A Medley of Potpourri

Monday, January 6, 2014

What energy problem? Doom-and-gloom activists have missed the real solution: tech innovation.

andrew saeger for the boston globe

By John E. Sununu

Globe Columnist

January 06, 2014

Whoever coined the phrase “everyone loves a good mystery” was wrong. What people really love is a good mystery story, with an exciting plot and — more important — a tidy resolution where everything becomes clear. It’s a formula that Edgar Allan Poe invented, Arthur Conan Doyle perfected, and Agatha Christie employed to make millions. By comparison, a mystery without resolution can be frustrating. And a mystery whose conclusion contradicts the spirit of the narrative can be downright annoying.

That’s the problem with the tale of electricity in the United States. Consumption is falling, no one saw this coming, and it contradicts the gloom-and-doom narrative that so many environmental activists use to raise money. As a result, it’s barely getting any attention. When the Associated Press published a year-end story on the dramatic trend, it appeared in this newspaper on page B6.

Yet the facts are striking. Since 2007, total electricity consumption in the United States has fallen by over 100,000 megawatt hours. Consumption on a per-person basis is down even more dramatically, reaching levels not seen since 2001. In an age of ubiquitous handheld devices and laptops, that appears counterintuitive. Surprisingly, those devices are helping to fuel the decline.

Laptops use less electricity than desktops; tablets use less than laptops; smartphones use less than tablets. As smaller devices displace their clunkier brethren, we use less power even as we spend more time online. Often unwittingly, consumers are applying enormous pressure for greater efficiency: As they demand longer and longer battery life, manufacturers must find ever-more clever ways to minimize power consumption. According to the Electric Power Research Institute, today’s iPad consumes less than 5 percent of the electricity used by a desktop computer.

In other parts of the home, traditional electricity hogs like televisions have turned over a new leaf. Today’s flat-screen models use 80 percent less energy than the monster cathode-ray sets from my childhood. That’s primarily the work of the humble light emitting diodes — low-power units that are fast becoming the light source of choice for everything from stadium jumbotrons to car headlights.

It’s noteworthy that the lion’s share of this transformation has occurred without government intervention. Computers, TVs, and industrial lighting are generally free from regulation. Consumers have been helped by energy-efficiency labels on appliances, but as electricity prices continue to rise, companies see this less as a federal imperative than as a competitive necessity.

Nor has the government been especially adept at noticing, let alone understanding, the trend. After years of erroneously forecasting usage growth, the Energy Department has at last projected a drop in household electricity consumption for 2014. The agency still maintains, however, that total consumption will increase once industrial and commercial uses are included. We’ll see. It’s difficult to argue that three years of declines were simply an anomaly when Canada and the United Kingdom have seen the same pattern.

The laws of supply and demand remain as powerful as ever. Ultimately, lower demand should help counter electricity rates that are skyrocketing because of high-priced renewable energy projects. Like the shale gas revolution rocking US energy markets, it’s a technological phenomenon that’s good for consumers, good for industry, and good for the environment.

Unfortunately, this news undermines the Malthusian narrative that the only path to salvation involves carbon taxes, renewable energy mandates, and a government that decides what kind of light bulbs you can buy. Environmentalists on the left raise lots of cash off the claim that current energy consumption trends are unsustainable and we’re running out of everything. Lower electricity consumption could really hurt their business model.

Innovation has given consumers better, faster, and more nimble electronic products. In a highly competitive marketplace, that same innovation has delivered greater efficiency and productivity as well. As always, activists and government officials would love to claim that their prescription of regulation and intervention is essential to save the world, when in fact their best course of action might be to get out of the way. Why, for example, can’t they make it easier to import cheap surplus hydroelectricity from Canada?

That remains a mystery, but perhaps not for long. As the public becomes more aware that the sky isn’t falling, the appetite for exotic solutions and hypothetical energy sources will decline even faster than electricity consumption. That conclusion may not be as entertaining as a Sherlock Holmes story. But, as the detective would appreciate, it is at least built on common sense.

Does cloudy super-Earth hold life? Weather may be factor

A cloudy super-Earth is raising questions.

Science Recorder | Delila James | Wednesday, January 01, 2014

Astronomers are having a tough time figuring out what some super-Earths are made of–thanks to layers of high-altitude clouds blanketing the planets.

The name “super-Earth” is just a bit misleading. In fact, these planets bear little resemblance to planet Earth. The term “super-Earth” only refers to the mass of the planet and doesn’t suggest anything
about its surface characteristics or potential for life.

Super-Earths are exoplanets–planets outside our solar system–that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. And despite being rather common in our Milky Way, scientists still know very little about them. Super-Earths could be watery worlds or gas balls like Jupiter with atmospheres similar to Earth’s or completely different. Unlocking their mysteries would not only enhance understanding of how planets and solar systems form, but help narrow down the search for intergalactic life forms.

