Commentary: A tale of two pipelines — It’s time for common sense to prevail

Posted on January 22, 2014 at 9:51 am by David Holt in Keystone XL, Pipelines, Politics/Policy   

      

A crewman directs a pipe on a site for TransCanada's Keystone XL project in Wood County, Texas, in 2012. (Cody Duty / Houston Chronicle)

In March 2012, President Obama visited the Pipe Yard in Cushing, OK where he announced his support for the Gulf Coast Project and directed his administration “to cut through the red tape, break through the bureaucratic hurdles, and make this project a priority, to go ahead and get it done.”
Today – almost two years later – the Keystone Gulf Coast Project has begun shipping about 830,000 barrels of oil a day across the 485 miles from Cushing, OK south to state-of-the-art refineries down on the Gulf Coast in Nederland, TX. The project took 4,000 tradesman and construction workers 16 months to complete.  Additional vendors and local businesses also benefited including the Read Ice Company in Kountze, Texas, 25 miles northwest of Beaumont which contracted with TransCanada to provide ice cold water to construction workers.

America’s energy consumers have reason to celebrate these jobs and the economic benefits resulting from the start of service for the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline project. But even as it launches today, delay pervades the remainder of the Keystone XL pipeline. Why more than five years after the initial filing are we still waiting for a final decision from the Obama Administration?

The Keystone XL pipeline project could be so much more. The next phase of the Keystone XL Pipeline project includes building a new pipeline from Hardisty, AB to Steele City, NE, where will it will connect with an existing pipeline that runs to Cushing. This final leg will require 9,000 more tradesman and construction workers. It could provide a $5 billion investment boost into the U.S. economy – not to mention the millions in tax revenue for cities and towns along the route.

Why is building energy pipelines to Cushing, OK so important?  It is the epicenter for storing crude oil in the United States.  From Cushing, crude oil is sent to Gulf Coast refiners where it is made into gasoline, jet fuel, diesel fuel and several other products which the U.S. economy uses to power businesses, manufacturing facilities, automobiles, truck fleets and airplanes.

Building the final leg of Keystone XL will connect landlocked crude oil being produced in the Bakken formation in North Dakota to Gulf Coast refiners.  In turn, there will be downward pressure on prices and a more reliable stream of crude into and out of America’s energy producing network.
 This new found reliability will make the U.S. less dependent on crude oil imports from regimes like Venezuela or Persian Gulf countries (link to other op-ed).

With all of these tremendous benefits available to the United States through the Keystone XL pipeline, why are we still waiting for a decision?

Already subjected to five years of government study and delay, the Keystone XL pipeline has been reviewed by the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality (NDEQ). The pipeline project has now undergone multiple environmental reviews by the State Department. This new review should be completed sometime this year. After that, it’s all up to President Obama.

However, if it had followed the same regulatory process as the Gulf Coast Project, the Keystone XL pipeline would now be up and running, supplying America’s largest refineries on the Gulf Coast with a secure supply of lower-cost oil from producers in Canada and the U.S. Bakken region. It’s clear that there is a fundamental disconnect between the processes for these two pipelines.

Back in March 2012, President Obama stated to a crowd in Cushing, OK: “Today, we’re making this new pipeline from Cushing to the Gulf a priority…we’re going to go ahead and get that done. The northern portion of it we’re going to have to review properly to make sure that the health and safety of the American people are protected.  That’s common sense.”

We can all agree that a thorough review is appropriate to ensure that the health and safety of the American people are protected. However, after five years of foot dragging by the State Department, now we are past the point of common sense. Instead, political debate on what is now the most thoroughly studied and publicly discussed pipeline in American history has replaced any logical thought common sense. Instead of misinformation continuing to plague the progress of one of the nation’s largest “shovel ready” construction projects, it’s time to make the Keystone XL pipeline a priority.

