Fair Science

The Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Mechanics

2011-05-02T15:02:00.000-07:00

The Uncertainty Principle is one of the fundamental laws at the base of Quantum Mechanics. It was postulated by Heisenberg and states precise inequalities that constrain certain pairs of physical properties, such as measuring the present position while determining future momentum.

It introduces also a precise relationship between space, momentum and the Planck constant ħ.

The following video introduces in a simple way the Uncertainty Principle. Enjoy yourself on Fair Science!

The Higgs Boson the God Particle

2011-05-02T14:11:00.000-07:00

The Higgs Boson, called the God Particle, is described in the following video. The Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. The existence of the particle is postulated as a means of resolving inconsistencies in current theoretical physics, and attempts are being made to confirm the existence of the particle by experimentation. Also the Higgs boson is the only Standard Model particle that has not been observed in particle physics experiments. It is a consequence of the so-called Higgs mechanism which is the part of the Standard Model that explains how most of the known elementary particles become massive.

Have fun!

The New Technologies Expected by 2020

2011-05-01T09:10:00.000-07:00

The technology that awaits us in the future is amazing. In the next overview we will view, according to the website popsci.com, what are the major technological innovations that lie ahead for future. Popsci.com the year 2020 as a deadline, and innovations technology that should be ready in only 9 years old. Some of Technological innovations that we will be feasible, for others we wait a few more years. If nothing else is a great way to fantasize and imagine how it will be our future.

Japanese Lunar Base

The Japaneses, as we all know, are at the forefront especially in technology and robotics. There is a program by Japan to build a robotics moon base designed for robots. Currently there is no country in the world outside of Japan could make a similar undertaking. Unfortunately, news reports of Fukushima have committed and will commit in the future Japan in difficult to repair the devastated area of his Country and the nuclear emergency. The Japanese will be able to achieve a such an undertaking? But why a lunar base of robots for robots? In the next post will talk about extraction of hydrogen from lunar rocks and mining Helio-3 and everything will be clear!

Superfast rail between London and Beijing

As everyone knows China is preparing to become the largest World Reference economy. The Chinese have therefore planned a technological railway line linking London to Beijing. China will pay the construction costs, would take in exchange for the exploitation of minerals extracted from the works of excavation, and more generally on part of the resources of the countries involved that will benefit. The plan seems feasible but I see very complicated by the political point of view to find a satisfactory agreement between the 17 countries involved.
We'll see!

Cars with autopilot

The possibility that the cars will auto-drive is one of the innovation Technologies of the most pursued by many companies that deal with development software worldwide. Surely it would be a great comfort by most of the drivers who travel and at the same time could relax or work. I personally love to drive and therefore only in extreme or urgent case I will use a similar technology, but an autopilot would be truly a global breakthrough.

But what are the critical points? You should develop a network of communication between cars in order they do not interfere in different ways and maintain satisfactory security standard. As travelers know well the wireless infrastructure is currently unsatisfactory even for our computer!
2020, I think it is a date too much optimistic for this Technological innovation!

Biofuels at costs competitive with fossil fuels

Biofuels I believe that are not a future technological innovation, it is a technology already competitive today. For this technology we enters the field of Geopolitics. On the one hand the countries largest consumer of fossil fuels do not want to depend too much on Middle Eastern countries, on the other the big oil companies (the famous seven sisters) that do not want to lose their political and economical power. But there are countries, such as Brazil, which already currently use biofuels for years along with traditional fuels for cars moving on their own territory.

Flying Cars

Even this would be a real revolution and change in quality of everyday life. Think of the traffic of the most world's great capitals. It is also true that the profession of the flight controllers would become more frequent and complicated! I believe that at present this technology is still far from becoming reality. We need to develop magnetic motors the works by levitation before.

Control of tools by Brainwaves

The ability to control computers, doors, washing machines etc. .. through brainwaves and then "telepathically" has always been the dream of every man. It is the way in which this goal could be achieved through the implantation of microchips under the skin, which is in discussion. Unfortunately, I think we are still far from such a result. We have not yet clear vision of how to operate the electro-chemical interactions between neurons to be interpreted by the microchip. We'll see!

Screens with OLED technology

However these technologies have a maturity level that can be expected that in the near future, all screens will be thin and rolling up mainly with many touch properties. We are not far from a revolution in this sense.

Other Technological Innovations
Other revolutionary ideas that can improve the quality of life or provide opportunity to benefit from opportunities unknown to those people who have lived before may be: able to travel through space by means of private companies, low cost computer with capacity to operate similar to our brain, capacity of simultaneous translation from any language, glasses with enlarged reality and possibility to give information on objects you are viewing, the membranes can play typical behavior of the brain, thoughts, etc.....

The future is upon us. We'll see which of these technological innovations above descripted will be realized by 2020, or sooner or later. Certainly the future often exceeds all our expectations.

Innovation technology, you know, is often generated by random discoveries.

The Last Shuttle Space Flight

2011-04-28T13:41:00.000-07:00

The Shuttle will have the anticipated last launch tomorrow at 3:47 Florida time. NASA will have done all the things well for the last shuttle Endeavour that will take off into the blue.

Thirty years have a certain age for a space program. And the Shuttle that hit the Americans had cooled during the last warm rolls. Hundred and fifty thousand, two hundred thousand spectators just for traffic the last Shuttle.

Space Shuttle lift off

Launch from inside orbitor

Nasa Endeavour landing

Nuclear Power Plants

2011-04-02T16:09:00.000-07:00

The Nuclear Power Plants interest has increased with the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Nuclear power is produced by controlled nuclear reactions. Commercial and utility plants currently use nuclear fission reactions to heat water to produce steam, which is then used to generate electricity.

But how does it work a Nuclear plant?

The pursuit of nuclear energy for electricity generation began soon after the discovery in the early 20th century that radioactive elements, such as radium, released immense amounts of energy, according to the principle of mass–energy equivalence. However, means of harnessing such energy was impractical, because intensely radioactive elements were, by their very nature, short-lived. With the discovery of nuclear fission the situation has changed.
In 1932, James Chadwick discovered the neutron, which was immediately recognized as a potential tool for nuclear experimentation because of its lack of an electric charge. Experimentation with bombardment of materials with neutrons led Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie to discover induced radioactivity in 1934, which allowed the creation of radium-like elements at much less the price of natural radium. Further work by Enrico Fermi in the 1930s focused on using slow neutrons to increase the effectiveness of induced radioactivity. Experiments bombarding uranium with neutrons led Fermi to believe he had created a new, transuranic element, which he dubbed hesperium.