In 2009, astronomers discovered a super-Earth exoplanet, classified as GJ 1214b, that is 2.7 times the size of Earth, a relatively nearby 40 light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, and races around its red dwarf star once every 38 hours. The problem was, despite being otherwise well-suited for study, scientists remained puzzled because they couldn’t determine its composition.

Now, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is shedding some light (literally) on the mystery by allowing scientists to observe GJ 1214b as it passes in front of, or transits, its host star. This gives them the chance to study the planet as starlight filters through its atmosphere. The researchers look for changes in certain wavelengths of light, which indicate what chemicals are in the atmosphere, and for apparent changes in the planet’s observed size. For example, a watery world would make it look bigger because water vapor is opaque when seen through certain colored filters and blocks starlight.

Completely contrary to the research team’s expectations, even with Hubble’s precision, they observed no apparent change in the size of the planet. According to lead author Laura Kreidberg of the University of Chicago and her colleagues, this could only mean that GJ 1214b was blanketed in a cloud cover composed not of water, but of zinc sulfide or potassium chloride. The team’s paper is published in the journal Nature.

While it’s nice to have the mystery partly solved, the downside is that the planet’s clouds, like those here on Earth, reduce visibility. So, whether GJ 2114b is home to any sort of biological activity is likely to remain a mystery for the time being.

Mars One moves closer to launching humans to Mars

Are humans headed to Mars?

Science Recorder | Rick Docksai | Tuesday, December 31, 2013

As 2013 draws to a close, the founders of Mars One will be making at least one New Year’s resolution: make even more progress toward the goal of flying humans to Mars. It’s been less than eight months since the Dutch nonprofit went public with its plan to send several humans on a one-way voyage to the red planet by 2024, but the venture has made some noteworthy headway in that short time frame.

First, the venture has secured the buy-in of several respected industry partners. Aerospace heavyweight Lockheed Martin has agreed to build a Mars Lander vessel for the future expedition; and satellite firm SSTL has signed on to build a communications satellite that will transmit communications to and from Earth and the Mars base. Lockheed Martin has been involved in nearly every one of NASA’s robotic missions to Mars, and it has a lead role in NASA’s research-and-development of technologies for a human expedition to Mars. The aerospace firm will be designing its Mars One lander based on the Phoenix, a robotic NASA lander that explored Mars back in 2008. If all goes according to plan, Lockheed Martin could have a Mars One lander prototype ready for launch into space by 2018.

This year has thrown up a few difficulties, however. Among these are the volunteer signups. Mars One seeks interested volunteers from the general public. Applications have been coming in, but at a lower number than the project had been expecting: It’s gotten 165,000 at the time of writing but had been hoping for one million. Also, the applicant pool is overwhelmingly male, whereas Mars One’s ideal pioneer group would be an even number of men and women so as to ensure enough procreation to get a new thriving human settlement on the red planet up and running.

Still, some may argue that this initial pool of 165,000 applicants is already arguably close to enough for a final crew. The initial pioneering expedition isn’t supposed to take more than a dozen finalists when it launches.

In addition, the finalizing of a crew selection won’t move until the next phase until 2015. That’s when large groups of applicants will be chosen to form into teams and compete in tests of mental and physical capability. Only those who outshine all fellow competitors on round after round of these tests will be approved to join the mission.

The years 2018 to 2023 will see several unmanned missions take off for Mars and lay out infrastructure for the base. When the humans arrive, an event that Mars One expects will happen in 2024, an operational base will be there waiting for them.

One-of-a-kind triple star system may offer clue to true nature of gravity

The system offers the scientists the best-yet opportunity to discover a violation of a concept called the Equivalence Principle.

Science Recorder | Jonathan Marker | Monday, January 06, 2014

According to a January 5 news release from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory , a team of astronomers using the NSF’s Green Bank Telescope has discovered a one-of-a-kind triple star system consisting of two white dwarf stars and a super-dense neutron star. Intriguingly, all three of these stars occupy an orbit smaller than that of Earth’s. This unique placement of three stars has permitted scientists to make the most accurate measurements yet of the intricate gravitational interactions in this type of star system. Eventually, the detailed analysis of this system may offer a major clue for understanding the true nature of gravity.

“This triple system gives us a natural cosmic laboratory far better than anything found before for learning exactly how such three-body systems work and potentially for detecting problems with General Relativity that physicists expect to see under extreme conditions,” said Scott Ransom, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. “This is the first millisecond pulsar found in such a system, and we immediately recognized that it provides us a tremendous opportunity to study the effects and nature of gravity.”