As the most-studied and safest pipeline in history, the Keystone XL pipeline project is still a good idea and enjoys the support of more than 70 percent of Americans. Mr. President, it’s time for common sense to prevail. It’s time to build the Keystone XL pipeline.

http://fuelfix.com/blog/2014/01/22/a-tale-of-two-pipelines-its-time-for-common-sense-to-prevail/

Issues and Trends: Natural Gas

Production Lookback 2013

Released: January 16, 2014

U.S. natural gas production increases by 1% in 2013

Average dry natural gas production grew modestly in 2013, despite a 35% year-on-year rise in prices. Production grew from 65.7 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) in 2012 to 66.5 Bcf/d in 2013, a 1% increase and the lowest annual growth since 2005. This production growth was essentially flat when compared to the 5% growth in 2012 and the 7% growth in 2011.

Average wholesale (spot) prices for natural gas in 2013 increased significantly throughout the United States compared to 2012. The average wholesale price for natural gas at Henry Hub in Erath, Louisiana, a key benchmark location for pricing throughout the United States, rose to $3.73 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) in 2013. However, 2013 prices were, with the exception of 2012, at their lowest level since 2002.

 

Slower demand growth, low imports limit room for gas production growth

Although prices remained relatively low, total disposition (consumption, gross exports, and net storage injections) of natural gas was flat in 2013 compared with 2012 levels, versus the annual 3% increase in 2012, and the 4% increase in 2011. Domestic consumption in 2013, which makes up 96% of total U.S. natural gas disposition, increased by 2%, despite the decrease in consumption of natural gas for electric generation (power burn) in 2013. Natural gas consumed for power burn was 2.6 Bcf/d below 2012 levels as coal regained some of its market share in response to higher natural gas prices, compared with coal, and as cooler summer temperatures in 2013 reduced total electric generation demand. Increased winter natural gas demand offset the decline in power burn, leading to a net increase in consumption for the year.

Since 2010, domestic production has satisfied 88% of U.S. natural gas disposition, as natural gas imports to the United States have continued to decline. As recently as 2007, the United States depended on imports for 16% of its natural gas needs. Although U.S. production has displaced some natural gas imports to the United States, imports continue, although as a marginal source of supply, largely during cold weather and pipeline maintenance outages.

Storage injections provided another outlet for U.S. natural gas production growth. The net withdrawal in working natural gas storage inventories in 2013 was significantly higher than 2012 because of large withdrawals in January and December. High demand at the end of the year offset the effect of end-of-October working gas inventories that had reached their third-highest level in the past 10 years. By the end of December, inventories had declined to their seventh-highest level in the past 10 years. The net withdrawal in inventories in 2013 was 537 billion cubic feet (Bcf), significantly greater than the net withdrawal of 49 Bcf in 2012. In 2011, there was a net injection into working inventories of 351 Bcf.

 

Growth in Marcellus Shale production offsets decreases in other basins

Greater levels of natural gas output in the Marcellus Shale contributed to the net increase in national production levels despite decreases in other basins. Dry natural gas production from Marcellus rose by 61%, from a 2012 average of 6.5 Bcf/d to a 2013 average of 10.4 Bcf/d (Figure 2), according to U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) calculations based on data from Drillinginfo.

Marcellus production alone accounted for 75% of all production growth over the past year in the six basins covered in EIA's recently released Drilling Productivity Report (DPR), which highlights the latest regional trends in drilling, completion, and production from gas- and oil-producing wells.

Despite a 21% decline from 2012 to 2013 in the total rig count in the Marcellus, natural gas output per rig rose by 47%, according to the DPR. Production gains have come largely from northeastern portions of the basin producing drier natural gas, where output has benefitted from gathering line and pipeline capacity expansions. However, infrastructure improvements have also bolstered production in the wetter southwestern portions of the basin, which saw increased drilling in 2013.

Outside of Marcellus, the shift toward liquids-rich production continued in 2013

Wide differences in natural gas and oil prices affect the decisions that upstream operators make about where and how to deploy capital. Although natural gas prices remained at relatively low levels through the end of 2013, crude oil prices remained mostly above $100/barrel (bbl), encouraging operators to target regions with wetter gas and higher returns on investment.