In the United States, where Fermi and Szilard had both emigrated, this led to the creation of the first man-made reactor, known as Chicago Pile-1, which achieved criticality on December 2, 1942. This work became part of the Manhattan Project, which made enriched uranium and built large reactors to breed plutonium for use in the first nuclear weapons, which were used on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Disposal of nuclear waste is often said to be the Achilles' heel of the industry. Presently, waste is mainly stored at individual reactor sites and there are over 430 locations around the world where radioactive material continues to accumulate. Experts agree that centralized underground repositories which are well-managed, guarded, and monitored, would be a vast improvement. There is an "international consensus on the advisability of storing nuclear waste in deep underground repositories",but no country in the world has yet opened such a site.

The Teleportation Process

2010-05-10T14:11:00.000-07:00

Teleportation is the process of more or less instantaneous transport of an object from one place to another, without using conventional means. As a hypothetical teleportation technology is often used in works of fiction, which is generally used as synonymous with instantaneous transport, meaning that the process may also occur over great distances (eg between the Earth and the Moon or another planet) and speeds of or greater than that of light.
Teleportation, as described in fiction, is far from being realized, however, is a major subject of research among physicists around the world who are operating in the field of quantum mechanics.

The teleportation is a theoretical possibility allowed by quantum physics and by the theory of general relativity, two conflicting theories for several other aspects.

This is a short animation that attempts to make sense of quantum mechanics and the method of quantum teleportation:

The Double Slit Experiment

2010-05-10T13:23:00.000-07:00

The double-slit experiment is a variant of Young's experiment that allows to demonstrate the wave-particle duality of light and matter. Richard Feynman used to say that the heart of quantum mechanics can be understood by reflecting on this experiment.

Quantum Mechanics says that makes no sense to ask a priori the question about what "really" a quantum object is. This is the meaning of the superposition principle which states that wave and particle are just categories of our language by which we describe what we observe in a quantum experiment. Only the experiment shows us the wave or particle nature.

The next video shows the double-slit experiment in a fantastic and very descriptive way.

The Stern Gerlach Experiment Reveals The Quantum Nature of Matter

2010-05-03T15:05:00.000-07:00

With the Stern-Gerlach experiment I started a series of posts where I want to describe in simple terms the quantum nature of reality that surrounds us. The experiment of Stern Gerlach experiment is particularly important because it is not directly understandable in terms of classical mechanics.

In quantum mechanics, the Stern–Gerlach experiment, named after Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach, is an important 1922 experiment on the deflection of particles, often used to illustrate basic principles of quantum mechanics. It can be used to demonstrate that electrons and atoms have intrinsically quantum properties, and how measurement in quantum mechanics affects the system being measured.

Here I present a very explanatory video that allows us to understand what are the differences between the quantum and the macroscopic world described by classical mechanics.

Joining hands for clean energy

2010-04-17T16:23:00.000-07:00

President Obama has pledged that the United States will join with our partners across the Americas to chart a low-carbon, clean-energy future. Energy and climate challenges affect us all, and it will take all of us to solve them. The Americas are blessed with talent, ingenuity and resources, and we can go further, faster by working together than by working alone.
That's why this week in Washington we are hosting energy ministers from across the Western Hemisphere to advance the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas (ECPA).
At the 2009 Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, President Obama called on governments across the region to work together on a range of initiatives: promoting energy efficiency, developing renewable energy, shifting to cleaner fossil fuels, integrating national power grids, expanding access to electrical services to more people in more places and meeting the urgent global challenge of climate change. Since then, more than a dozen new ECPA initiatives are showcasing our hemisphere's best ideas and practices.
Here at home, we are changing our energy habits. We're working to reduce our dependence on imported oil and increase domestic production of renewable energy from wind, solar and biofuels. And we've put in place energy efficiency standards that will conserve energy and save consumers money. Our companies, universities and laboratories are expanding research and development of new clean energy technologies. And through ECPA, we have a forum to learn from our neighbors and the innovative approaches they are spearheading.
Costa Rica is pioneering forest conservation through its ecosystem services program. Brazil is a world leader in biofuels technology. Colombia has built cutting-edge urban mass-transit systems and is leading efforts in electricity integration. Mexico and Peru have implemented innovative programs for energy efficiency and conservation. Barbados is unlocking the potential of solar water heaters, and islands such as St. Kitts and Nevis and Dominica are developing their geothermal resources.

By cooperating on energy and climate, the nations of the Americas can all benefit from these advances. And clean, reliable energy will provide a foundation for broad-based economic growth that will widen the circle of prosperity across our hemisphere and also reduce our carbon emissions.
We're already making progress. As part of ECPA, the United States and the Inter-American Development Bank are working with partners across the region to develop a regional clean energy network that will link energy efficiency centers in Peru and Costa Rica with Chile's Renewable Energy Center in Santiago, Mexico's Wind Center in Oaxaca, a biomass center in Brazil and a geothermal center in El Salvador. This new network will bring U.S. and regional experts together to explore technologies and implementation strategies that will benefit us all.
Other governments are making critical contributions to ECPA. Brazil is leading an initiative to promote sustainable urban planning and energy efficiency in low-income households to respond to the challenges of urbanization and climate change. Colombia, which sits at the crossroads of Central and South America, is promoting cross-border trade in electricity with Panama, the Andes and Chile. Mexico, with a long commitment to help integrate Central American power markets, is training Central American officials on energy efficiency best practices. Trinidad and Tobago is leading a Caribbean initiative to bring renewable energy to island nations.
It is a testament to the resourcefulness of our people and the commitment of our governments that so many countries in the hemisphere are participating in -- and leading -- this effort.
These initiatives are only the beginning. At our meeting this week, we are mapping out new areas for collaboration, building on the best ideas of NGOs and the private sector and setting the stage for even greater progress in the future.
As President Obama said in Trinidad, through this partnership we will ``create the jobs of the future, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and make this hemisphere a model for cooperation.'' This week we are moving closer to making that vision a reality.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/16/1582153/joining-hands-for-clean-energy.html#ixzz0lP1GgKwM

Atom smasher will help reveal 'the beginning'

2010-03-30T16:15:00.000-07:00

The world's largest atom smasher threw together minuscule particles racing at unheard of speeds in conditions simulating those just after the Big Bang - a success that kick-started a megabillion-dollar experiment that could one day explain how the universe began.