The astronomers embarked on an exhaustive observational program using the Green Bank Telescope, the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, and the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope in the Netherlands. In addition, they observed the system using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the GALEX satellite, the WIYN telescope on Kitt Peak, Arizona, and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
“The gravitational perturbations imposed on each member of this system by the others are incredibly pure and strong,” Ransom said. “The millisecond pulsar serves as an extremely powerful tool for measuring those perturbations incredibly well.”

By accurately recording the time of appearance of the pulsar’s pulses, the scientists calculated the geometry of the system and the masses of the stars with unequaled precision.

“We have made some of the most accurate measurements of masses in astrophysics,” said Anne Archibald, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. ”Some of our measurements of the relative positions of the stars in the system are accurate to hundreds of meters.”
The system offers the scientists the best-yet opportunity to discover a violation of a concept called the Equivalence Principle. According to this principle, the effect of gravity on a body does not depend on the nature or internal structure of that body.

“While Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity has so far been confirmed by every experiment, it is not compatible with quantum theory. Because of that, physicists expect that it will break down under extreme conditions,” Ransom said. ”This triple system of compact stars gives us a great opportunity to look for a violation of a specific form of the equivalence principle called the Strong Equivalence Principle.”

The complete research findings appear online January 5 in the journal Nature.

Scientists split water into hydrogen, oxygen utilizing light, nanoparticles

The experiments used different sources of light, ranging from a laser to white light simulating the solar spectrum.

Science Recorder | Jonathan Marker | Monday, December 16, 2013

According to a December 15 news release from the University of Houston (UH), researchers there have discovered a catalyst that can rapidly separate hydrogen and oxygen from water using the sun’s rays and cobalt oxide nanoparticles.

Technology potentially could create a clean, renewable source of energy

Researchers from the University of Houston have found a catalyst that can quickly generate hydrogen from water using sunlight, potentially creating a clean and renewable source of energy.

Their research, published online Sunday in Nature Nanotechnology, involved the use of cobalt oxide nanoparticles to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

Jiming Bao, lead author of the paper and an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering at UH, said the research discovered a new photocatalyst and demonstrated the potential of nanotechnology in engineering a material's property, although more work remains to be done.

Bao said photocatalytic water-splitting experiments have been tried since the 1970s, but this was the first to use cobalt oxide and the first to use neutral water under visible light at a high energy conversion efficiency without co-catalysts or sacrificial chemicals. The project involved researchers from UH, along with those from Sam Houston State University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Texas State University, Carl Zeiss Microscopy LLC, and Sichuan University.

Researchers prepared the nanoparticles in two ways, using femtosecond laser ablation and through mechanical ball milling. Despite some differences, Bao said both worked equally well.

Different sources of light were used, ranging from a laser to white light simulating the solar spectrum. He said he would expect the reaction to work equally well using natural sunlight.

Once the nanoparticles are added and light applied, the water separates into hydrogen and oxygen almost immediately, producing twice as much hydrogen as oxygen, as expected from the 2:1 hydrogen to oxygen ratio in H2O water molecules, Bao said.

The experiment has potential as a source of renewable fuel, but at a solar-to-hydrogen efficiency rate of around 5 percent, the conversion rate is still too low to be commercially viable. Bao suggested a more feasible efficiency rate would be about 10 percent, meaning that 10 percent of the incident solar energy will be converted to hydrogen chemical energy by the process.

Other issues remain to be resolved, as well, including reducing costs and extending the lifespan of cobalt oxide nanoparticles, which the researchers found became deactivated after about an hour of reaction.

"It degrades too quickly," said Bao, who also has appointments in materials engineering and the Department of Chemistry.

The work, supported by the Welch Foundation, will lead to future research, he said, including the question of why cobalt oxide nanoparticles have such a short lifespan, and questions involving chemical and electronic properties of the material.

Extinct ancient ape did not walk like a human, study shows

Jul 25, 2013
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-extinct-ancient-ape-human.html#jCp

According to a new study, led by University of Texas at Austin anthropologists Gabrielle A. Russo and Liza Shapiro, the 9- to 7-million-year-old ape from Italy did not, in fact, walk habitually on two legs.

The findings refute a long body of evidence, suggesting that Oreopithecus had the capabilities for bipedal (moving on two legs) walking.

The study, published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Human Evolution, confirms that anatomical features related to habitual upright, two-legged walking remain exclusively associated with humans and their fossil ancestors.

"Our findings offer new insight into the Oreopithecus locomotor debate," says Russo, who is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Northeast Ohio Medical University. "While it's certainly possible that Oreopithecus walked on two legs to some extent, as apes are known to employ short bouts of this activity, an increasing amount of anatomical evidence clearly demonstrates that it didn't do so habitually."

As part of the study, the researchers analyzed the fossil ape to see whether it possessed lower spine anatomy consistent with bipedal walking. They compared measurements of its lumbar vertebrae (lower back) and sacrum (a triangular bone at the base of the spine) to those of modern humans, fossil hominins (extinct bipedal human ancestors), and a sample of mammals that commonly move around in trees, including apes, sloths and an extinct lemur.