The Haynesville Shale in Texas and Louisiana and the Barnett Shale in Texas generally are considered dry natural gas plays because of the low level of liquids in their production streams. Production from the Haynesville and Barnett declined by 27% and 9%, respectively, between 2013 and 2012. The Barnett and Haynesville reductions exceeded the 3% combined increase in gas production at the Fayetteville Shale in Arkansas and the nearby Woodford Shale in Oklahoma. The Baker Hughes active rig count decreased significantly in all four of these basins between 2011 and 2013. Some of the production declines in these fields are also partially attributable to the normal decline or maturity of their existing wells.

At the same time, increased new production activity in wetter shale basins enabled these basins to pick up some of the drop-off in production from their drier counterparts. At the Eagle Ford in south Texas, where operators target a combination of crude oil, condensate, and natural gas liquids, average daily gas production reached 3.3 Bcf/d in 2013, 54% higher than in 2012. In 2012, the average active rig count in Eagle Ford rose by 29% before declining slightly in 2013. Production also grew by 33% in the Bakken Shale in North Dakota and Montana, where operators predominantly target crude oil, following a rig count increase in 2012.

The shift in new production activity from drier to wetter production fields is demonstrated by data on Lower 48 gross withdrawals from wells producing only natural gas, versus those producing a combination of gas and oil. While gross withdrawals from wells containing only natural gas rose by 4% from 2011 to 2013, from 40.4 Bcf/d to 42.1 Bcf/d, gross withdrawals from wells producing a combination of both gas and oil increased by 7%, from 25.0 Bcf/d to 26.8 Bcf/d (Figure 3), according to EIA calculations with data from Drillinginfo.

The increased gross withdrawals from wells producing both gas and oil coincided with changes in the oil-to-natural gas price ratio. When the oil-to-natural gas price ratio increased by 49% in 2012, from $28.33/bbl of Brent crude oil in 2011 to $42.13/bbl of Brent crude oil for every $1.00/MMBtu of natural gas, gross withdrawals from wells producing both gas and oil rose by 8%. When gas prices rose and the oil-to-gas price ratio decreased by 30% to $29.61/bbl of Brent crude oil for every $1.00/MMBtu of natural gas in 2013, gross withdrawals from wells producing both gas and oil decreased by 1%. The shift in the focus of new natural gas production activity was also evident in terms of the increase since 2010 in the percentage of new wells that produced both natural gas and oil (Figure 4). In 2010, 57% of all new natural gas-producing wells produced both gas and oil. By 2012, 73% of all new natural gas producing wells produced both gas and oil. This share fell to 68% in 2013.

Other production

The shift in natural gas production also involved movement away from geologically more permeable zones that have traditionally accounted for a greater share of North American gas supply. Marketed natural gas production was generally flat or down for inland production areas outside of shale and tight formations in 2012 and 2013, except for New Mexico, and also remained relatively flat in onshore Canada. Production from offshore areas in both Canada and the United States declined between 2012 and 2013

 

More info:  http://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/issuesandtrends/production/2013/?src=home-b1

Northern Ireland Christians force cancellation of comedy based on Bible

Play is pulled from schedule of Newtownabbey theatre after calls for ban from DUP politicians   

• Henry McDonald, Ireland correspondent
• theguardian.com, Thursday 23 January 2014 08.36 EST

The Theatre at the Mill is run by the DUP-dominated Newtownabbey borough council. Photograph: Paul Mcerlane

 

Christians have forced the cancellation of play at a Northern Ireland theatre because it supposedly mocks the Bible, it has emerged.

The irreverent comedy The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged) has been pulled from the schedule of the Theatre at the Mill in Newtownabbey on the northern outskirts of Belfast.
Evangelical Christian politicians from the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) called for the play to be banned from the theatre, which is run by unionist-dominated Newtownabbey borough council.
The Reduced Shakespeare Company was due to start its latest UK tour by presenting the show at the venue in Co Antrim on 29 and 30 January.