Scientists cheered Tuesday's historic crash of two proton beams, which produced three times more energy than researchers had created before and marked a milestone for the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider.

"This is a huge step toward unraveling Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1 - what happened in the beginning," physicist Michio Kaku told The Associated Press.

"This is a Genesis machine. It'll help to recreate the most glorious event in the history of the universe."

Tuesday's smashup transforms the 15-year-old collider from an engineering project in test phase to the world's largest ongoing experiment, experts say. The crash that occurred on a subatomic scale is more about shaping our understanding of how the universe was created than immediate improvements to technology in our daily lives.

The power produced will ramp up even more in the future as scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, watch for elusive particles that have been more theorized than seen on Earth.

The consequences of finding those mysterious particles could "affect our conception of who we are in the universe," said Kaku, co-founder of string field theory and author of the book "Physics of the Impossible."

Physicists, usually prone to caution and nuance, tripped over themselves in superlatives praising the importance of the Large Hadron Collider and the significance of its generating regular science experiments.

"This is the Jurassic Park for particle physicists," said Phil Schewe, a spokesman for the American Institute of Physics. He called the collider a time machine. "Some of the particles they are making now or are about to make haven't been around for 14 billion years."

The first step in simulating the moments after the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago was to produce a tiny bang. The most potent force on the tiny atomic level that man has ever created came Tuesday.

Two beams of protons were sent hurtling in opposite directions toward each other in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel below the Swiss-French border - the coldest place in the universe at slightly above absolute zero. CERN used powerful superconducting magnets to force the two beams to cross; two of the protons collided, producing 7 trillion electron volts.

It's bizarrely both a record high and a small amount of energy.

washingtonpost.com

Bid for retired NASA space shuttle touts early Intrepid astronaut rescues.

2010-03-28T09:24:00.000-07:00

Astronaut Scott Carpenter floated in the Atlantic Ocean as helicopters from the Intrepid hovered overhead, ready to pluck him from the sea after his historic ride into space.

"I was kind of sorry to see that it was over when the chopper appeared and picked me up," Carpenter, now 84, told the Daily News from his Florida home. "It was the greatest adventure you can imagine."

It was 1962, and Carpenter had just become the second man to orbit the Earth - just after John Glenn's historic trip months before.

The Intrepid, converted to a museum now vying to win one of the soon-to-be-retired NASA space shuttles, is best known for surviving five kamikaze attacks during World War II.

It also was pressed into duty for NASA. The aircraft carrier had been converted into an anti-submarine ship and was the main recovery vessel for the cutting-edge space program in the early 1960s.

"It was because of the U.S. Navy's prowess on the open ocean that we were able to use the ocean as a recovery medium," Carpenter said. "The Russians didn't land on the water because they didn't have the U.S. Navy."

Carpenter missed his mark by several hundred miles, but the Intrepid - one of the Navy's most decorated warships - was racing to the rescue.

"Everybody was glad to see him," recalled retired Rear Adm. Lloyd (Doc) Abbot, who was the Intrepid's skipper at the time. "We were very happy to have him back.

"We had dinner in my cabin. The steward had brought steaks, and someone said, 'You had a hard day, Scott, you better pick a big one.' Scott looked at me and said, 'Can I have two?'

"I said, 'You can have them all!'" Abbot recalled. "It was a very, very wonderful experience."

The Intrepid was back out at sea just three years later, this time scooping up John Young and Gus Grissom after they splashed down in the Gemini capsule Molly Brown.

Now the Intrepid is hustling for a permanent NASA prize - the space shuttle Discovery, Atlantis or Endeavour - which will be awarded to three museums for permanent viewing.

And it's the ship's history with NASA's space program, not her heroism during World War II and Vietnam, that's front and center during the museum's lobbying effort.

"These early missions that the Intrepid participated in were really laying the groundwork for NASA's space program," said museum curator Jessica Williams. "When called upon to support these historic missions, she was there. She performed admirably."

NASA is expected to pick the winning museums in the coming weeks. The last shuttle flight is slated for February, with the aircrafts heading to sites like the Intrepid later next year.

Intrepid museum and city officials are hoping the ship's history with NASA will boost its chances.

"I think it's a great melding of superiority at sea and superiority in space," said Carpenter. "They should be displayed together."

read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/03/28/2010-03-28_intrepid_shuttle_bid_touts_astro_rescues.html

California Lists Moon Junk as Historical Resource

2010-01-30T13:25:00.000-08:00

Seeking to preserve the site where humans first set foot on the moon, a California state panel on Friday registered a collection of 106 objects left by the Apollo 11 mission as an historical resource.

The move by the state Historical Resources Commission marks the first such designation for cultural artifacts located other than on Earth, said Lisa Westwood, part of a team of scholars and museum professionals who applied for the listing.

The group hopes that placing the moon objects on California's registry of historic landmarks and resources will lead ultimately to designating Tranquility Base as a United Nations World Heritage Site.

"We are elevating the profile of this resource, and instilling upon the public, which could include space travelers at some point, a sense of site stewardship and the importance of preservation," said Westwood, an archeologist who teaches at Chico State University.

The collection encompasses about 5,000 pounds of objects, ranging from the bottom stage of the lunar lander to the American flag planted on the moon's surface on July 16, 1969 by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

It also includes a seismic monitor left behind to record moonquakes and a high-tech mirror used to reflect laser beams aimed at the lunar surface from Earth to measure the precise distance between it and the moon.

LUNAR CASTOFFS

Less lofty is an assortment of junk cast off by the astronauts -- space boots, tools, arm rests, empty food containers and bags of human waste -- to lighten their load for the takeoff from the moon back to Earth.

An inventory of the items was made through independent research conducted for several years by Ralph Gibson, a program manager at the Placer County Museums near Sacramento, with $22,000 in grants from NASA.

The artifacts were left spread over an area nearly 330 feet across.

But the listing was carefully written to include only the objects -- not the site itself or even the astronauts' footprints -- because international law precludes any country or state from making a claim to the lunar surface, said Jay Correia, a state historian who oversees the registry.

abcnews.go.com

U.N.'s Global Warming Report Under Fresh Attack for Rainforest Claims

2010-01-30T13:17:00.000-08:00

A United Nations report on climate change that has been lambasted for its faulty research is under new attack for yet another instance of what its critics say is sloppy science -- adding to a growing scandal that has undermined the credibility of scientists and policymakers who back the U.N.'s findings about global warming.

In the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), issued in 2007 by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists wrote that 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest in South America was endangered by global warming.

