GEN-ERIC News

A previously undiscovered type of aurora could be brightening the skies over the poles. That’s the conclusion from satellite images of the poles showing the new phenomenon above Antarctic in 2004. The conventional aurora borealis in the Arctic and aurora australis in the Antarctic are typically seen as curtains of brightly coloured light descending through the atmosphere near the poles. The light is generated when electrons from the solar wind become trapped and accelerated by the Earth’s magnetic field to energies in excess of 1 kiloelectronvolt.

Missing something? The vents on the space shuttle and International Space Station serve as the lost and found, sucking up anything that’s floating about unsecured. The shuttle commode requires that astronauts align themselves precisely in the dead center of the seat. A mock-up of the shuttle toilet, complete with built-in camera, is used to train them how to position themselves, and more…

Researchers have found a surprising diversity of hardy bacteria in a seemingly unlikely place — the so-called sterile clean rooms where NASA assembles its spacecraft and prepares them for launching. Samples of air and surfaces in the clean rooms at three National Aeronautics and Space Administration centers revealed surprising numbers and types of robust bacteria that appear to resist normal sterilization procedures, according to a newly published study. The findings are significant, the researchers report, because they can help reduce the chances of stowaway microbes contaminating planets and other bodies visited by the spacecraft and confounding efforts to discover new life elsewhere. “These findings will advance the search for life on Mars and other worlds both by sparking improved cleaning and sterilization methods and by preventing false-positive results in future experiments to detect extraterrestrial life,” said the leader of the study, Dr. Kasthuri Venkateswaran, a microbiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

The amount of dark matter left over from the early universe may be less than previously believed. Research published in the open access journal PMC Physics A shows that the “relic abundance” of stable dark matter particles such as the neutralino may be reduced as compared to standard cosmology theories due to the effects of the “dilaton"‘, a particle with zero spin in the gravitational sector of strings. Results were obtained by studying a special “off-shell” time-dependent term (due to the dilaton) in the Boltzmann equation that describes the evolution of hot matter density as the Universe cooled down. “The formalism that this work used was developed in partial collaboration with John Ellis of CERN and Vasiliki Mitsou of IFIC, Valencia, and is a version of ‘non-critical string theory’", said Mavromatos. All the matter and radiation in the universe is thought to have been created by the Big Bang. The radiation stopped interacting with the matter some 400,000 years later – when the universe had cooled down enough for electrons and protons to form hydrogen atoms. The density of dark matter particles such as the neutralino (a dark matter candidate favoured by many of the current “supersymmetric” approaches to particle physics) was therefore “frozen” at this time – the so-called relic abundance.

Astronomers who stumbled upon a powerful burst of radio waves said on Thursday they had never seen anything like it before, and it could offer a new way to search for colliding stars or dying black holes. They were searching for pulsars – a type of rotating compacted neutron star that sends out rhythmic pulses of radiation – when they spotted the giant radio signal. It was extremely brief but very strong, and appears to have come from about 3 billion light-years away – a light-year being the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.

Strains of salmonella bacteria flown as part of a space shuttle experiment last year grew more virulent in orbit, providing researchers with new insights about how to prevent and cure infectious diseases. There was no chance the shuttle crew that flew with the super bug would get sick, though Salmonella typhimurium typically is to blame for food poisoning on Earth. The bacteria was contained in a special chamber throughout the 12-day flight of shuttle Atlantis in September 2006. Post-flight analysis suggest that changes in fluid flows around the bacteria caused by microgravity affected how the Salmonella’s genes made proteins, making it more deadly than identical strains grown simultaneously in ground-based units at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Britain is preparing territorial claims on tens of thousands of square miles of the Atlantic Ocean floor around the Falklands, Ascension Island and Rockall in the hope of annexing potentially lucrative gas, mineral and oil fields, the Guardian has learned. The UK claims, to be lodged at the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, exploit a novel legal approach that is transforming the international politics of underwater prospecting. Britain is accelerating its process of submitting applications to the UN - which is fraught with diplomatic sensitivities, not least with Argentina - before an international deadline for registering interests.

Jatropha, an ugly, fast-growing and poisonous weed that has been used as a remedy for constipation, may someday power your car. The plant, resilient to pests and resistant to drought, produces seeds with up to 40 per cent oil content that when crushed can be burned in a diesel car while the residue can be processed into biomass for power plants. Although jatropha has been used for decades by farmers in Africa as a living fence because its smell and taste repel grazing animals, the New York Times reports that jatropha may replace biofuels like ethanol that require large amounts of water, fertilizer, and energy, making their environmental benefits limited. Jatropha requires no pesticides, little water other than rain and no fertilizer beyond the nutrient-rich seed cake left after oil is pressed from its nuts. Poor farmers living close to the equator are planting jatropha on millions of acres spurred on by big oil companies like British Petroleum that are investing in jatropha cultivation.