But the Theatre at the Mill confirmed on Thursday that the two planned performances had been cancelled and said refunds would be available from its box office.

The Democratic Unionist councillor Billy Ball had called for the play to be banned because it would cause offence to Christians.

"For Christians, the Bible is the infallible word of God and it's not something to be made fun of. These people are treating something sacred with irreverence and disrespect," he said.

But the theatre group behind the production pointed out that they had taken the show to Jerusalem recently and had had no problems staging it, nor were there any protests from the Israeli authorities.

Before the cancellation on Thursday, Dave Naylor, the play's producer, had said: "Maybe Councillor Ball should come and see our show before denouncing it as unholy. But he'd better be quick as all his comments have done is increase ticket sales."

The drama company's production poses questions in the play such as: "Did Adam and Eve have navels? Did Moses really look like Charlton Heston?"

In its promotion for the play, the company adds: "Whether you are Catholic or Protestant, Muslim or Jew, atheist or Jedi, you will be tickled by the RSC's romp through old-time religion."
The evangelical Christian wing of the DUP has a long history of trying to ban works of art, films, exhibitions and dramas that it regards as blasphemous or offensive. DUP-controlled councils have banned Monty Python's Life of Brian and even barred the Electric Light Orchestra from playing a concert in a Ballymena-council-controlled leisure centre because the band were staging the gig on a Sunday.

The DUP also pioneered protests against the first sex shops to open in Northern Ireland during the 1980s. Outside one sex shop that had opened in the future first minister Peter Robinson's East Belfast constituency, DUP activists held up placards calling on passing motorists to "bump your horn for decency".

New Global Program Bolsters Skills of Experts in Sustainable Energy

Installing solar panels in West Africa

Energy issues facing society are one of the biggest technological and policy challenges of the twenty-first century. A new global program at Columbia Engineering is aiming to make headway in addressing this problem.

“It is absolutely critical to develop a global curriculum to prepare engineers to ensure universal access to modern energy services,” says Mechanical Engineering Professor Vijay Modi, who has been working on these issues around the world for 10 years. “For example, there are 1.4 billion people without electricity access today—We want to bring electricity access to them. We also need to increase the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix as it is one of the drivers of decarbonization, and accelerate the rate of improvement in energy efficiency.”

To that end, Modi has been working with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (ECREEE), the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), and the Engineering Department of the University of Cape Verde in Mindelo, Sao Vicente, to design an innovative distance-learning program that leads to a certification in Sustainable Energy Solutions. The program is designed to build skills of experts in the field of sustainable energy systems and solutions. In January 2014, the certification program will be offered to a pilot group of 10 students from West African countries that are members of ECOWAS. This cohort is expected to comprise current employees of utilities, regulators, or independent power producers.

The idea for the program came about during a post-event discussion hosted by Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger as part of the World Leaders Forum a few years ago. Enhanced engineering skill development was identified as an essential need. Subsequently, ECREEE and UNIDO identified a need for assistance in the areas of design and assessment capability, as well as techno-economic feasibility of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies.

“Our overall objective,” says Modi, “is to strengthen the long-term capabilities of these institutions, service providers, and companies to design and appraise projects, integrate renewable energy and energy efficiency into their planning, operational, and monitoring cycles, and contribute to strengthening of policy framework at the national level.”

The School’s Certification of Professional Achievement in Sustainable Energy Solutions comprises four 3-credit courses, two of which are taught by Modi. He is joined by Mechanical Engineering Assistant Professor Arvind Narayanaswamy and Pezhman Akbari, lecturer in the discipline of mechanical engineering. The yearlong program includes distance-learning lessons through Columbia Video Network as well as face-to-face workshops to be held at the University of Cape Verde.
ECOWAS is a regional group of 15 countries—Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo—founded in 1975. “Our Columbia Engineering program dovetails nicely with ECOWAS’s mission,” Columbia Engineering Vice Dean Soulaymane Kachani adds, “which is to create a favorable business environment for development within the region and to ensure that private enterprise is effectively supported and sustained.” Modi’s laboratory is already working in the region with a range of projects that include innovations, information systems, and/or national planning support in Mali, Senegal, Nigeria, and Liberia.