But that assertion was discredited this week when it emerged that the findings were based on numbers from a study by the World Wildlife Federation that had nothing to do with the issue of global warming -- and that was written by a freelance journalist and green activist.

The IPCC report states that "up to 40 percent of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation" -- highlighting the threat climate change poses to the Earth. The report goes on to say that "it is more probable that forests will be replaced by ecosystems ... such as tropical savannas."

But it has now been revealed that the claim was based on a WWF study titled "Global Review of Forest Fires," a paper barely related to the Amazon rainforest that was written "to secure essential policy reform at national and international level to provide a legislative and economic base for controlling harmful anthropogenic forest fires."

EUReferendum, a blog skeptical of global warming, uncovered the WWF association. It noted that the original "40 percent" figure came from a letter published in the journal Nature that discussed harmful logging activities -- and again had nothing to do with global warming.

The reference to the Brazilian rainforest can be found in Chapter 13 of the IPCC Working Group II report, the same section of AR4 in which claims are made that the Himalayan glaciers are rapidly melting because of global warming. Last week, the data leading to this claim were disproved as well, a scandal being labeled "glacier-gate" or "Himalaya-gate."

The Himalaya controversy followed another tempest -- the disclosure of e-mails that suggested that leading global warming scientists in the U.K. and the U.S. had conspired to hide a decline in global temperatures.

"If it is true that IPCC has indeed faked numbers regarding the Amazon, or used unsubstantiated facts, then it is the third nail in the IPCC coffin in less than three months," Andrew Wheeler, former staff director for the U.S. Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, told FoxNews.com. "For years, we have been told that the IPCC peer review process is the gold standard in scientific review. It now appears it is more of a fool's gold process."

Wheeler, who is now a senior vice president with B&D Consulting's Energy, Climate and Environment Practice in Washington, said the latest scandal calls into question the "entire underpinnings" of the IPCC's assessment and peer review process.

The U.N. did not return calls seeking comment on the scandal.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice chairman of the IPCC, was quoted in the European press as saying, "I would like to submit that this could increase the credibility of the IPCC, not decrease it. Aren't mistakes human? Even the IPCC is a human institution."

But not everyone agrees. Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guleph in Ontario, said the U.N. needs to start from scratch on global warming research and make a "full accounting" of how much of its research findings have been "likewise compromised."

McKitrick said this is needed because the U.N. acknowledged the inaccuracy of the data only now that its shortcomings have been exposed. "They are admitting what they did only because they were caught," he told FoxNews.com. "The fact that so many IPCC authors kept silent all this time shows how monumental has been the breach of trust."

Lubos Motl, a Czech physicist and former Harvard University faculty member, said the deforestation of the Amazon has occurred, but not because of global warming. He said it was due to social and economic reasons, including the clearing of cattle pastures, subsistence agriculture, the building of infrastructure and logging.

"Such economically driven changes are surely unattractive for those of us who prefer mysterious and natural forests," says Motl. "But they do help the people who live in Latin America."

The rapidly accumulating scandals surrounding climate change research appear to be driving the public away from its support for government measures to intervene. On Wednesday, Yale University and George Mason University released a survey showing that just 57 percent of respondents believe global warming "is happening." That was down 14 percentage points, from 71 percent, in October 2008. Fifty percent of people said they were "very" or "somewhat" worried about global warming, down 13 points from two years ago.

Another poll released Monday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press asked respondents to rank 21 issues in terms of their priority. Global warming came in last.

foxnews.com

Photovoltaic Cycle: Making PV module recycling a reality

2010-01-21T15:05:00.000-08:00

After almost two years of hard work, the initial efforts of PV CYCLE have started to pay off. This month the take-back and recycling scheme for Photovoltaic (PV) modules has been rolled out in Germany. In this country, approximately 3,000 tons of end-of- life panels will be generated this year representing about 50% of the European total. The estimates for 2030 show that this figure will rise to 130,000 tons in Europe. The members of PV CYCLE have shown their commitment to protect the environment and are putting into practice the promises made in the last few years.

The last few months of 2009 were particularly exciting for PV CYCLE. All the efforts put into the imminent launch of the scheme are paying off and the association will be operational in Germany during the first quarter of the year. Preparations are well underway and Hellmann Logistics was selected to take care of the collection and transportation of end-of-life modules. In addition, soon the first agreement will be signed with one or more recycling plant(s) which can recycle the collected modules.

The Origins of PV CYCLE

PV CYCLE was set up in 2007 to bring together all major European PV producers and distributors.

The members of PV CYCLE include mostly manufacturers and importers of PV modules and represent more than 85% of what has been put on the market in Europe. Their contributions will serve to finance the set up and implementation of the take-back and recycling scheme. However, money alone will not make the system work. To guarantee that end-of-life PV modules get adequately recycled, it is imperative that wholesalers, retailers, electrical installation contractors, system integrators, and project developers also get involved in the process.

Thinking Ahead

According to the figures presented by the European Photovoltaic Industry Association (EPIA) in a recent study entitled ‘SET For 2020', about 4.5 GW were already installed in Europe in 2008. This represents 18% of all the new installed electrical capacity. PV has become the fastest growing renewable energy technology and, as EPIA's study suggests, PV electricity could provide up to 12% by 2020.

Therefore, it is vital to start thinking ahead and putting into place the necessary mechanisms to take care of the recycling of PV modules. Photovoltaic energy has an enormous potential to represent a viable source of renewable energy for Europe. By setting up PV CYCLE, the industry has also shown its voluntary determination to make solar energy “DoubleGreen” and take responsibility for its waste. The substantial reduction in component incineration in favour of an increased volume of recycled modules will also contribute to recovering precious raw materials and preserving the planet's scarce natural resources.

Supporting the Network

The system PV CYCLE has envisioned will be based on the creation of a network of collection points that will operate with a reverse logistics approach. Special containers will be permanently located across the country in distribution and retailing stores, installers' facilities, storage and transfer stations. End-of-life PV modules will be taken to those disposal locations by either the owners or the installers right after they are dismantled. Where necessary, PV CYCLE will arrange the pickup and transportation. Temporary containers will also be placed at large construction, renovation and demolition project sites.

In order for the whole system to operate efficiently, as many actors as possible in all stages of the value chain must become involved. The distribution and installation channels of photovoltaic modules are therefore crucial for the PV CYCLE scheme to move forward because the replacement of modules will likely be done by the same companies that took care of the initial sale and installation and who can now contribute to their appropriate disposal.