Russian scientists in the Khibinsky Mountains in the Arctic Circle have made an important scientific discovery. They’ve found a new mineral which absorbs radiation. It does not yet have an official name and is known only as number 27-4. It can absorb radioactivity from liquid nuclear waste. “It can extract radioactive substances from any water-based solution and so has a very important practical significance,” said Yakov Pakhomovsky, the head of the Kolsky Research Institute. After coming into contact with the mineral, radioactive water becomes completely safe. Had this mineral been available to physicists after the Chernobyl or Three Mile Island disasters, the consequences might have been very different, as both accidents resulted in contamination from radioactive water.

We abuse our food. Or so says Columbia University professor Dr. Dickson Despommier. “We treat our plants poorly,” Despommier observes. “I go inside when it’s cold. Why don’t we do this with our crops?” What began as a class project to lower the heat bubble that forms every summer above Manhattan by planting green rooftops, turned into a quest to feed the world safely and sustainably. But as nice as green roofs were, they were completely inadequate. “You can only feed two per cent of New York City on the most energetic crop we can raise, which is rice,” Despommier says, noting that rice has its own problems, namely that it produces methane, a greenhouse gas. “Just as a flippant remark I said, ‘Why don’t we move the whole thing inside?’” This simple observation spurred the microbiologist and his students at the School of Public Health to take farming indoors and start the Vertical Farm Project as a way to make food production practical for urban centres. Vertical farms are like condominiums for food. Completely automated, they are a closed loop ecosystem which recycles air, water, and sewage while eliminating food–borne diseases, such as E. coli or Salmonella.

To protect against a nuclear bomb, a plague, a natural disaster, an asteroid collusion or some other doomsday event, scientists are lobbying to have a reserve library of human scientific and cultural achievements built and maintained on the moon. Jim Burke, a retired long-time NASA expert now working at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, warned that a doomsday asteroid or comet could annihilate global civilization and that something should be done to insure against the wholesale loss of human achievement. Burke suggests a project to create a “lunar biological and historical archive,” which would include samples and a record of human scientific and cultural achievements. The idea for what Burke calls a “space-age Noah’s Ark” is one shared by the Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC), which also seeks to include backups of Earth’s biological heritage and diversity in a permanently manned lunar facility.

Calving Alaskan glaciers have attracted more than the regular tourists and concerned climate scientists this summer — they’ve also brought some pioneering surfers. The surfers’ goal is to ride the swift, icy dwarf tsunamis that are launched by the calving ice in the pursuit of the biggest waves ever ridden. The waves created by the falling walls of ice near what’s known as the Million Dollar Bridge, near Cordova, Alaska, have been seen as tall 30 feet along the river banks. They have been clocked heading downstream as fast as 40 miles per hour and almost standing still relative to shore as they move upstream against the current, said Ryan Casey of Deepwater Films. Casey is developing a documentary about the strange glacial surf.

Shrubs far outgrew native grasses in Colorado rangeland when exposed to elevated levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), according to a study published by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists and cooperators at Colorado State University. The results suggest that rising CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere may be contributing to shifts in plant community dynamics, in which woody vegetation is favored over perennial forage grasses. The study will be published in this week’s online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A California researcher says Los Angeles is in the midst of a 1,000-year seismic lull characterized by relatively small and infrequent earthquakes. The report, published in the September issue of Geology, suggests seismic activity alternates between the Los Angeles basin and the Mojave Desert, which is in a seismically active period. James Dolan, associate professor of earth sciences at the University of Southern California, said the Northridge earthquake of 1994 was a drop in the bucket compared to the massive jolts that would strike the basin during a period of high seismic activity. The past 1,000 years has been relatively quiet, Dolan said Friday in a release.

Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That’s got them scratching their heads about what’s just not there. The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That’s an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday. Astronomers have known for many years that there are patches in the universe where nobody’s home. In fact, one such place is practically a neighbor, a mere 2 million light years away. But what the Minnesota team discovered, using two different types of astronomical observations, is a void that’s far bigger than scientists ever imagined. “This is 1,000 times the volume of what we sort of expected to see in terms of a typical void,” said Minnesota astronomy professor Lawrence Rudnick, author of the paper that will be published in Astrophysical Journal. “It’s not clear that we have the right word yet … This is too much of a surprise.”