The program offers a broad overview of possible energy generation technologies, integration of renewable technologies in the larger energy system, both bottom-up and top-down approaches to achieving energy access and reliable supply, smart payment systems and business models for entrepreneurs, and devising national scale programs to achieve the above objectives along with energy efficiency technologies.

 

—by Holly Evarts

Happy Birthday, Lord Byron: His Epic Poem “Don Juan,” Annotated by Isaac Asimov and Illustrated by Milton Glaser

by Maria Popova

 

Three of history’s greatest geniuses converge around some of the finest satire ever written.

Despite having fathered Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, Lord Byron (January 22, 1788–April 19, 1824) is best remembered for his poetry, countless collections of which have been published in the centuries since he put ink to paper. But arguably the best such volume is a rare vintage gem published by Doubleday — which also commissioned Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for the essays of Montaigne and Edward Gorey’s paperback covers for literary classics — in 1972. The lavish thousand-page tome Asimov’s Annotated Don Juan (public library) presents Byron’s Don Juan — one of the great epic poems in the English language, launching an audacious and timeless attack on greed, complacency, and hypocrisy — with annotations by beloved writer Isaac Asimov, a man of strong opinions and a large heart, and breathlessly gorgeous pen-and-ink illustrations by none other than Milton Glaser, creator of the iconic I♥NY logo and celebrated as the greatest graphic designer of our time.

What makes the pairing especially poetic is that, besides their match of cultural stature, Asimov and Glaser have in common a certain sensibility, a shared faith in the human spirit — Asimov with his religion of humanism and Glaser with his belief in the kindness of the universe.

To be sure, Asimov takes no prisoners with his annotations — or, rather, plays along with Byron — beginning with the opening verse, which reads:

FRAGMENT
I would to heaven that I were so much clay,
As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling—
Because at least the past were passed away—
And for the future—(but I write this reeling,
Having got drunk exceedingly today,
So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling)
I say—the future is a serious matter—
And so—for God’s sake—hock and soda water!

Beneath it, Asimov winks:

This isolated stanza has nothing to do with the poem, but it epitomizes Byron’s utter lack of reverence for anything—even himself—and therefore sets the tone of what follows, even if it is divorced from the content.

After Byron’s third stanza, which begins with “You, Bob! are rather insolent, you know” and ends “… because you soar too high, Bob, / And fall, for lack of moisture quite a dry, Bob!,” Asimov, who wears the many hats of historian, etymologist, lexicographer, literary critic, and cultural commentator, adds an entertaining and educational clarifier:

“A dry Bob” seems to have been then-current slang for intercourse without ejaculation (“lack of moisture”). The use of the phrase shocked and (of course) titillated the public and was a particularly effective way of indicating that Southey went through the motions of writing poetry without producing anything poetic.

Though most of Asimov’s annotations offer biographical and historical context, they are by no means dry or bland. He imbues his commentary with his characteristic snark: After another Byron verse that reads “And recollect a poet nothing loses / in giving to his brethren their full meed / of merits, and complaint of present days / Is not the certain path to future praise,” Asimov snidely remarks:

It is obvious that Byron emphatically does not follow his own advice, but then few people do.

Indeed, Asimov seems entranced by Byron’s contradictions. In another note, he writes:

There was a great deal of cousin-marriage in Byron’s family. But that was not all. Perhaps the most scandalous item in the Byronic array of scandal was the fact that Byron seems to have made his half-sister, Augusta, his mistress, and to have had a daughter by her. He was fascinated by his own action in this respect and dealt with incest over and over in his writing.