PV CYCLE's take-back and recycling scheme will be fully transparent. To accomplish that goal, an independent monitoring committee will be created with representatives from the European institutions and NGOs. They will be in charge of supervising the work and progress of the association under the presidency of Prof. Jef Poortmans, a well-known specialist in PV technology. In addition, PV CYCLE will issue an annual public report on the performance of the system as well as the future perspectives.

26 January 2010, Berlin, Germany

In the framework of the international collaboration IEA PVPS Task 12 “Environment Health &Safety”, EPIA, PVCYCLE and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC) will host the 1st International Conference on PV Module Recycling on the 26 January 2010 in Berlin, Germany.

The event aims at presenting the state-of-the-art PV module recycling and providing a platform for discussion between the PV industry and the most experienced players in recycling from other related sectors.

During the first session, an overview of all the recovery and recycling techniques for the different PV technologies (c-Si, CdTe, CIGS, thin film silicon) will be given by the most experienced industry and knowledgeable research centres.

During the second session, industries involved in recycling processes from other sectors (e.g WEEE recycling, glass, lamps, etc.) will share experiences and synergies which could be applied to the PV module recycling technologies. A discussion on recycling costs and future plans for recycling in the EU will take place during the last session of the conference.

UN climate body admits 'mistake' on Himalayan glaciers

2010-01-19T15:31:00.000-08:00

The vice-chairman of the UN's climate science panel has admitted it made a mistake in asserting that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) included the date in its 2007 assessment of climate impacts.

A number of scientists have recently disputed the 2035 figure, and Jean-Pascal van Ypersele told BBC News that it was an error and would be reviewed.

But he said it did not change the broad picture of man-made climate change.

The issue, which BBC News first reported on 05 December, has reverberated around climate websites in recent days.

Some commentators maintain that taken together with the contents of e-mails stolen last year from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, it undermines the credibility of climate science.

Dr van Ypersele said this was not the case.

"I don't see how one mistake in a 3,000-page report can damage the credibility of the overall report," he said.

"Some people will attempt to use it to damage the credibility of the IPCC; but if we can uncover it, and explain it and change it, it should strengthen the IPCC's credibility, showing that we are ready to learn from our mistakes."

Grey area

The claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 appears to have originated in a 1999 interview with Indian glaciologist Syed Hasnain, published in New Scientist magazine.

The figure then surfaced in a 2005 report by environmental group WWF - a report that is cited in the IPCC's 2007 assessment, known as AR4.

An alternative genesis lies in the misreading of a 1996 study that gave the date as 2350.

AR 4 asserted: "Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world... the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high."

Dr van Ypersele said the episode meant that the panel's reviewing procedures would have to be tightened.

Slow reaction?

The row erupted in India late last year in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate summit, with opposing factions in the government giving radically different narratives of what was happening to Himalayan ice.

In December, it emerged that four leading glaciologists had prepared a letter for publication in the journal Science arguing that a complete melt by 2035 was physically impossible.

"You just can't accomplish it," Jeffrey Kargel from the University of Arizona told BBC News at the time.

"If you think about the thicknesses of the ice - 200-300m thicknesses, in some cases up to 400m thick - and if you're losing ice at the rate of a metre a year, or let's say double it to two metres a year, you're not going to get rid of 200m of ice in a quarter of a century."

The row continues in India, with Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh calling this week for the IPCC to explain "how it reached the 2035 figure, which created such a scare".

Meanwhile, in an interview with the news agency AFP, Georg Kaser from the University of Innsbruck in Austria - who led a different portion of the AR4 process - said he had warned that the 2035 figure was wrong in 2006, before AR4's publication.

"It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing," he told AFP in an interview.

He said that people working on the Asia chapter "did not react".

He suggested that some of the IPCC's working practices should be revised by the time work begins on its next landmark report, due in 2013.

But its overall conclusion that global warming is "unequivocal" remains beyond reproach, he said.

news.bbc.co.uk

Fossil footprints force reassessment of prehistory

2010-01-11T14:11:00.000-08:00

Polish and Swedish researchers have discovered fossil footprints from early backboned land animals which could push back the date that animals left their watery homes for land by at least 18 million years.

The study, published in the latest edition of the journal Nature, details discoveries made in the Holy Cross Mountains in south-eastern Poland.

Until now, claims of tetrapod tracks predating verified body fossils have remained disputed as to their age and origin. Tetrapods are vertebrate animals with four feet, legs or leg-like appendages, and while traced to the Devonian Period (408 million to 360 million years ago), their origin remains a mystery.

'These results force us to reconsider our whole picture of the transition from fish to land animals,' said Professor Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University in Sweden, one of the two leaders of the study.

For decades, palaeontologists have been scouring the planet for fossil bones and skeletons of the earliest land vertebrates - the ultimate progenitors of all later amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Discoveries have suggested that the first tetrapods evolved relatively rapidly from lobe-finned fishes, through a short-lived intermediate stage represented by 'elpistostegids', about 380 million years ago. But there is another potential source of information about the earliest tetrapods: the fossilised footprints they left behind.

The Polish and Swedish researchers describe several trackways of different sizes and characteristics, as well as a number of isolated prints of up to 26 centimetres wide, indicative of animals of around 2.5 metres in length. The tracks have distinctive 'hand' and 'foot' prints and no evidence of a dragging body. The finds can be securely dated to the early Middle Devonian period, around 395 million years ago.

'[The study results mean] that not only tetrapods but also elpistostegids originated much earlier than we thought, because the position of elpistostegids as evolutionary precursors of tetrapods is not in doubt, and so they must have existed at least as long,' continued Professor Ahlberg. 'Instead, our distant ancestors may first have left the water in order to feed on stranded marine life left behind by the receding tide.'

The fact that the tracks were left on the shores of an ancient sea is also a major surprise; almost all previous scenarios for the origin of tetrapods have placed this event in a freshwater setting and have associated it with the development of land vegetation and a terrestrial ecosystem.

lswn.it

Tracking the role of clouds in climate change

2009-12-25T08:04:00.000-08:00

The role clouds play in climate change remains a mystery, but the EUCLIPSE ('Cloud intercomparison, process study and evaluation project') project is set to shed light on this issue by using state-of- the-art technology to produce an accurate picture of the relation of clouds to changing weather patterns. The EU-funded project, backed to the tune of EUR 3.5 million, aims at helping meteorologists predict more accurately future worldwide patterns of climate change.

