, nuclear rockets are twice as fuel-efficient as conventional rockets, he said.

NASA has used small amounts of plutonium in deep space probes, including those to Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto and heading out of the solar system.

The only planetary mission currently considered by Russia is a plan to send a probe to one of Mars’ twin moons, Phobos. It was set to launch this year, but was delayed.

Casey Kazan

Sources: Associated Press and Physorg.com

Follow link for Video – http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/10/russias-nuclear-spaceship-for-manned-mars-mission-mimics-1960s-nasa-project-orion-video.html

First the Moon, Now Antarctica: China Mapping Bottom of the World in Awesome Detail

Chinese scientists have shifted its focus from mapping the moon to completing the world’s first land cover map of the Antarctica at the end of this year. The result will be the most accurate map of the continent ever published.

Using the application of high resolution remote sensing technology, the map will be the first ever to show the distribution of key features on the continent, including sea ice, snow, blue ice, rocks, soil marshes, lakes and ice crevasse. The map is also based on 1,073 images acquired from the U.S. satellite Land sat mainly during the austral summer from 1999 to 2002,according to Cheng Xiao, deputy dean of the College of Global Change and Earth System Science, Beijing Normal University, in an interview with Xinhua.

“The precision of the map is 15 meters, about 20 times of former Antarctic maps made by other countries,” Cheng said. “It will greatly advance our geographic knowledge of the Antarctica.”

The map will provide not only more accurate ground parameters for scientists to forecast global change or global warming with climate system models, but also important data for detection on the change of Antarctica land cover in a long run, Cheng said.

The 26th expedition team began its journey on Oct. 11 from Shanghai and sailed into Australia’s Coral Sea on Sunday. A total of 251 scientists, workers and logistics staff joined the team for the half-year-long research expedition on the icebreaker. The scientists will stay on the icy continent until April 10 next year.

Casey Kazan

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-10/26/content_12332541.htm

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/10/china-mapping-artarctica-in-unprecendedted-detail.html