Asimov’s own witty and spirited irreverence comes through once again in a comment on Byron’s usage of “wh—” and “G—d” in the fourth canto, wherein Asimov adds to literary history’s finest meditations on censorship:

Like “damn,” “whore” could not be spelled out, though what sense of purity is served by a missing “o” is known only to the Devil and to censors.
[…]
“God,” like “whore,” sometimes requires a missing “o” to be acceptable to the censor. Surely only a censor’s mind could find such neatly equal embarrassment in these two words.

Asimov weaves his own reservations about religion into the annotations, remarking in one about Byron’s line “‘But heaven,’ as Cassio says, ‘is above all—’” in canto nine:

The phrase “heaven is above all” is a kind of last resort of puzzled mankind. If problems are insoluble, leave them then to God, to whom nothing (by definition) is insoluble. THus, in Shakespeare’s Othello, when Cassio is tempted into drinking by the villainous Iago, the former quickly finds himself befuddled by alcohol and must find refuge in “Well; God’s above all…”

Above all, however, Asimov seems to peer straight into Byron’s soul, discerning his motives and intentions with equal parts clarity and compassion. In the twelfth canto, where Byron writes “I thought, at setting off, about two dozen / Cantos would do; but at Apollo’s pleading, / If that my Pegasus should not be founder’d, / I think to canter gently through a hundred,” Asimov remarks:

Byron may well have intended to keep writing Don Juan all his life as a perfect vehicle for satirizing the age. But, alas, he was approaching the end.

In his final footnote, Asimov revisits the subject of Don Juan’s intended fate:

Byron always maintained he had no plan for Don Juan, but simply improvised as he went along, taking all the world as his target. And, indeed, as we go from canto to canto, the plot grows thinner, the digressions longer, the satire deeper, so that it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that no matter how long he had lived and how long written, Byron would never have finished Don Juan nor progressed enormously with the plot, even though the number of cantos had reached the century mark. At one time he said he would send Juan to every nation in turn, satirizing each in its own fashion, and have him end an extreme radical like Cloots in the Reign of Terror, or else to end by sending him either to Hell or to an unhappy marriage, whichever was worse. 

And yet — I wonder if Byron might not have relented. Might he not have had Don Juan visit Hell, but have had him saved from damnation by the intercession of the shade of Haidée, surely to be found in Heaven? Might he not, then, in the end, have married Leila, the little girl he had saved at Izmail, and settled down to the blameless life of husband, father, and country squire?

Though Asimov’s Annotated Don Juan is, sadly, long out of print, I was fortunate enough to find a surviving copy of this out-of-print treasure at Heather O’Donnell’s wonderful Honey & Wax, which is a gift to bibliophiles everywhere and a heartening game-changer for the world of rare books.
Copies can also be found elsewhere online as well as at some better-stocked public libraries, and are well worth the splurge or the trip.

Complement this treat with other rare artistic editions of literary classics, including Matisse’s 1935 etchings for Ulysses, Picasso’s drawings for a naughty ancient Greek comedy, William Blake’s paintings for Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Salvador Dalí’s prolific illustrations for Don Quixote in 1946, the essays of Montaigne in 1947, Alice in Wonderland in 1969, and Romeo & Juliet in 1975.

Physicists Produce Quantum Version of the Cheshire Cat

2014-01-22 16:45

Katia Moskvitch in ScienceNow

 

 

 

In Lewis Carroll's famous children's novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice meets the Cheshire Cat, which disappears and leaves only its grin behind. Now, physicists have created a quantum version of the feline by separating an object—a neutron—from its physical property—its magnetism. The experiment is the latest example of how quantum mechanics becomes even weirder using a technique called weak measurement and could provide researchers with an odd new experimental tool for performing precision measurements.

In quantum physics, tiny particles can be in opposite conditions or states at the same time, a property known as superposition. For instance, an electron can literally spin in opposite directions simultaneously. Try to measure the spin, however, and that state will "collapse" so that the electron is found spinning one way or the other. That's because quantum theory generally forbids you to measure a particle's state without altering it—at least ordinarily.