We live with them all our lives, but how often do most of us look up and notice the extraordinarily complex shapes and formations made by the millions of drops of water vapour that condense in the sky to form clouds?
We take their role in the ecosystem for granted, but clouds play a central role in the formation of the world's weather patterns in terms of rainfall, sunshine hours and temperature. And now with the changing of traditional worldwide weather patterns -due to climate change - their role is being given close attention.

The four-year collaborative project will study the role of clouds in contributing to climate change. EUCLIPSE involves 13 research institutions led by Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands. Other prestigious institutes participating in the project are the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany.

The research will be led by Professor Pier Siebesma of TU Delft. The project's aim is to produce much clearer current climate models to shed more light on the role that clouds are playing in climate change.

Climate models give predictions on changes in the climate. Currently, however, they are not accurate enough because of deviating weather patterns that are triggered by these changes. Existing climate models show how low cloud responds differently in various models due to CO2 in the atmosphere. Being able, therefore, to predict the behaviour of cloud is of vital importance in climate change prediction.

A new climate model called EC-Earth will be used to calculate the behaviour of clouds in an increasingly warm climate using high resolution models to represent clouds in a realistic way.

The project will be divided into a series of Work Packages which will, among others, use Earth System Modelling (ESM) predicting systems to carry out simulation activities. These will include evaluating how clouds behave in a warming climate, assessing the behaviour of clouds in different climates, quantifying climate sensitivity to identify cloud behaviour in different regions, and simulating extreme weather and temperature conditions in Europe with relevant cloud behaviour.

A series of case studies will also be carried out and EUCLIPSE will use a new range of satellites which for the first time will be able to depict clouds three-dimensionally.

These 'A-train' satellites are equipped with active radar and lidar systems, and will be used for critical testing of climate models. Their results will be used for the next report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and will give a much clearer picture of how cloud formation is responding to climate change.

lswn.it

Italian-Turkish joint venture for the Mediterranean largest PV plant

2009-12-19T14:25:00.000-08:00

Turkey’s Anel Group and Italy’s Enerqos spa have signed an agreement for a joint venture to build an EU commission funded 1.3 MW photovoltaic (PV) plant in the Turkish part of Cyprus.

The plant will represent the first PV installation in Cyprus and the biggest in the whole Mediterranean area. Funding will come from the EU Commission. Construction works will start in January 2010. Once completed, it will produce 2 GWh of clean energy annually and contribute to eliminate the power cuts experienced on the island during the Summer, due to over demand for energy, mostly from the tourist industry.

The solar system will be donated to Kb-tek (Cyprus Turkish Electric Corporation) .

“This initiative represents a further step of our international growth process” declared Mauro Marcucci, CEO of Enerqos spa, “We are glad to enhance our presence in the Mediterranean area, the most promising area for solar industry, with a strong and reliable partner such as Anel Group”.

“This plant is the expression of the great potential of the Mediterranean region in the renewable sector” explained Ender Olak, vice chairman of Anel Group. “We are convinced that Turkey, together with Greece and the whole Mediterranean area, will shortly become the new leaders in the solar energy field. This first project will lead to many other interesting activities in joint-venture with Enerqos spa in the very next months”.

reportingtheworldover.wordpress.com

Centuries-Old Planetary Mystery Solved With Data From Cassini

2009-12-10T15:06:00.000-08:00

Researchers have solved what may be the oldest mystery in planetary science, the two-tone surface of Saturn’s moon Iapetus. The odd feature — the moon’s trailing side is about 10 times brighter than its leading side — has been a mystery since it was first observed by Giovanni Cassini in 1671. In two papers published online by Science, researchers have unraveled the mystery, using images and data from instruments aboard the spacecraft named for Cassini.

The studies confirm an earlier idea that dust, most likely from another of Saturn’s moons, falls on the leading side of Iapetus as it orbits the planet. “It’s just like a motorcyclist, who only gets the flies on the leading side of the helmet rather than the trailing side,” said Tillmann Denk of the Free University of Berlin, an author (with John R. Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute) of one of the papers and lead author of the other.

But the pattern of the surface features — the dark area extends to the trailing side at the equator, for example — is not fully explained by the deposition dust. Rather, the researchers say, the reason has a lot to do with the moon’s rotation on its axis, which takes 80 earth days.

Such a slow rotation (“mid-day” lasts for a couple of weeks) allows the distant sun to warm the dark dust-covered areas enough that water ice becomes vapor. The vapor migrates elsewhere, freezing to ice again when it reaches colder areas. The areas where the ice was lost become darker, and those that gained ice become brighter.

nytimes.com

Discovery reveals where dinosaurs originated

2009-12-10T15:00:00.000-08:00

Long, long ago, some of the first dinosaurs walked the Earth. But scientists have not known with any confidence where those initial dino prints were made. Much more recently, hikers stumbled across a few bits of bone at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, leading to the discovery of a game-changing dinosaur that reveals where it all began.

The dinosaur, now called Tawa hallae, had a body that was only the size of a medium to large dog, but its remains have helped scientists shore up where dinosaurs came from. The research team used the extremely well-preserved and complete skeletal remains as a means to fitting the newbie and other early dinosaurs onto the evolutionary tree.

"[The results] showed a lot of the South American dinosaurs in the Triassic were the most primitive dinosaurs we have found to date," said lead researcher Sterling Nesbitt of the University of Texas at Austin. "They are closest to the common ancestor of all dinosaurs." (Nesbitt was at the American Museum of Natural History in New York when he made the discovery.)

The upshot: The earliest dinosaurs originated and diverged in what is now South America before trekking across the globe more than 220 million years ago when the continents were assembled into one gargantuan landmass called Pangea.

Nesbitt and his colleagues describe the dinosaur in the Dec. 11 issue of the journal Science. Their analyses suggest T. hallae lived some 213 million years ago and was a primitive theropod (mostly carnivorous dinosaur that walked on two legs). Like Velociraptor, the dinosaur was likely covered with feather-like structures and sported claws and serrated teeth for snagging prey.

Dinosaur relations
After the hikers stumbled upon the dinosaur quarry in 2004, scientists excavated the area in northern New Mexico. They uncovered five to seven partial skeletons belonging to T. hallae species buried together in a relatively small pocket among a jumble of tens of thousands of other fossils.

The excavated skeletons suggest this species had a snout-to-tail tip length of about 6 to 13 feet (2 to 4 meters), with a hip height of 3 to 5 feet (1 to 1.5 meters). The bones suggested that when alive, T. hallae was equipped with air sacs surrounding its neck and braincase — features found in birds today.

To find out how T. hallae was related to other early theropods and how the animal came to its North American resting place, the researchers compared T. hallae with other dinosaurs.

"If you have continents splitting apart, you get isolation," Nesbitt said. "So when barriers develop, you would expect that multiple carnivorous dinosaurs in a region should represent a closely related endemic radiation. But that is what we don't see in early dinosaur evolution."

Rather, in the Ghost Ranch sediments they found three carnivorous dinosaur species, including T. hallae, that were only distantly related.

"This implies that each carnivorous dinosaur species descended from a separate lineage before arriving in [the part of Pangea that is now] North America, instead of all evolving from a local ancestor," said study researcher Randall Irmis of the Utah Museum of Natural History and the University of Utah.

That wouldn't be surprising, since the giants were free to roam at the time. "[Dinosaurs] could essentially walk from pretty far south in the Southern Hemisphere to pretty far north in the Northern Hemisphere," Nesbitt told LiveScience.

Climate limits
The team then looked at a variety of reptile groups to see if other animals were wandering across the still-connected continents during the Late Triassic period (about 225 million years ago). And just like the early theropods, such reptiles were indeed making multiple trips between what are now North and South America, the researchers speculate.

msnbc.msn.com

New Russian missile may be behind Norwegian lights

2009-12-10T14:54:00.000-08:00

The failure of a new Russian intercontinental ballistic missile during testing was the cause of spectacular spiraling blue lights in the skies over northern Norway, analysts said Thursday.
Russia's defense ministry said a Bulava missile was launched Wednesday by a nuclear submarine submerged in the White Sea and its third stage suffered an unspecified failure.
Photographs and amateur video footage of the bluish-white in the Norwegian skies have been circulating on the Internet since Wednesday and spawning speculation of UFOs. The ministry did not confirm the lights were the result of the failed launch but military analysts said they clearly came from the Bulava explosion.
"This kind of light show comes from a failed missile launch," said Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent military analyst. "Russia has run free fireworks for the Norwegians."
The botched launch was the twelfth test of the Bulava and its eighth failure, which deals another blow to Kremlin's hopes that the sea-based weapon would become a cornerstone of its nuclear arsenal.
"They will have to spend quite a long time trying to make it work," said Alexander Konovalov, the head of the Moscow-based Institute of Strategic Assessment, who agreed with Felgenhauer on the source of the lights over Norway.

"That is fraught with very negative consequences, up to the loss of the sea-based component of the Russian nuclear forces," he said.
The ministry said that a government commission was looking into the possible reasons behind the test failure.
Officials have insisted the Bulava's design is fine and have blamed the previous failures on manufacturing flaws resulting from post-Soviet industrial degradation. They have said it's difficult to control the quality of all the parts supplied by hundreds of subcontractors involved in the program.
"Every time they give a different reason for the failure, and that shows that there are problems with the quality of components," said Alexander Golts, an independent military analyst. "To build a state-of-the-art weapon like the Bulava, it's necessary to have a chain of subcontractors working well. Clearly, they can't do it."
Despite the repeated failures, the military must make Bulava work because Russia has already invested huge funds in building the new submarines supposed to carry it, military analysts said.
The first in a series of the new Borei-class nuclear submarines has already been launched and has been undergoing sea trials. Another two such subs, each capable of carrying 12 Bulava missiles, are being built and the construction of the fourth is to start soon.
The new submarines are supposed to replace the aging Soviet-era ones, which are approaching the end of their lifetime. The old submarines carry the Sineva missile, which are too big and too heavy for the new type of submarines.
"It's a paradoxical situation," said Konovalov. "We have the Sineva missiles, which are quite good, but the submarines carrying them won't serve for long. And we have a new good type of submarines supposed to carry the Bulava, but the Bulava isn't available."
Russian officials billed Bulava as a new-generation weapon, capable of dodging any potential missile defenses thanks to its quick start and an ability to perform unusual maneuvers in flight.
The Bulava program has consumed a large chunk of the Russian military budget without producing any visible result, Felgenhauer said. He and some other analysts said that even those few launches officially considered successful were flawed in one way or another.
"It shows that the Russian military industries has reached the final stage of degradation," he said. "It just can't build a new missile. And it will only grow worse as the military industries are continuing to lose key technologies and materials."
He said that part of the Russian military industrial complex and the top brass are strongly critical of the program and they make it impossible to conceal the failures.
"There is a very serious opposition," he said. "There have been numerous leaks because of that."

The Associated Press

A climate change dust-up

2009-11-22T07:23:00.000-08:00

Reporting from Washington and London - Is it a "Warmist Conspiracy," or a case of an e-mail being "taken completely out of context"?

Regardless, the latest dust-up over the science of climate change appears unlikely to affect the dynamics of either a pending debate in the Senate or international climate negotiations in Copenhagen next month.

Conservative bloggers have seized on a series of e-mails between leading climate scientists, which were obtained by computer hackers and posted online last week, as evidence of a scientific conspiracy to push claims about human-caused global warming.

But advocates of action to curb global warming dismiss those claims, and political leaders and analysts say the Senate bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions will sink or swim based on economics, not science.

"The scientists are going to fight about this for decades," said Robert Dillon, a spokesman for Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of several Senate Republicans who say they are open to some form of a climate bill. "We should be doing something to curb our emissions that would not harm the economy, and could in fact boost the economy," he said.

The British institution at the center of the debate confirmed Saturday that its server had been hacked and that it had contacted the police to pursue an investigation of what it believes was a criminal act.

The University of East Anglia said it could not confirm the authenticity of all the hacked data, including e-mails that have been published on the Internet, because of their sheer volume.

But it accused the hackers of using the material selectively and out of context to undermine the "strong consensus" that global warming exists, and declared that such misuse of information "cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with this issue in a responsible way."

An e-mail by one of the university's professors, Phil Jones, has been singled out by skeptics as proof that scientists have deliberately misled the public on the issue.

In the 1999 e-mail, Jones wrote of using a "trick" to hide an apparent decline in recent global temperatures on a chart being prepared for use by a meteorological organization. But in a statement posted on the university's website Saturday, Jones said that the e-mail had been "taken completely out of context" and that there had been no misrepresentation of data.

"The word 'trick' was used here colloquially as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward," Jones said.

Skeptics of man-made global warming disagreed, trumpeting the e-mails online. "The Death Blow to Climate Science," one website headlined. Another hailed a "Warmist Conspiracy."

Last week, the leading Republican on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, declared 2009 "The Year of the Skeptic"; on Saturday, a spokesman for environment committee Republicans, Matt Dempsey, said the e-mails, if authentic, "would have a profound impact on the debate" over the climate bill.

Advocates of the bill disagreed. "The science is clearly on the side of those who are concerned the world is warming," said Joshua Freed, a senior advisor for clean energy at the think tank Third Way.

The e-mail controversy, said Josh Dorner, a spokesman for the pro-climate bill group Clean Energy Works, "does absolutely nothing to change the fact that we are now closer than ever before to reaching binding international and domestic deals. We have a path to success in the Senate and at Copenhagen and beyond."

A clear majority of senators appears to back some action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. President Obama and congressional leaders have framed their support for the bill largely in terms of its potential to create "clean energy" jobs in the United States.

Large Hadron Collider progress delights researchers

2009-11-22T07:17:00.000-08:00

Researchers working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) say they are delighted with the progress made since the machine restarted on Friday.
One official said the collider had done more in a few hours than it did in five days of operations last year.
The LHC is being used to smash together beams of protons in a bid to shed light on the nature of the Universe.
Housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel under the Franco-Swiss border, it is the world's largest machine.
During the experiment, scientists will search for signs of the Higgs boson, a sub-atomic particle that is crucial to our current understanding of physics. Although it is predicted to exist, scientists have never found it.
The machine was heavily damaged when an electrical fault caused a tonne of liquid helium to leak into the tunnel just nine days after it was first launched in September last year.
During 14 months of repairs dozens of giant superconducting magnets that accelerate particles at the speed of light had to be replaced.
Operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), the LHC will create similar conditions to those which were present moments after the Big Bang.
"We are further advanced now than where we were after five days of experiment last year," said Cern's director of accelerators Steve Myers.

He added that the extra year had allowed researchers to upgrade instrumentation and computer software.
Better beam
"It's all been pretty positive so far," said James Gillies, director of communications for Cern. "Now, [the team] is knuckling down to the hard work."
He added: "We're not expecting any major milestones to be reached over the next few days."
Operations team members spent Saturday injecting protons into the LHC's 27km-long "ring", attempting to improve the lifetime of the beams.
"Right now we've got a beam lifetime of half an hour, which is pretty good for where we are. But ultimately, we want to keep a beam in the machine for 10-12 hours. There's a lot of detailed, nitty-gritty work in order to get there," said Dr Gillies.
Engineers had discussed the possibility of attempting to increase the collider's energy to a record-breaking level of 1.2 trillion electron volts this weekend.
Only the Tevatron particle accelerator in Chicago, US, has so far approached this energy, operating at just under one trillion electron volts.
However, this plan now looks unlikely. Instead, engineers will probably concentrate on preparing the machine for its first low-energy collisions, scheduled to happen in the next 10-15 days.
Progress on restarting the machine went more quickly than expected on Friday. It was not anticipated that engineers would try to circulate a proton beam until 0600 on Saturday at the earliest.
Two stable proton beams had already been circulated in opposite directions around the machine by midnight (GMT) on Friday.
Engineers first circulated a beam all the way around the LHC on 10 September 2008.

news.bbc.co.uk

Rare Charles Darwin book found on toilet bookshelf

2009-11-22T07:14:00.000-08:00

An auction house says it is selling a rare first edition of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" found in a family's guest lavatory in southern England.
Christie's auction house said Sunday the book — one of around 1,250 copies first printed in 1859 — had been on a toilet bookshelf at a family's home in Oxford.
The book will be auctioned on Tuesday — the 150th anniversary of the publication of the famous work. Christie's said the book is likely to sell for 60,000 pounds ($99,000).
Darwin's "The Origin of Species" outlined his theory of natural selection — the foundation for the modern understanding of evolution.
Celebrations around the world this year have marked the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth.
On the Net:
Darwin's Collected Works: http://darwin-online.org.uk/

AP

GIANT GALAXY GRAVEYARD GROWS

2009-11-09T13:24:00.000-08:00

A gigantic galactic graveyard lurks in the distant universe, and the death toll is growing.

New observations establish a supercluster centered on the cluster CL0016+16 as the largest galactic congregation ever found, astronomers report in Astronomy & Astrophysics. The supercluster extends even farther than previously thought, and it’s drawing in more and more galaxies.

CL0016+16 lies about 6.7 billion light-years away from Earth. That cluster was first observed in 1981, and later observations hinted that it might be just one of a cluster of clusters. Observations by David Koo of the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1996 pointed to a large structure extending from the main cluster.

“There are many predictions for large-scale structure in the universe, but nobody has really confirmed that this large-scale cluster exists in the distant universe,” says Masayuki Tanaka from the European Southern Observatory, a coauthor of the new report. “We actually see this massive structure in the distant universe. Not theory, not prediction — this is the real universe.”
Tanaka and his colleagues made several observations of the region between August 2007 and December 2008 using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii and the Very Large Telescope in Chile. They found that the supercluster extends at least 60 million light-years in one direction beyond the 100 million light-years already known, and it could reach even farther.

“It must be gigantic,” Koo says. “This thing is not only big, it’s big in the opposite direction from what we saw. It’s probably twice as big as we thought.”

Galaxies that group together tend to switch off each others’ star formation, “bringing a flourishing galaxy into a dead one,” says study coauthor Alexis Finoguenov of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany.

Astronomers think that grouped galaxies speed up, stripping away their neighbors’ hot gas, the raw material for forming stars. When galaxies cluster, “there is always a threshold when groups go from an encouraging environment to a suffocating environment,” Finoguenov says.

Galaxies are known to clump together along dark matter filaments, which grew from slight variations in the concentration of matter after the Big Bang. The filaments extend for millions of light-years in an enormous cosmic web, providing a framework for the universe’s large-scale structure.

Tanaka’s team identified tens of clumps of galaxies surrounding CL0016+16, some of which are up to a thousand times more massive than the Milky Way.

And most of those galaxies are either dead or dying, meaning they’re not making new stars. The tremendous gravitational pull of the central cluster is drawing in other galaxies, which will eventually cease star formation in the growing galactic graveyard.

On the bright side, “this will be an ideal data set to study when, where and how galaxies die,” Tanaka says.

Galaxies near the Milky Way, at least, are at a safe distance from the graveyard. “We will probably never turn into such an environment anyway,” Finoguenov says. “We will keep living.”

sciencenews.org