The lower spine serves as a good basis for testing the habitual bipedal locomotion hypothesis because human lumbar vertebrae and sacra exhibit distinct features that facilitate the transmission of body weight for habitual bipedalism, says Russo.

According to the findings, the anatomy of Oreopithecus lumbar vertebrae and sacrum is unlike that of humans, and more similar to apes, indicating that it is incompatible with the functional demands of walking upright as a human does.

"The lower spine of humans is highly specialized for habitual bipedalism, and is therefore a key region for assessing whether this uniquely human form of locomotion was present in Oreopithecus," says Shapiro, a professor of anthropology. "Previous debate on the locomotor behavior of Oreopithecus had focused on the anatomy of the limbs and pelvis, but no one had reassessed the controversial claim that its lower back was human-like."

'Ardi' skull reveals links to human lineage -- did our pre-chimp ancestors walk upright?

Enlarge

This is the 4.4 million-year-old cranial base of Ardipithecus ramidus from Aramis, Middle Awash research area, Ethiopia. Credit: Tim White.

One of the most hotly debated issues in current human origins research focuses on how the 4.4 million-year-old African species Ardipithecus ramidus is related to the human lineage. "Ardi" was an unusual primate. Though it possessed a tiny brain and a grasping big toe used for clambering in the trees, it had small, humanlike canine teeth and an upper pelvis modified for bipedal walking on the ground.

Scientists disagree about where this mixture of features positions Ardipithecus ramidus on the tree of human and ape relationships. Was Ardi an ape with a few humanlike features retained from an ancestor near in time (6 and 8 million years ago, according to DNA evidence) to the split between the chimpanzee and human lines? Or was it a true relative of the human line that had yet to shed many signs of its remote tree-dwelling ancestry?

New research led by ASU paleoanthropologist William Kimbel confirms Ardi's close evolutionary relationship to humans. Kimbel and his collaborators turned to the underside (or base) of a beautifully preserved partial cranium of Ardi. Their study revealed a pattern of similarity that links Ardi to Australopithecus and modern humans and but not to apes.

The research appears in the January 6, 2014, online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Kimbel is director of the ASU Institute of Human Origins, a research center of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. Joining ASU's Kimbel as co-authors are Gen Suwa (University of Tokyo Museum), Berhane Asfaw (Rift Valley Research Service, Addis Ababa), Yoel Rak (Tel Aviv University), and Tim White (University of California at Berkeley).

White's field-research team has been recovering fossil remains of Ardipithecus ramidus in the Middle Awash Research area, Ethiopia, since the 1990s. The most recent study of the Ardi skull, led by Suwa, was published in Science in 2009, whose work (with the Middle Awash team) first revealed humanlike aspects of its base. Kimbel co-leads the team that recovered the earliest known Australopithecus skulls from the Hadar site, home of the "Lucy" skeleton, in Ethiopia.
"Given the very tiny size of the Ardi skull, the similarity of its cranial base to a human's is astonishing," says Kimbel.

The cranial base is a valuable resource for studying phylogenetic, or natural evolutionary relationships, because its anatomical complexity and association with the brain, posture, and chewing system have provided numerous opportunities for adaptive evolution over time. The human cranial base, accordingly, differs profoundly from that of apes and other primates.

In humans, the structures marking the articulation of the spine with the skull are more forwardly located than in apes, the base is shorter from front to back, and the openings on each side for passage of blood vessels and nerves are more widely separated.

These shape differences affect the way the bones are arranged on the skull base such that it is fairly easy to tell apart even isolated fragments of ape and human basicrania.
Ardi's cranial base shows the distinguishing features that separate humans and Australopithecus from the apes. Kimbel's earlier research (with collaborator Rak) had shown that these human peculiarities were present in the earliest known Australopithecus skulls by 3.4 million years ago.
The new work expands the catalogue of anatomical similarities linking humans, Australopithecus, and Ardipithecus on the tree of life and shows that the human cranial base pattern is at least a million years older than Lucy's species, A. afarensis.

Paleoanthropologists generally fall into one of two camps on the cause of evolutionary changes in the human cranial base. Was it the adoption of upright posture and bipedality causing a shift in the poise of the head on the vertebral column? If so, does the humanlike cranial base of Ar. ramidus confirm postcranial evidence for partial bipedality in this species? Or, do the changes tell us about the shape of the brain (and of the base on which it sits), perhaps an early sign of brain reorganization in the human lineage? Both alternatives will need to be re-evaluated in light of the finding that Ardi does indeed appear to be more closely related to humans than to chimpanzees.

"The Ardi cranial base fills some important gaps in our understanding of human evolution above the neck," adds Kimbel. "But it opens up a host of new questions…just as it should!"