But in 1988, Yakir Aharonov, a theorist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, and colleagues dreamed up a way to measure delicate quantum states without disturbing them through so-called weak measurements. There's a price to pay, of course. A weak measurement can't reveal anything about an individual particle, but only the behavior of many particles all in the same state. And it requires not only putting the particles in just the right state to begin with, but also picking only those in a specific different state in the end, so the whole experiment has to be analyzed retrospectively. Nevertheless, weak measurements can probe phenomena that ordinary measurements can't, and last November Aharonov and colleagues described how they could be used to realize a quantum Cheshire Cat.

Here’s the idea. A beam of neutrons all magnetized in the same direction, say right, enters a device called a neutron interferometer (see diagram). The beam strikes a beam splitter, which splits not only the macroscopic beam but also the quantum wave describing each neutron. So after the beam splitter, each neutron is in the bizarre quantum state: in path 1, polarized right, and in path 2, polarized right. This is the "preselected" state. After taking different paths, the waves recombine at the second beam splitter and interfere with each other so that the neutrons all exit the interferometer through one of two "ports," the light port.

Now, here's where things get weird. Experimenters install a few gadgets before the second beam splitter that work like a filter so that if a neutron is in the state in path 1, polarized right and in path 2, polarized left—the "postselected state”—it will come out the dark port instead. That may sound superfluous, because each neutron is not in that state. However, the two states have a common part—in path 1, polarized right—and that overlap ensures that some neutrons emerge from the dark port, just by virtue of trying to filter out this postselected state.

If you look at only these postselected events, you can say for sure that the neutron went through path 1. That's because the only parts of the preselected and postselected states that overlap are the ones for path 1. On the other hand, if you try to measure the magnetism, you'll find that all the magnetism is in path 2. That's because to know the magnetism is there, you essentially have to apply a magnetic field that flips the neutron’s polarization. So after the measurement, the parts of the altered preselected state and postselected state that are identical are the ones for path 2.

The traditional interpretation is that the whole argument is moot. If you reach into path 1 with a neutron detector, then that measurement alters the original quantum state, making it pointless to speculate about what you would have seen if you'd measured magnetism in the path 2 instead, and vice versa. According to Aharonov’s theory though, the measurements could be done weakly, so that they would not alter the neutrons' state. And that's exactly what Yuji Hasegawa of the Vienna University of Technology and colleagues have done, as they report in a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server.

Using a neutron interferometer at the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France, the researchers inserted an absorber that soaked up only a few percent of the neutrons—not enough to ruin the interference of the waves. When they put it in path 2, the rate of neutrons leaving the dark port remained the same. When they put it in path 1, the number decreased, proving that the neutrons in the postselected state go through path 1. Then, they applied a small magnetic field to slightly rotate the neutrons’ polarization and perturb the interference pattern. When the field was applied to path 1, it had no effect. But in path two, the number of neutrons exiting the dark port changed, proving the neutrons' magnetism was all in path 2. Thus the cat—the neutron—was separated from its grin—its magnetism.

The experiment will “surely help us understand better the counter-intuitive nature of quantum phenomena,” says Sandu Popescu, a theorist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom who was not involved in the experiment. The odd quantum phenomenon might even prove useful for making better precision measurements, he says. Some physicists have been testing whether Newton's law of gravity remains correct at distances shorter than a millimeter or so; the delicate experiments can be muddled by extraneous electromagnetic effects. But if researcher could split the mass of neutrons from their magnetism, then they might be able to study gravitational effects without being disturbed by electromagnetic ones, says Aephraim Steinberg, an experimenter at the University of Toronto in Canada.

Epigenetics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the unfolding of an organism or the theory that plants and animals (including humans) develop in this way, see epigenesis (biology). For epigenetics in robotics, see developmental robotics.

In biology, and specifically genetics, epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene activity that are not caused by changes in the DNA sequence; it also can be used to describe the study of stable, long-term alterations in the transcriptional potential of a cell that are not necessarily heritable. Unlike simple genetics based on changes to the DNA sequence (the genotype), the changes in gene expression or cellular phenotype of epigenetics have other causes. The name epi- (Greek: επί- over, outside of, around) -genetics.^[1]

 

The term also refers to the changes themselves: functionally relevant changes to the genome that do not involve a change in the nucleotide sequence. Examples of mechanisms that produce such changes are DNA methylation and histone modification, each of which alters how genes are expressed without altering the underlying DNA sequence. Gene expression can be controlled through the action of repressor proteins that attach to silencer regions of the DNA. These epigenetic changes may last through cell divisions for the duration of the cell's life, and may also last for multiple generations even though they do not involve changes in the underlying DNA sequence of the organism;^[2] instead, non-genetic factors cause the organism's genes to behave (or "express themselves") differently.^[3] (There are objections to the use of the term epigenetic to describe chemical modification of histone, since it remains unclear whether or not histone modifications are heritable.)^[4]

 

One example of an epigenetic change in eukaryotic biology is the process of cellular differentiation. During morphogenesis, totipotent stem cells become the various pluripotent cell lines of the embryo, which in turn become fully differentiated cells. In other words, as a single fertilized egg cell – the zygote – continues to divide, the resulting daughter cells change into all the different cell types in an organism, including neurons, muscle cells, epithelium, endothelium of blood vessels, etc., by activating some genes while inhibiting the expression of others.^[5]

 

In 2011, it was demonstrated that the methylation of mRNA plays a critical role in human energy homeostasis. The obesity-associated FTO gene is shown to be able to demethylate N6-methyladenosine in RNA. This discovery launched the subfield of RNA epigenetics.^[6][7]

Molecular basis of epigenetics

Epigenetic changes can modify the activation of certain genes, but not the sequence of DNA. Additionally, the chromatin proteins associated with DNA may be activated or silenced. This is why the differentiated cells in a multi-cellular organism express only the genes that are necessary for their own activity. Epigenetic changes are preserved when cells divide. Most epigenetic changes only occur within the course of one individual organism's lifetime, but, if gene inactivation occurs in a sperm or egg cell that results in fertilization, then some epigenetic changes can be transferred to the next generation.^[22] This raises the question of whether or not epigenetic changes in an organism can alter the basic structure of its DNA (see Evolution, below), a form of Lamarckism.

 

Specific epigenetic processes include paramutation, bookmarking, imprinting, gene silencing, X chromosome inactivation, position effect, reprogramming, transvection, maternal effects, the progress of carcinogenesis, many effects of teratogens, regulation of histone modifications and heterochromatin, and technical limitations affecting parthenogenesis and cloning.

 

DNA damage can also cause epigenetic changes.^[23][24][25] DNA damages are very frequent, occurring on average about 10,000 times a day per cell of the human body (see DNA damage (naturally occurring)). These damages are largely repaired, but at the site of a DNA repair, epigenetic changes can remain.^[26] In particular, a double strand break in DNA can initiate unprogrammed epigenetic gene silencing both by causing DNA methylation as well as by promoting silencing types of histone modifications (chromatin remodeling) (see next section).^[27] In addition, the enzyme Parp1 (poly(ADP)-ribose polymerase) and its product poly(ADP)-ribose (PAR) accumulate at sites of DNA damage as part of a repair process.^[28] This accumulation, in turn, directs recruitment and activation of the chromatin remodeling protein ALC1 that can cause nucleosome remodeling.^[29] Nucleosome remodeling has been found to cause, for instance, epigenetic silencing of DNA repair gene MLH1.^[19][30] DNA damaging chemicals, such as benzene, hydroquinone, styrene, carbon tetrachloride and trichloroethylene, cause considerable hypomethylation of DNA, some through the activation of oxidative stress pathways.^[31]

 

Foods are known to alter the epigenetics of rats on different diets.^[32] Some food components epigenetically increase the levels of DNA repair enzymes such as MGMT and MLH1^[33] and p53.^[34][35] Other food components can reduce DNA damage, such as soy isoflavones^[36][37] and bilberry anthocyanins.^[38]

 

^{For more details and references see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics}